Shattered

The glass in the window sparkles like diamonds as the sun reflects and refracts with the brilliance of a cathedral window, dancing along the arc of the ceiling.

It would be beautiful if it weren’t a symbol of the invasion.

Just three hours earlier, we’d stepped over homeless people on a trash-strewn sidewalk in Hollywood as we made our way to a tiny theatre where our son was in a play. A power outage impacted several blocks, so the only lights guiding us were from our cell phone flashlights and the headlights and taillights of cars taking turns at the intersection of Santa Monica Blvd and Western Avenue. Thankfully the outage didn’t impact the graffiti-covered building where the play was taking place, though the cast was ready with battery operated flood lights because the show MUST go on.

Walking back to our car parked at a broken meter in front of a Triple X theatre, we passed a woman on a bench in a very short, hot pink dress and dangerously spiked high heels, her face lit by the glow of her phone. Power was still out at the intersection and I imagine her business was down because of it. “Thank goodness we live in quiet, safe Burbank,” I said to my husband as we got in the car and locked our doors to the darkness of the outside world.

Twenty minutes after we left Hollywood, we pulled into our garage, the door closing safely behind us.

The first thing that was odd was that our kitchen door was locked. We rarely lock it because it leads into the laundry room and the exterior door locks. Then we notice our dog jumping outside the back door, barking.

But we’d left her inside.

We walked around the back of the house where we discovered our French door was shattered. Glass was all over the back steps as were pieces of wood and metal from the panes. Our dog Luna is often called Lunatic because she is so easily excitable but good lord!  She must have seen something in the yard and run full force through the door!? Damn dog! She’s got to have cuts all over her! We opened the door and crunched over the glass.

And that’s when we realized all the “God Damn Dog” exclamations were misdirected. We’d been burglarized.

My hands were shaking as I looked in each room to see open and emptied drawers. My fingers were shaking as I called 911. My voice was shaking as I greeted the police on the driveway and lead them to the scenes of the crime. Every drawer in our bedroom had been tossed. My jewelry box was emptied. Underwear and clothing was all over the floors and strewn across the bed.

I’d already pondered what mattered earlier this year when Los Angeles was ablaze. What do you take if you have to run? What would you miss if you were to lose everything? The reality is that what matters most to me, my photo albums and children’s momentos, would matter little to a thief.

The search for whatever it was they were searching for had to be a serious disappointment. My jewelry box features fake baubles from mall stores like Claire’s and National Park gift shops. The few pieces of actual value don’t scream “I’m real!” My husband and I tend to opt for experiences over bling. We’d spoken just a day before about my idea of maybe getting him a Rolex for our upcoming 30th Anniversary, but we decided a trip would hold more meaning. The burglars found no fancy watches because he was wearing his only good one.

Oh crap! My lap top! I’d been writing earlier that day and hadn’t backed it up! But no, the office was mostly untouched.

Closet doors throughout the house including the ones leading to the water heater were wide open, but oddly, they didn’t seem to have noticed the closet with the safe, which I’d forgotten to close earlier that day after adding our new passports.

$80 in cash was clipped to our NCAA brackets on the ottoman. But it was still there. Cameras, televisions, journals filled with secrets? All still there.  As far as we could tell, nothing was obviously missing.

Including the dog. The gate had been left wide open and she could have run away. “She likely scared them off” the cops said. But have you met our dog? Luna is a Labrador/Great Dane mix who was likely happy to meet new people and then ran straight through the hole in the glass door to hunt for possums and raccoons in the yard while the burglars were hunting through our disappointing linen closet, where they found random party supplies next to a stack of towels. Our medicine cabinet has nothing but ineffective anti-aging creams.

The cops said our house didn’t look like a typical target. “Well, not to make you feel bad, but it isn’t particularly fancy,” said Officer Sayers, who also gave me props for having dirty windows. They found several handprints above the mangled screens now twisted on the ground. Unfortunately, there were no fingerprints. The would-be jewel thieves - had there been any jewels - were wearing gloves.

After the cops left, as we picked up the glass, tracked throughout the house and refilled our drawers and cabinets, I felt a mix of gratitude and rejection. My stuff isn’t worthy of criminals?!

I briefly feared they’d absconded with my mom’s pearls which my daughter plans to wear for her wedding next week, but no, they were under the bed. I feared, perhaps, they’d taken my favorite heart necklace with the tiny diamonds, but no, it was under my underwear. We couldn’t find my husband’s gold class ring, but it later showed up in a shoe.

In the end, the only thing unaccounted for was what was left of the Oxycodone my husband had after hip replacement last December. The jar of maybe 20 pills had been hidden in a purse in the back of a closet. We stopped keeping meds in our medicine cabinet when pills from another surgery disappeared during my son’s batman birthday party in the early aughts.

Maybe they were in search of drugs all along. But it is strange that they walked right by cash. All they really did was shatter a once pretty French door. And they shattered my sense of security in my not-fancy house, where every creak now sounds like an intruder and a masked ghost in gloves keeps invading my dreams.

As shared at Story Salon on April 16, 2025.