What happens when you wake up to find a homeless woman in your bedroom?
Early on a freezing November morning in 2015, I was pulled out of a dreamless sleep when my bedroom door creaked open. I jolted up, half-awake and confused to see a woman silhouetted in my doorway. She had turned on the hallway light, so I could see she was black and wearing a thick, old, red coat. She had to be in her 40s.
Raising her hands, she stepped back in alarm, as though I was the one breaking into her house in the middle of the night.
Disoriented, I sat up and pulled my blanket to my chin. “Who are you?” I asked. Still foggy with sleep, I was half-rationalizing that she was a ghost.
“I-I’m sorry, missus,” she said. “It’s so cold outside. I was looking for a place to sleep.”
Damn. She was real.
As she explained that she thought the house was empty, I stared at her, fear threatening to lock my brain. She wasn’t holding a weapon, though she might have been hiding one in her puffy coat. But she didn’t seem dangerous. Her hollow eyes locked onto mine as though she was afraid I was the one hiding a gun.
“How did you get in here?”
“The window.” Her voice was raspy, melancholy. “I was just looking for a place to stay.” Her coat was faded. Her skin looked faded. Her soul seemed faded. If she were going to attack, she would have by now. And it was cold outside. Despite my fear, I couldn’t help but pity her. But I wanted her out of my room. “Okay,” I said, “you can sleep on the couch.”
She thanked me profusely and backed away, disappearing into the living room, leaving my bedroom door open and the hall light on. I sat there, trying to process: What just happened? Where the hell was my dad? How was he still asleep?
I checked my phone: 5:14 a.m. Should I call the police? No. She seemed harmless, and for some reason, I felt I’d be the worst person in the world if I sent a homeless person into the cold, even though she’d broken into my house.
“Missus?” Her frail voice made me jump. She called out several more times before I summoned the courage to get out of bed. Trembling, I shuffled into the living room. She was lying on the white leather couch next to the window, which was still open, and winter clung to every bit of the air. Her hands wrapped around her torso. Her legs hung off the couch, so I doubted she was comfortable.
“Missus?” Why was she calling me that? “Do you want me to close the window?”
“Sure,” I said. I backed into my room, still debating what I should do. I had pepper spray in my purse. Maybe I could grab that, then go wake up my dad. But he would send her out into the cold.
I found myself arguing with my subconscious, which wanted to know, What is wrong with you? She broke into your house. She could have hurt you. Why do you pity her?
I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. My dad always said that I am too nice, that I have the curse of a bleeding heart.
I tried to reason with my subconscious about my dad’s temper. Who knew what he would do when he found out about this lady? He couldn’t stand in line at the grocery store for more than 30 seconds without getting pissed. Or what if she was desperate enough to attack him when he tried to make her leave?
My worries turned out to be pointless. My dad woke up to use the bathroom, saw the hallway light, and came out to investigate. When he saw the homeless lady, he first thought it was my older brother Sean, who moved out five years ago, when he was 17, because he and my dad were near fistfights every day. But then he took a closer look.
Miraculously, a gentler side existed in his frozen heart, and he didn’t scream or threaten her. He listened while she lied to him, insisting she was a friend of his wife — oh, that was why she called me missus; she meant Mrs. — who invited her to sleep on the couch. He had her show how she got into the house before making her leave, giving her $20 and an old coat I never wear. He warned that if she ever showed up again, he’d call the cops.
“You’re useless,” I said to my dad over breakfast later. “I’m alone here almost every night, and the window is unlocked?! How the hell didn’t you hear her — she could have had a gun or a knife or something! I could have died!”
Was I overreacting? Maybe. I was overflowing with conflicting emotions, fear for my safety versus empathy for the woman. But I was angry that the one person who was supposed to make me feel safe always seemed to fall short (there’s a history here) — even though he did manage to get her out of the house without a catastrophe.
To be honest, one reason I didn’t wake up my dad was because I was afraid she was hiding a weapon and would attack him. As much as I couldn’t stand him sometimes, he was my dad, and the idea of losing him was terrifying. Not because I needed him to take care of me. I was afraid he would die before I could forgive him for all of the pain he has caused me — for example the time he told me that he wasted 20 years raising my brother and me.
My dad didn’t even blink at my tirade. His face, lined with weariness, softened into a laugh as he explained that the window had been locked — she unlocked it with a screwdriver she’d found in the shed. My dad believed that she was trying to rob us and thought no one was home.
Maybe that should have been a wakeup call. I had always understood the danger that existed in Las Vegas, but I considered my neighborhood safe. I grew up on the east side, Flamingo and Sandhill, six minutes from Sam’s Town. I lived my entire life in the same one-story white and brown house with the rose bushes in the yard and paint chipping off the trim. I just never worried about someone breaking in, even though, according to AreaVibes, there is a 1-in-26 chance of becoming a victim of a crime in Las Vegas. There were 180 homicides in Clark County that year, according to the Review-Journal. And 8 News NOW reports that Las Vegas has the nation’s fourth highest-homeless rate. Out of every 10,000 people, 50 are homeless.
Mostly, though, our lives didn’t change after the incident. Sure, my dad installed an alarm on every window, but I never kept the monitor on — I hated the loud noise it made when I went near a window. Otherwise, I didn’t have nightmares, and I didn’t put a lock on my bedroom door. My dad still refused to replace the porch light that had been dead for 13 years, so that at night my house looked like an abandoned shack for ghouls on crack.
My mom will never let me live down how I handled the situation. “Are you crazy?” she yelled over the phone from her apartment across town. “Why didn’t you call the cops?”
When I was 12, my brother accidentally set the microwave on fire, and my mom ran out of the house without either of us. So she might not be the right person to dispense advice in this situation.
“Why didn’t you get your dad?”
she asked.
“I was getting to it,” I replied.
In the end, no one got hurt, so I suppose I handled the situation well enough. I still don’t know why I didn’t completely lose it that night. Maybe I have no self-preservation instincts whatsoever. Or my dad’s right about my bleeding heart: I’m just too nice. But what’s wrong with that?