June asked Helen a few more questions, but I barely heard them. I kept looking up at the panels. The red streaks were bright against the dark glass, almost cheerful in the morning sun, and that made the whole scene feel even stranger. It looked like vandalism. It looked like something a stranger would do. It did not look like something Helen Burke would do, and yet there she was, standing in my yard in handcuffs, telling me there was a camera underneath panel number six, pointed at her house.
I thought about the past two months then, and about how little I had actually understood about what was happening to my own home. I had treated each incident as a separate problem to be fixed. I had paid the money, filed the claim, argued with the installer, and moved on. I had never once asked myself why the damage kept happening, or why it kept happening to the same system, or why every camera facing the roof seemed to fail during the exact minutes the vandalism occurred. I had been so focused on the cost and the inconvenience that I had never stopped to ask what the damage might be preventing.
Helen had asked herself that question. Or at least, that was what she seemed to be telling me. She had damaged my panels not to punish me, but to stop something. She had told me the camera was pointed at her house, at her granddaughter's window. She had said her granddaughter was still inside. And she had said she would do it again if I turned the panels back on, which meant she believed the danger would return the moment the power returned.
I did not believe her yet. I want to be honest about that. Standing in my yard that morning, I did not believe there was a camera under my solar panel. I believed Helen had damaged my property and that she was trying to justify it with a story. But I also could not forget the way she had waited on the roof. She had not run. She had not hidden. She had placed the can beside her and waited for the police, as if the police were part of her plan rather than a consequence she feared. That was not the behavior of a person making up an excuse. That was the behavior of a person who wanted a record, a witness, someone in uniform standing in the yard when the truth came out.
June eventually led Helen toward the patrol car, but Helen kept looking back at my roof, and then at her own house, and I found myself looking at her house too, at the upstairs window where Naomi slept, and wondering what Helen saw when she looked at that window that I could not see from where I stood.
I keep returning to those six minutes between my phone call and June's arrival. Helen stayed on the roof after she finished spraying. She did not try to climb down on her own. She sat near the edge of the panels with the empty can beside her, and she looked out over the neighborhood. I stood below and thought about climbing the ladder myself. I thought about going up there and pulling her down, or at least standing next to her and demanding an explanation face to face. Then I remembered what she had said, about calling the police before climbing the ladder, and I realized she had been protecting me in her own strange way. If I had gone up there, it would have been my word against hers about what happened on that roof. With the police on the way, there would be a record. There would be a witness. Helen had thought about that before I had, and that unsettled me almost as much as the paint.
I also worried, in a way that surprised me, that she might fall. She was seventy-two years old, standing on a sloped roof with paint on her gloves. I stayed on the ground. I kept my phone in my hand. I watched her, and she watched the street, and neither of us said anything more until the patrol car turned into the driveway.