Personal Essay: Neighborhood Watch
How would I protect my family from the sex offender across the street?
by Ashley Shelby
May 21, 2009
"Dear Concerned Citizen," the letter began. "The Hopkins Police Department received notification from the Minnesota Department of Corrections that a Level III Predatory Offender will be moving into the community."
Oh, that guy. The one whose parents live across the alley.
"It is not the intention of the Hopkins Police Department to increase fear in the community."
Oh, I wasn't fearful. I was pissed. My husband and I had moved to the Twin Cities from New York about three years earlier. I got pregnant a month after we arrived. We bought our home a month before my son was born. Hopped up on hormones, I had done a frenetic
search of the Minnesota State Department of Corrections Offender Records database before signing the purchase agreement, scouring my zip code and those nearby to see if any sexual predators lived in the neighborhood. Nothing came up, and although I realized
the state only had to report the Level III guys (the ones deemed most likely to re-offend), I was sufficiently mollified and gave it no more thought.
Then, one day, in the middle of a blizzard, our carbon monoxide detector went off. While the guy from Centerpoint was checking things out, our next-door neighbors invited us in for a glass of wine. As I sat there with Hudson on my lap, the young wife dispensed
with the gossip of the neighborhood, including the duplex across the alley that was really a "crack house;" the "raging conservative" across the street; and the couple a few houses down who had a pedophile son. At that last revelation, the woman's husband
had looked at me sheepishly and made one of those hand gestures that said "too much wine." So I put the gossip out of my mind.
I had absolutely no control over whether a sex offender chose to live across the alley.
Until a few months later, when the city raided the duplex, kicked out the dealers, and new, quieter tenants moved in. I began wondering about the pedophile. His parents were fixtures in the neighborhood — an elderly man who "patrolled" the block every morning
and night, and his wife, who always wore black gardening gloves over her hands, even at the National Night Out parties she hosted. But I never saw a son, nor heard mention of him, and as the months passed, he mercifully disappeared from my consciousness once
again.
Then came the letter. Local newspapers and news stations began reporting on the story. The Star Tribune referred to the guy as a "serious sex offender" (whatever that means). Little by little, the story emerged. Here was a troubled juvenile, a kind of mini-thug
who got into confrontations with his friends (one time wielding a knife) and who had underage girlfriends. The crime in question was the sex he had with a fourteen-year-old girl when he was twenty-three. He was charged with rape. While the police tried to
downplay it by emphasizing that the guy had cultivated a relationship with this girl, his "seriousness" as a sex offender played out in incidents on the bike path near our house, where he was charged with indecent exposure and committing a lewd act just yards
from a park where kids were playing baseball and football games and where I took my son on nice days.
As more details emerged and I came to realize that I had absolutely no control over whether a sex offender chose to live across the alley, my anger did begin to turn into fear — specifically, the brand of fear that had plagued me in the months following
the birth of my son. Actually, it was terror.
Annie Dillard writes that terror, with insoluble beauty, is woven into the trim of the garments all creatures wear. If that is true, then I wore nothing but trim. The terror constricted me, leaving me as useless as a mummy. It was the shock that jolted
me awake at three in the morning, a phantom hand on my throat. It was mental blueprints of escape from fire, plans over which I obsessed and never quite finished. My son could never be protected enough; I was not up to the task; I wouldn't be the mom who,
when her car went careening off the bridge, would be able to undo the car seat straps in time. My mother called it anxiety, and while I could cop to the fact that it was probably a biological reaction to new motherhood, I called it by its real name. Terror
is the recognition that despite appearances to the contrary, we are surrounded by chaos.
But we get through it. Every day becomes slightly less terror-filled. The baby grows, becomes less helpless, pushes away your breast to watch a bird at the birdfeeder, begins to walk, then runs, then starts going down the stairs, rejecting your helping hand
by saying "I do." And we learn to relinquish control to whatever, to pick our battles, to let our toddler win once in a while so that maybe, once in a while, we can win, too. All of these little adventures combine to lessen the terror that is, after all, an
utterly unsustainable state (if you want to live long enough to see your kid graduate, anyway). Nature is merciful, after all.
But then this damn sex offender moved in and it all started again. I found myself up at three a.m. On morning walks I'd look down to see my son trying to wrench himself free from my new iron grasp. I compulsively craned my neck out my son's window to see
what was happening at the sex offender's house, to see if any preparations for his arrival were being made.
©2009 Ashley Shelby and Babble Media
About the Author
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Ashley Shelby is the author of Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Sierra, E: The Environmental Magazine, Gastronomica, and other outlets. She recently won the 2009 Third Coast Fiction Prize and is currently an artist fellow at the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary. She lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and two-year-old son, and is expecting her second child in September. She blogs at www.scienceforsale.com |
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