Neighbourhood F*ing Watch: The Sequel

Every point, unfortunately, has a counterpoint

If you’ve been around for a while, you may have read about the summer I turned 18. I was living in Somewhere-Small-and-Desolate, Canada, and convinced myself I was being followed. I wasn’t. My schedule just happened to align with the daily drives of a lonely old man. I worried about him for over a month before we became friendly, and then I felt like an asshole.

It wasn’t paranoia, not really. In most ways, it was entirely reasonable to feel suspicious.

Noticing the same vehicle appearing over and over again on the same route, with the same face and same timing, is just ordinary awareness. Most of us would take note.

The problem, of course, is that noticing something doesn’t mean you understand it.

This past weekend, I was talking with a few friends about moments we’ve had that may have been close brushes with danger. In every story, there was a distance between our perception and the intention. We can’t know what the people we encountered meant to make us feel or what they were trying to do, we just know what we sensed. I found myself thinking of that old man in the van and how wrong I had been.

As I was revisiting the article, where I warned everyone not to make assumptions, it struck me that I have a counterexample, or maybe a cautionary tale. Something that flips that advice on its head and pokes at it, inconveniently.

Probably three summers later, I was living in a different, slightly larger Somewhere-Small-and-Desolate, Canada.

I was there for work, renting a house with a roommate whose schedule barely overlapped with mine. Most weeks, we were only in the house together for about two days.

At some point, she had to take an unexpected leave, and five weeks passed while I was in the house alone.

Once a month, I’d have four days of 13.5-hour split shifts. At the station by 4:30 a.m. to write and report the news, back again for the evening slot, finally getting home around 10 p.m.

Being in my very early 20s, barely able to afford the necessities of rent and groceries, scraping together change for gas and weekend beers, yet holding the responsibility of a key to a newsroom and the freedom to broadcast across the country, it’s something I look back on romantically. But it was hellish at the time, averaging about four hours of sleep, begging some higher power to let my mouth-mind connection function behind the microphone.

I don’t remember much about the day itself, only that I had come home in the afternoon between shifts, and when I’d looked out the kitchen window, I noticed a truck. It was striking because the lot across from us was oddly shaped, and no one ever parked in front. A few hours later, when I left for my second shift, it still sat empty.

Later that night, it was hot and humid. I imagine I was walking into the house around 10:15 p.m. The sun was gone, but the sky hadn’t fully committed to night. The first stars may have been showing, but only barely.

I was 21, so hardly concerned with exhaustion, and laced up for a run before bed. I remember it distinctly. Not the run itself, but rounding the corner back onto my street and noticing that the truck was still there.

Standing in the kitchen window, filling the water tank of my coffee machine, something seemed off. And that something was that the driver’s seat was totally gone. I could see no one and nothing.

When I pulled out of the driveway five hours later, the truck was still there, and when I returned a few hours later, it was gone.

It was strange, I thought, but not necessarily worrisome. Life goes on.

That night, I was wandering from the bathroom to my bedroom when I heard a faint knocking. I stopped, waited. The sound came again, only it wasn’t coming from the front door; it was coming from the side of the house. There was a door at the side of the house, but it wasn’t well-lit, and it wasn’t where people usually knocked.

It was just before 11 p.m.

I thought about ignoring it, but every window in the house would betray me. It was evident someone was home, and the knocking wasn’t stopping. It wasn’t forceful or loud, but it was there.

I walked through the kitchen, to the door, and opened it only slightly. I couldn’t really make out the features of the person standing there, just that it was a man, fairly tall, thin.

“Is Laura here?” he asked.

Laura was my roommate.

“No,” I said. “She’s not.”

“Do you know where she is?”

I did.

“I don’t.”

“Do you talk to her?”

“I’m in contact with her family,” I said honestly.

“Can you tell her to call me?”

“Who are you?”

“She’ll know,” he said, and then he walked away.

That was it.

When I turned back into the kitchen and began turning off the lights, I noticed him getting into a truck, the same one from the night before, parked in the same spot.

The next day was my last split shift of the week. I came home at lunch, and the truck was there, again, empty. At the end of my work day, it wasn’t there. But that night, shortly after 10 p.m., there was a knocking at the door again.

This time, I called a friend who lived across town and told him to stay on the phone with me while I answered the door.

Same guy, this time, holding something in his hands.

“Is Laura here?”

“No, I told you she’s not.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“She’s not here.”

There was a long pause.

“Can you just get her?”

“You have to leave.”

“I know she’s here.”

“I’ll call the cops.”

“I just want to talk to her.”

“She is not here.”

“Then I’ll stay until she is.”

The moment continued to escalate. I’m not proud of the things I said or threatened, but as the moment sustained, my fear built, disguised as anger and bravado. Eventually, he sighed and thrust a sad bouquet of grocery-store flowers toward me. “Just give these to her.”

He got in his truck and drove away.

I picked up the phone, my friend still on the line.

“I almost called the cops,” he said, “but you were threatening him.”

I was.

And my threats probably seemed disproportionate. A man was on my doorstep with flowers. He never threatened to hurt me, never forced his way inside.

But a stranger spent days parked across from my house. He seemingly slept there, driver’s seat reclined into invisibility. He appeared at my door late at night. He came back after being told the person he wanted wasn’t there. He knew where we lived, and I didn’t know who he was.

The threat wasn’t spoken to me. It was implied by the simple fact that a man I didn’t know had decided that my home was an appropriate place to conduct whatever business he had with my roommate.

And in doing so, he placed me in a position where I felt I had to become threatening.

Not because I wanted to be. But because women learn, often very young, that there is a narrow window between discomfort and danger, and that nobody can tell you exactly where that line is until after it’s been crossed.

Maybe he was just a lonely guy trying to find a woman he missed. Maybe he was heartbroken. Maybe the flowers were genuine, and the whole thing looked different from where he was standing.

But that’s the privilege of hindsight and distance. At 11 p.m., standing alone in a poorly lit doorway, I wasn’t being asked to judge him after the fact. I was being asked to make a decision in real time.

When I did finally get to discuss this with my roommate, what I learned made things feel far worse. Like everything I’d done was both too much and not enough, and that I should’ve called my friend the night before and prepared a plan. Called the cops and told them someone was outside my house.

But in that moment, that felt like too much.

People often discuss women’s caution as though it’s a personal failing, an overreaction. Paranoia and anxiety.

If I'd been wrong, I was an asshole. Because I was right, I needed to be one.