Please come quickly—there’s a man in my house…

I traveled back to Iowa last weekend. And BOY, was the trip a DOOZY.

I grew up in Eastern Iowa, and still visit often, as my grandparents still live there. While I lived in a metropolitan area when I was in junior high and high school, my grandparents lived on a farm until about 12 years ago, when they moved to a town with about 5,000 people. It is a very quiet town, when almost no crime and everyone knows everyone else’s business.

My grandpa was put into the nursing home about 8 months ago (due to COPD, Congestive Heart Failure and uncontrolled diabetes) and my grandma has been living alone in their house ever since.

Before he went in to the nursing home, she was his primary caregiver, and I think she was really ready for someone else to take care of him. Now that he away from home, I think she gets lonely sometimes.

But I digress.

I arrived at my grandma’s house about 1:30 on Friday afternoon. We went to get pizza at my favorite joint, then drove the 25 or so miles to visit my grandpa. We had a good visit, then headed back home to grab some dinner ingredients from the store and a few videos from the (going out of business, we found out) video store on the corner.

We picked up August Rush, The Time Travelers Wife and Marley and Me. The only one I hadn’t seen was The Time Travelers Wife so we popped it in, grandma falling in and out of sleep as we watched it. If you have seen it, you know that falling asleep is not the best thing to do, as the movie can be kind of confusing, what with all the time traveling.

We got ready for bed when the movie was over, said good night and went to bed. It was about 10:15pm. I stayed up playing with my phone and reading a magazine. I think I finally fell asleep about 1:30am. It was a calm and fun evening.

Everything changed at 4:00am.

I woke up to the sound of what I thought was the TV in the living room. I could hear two voices—2 women talking, though muffled and I thought I recognized one of them. I saw that a light was on (again, I thought it was coming from the living room) through my open-by-about-3-inches bedroom doorway.

I noticed it was still dark outside and thought that my early-bird grandma had gotten up and was watching TV. I was just going to get up and close my door when I heard my grandma say these words:

“Please come quickly—there is a man in my house.”

In about 2 tenths of a second, I figured out what was going on.

The two women’s voices I could here were my grandma and a 911 operator. Her phone volume is up very high as she is a bit hard of hearing.

I didn’t hear the voices coming from the living room, I was hearing my grandma talk from her bedroom. 

And the light I saw was in her room.

As I looked again out in the hallway, I saw a pair of men’s shoes, with feet still in them, laying in front of my bedroom door (see diagram below).

Holy Shit.

I could hear my grandma answering the 911 operators’ questions, but for the first few seconds, all I could do was stare at the feet in my doorway, illuminated by the light coming from my grandma’s doorway.

Then I went into survival mode. I heard my grandma tell the operator that the intruder had his head inside her doorframe, (and obviously his feet were in mine) so she was stuck in her room.

I heard the intruder snoring—and realized he was passed out. I knew as long as he was snoring we were in no danger. I calmed down a little bit.

The 911 operator asked her if she knew the man, and my grandma answered her “no, but he is young, so my granddaughter might know him, I don’t know.” My grandma also told the operator the man was “sleeping.”

Realizing that my grandma had no idea I was awake let alone that I was ok, I called 911 from my cell phone (which was charging above my head on a table) and told another 911 operator that I was fine and to please pass the word on to my grandma, I DID NOT know the man, and the man was not just “sleeping”, he was dead drunk passed out.

About 12-15 minutes after my grandma originally called 911 (she called them back after about 8 minutes wondering “where the hell” the police were) 2 policemen entered the house and woke the sleeping dude up.

His first words? 

“Please don’t call the cops.”

The police asked the dude his name and where he thought he was.

He had no freaking idea. He thought he was in a town about 20 minutes up the highway.

We found out from his ID that he was 26.

Obviously he was drunk, and obviously he was oblivious that he had passed out on my poor grandma’s hallway floor.

The cops took him out to the car, and one came back in and asked if we wanted to press charges. I asked the cop if it would be a felony or misdemeanor charge——because my grandma forgot to lock the front door before going to bed, there was no breaking and entering—he didn’t break in. He would be charged with Trespassing, a misdemeanor, and would be held in jail overnight.

We agreed to press charges and the cops left with the dude.

For a little bit, my grandma and I joked about how FUNNY it was (not funny ha-ha but funny strange) that this happened in her little tiny town and not to me in Chicago. And how crazy it was that I happened to be visiting when it happened. And how bizarre that he picked HER house.

And then she started crying.

And she didn’t stop for 2 days.

She asked me to call her pastor at 7am—we couldn’t go back to sleep after that rude awakening- and pastor Sarah came over to counsel her about 8am. My grandma was going through the 5 stages of grief, shock and PTSD all at the same time.

She was also very embarrassed that she could not stop crying.

My grandma is a quintessential German woman from the depression—WE SHOW NO EMOTIONS BECAUSE EMOTIONS MAKE US WEAK. 

I have had many years of emergency training through work and am best under pressure or stress. I had to take care of my grandma—she was really struggling. I could take care of me later. I still have not processed the “break-in” – it will probably take me a while to finally get to crying about it.

After pastor left, my grandma was feeling a bit better, so we drove to the nearest bigger town and got some lunch, then went to see the movie she had wanted to see: The Last Song.

The Nicolas Sparks movie.

In which she cried through most of. (I on the other hand HATE Miley Cyrus as a serious actress so I rolled my eyes throughout the movie.)

We headed to see my grandpa after (where she did not tell him what happened) then we headed home.

We had a healthy dinner of cheese popcorn, cracker jacks, apple slices and diet coke, and watched yet another happy movie (read: sarcasm) Marley and Me.

Thankfully, grandma fell asleep during the movie (we still had not slept yet) so she missed the horribly sad ending.

I got up and cleaned up a bit, then kneeled in front of my grandma to take the DVD out of the player and turn of the TV.

Then the blood-curdling screams started.

(I have to tell you, I was doing OK up to then. I had lived alone almost 15 years – in Chicago and Atlanta — and have seen and heard about a lot of crazy F’ed up things.  Women being bashed in the head with baseball bats for their purses, a crazy dude stabbing people with scissors in my neighborhood at 8am, and countless home invasions and break-ins. This invasion was vanilla compared to the horrible things I had heard of. AND I didn’t wake up to a man’s head in my doorway. AND it wasn’t MY house I have to live in by myself.)

I jumped up and ran to my grandma, who had a look of terror I can’t describe. I think I blocked the look from my memory—it was that horrible.

She was screaming so loud and so hard.  (she ended up with a sore raspy throat for 3 days from the screams)

I started rubbing her back and saying “its ok grandma, its ok” trying to get her to stop.

But she didn’t.

For over 20 seconds she screamed, vacant look of terror in her eyes, having NO IDEA I was there with her.

Then, she kind of shook her head, realized I was standing next to her; that I was talking to her; rubbing her back.

And she began to sob.

I went in to the kitchen out of view of my grandma and put my head between my legs. I was shaking and had tears in my eyes.

I NEVER want to see a night terror like this again. EVER. 

My god it was bad.

After about 20 minutes of quiet sobbing, she got up and got ready for bed, silently.

I also silently got ready.

We both checked that both doors were locked 3 times, then turned in.

After about an hour, I saw my grandma turn off her light then heard light snoring. I couldn’t believe she had fallen asleep. Good for her.

I wish I could say that I also went right to sleep.

But my mind began to wander and I began to remember my early life as a sleepwalker/talker, having full conversations with my mom and friends and not remembering any of it in the morning. Remembering finding my also-sleepwalker mom sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor at 2:30 am going through a recipe box. Also having long conversations with my mom and her not remembering them in the morning. 

I live alone now—I have no idea if I sleepwalk/talk now.

I probably do.

But all my mind could gather from those memories was that the sleepwalking gene had to come from somewhere and my grandma was going to “wake up”, think I was an intruder, have nothing to stop her from going to the kitchen, getting a knife and stab me.

I didn’t sleep at all Saturday night.

Sunday is a blur—We went to church, but my grandma wanted to leave before the end so she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. She sobbed through the service and was very embarrassed of her red and tear-stained face.

Because they live in a very small town, word was going to get out about the intruder. The town paper prints the addresses of “police calls” and I am sure people on her street saw the lights of the police cars on Friday night.

Since she hadn’t told my grandpa yet (but needed to) I went with her to the nursing home so she could limp through the story.

I think she was reluctant to tell our family (and especially grandpa) because she was afraid everyone would tell her to move to an assisted living home. She is prideful and enjoys her independence. This was also the second “oops” that had happened in the last few months—she rear-ended a car 2 months ago and didn’t tell anyone about it.

Anyway, she told grandpa, with tears streaming, about the dude in the house, and after the story, he half-laughed and said “Well, I guess you need to keep the front door locked from now on, right?!”

I  love him.

On Sunday, Nosy Neighbor Carol from across the street called to “warn us” of the “intruder that broke in somewhere on the street.” My grandma played dumb, not wanting to tell her story just yet to the neighbors, and Carol told her that she found out about the intruder from the police when she called to turn in a set of keys she found in her grass that morning. (The house keys were indeed traced back to the drunk dude)

So it seems drunk dude was looking for a place to crash, so he tried doors until he found one that was open.

The moral of this story is that everyone is OK, LOCK YOUR FRONT DOOR ALWAYS and I have a crazy story to tell people at dinner parties.

It could have been much worse, but it wasn’t.

I am coming to terms with it (writing it out for this blog actually helped.)

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