Thief in the Frame

The man in my window is stuck at the hips.

He's been there since 2:47 a.m., which I know because the clock on my nightstand glows green and I've been staring at it for the past forty minutes, listening to him grunt and twist. The window frame is old, the kind that swells in summer humidity and refuses to budge without a fight. He didn't account for that. He also didn't account for my neighbor's motion light, which is currently blasting his backside in a cone of white that makes him look like a museum exhibit. A thief, circa now, caught mid-entry.

"You gonna call the cops?" he asks. His voice is muffled against the sill. He's got one arm inside my apartment, fingers splayed on the hardwood like he's trying to crawl his way to freedom. The other arm is somewhere outside, probably scrabbling at the siding.

I don't answer. I'm sitting up in bed with my knees pulled to my chest, back pressed against the headboard, and I'm trying to decide if this is real. My apartment is small. One bedroom, a kitchen that's really a hallway with a stove, a bathroom where the toilet runs if you don't jiggle the handle. I've lived here for three years and nothing has ever happened. Not one thing. The most exciting event was when the couple downstairs broke up and I heard the woman throw a blender at the wall. That was a Tuesday.

Now there's a man in my window.

"I'm not gonna hurt you," he says. "I can't even move."

That's true. He's wedged tight. His jeans are dark and dusty, and his shirt has ridden up, exposing a strip of pale lower back. He smells like cigarettes and rain. It rained earlier, a hard summer storm that rattled the windows and knocked the power out for twenty minutes. I'd fallen asleep to the sound of it, and now this.

"Are you going to say something?" he asks.

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know. Something. Anything. This is weird for me too."

I almost laugh. Almost. But my heart is beating hard enough that I can feel it in my throat, and my hands are shaking, and I don't think anything about this is funny. There's a man in my window. A stranger. He could be anyone. He could be the kind of person who does worse things than break into apartments.

But he's stuck. And he's asking me to talk to him.

"What's your name?" I ask.

A pause. "Marcus."

"Is that your real name?"

"Does it matter?"

"I guess not."

The motion light clicks off. The timer must have run out. Now it's just the two of us in the dark, and I can barely make out the shape of him, a black mass against the slightly less black sky. The city hums outside. A car passes. Someone laughs on the street below, a sharp, bright sound that feels like it belongs to a different world entirely.

"Look," Marcus says. "I picked the wrong window. I thought this place was empty. The lights were off."

"They're off because I was sleeping."

"Yeah. I figured that out."

I pull my blanket tighter around my shoulders. It's thin, a cheap thing I bought at a discount store when I moved in, and it doesn't do much against the cold. The air conditioning in this building is either broken or set to arctic, no in-between. Tonight it's arctic.

"Why my apartment?" I ask.

"Does it matter?"

"I asked first."

He shifts, trying to find a better angle, and the window frame creaks. I flinch. He notices.

"I'm not gonna break it," he says. "I'm not trying to make this worse."

"You broke into my home."

"I know."

"So it's already pretty bad."

He doesn't have a response to that. Good. I don't want him to have a response. I want him to feel the weight of what he's done, even if he can't move, even if he's helpless. He chose this. He climbed up the fire escape and pried at my window with something, a crowbar probably, because the lock is bent now, ruined. He did that. He made this happen.

And now he's asking me to talk to him like we're two people stuck in an elevator.

"What were you looking for?" I ask.

"Money. What else?"

"Everyone has money."

"Not everyone. But enough people."

I think about my own money. There's not much of it. A jar on the counter with maybe forty dollars in singles and quarters. My wallet on the dresser with a debit card that's overdrawn by eleven dollars. I get paid on Friday. I've been eating ramen and eggs for a week.

"You picked the wrong apartment," I say.

"Yeah. I'm getting that."

The clock ticks. 2:53 a.m. I should call the police. That's what a normal person would do. That's what my mother would tell me to do, if I still talked to my mother. But my phone is on the nightstand, six inches from my hand, and I haven't touched it. I don't know why.

Maybe because he's stuck. Maybe because he can't hurt me.

Or maybe because I'm tired. Not just sleepy tired, but the kind of tired that sits in your bones and makes everything feel like too much effort. The kind of tired that comes from working double shifts at a job you hate and coming home to an empty apartment and doing it all over again the next day. The kind of tired that makes a man in your window feel like just one more thing, not even the worst thing.

"Are you gonna call them?" Marcus asks. He sounds resigned. Like he already knows the answer.

"I haven't decided."

"What's taking so long?"

I look at him. Really look. The light from the streetlamp outside catches the side of his face, and I can see he's younger than I thought. Maybe twenty-five. Maybe younger. He's got a bruise on his cheekbone, faded yellow at the edges, and a tattoo on his neck that I can't quite make out. He looks like a kid. A kid who made a bad choice and got caught in the worst possible way.

"I don't know," I say. "Maybe I'm waiting for you to give me a reason."

"A reason to call the cops?"

"A reason not to."

He's quiet for a long time. The city hums. The clock ticks. My heart slows, just a little.

Then he says, "I was gonna rob you. That's the truth. I saw the fire escape and the dark window and I thought, easy. I didn't think about who lived here. I didn't think about you."

"Okay."

"But now I'm here. And you're here. And I don't know what happens next."

I don't either. That's the problem. That's the whole problem. There's a man in my window, and I don't know what happens next, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like something is actually happening. Something real. Something I can't predict or control or ignore.

I reach for my phone.

Marcus tenses. I can see it, the way his shoulders go tight, the way his fingers curl against the floor.

I don't dial. I just hold it. The screen glows, bright and blue, and I look at him in that light and he looks at me, and neither of us says anything.

Then I put the phone down.

"Tell me why you picked this building," I say. "Tell me the truth. And maybe I won't call."

He exhales. Slow. Shaky.

"Okay," he says. "Okay."

And he starts to talk.