Golden States by Michael Cunningham

right behind her when Janet opened the front door and stepped into the dazzling beam of a flashlight. Thelight delineated her body like an x-ray. It held her pinned at the threshold, and flicked off. Her nightgown turned solid again.
    “Evening,” a gravelly man’s voice said. “You report a prowler?”
    David and Mom squeezed themselves in on either side of Janet in the doorway. A patrolman stood on the front stoop. He had a square, handsome face in which only the mouth moved.
    “I guess we did,” Janet said.
    “I reported the prowler,” Mom said, working her way in front of Janet, taking charge. “I’m Beverly Stark.” David noticed, as he sometimes did, her habit of announcing her name to people as if she expected them to have heard of her.
    “My partner’s in the back,” the patrolman said. Behind his broad body the revolving light of a cruiser stained the front lawn pink and gray and pink again.
    “Thank you for coming out,” Mom said. She covered herself with her arms. She was so tiny before the uhiform. David stepped around and stood between Mom and the patrolman.
    “I was the one that saw him,” he said.
    “Tell me what you saw, please,” the policeman said.
    David glanced nervously back at Mom, who nodded. “I saw a man by the pool,” he said. “Over in the bushes by the fence.” In a fit of embarrassment, he spoke these sentences to the policeman’s square, black shoes.
    “What was he doing?” the policeman asked.
    “He was just standing in the bushes,” David said. “Looking at me.”
    “Looking at you?” the policeman said. “How could you tell in the dark if he was looking at you?” The policeman wore a wristwatch big as a silver dollar. The black hairs of his wrist curled up over the metal band.
    “Well, I couldn’t, really,” David said. “But he was standing there looking. ”
    “Was he trying to get in the house?”
    “Yes, ” David said, and his voice cracked.
    “Was he?” Mom asked. “Are you sure, David?”
    “No,” David said. “I don’t know.” He couldn’t imagine how he had worked himself over into the wrong.
    The partner returned from the back, walking behind the puddle of light his flashlight cast on the ground. “Negative,” he said. “Nobody’s there.” He was younger than the other, but shared his wide, well-cut face. They might have been brothers.
    “Looks like a false alarm,” the first one said. “Nobody saw him but the boy here.”
    “It’s not a false alarm just because nobody’s standing back there with an ax, for God’s sake,” Janet said. “If David says he saw somebody, he saw somebody.”
    “Right,” the partner said. “Anyhow, there’s no one on the premises now.”
    “Did you check the windows?” Janet asked with irritation. “The windows haven’t been tampered with,” the partner said. “If you like, we’ll come in and check the house.”
    “Please,” Mom said. “We’d all sleep better.”
    The three of them hung back to let the police enter. The police brought with them into the house their smell of aftershave, fried food, and leather. They split up, running the beams of their flashlights all over the dark rooms. David followed the partner, who had not been so skeptical about his story. The partner walked briskly through the living room and the kitchen, shining his light here and there, surprising everything with light. There was the milky green glass of the television, there the shiny leaves and grotesque shadow of the rubber plant in its brown plastic pot. In these slashes of light the house looked haunted, a mute witness to murders.
    After the police had gone through with their flashlights they turned on the lamps and checked again, upstairs and down, looking into every closet. They opened the door to Lizzie’sroom. She didn’t wake up. David wondered with a chill how often they found somebody hiding in closets, or in little girls’ rooms.
    When they finished their circuit they met back at the front