Crime Wave

A CAR TURNS into my neighborhood just as I am heading out. It is early July, eight o’clock on a Friday morning. It’s sticky hot, and I have ten minutes to get somewhere twenty minutes away. My heart is already racing when I notice the car (compact, silver) and the driver’s arm (white, wiry) flagging me down from fifty yards away. The car is unfamiliar, and the wave is jerky, urgent, not the fluttery wave of a neighbor. I grip the steering wheel. A voice inside me says, Keep driving. Another voice says, Stop. One says, Nothing good can come from this. The other says, Be kind.

SIX YEARS AGO, when my husband and I moved here with our two sons, a friend jokingly advised me to buy a Kevlar vest. Laughing, I told him not to believe everything he heard about Durham, a blue dot in the red state of North Carolina. Sure, there’s crime, but no more than in other cities of comparable size. Rather than denounce Durham’s bad rep, residents embrace it. “Keep Durham Dirty,” a bumper sticker proclaims. A T-shirt says, “I’d rather be shot in Durham than die of boredom in Cary.” Exactly.

Sort of.

We’ve lived in pre-Giuliani New York and a sketchy Los Angeles neighborhood, where I once chased off a barefoot, bearded man trying to hotwire our car. Durham, in comparison, oozes livability. It’s full of foodies, artists, and entrepreneurs, and our neighborhood, with its vibrant rose gardens and older traditional homes, has always felt squeaky safe to me.

My husband, a filmmaker, mostly works on location, and we’re used to long separations, but I find this arrangement less appealing now that our sons are older—sixteen and twenty—and I’m not as involved in their day-to-day lives. Though I like to think I’m self-sufficient and independent, something has started to shift; I’ve become aware of myself as a woman often alone. I attend a Neighborhood Watch meeting in which I learn more about local crime and ways to deter it, and in May, when my husband accepts a five-month gig in Atlanta, we install a home