I remember the exact time because the clock on my kitchen wall was the first thing I looked at when the sound woke me. It was 7:14 on a Saturday morning. I had been asleep for only a few hours. I worked overnight twice a week, and Friday night had been one of those nights, so my body still felt like it belonged to the dark. Ava had spent the night at a friend's house. I had been alone in the house since Friday evening, and the quiet of the place had settled around me in the way it always did when she was gone.
The sound that woke me was not loud. It was a thin scraping noise from above, the kind of sound a roof makes when something moves across it that should not be there. At first I thought it might be a branch. We had no storm the night before, though, and I could not think of any branch long enough to reach over the back slope of the roof. I lay still for a moment and listened. The scraping came again, steady and deliberate, and then I heard a short hiss, like air escaping from a can.
I got out of bed and went to the back window. I pulled the curtain aside and looked up at the roof.
Helen Burke was standing on my roof.
I stared at her before my brain caught up with my eyes. Helen was seventy-two years old. She lived alone in the small blue house directly behind mine, on the other side of the shared fence. She grew tomatoes beside that fence. She had collected packages for Ava when I worked late. After my wife Danielle died, Helen had brought dinner to our house every Sunday for nearly six months. She was the last person in the world I would have expected to find standing on my roof at seven in the morning.
She was holding a can of red spray paint in one hand. The dark glass of my solar panels was already streaked with thick red lines. She moved carefully along the row, the way a person moves when they are doing a job they have planned, and she sprayed another panel as I watched. Her hair was pulled back. She wore a plain jacket and work gloves. She did not look frightened. She did not look hurried. She looked like someone finishing a task she had already decided to finish.
"Helen!" I shouted through the glass. "Helen, get down!"
She turned her head just enough to look at me. Then she shook the can and sprayed another panel. Her voice came back calm, almost conversational, as if we were talking across the fence instead of across the height of a roof.
"I did the other three times too."
I did not understand her at first. The words did not fit together in my head. The other three times. Three times my solar panels had been damaged over the past two months, and I had spent weeks trying to figure out who was doing it. I had blamed teenagers I had never seen. I had blamed the contractor. I had never, not once, blamed Helen.
"What?" I said. "Helen, get down from there right now."
"Call the police first," she said.
I stared at her. "What?"
"Call them before you climb this ladder."
I remember thinking that the sentence made no sense. Why would she want me to call the police on her? Why would she tell me to do it before I climbed the ladder, as if the order of things mattered? I said the only thing that seemed to make sense at that moment.
"You're destroying my property."
She sprayed another panel. The red paint went on thick, covering the dark glass in a wide streak.
"I'm stopping it from turning back on."
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. My hands were shaking, and I was not sure whether that was anger or shock or tiredness. Helen kept spraying while I dialed. She did not rush. She did not look at me again. She worked her way along the row of panels until the final panel was completely covered, and then she placed the can beside her on the roof, sat back slightly, and waited. She made no attempt to escape. She did not climb down the ladder on her own. She simply waited for whatever came next, as if she had already accepted it.