By Esther C. Baird. First published in the Ipswich Local News August 16, 2024
“I’m in your closet, trying to find gym shorts,” said our high-school-aged daughter.
Entire columns could be written about why the American teenage girl feels compelled to raid other people’s closets to accomplish their fashion goals … and why it never ends well.
“And?” I replied coolly.
“It’s a mess.”
I remained silent. Silent … and chill.
She continued, “I think a contractor broke stuff.”
“That makes no sense.” I said. Contractors roam our house as if we are merely another aisle in Home Depot, but all of them are meticulous and clean.
“They ripped a wall panel off and knocked over your jewelry box. Plus your stuff is everywhere.”
Time stopped.
I clarified with a touch of emotion. “You’re standing in my closet and my jewelry box is upside down on the floor!?”
“Yeah. You have weird jewelry, like old pictures, necklaces that are tangled and … gross! Are these teeth?”
I took a deep breath. Since time had stopped, I’ll digress to say “yes.” Yes, they were teeth. Baby teeth. Our Tooth Fairy was a hoarder. Clearly, that was irrelevant to the situation at hand.
“Very carefully walk out of the closet and find your father.”
“But the shorts …”
“Get out,” I snapped with zero chill. “We’ve been robbed.”
Moments later my husband called me from the closet. “It’s been ransacked.”
I quickly asked, “What about the watch?”
We had recently purchased an Apple Watch for our college-aged daughter’s upcoming birthday. “It’s in the top-right drawer.”
There was silence and then,“It’s not there.”
And that’s when he called the police. They came, fingerprinted, and had my husband check for other places that might have been “tossed.”
A painting in the office was knocked to the floor, our older daughter’s closet had bins swept off shelves, and our younger daughter’s closet — well, I explained, “One can’t possibly know if her closet has been tossed by a robber, invaded by aliens, or it’s just a regular Tuesday afternoon.”
But clearly it had been a multi-room event.
By the time I got home, my husband had called the alarm company.
“No doors or windows were triggered. The police are talking to the chimney guy.”
Actually he is a mortar guy. But our chimney had a leak and he’d been up there for weeks fixing it from atop a giant crane.
“They thought maybe he saw something since he’s up by our bedroom windows.”
Saw what? Our dysfunctional Tooth Fairy? Our windows are three stories up and open sideways, not vertically.
The idea that someone might scale the highest side of our house and hurl themselves through the ten-inch opening seemed a little more Mission Impossible than North Shore.
Back in my closet, I got down on my hands and knees and began to pick up my strewn jewelry, and — yes — baby teeth. But as I turned to put some of the non-dentally related items into the drawer, I saw it.
The Apple Watch. In the top-right drawer.
I felt crazy. Was I crazy? I called my husband back upstairs (this time, of course, I was there and in person). “Look!”
He stared at the watch. “That’s not the drawer you told me to check.”
For the sake of this column — by which I mean our marriage — I’ll just say we’ll never know what I did (or did not) communicate about the (top-right) drawer. Clearly, it was not the time to play “he said/she said.”
But there the watch was. Not stolen.
And then our chimney guy started up again. It was loud and vigorous. I stared at the closet wall where it touched the ceiling that led … to the back of the chimney.
We’d found our Tooth Fairy. Only she wasn’t only oddly obsessed — she was also a vibration. A vibration just strong enough to dislodge a panel, knock over a jewelry box, and generally cause household chaos.
The Boxford police were polite when my husband called with the news, mostly because they didn’t have to catch a rogue magical creature.
And our daughter was thrilled when she opened the not-stolen watch on her birthday.
And I say that nothing good comes from teenagers raiding your closet.