Photograph by Amy Hart
On Thanksgiving morning when I was fifteen, a naked man sprinted across my lawn.
It was quiet before that. My dad asked me to fetch the newspaper, so I stepped onto the doorstep of our suburban home, ankles chilly in running shoes I’d just slipped on, when the movement caught my attention. I’d say I was shocked, but it happened so fast the shock could hardly register.
He came barreling through the grass with a dark thicket of pubic hair and unmistakable terror in his eyes, his arms flinging wildly around his pale torso. He wasn’t wearing a stitch—including shoes—and was absolutely hauling ass, even though there didn’t seem to be anyone chasing him. He tore through out of our neighbor’s tidy front lawn and, not breaking stride, crossed the road and passed directly into ours. He pivoted right when he hit our driveway, bolting past my mother’s slumbering Volvo. A diamond stud earring in his right lobe caught the light, flashing like a tiny bulb before he disappeared, heading in the direction of our backyard.
He didn’t seem to see me at all. Fifteen is the age of invisibility as a boy, so I guess I wasn’t surprised. I was medium height and had a medium build, and wore an awful, shaggy, in-between-styles haircut.
But my memory captured his profile perfectly as he passed by: his blonde surfer hair and beard. I thought in that earring-flash that he looked like one of the Allman Brothers. I might have wondered if I’d hallucinated the whole thing if it wasn’t for his trail of footprints through the frosty dew. Twice he’d looked over his right shoulder, but behind him now, the street was still.
I stood in the silence for a few seconds, then reopened the front door, returning to the now-otherworldly warmth of our foyer, where Thanksgiving scents pervaded: thyme, cinnamon, sage. The radio was switched on in the kitchen and I could hear Mom humming along with the wistful bridge of a Paul Simon song, a particularly sad line about how “it’s all going to fade.”
A brisk mood had descended over the house that year. My parents didn’t know what to do with the fact that my older sister, Gina, had decided not to come home from college for the holiday, but instead had decided to spend the long weekend with the family of someone she’d recently started dating.
Suspiciously recently.
Earlier in the week, Mom had wondered aloud several times about whether Gina had made her boyfriend up entirely. Neither of my parents are good at hiding their feelings, and consequently the morning seemed hushed. Somehow, at the same time, I admired and resented Gina for not being there.
When I closed the door, my father looked up from the dining room table in his plaid pajama shirt. His hair was rumpled and his glasses were balanced on the tip of his nose. He issued a perplexed nod at my empty hands. “Well, did you get the paper?”
Right, that. His request seemed like it was from a long time ago, maybe a different day.
I shook my head.
“Ohh–kay,” he sighed, like all his fears about me had just been confirmed.
“A man ran into our yard,” I pointed. “He was naked.”
He’d started to rise from his chair but stopped. He looked at me for a few seconds then burst out laughing.
I laughed, too. It was all I could do.
Paul Simon’s song continued on in the background, and then suddenly the radio clicked off. Mom’s head poked out from the door. “Brian,” she hissed. “Someone’s in our backyard.”
Time started to decelerate. My father’s gaze swung back toward me and I nodded, confirming that we were indeed sharing this same completely unanticipated reality. His expression shifted from bemusement to aggravated accusation, as if I’d somehow invited this, and stood so quickly that the chair teetered behind him. He strode through the kitchen to the windows in the family room. Mom and I joined, and for a while the three of us watched the backyard in silence. Mom actually clutched a kitchen towel to her chest.
Finally, my father spoke up. “Darla, are you sure you saw . . .”
“Shh.”
A light inside the carriage house switched on and a shadow moved quickly through the pale-yellow light, ruffling the curtain.
“What on earth!” Dad asked. He was already lurching for the loafers that rested on a rack by the rear door. “What on God’s green earth could someone want from . . .”
“Wait! Brian, he could be crazy! He could have a gun or something!” Mom grasped his sleeve, the red material bunching tight between her fingers.
Dad hesitated as a smirk crept onto his face. “An unlicensed firearm if ever there was one.”
“I’m serious!” Mom shrieked. “We need to lock all the doors!”
One thing I was absolutely certain of: that man was not hiding any weapons.
Dad gently set his shoes down and flipped the deadbolt on the back door as Mom scurried to the front of the house. A few seconds later, I heard a lock click. “I’m calling the police,” she said, wheeling back toward the kitchen. A second later, I heard the plastic rattle of a cordless receiver being plucked from its base.
Considering her agitation a moment earlier, Mom was remarkably calm as she described the situation to the dispatcher. She sounded assertive and sort of professional, urgent in requesting help and yet vaguely apologetic for putting anyone out. She rested her hand on her hip the way she did when she spoke candidly.
Dad checked the backdoor lock and then ran up the stairs. A few minutes later he was back, wearing jeans and a wrinkled forest green sweater, his hair still sticking up in various directions.
I kept an eye on the carriage house window and saw the shadow move once more.
“Stay back from the glass,” Mom scolded us. “He’s in there still, probably watching us. What’s wrong with some people?”
I highly doubted he was watching us, because why would he be? It sounded like she’d quoted a line from a tv show at the wrong moment. Dad and I shared a fleeting glance that confirmed his own dubiousness. The vulnerability gradient between us and a naked man who’d run through our yard was clear. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he assured her.
Mom muttered a few spiteful phrases about selfishness and how the holiday had been spoiled, like it was a dish that had been left on a countertop too long.
My parents shared a distaste for firearms, but Dad gripped his hands together in a regretful way, like he was sorry he’d passed on acquiring one. As if he could hardly wait to spring into action. There’s something suspicious about adults when you’re fifteen. There’s a quiet sadness tucked into their anger, like their feelings are exaggerations about something else entirely. Like maybe they hadn’t meant to end up where they are. I had the odd feeling that among us, I was the sensible one.
For me? This was by far the most exciting Thanksgiving we’d ever shared and without question the most memorable. Who could have dreamed up an R-rated morning like this? There was nudity, mystery, tension . . . and a plot that continued to unfold. I wondered what Gina would have made of it, and even imagined how Mom would tell her about it later. I wasn’t sure why, but it felt like if Gina had been home, the stranger wouldn’t have appeared.
Soon, I heard the shushing sound of car brakes outside. Two patrol cars appeared and soon three officers in dark uniforms strode across the lawn, one resting his hand on his holstered pistol. Dad exited through the front door, letting in a burst of cold air, and issued a somber, apologetic wave. I watched as the four of them met in the center of the yard, their shoe marks in the frost obscuring the clear line of the stranger’s bare footprints.
A third patrol car arrived, and their heads all turned as a fourth policeman joined the group. “Seems like a lot of cops,” I said to Mom.
One of the officers said the words “home invasion.”
“God knows what the neighbors imagine is happening over here,” she mumbled.
As if on cue, the telephone rang and Mom returned to the kitchen. “Hi, yes, yes, no, we’re all okay. We have a situation and we’re . . . no, not a fire. Listen, I’m going to have to call you back.”
The men made their way around the side of the house. The police entered the back gate, with my father just behind them. The gate’s hinges creaked as each one pushed in, all wearing grim expressions of determination, as if they were about to get to the bottom of something or right some deep wrong. My father hadn’t looked so uneasy since I brought home a C- in Geometry.
“I wonder if he’s mentally ill, that man,” Mom asked tentatively, her voice softening some. “Maybe he’s lost his marbles. Holidays can do that. Make people lose it.” She sounded sad, suddenly, like she was speaking nonspecifically of a specific experience—not a situation like this one, surely, but a bleak holiday in her past I’d never hear about.
I almost made a joke about how I could just go find one of Dad’s robes upstairs and invite everyone inside for dinner, but I decided it was maybe too soon for that.
Mom gasped as the first officer reached the carriage house. “Close your eyes!” she whispered, urgently.
But I looked, of course. How couldn’t I? My pulse was racing.
He unholstered his revolver and was waving it around.
“Somebody’s going to get shot with that thing!” she whispered.
Fifteen is an age where consequences can’t even be seen. Fifteen, I came to understand later, and with a measure of shame, is agnostic to penalties. It wants to witness life.
Fifteen wants to see what will happen.
I didn’t blink.
The officer flung open the carriage house door, which hit an interior wall with a loud bang—I knew right then that particular door would forevermore remain locked—and shouted, “Come out of the house, pervert! This is the police!”
Pervert!
I’d never heard the word used in earnest before, as a true disparagement. It sounded so different, so ugly when the person wasn’t teasing. A second passed, then all the men charged into the carriage house. More lights flipped on. My imagination could barely conjure images of the scene inside.
Mom gripped my shoulder.
I realized I had balled my own hands into fists and was squeezing them tight. Because then, all at once, the consequences of what was happening actually did occur to me. Five men, including my father, had rushed into the confrontation. Were we about to hear shots ring out? Real-life gunfire? Was the naked man about to be killed? Here? Would we see his dead body afterward? And would we ever learn why he had no clothes and what he was running from?
Then, probably because Halloween had just passed, I wondered briefly if the man’s ghost would haunt us, if I might later witness apparitions or hear unexplained noises at night, if maybe . . . but then I heard the hinges creak again, and the carriage house door reopened.
“Oh God,” Mom said, cutting the silence.
My father stepped out.
His eyes met Mom’s and he shrugged. He mouthed the words, “He’s gone.”
You can imagine what a bummer the rest of the day was. The police walked the house’s perimeter, took statements from Mom and Dad, then spoke to our neighbors. The patrol cars were gone in thirty minutes, I think with a vague sense among the officers that we’d made up the story entirely. “He might have gone out a window,” Dad posited, mournfully. “And then closed it behind him.”
Dad actually moved through his feelings about the morning’s events pretty quickly, pivoting toward being jovial, joking around about what had happened. “Helluva practical joke, convincing one guy to go streaking like that,” he crooned as he opened a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. Mom’s withering glances cut this levity pretty short. The experience had left her snappy and defensive, like we’d been robbed, although obviously nothing was missing.
Later, we ate a quiet dinner. A football game came on TV. Mom called Gina.
At the time, I had a job at the supermarket where my family shopped. It was a bright, sparklingly clean store which Mom frequented so regularly that she knew the names of some of the cashiers and even a few of the managers. It was a fine enough first job, even if being so familiar with the place made me feel vaguely observed as I went about my work.
Anyway, I sorted and bagged groceries, pushed cartfuls to customers’ vehicles and helped unload, then returned collected carts to the store.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving weekend, I’d been working for less than an hour when I looked up from beside the cashier and recognized the stranger. There was no mistaking his profile, and if I had any question, his earring confirmed it. My chest felt tight and pressured, feeling a little starstruck even if there wasn’t a rational reason to be. I felt embarrassment and a fear of being caught, even though I wasn’t in the wrong and he clearly didn’t recognize me. I was almost sure he hadn’t even seen me that morning.
His cart had some regular groceries—a loaf of bread from the bakery, a block of cheese, some shaving cream—things like that. I don’t know why I would’ve expected otherwise, but I found the usualness of his items a little endearing.
I didn’t raise my eyes as he took his receipt, but I asked what I always did at this stage, “Would you like some help out with this?”
He started to shake his head when he held up his finger signaling a pause. He reached into his pocket and looked at his phone. “Yeah, actually. Thanks,” he said.
He strode toward the sliding doors and I followed, listening as he answered the call. He motioned toward a far part of the parking lot, then walked two steps in front of me, phone to his ear. Behind him trailed a light scent of wood smoke, like he’d been working outdoors that morning. I wish I could say I was trying to not eavesdrop but I was listening to every word.
“Yeah, sorry,” he muttered. “I ran in to get a few things, didn’t know how long you’d be.”
The cart was an old one; one of the wheels didn’t reach the ground but spun around in circles as we headed toward the far end of the parking lot. My hands had a sweaty grip around the handle despite the cold morning. He reached into his pocket and the lights on a black sedan flashed. A second later, the trunk opened.
It so happened that he was backed into his parking spot. And beside him was a car that I recognized immediately. It was a white convertible that belonged to our neighbor, Mrs. Green.
Her driver’s side door opened as we approached.
She wore large, round sunglasses but despite them I could read shock in her expression when she recognized me. I never called Delilah Green anything other than Mrs. Green, but in that instant, as naive at it may sound, I realized that not only was she a person with a first name, but that she had come to this parking lot to meet the Thanksgiving streaker. That the two were obviously having some sort of clandestine affair. She did a double take as she recognized me, waved shyly, and quickly got back into her car.
The man, who I was now thinking of as Greg Allman, made a puzzled hmm sound as I unloaded his things, then thanked me as I pushed the cart away.
I was exhilarated as I went about work. Even if it was because of a coincidence, and even if I didn’t fully understand, I’d solved a mystery.
When I came back outside to help another customer, Greg Allman’s car was gone, but Mrs. Green’s was still there. She leaned against her hood with her coat collar pulled up around her neck and her arms folded over her chest. Her breath was white in the cold air and she blew a puff of it away as if she’d been smoking a cigarette.
She waved when she saw me. Sheepishly, I approached—and only because she’d clearly been waiting. And I understood that she’d been waiting because I had seen them together.
Only when she turned her head did I notice that her right eye was bruised. There was also a small cut on her bottom lip that looked as if it had recently scabbed over.
She took off the sunglasses and looked at me directly. “I wanted to apologize to you for what happened last week. I’m sure it was no fun having the police called to your home on Thanksgiving morning.” She rubbed her hands together and went on. “The person who ran through your yard is someone I’ve been in a relationship with. Doctor Green was supposed to be at work that morning and, well . . . Travis had been doing some work at the house over the last year. Things happen,” she said, shrugging.
Travis, I thought. The name fit him, once she said it. But mainly, as she talked, I tried not to think about her body: her bare arms and thighs, her hidden nipples, the certain shift in her look when she spoke to a boy and not a man. It was a kind of waking dream, standing there, fragile as a radio signal on a crisp autumn morning, a lonesome wish to be with someone far away. A suggestion that everything will fade.
“Everything was fine,” I said, trying my best to seem self-possessed. “You don’t have to apologize.”
She laughed shyly. “Your Mom probably thinks otherwise. I would if a naked man ran into my house.”
I didn’t want to say she was probably right.
“I’ll probably leave a letter for her before we move.” She rolled her eyes at herself. “I don’t know if I can actually face her.”
She saw my expression register the word “move.”
“Doctor Green and I are getting a divorce,” she said, sounding apologetic, as if apologizing to me were necessary. “I’ll probably move in with my parents in Virginia for a while.”
I didn’t know what to say but I nodded.
She touched my shoulder. “You’re a good kid,” she said. “Take care, okay?”
I heard the engine of her car start as I returned to the store.
I could have run home and told my parents about my conversation with Delilah Green. Part of me eagerly wanted to spill the secret. I pictured the look on Mom’s face as I thought of entertaining her, like a needy child begging for attention, wanting to please.
But I was suspicious of the feeling. And later I was glad for the hours of work that stood between me and home. That was when I decided that sixteen, when it came, could be many things at once. It might be as hapless as the broken wheel of a shopping cart or as surprising as a glimmer on a diamond stud earring. It might be both, I reasoned, and knowing that helped me decide to keep that Thanksgiving’s backstory to myself.
I decided not to tell anyone what I’d learned. Not even on the afternoon the For Sale sign appeared in the Green’s yard, or on the striking, bitter day when the moving trucks glumly arrived, or when Gina remarked on the matter during winter break. (Her boyfriend was in fact with her and not fictional at all.) Holding the knowledge felt like a sort of gift I’d been given, a confidence to maintain, like an unexpected greeting into the elliptical contradictions of the age just about to arrive.
R.J. Jacobs: I’m a psychologist and author in Nashville, and my most recent novel was published in 2023. I have four traditionally published books, participate in Nashville’s local writer’s collective, and maintain a psychology practice.