That Time Our Car Was Stolen

On unexpected departures and returns

Here’s what happened: One winter morning before I took our children to school, I started our car to warm it up, went back to the house, and helped the kids into their coats. When we were walking to the door I watched from the kitchen window as the car—our car!—backed out of the driveway and drove away.

My father used to crank his pickup on cold mornings and leave it running before taking us to the bus stop. My first thought: You can leave a car unlocked and running in a small town, not here in the big city.

I wondered what shape the theft would take in our kids’ imaginations. Days later it was all they could talk about. Every afternoon at school pickup: “Did they find the car?” Our six-year-old dreamed about it, her dream part of a new era, one in which such things can happen. “Daddy, I can’t stop thinking about it.”

The theft was shorthand for all that I try to protect them from. For nights afterward I would stare at the ceiling in the dark, considering what I could have done differently. Stand in the road? Jump on the hood? Anything other than just call 911 and watch the car disappear. I pictured our kids’ bags in the backseat, packed for school, and couldn’t quit imagining them.

We make sense of the present using what’s come before, so here’s what it was like: When the hawk that hunted in our neighborhood passed just overhead and the raptor shadow made me feel like prey. Or the time in Baton Rouge when someone was killing people, and because he could be anywhere, it seemed like he was everywhere—a ubiquity of predation.

And what if our kids had been in the car?

Before I get carried away, here’s how it all turned out: My daughter dreamed we would get the car back, and we did. It wasn’t discovered in a forest like she said, but still.

We were headed to the library when the police called to say the car was found in a parking lot. “Do you want to pick it up before it’s towed?” So we traveled across town to discover it was fine. Even the kids’ backpacks were untouched. The best I can tell, the person drove to the mall, ate some Chick-fil-A, and parked the car, leaving a stolen credit card and a bottle of cologne in the glove compartment. Just your classic, really-need-to-go-to-the-mall-theft.

Later I hear our daughter tell her siblings: “The car smells good but different.” And: “Bad guys are real.” And: “Remember that time our car was stolen?” One thing’s for sure: Our car’s return was as sudden and inscrutable as its theft—maybe shorthand for life itself.

Robert Erle Barham is Associate Professor of English at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA. He is the deputy editor of Current.

^{Image credit: Joey Marchy}