On a Bright Day

She approached me as I stood shivering by the car.

“Ma’am, can you give me a ride home? I’ll pay you. I just live near Maryland Market.”

There are two types of people in Steubenville: the Townies who talk with some variation on an Appalachian accent, and the Frannies who talk with whatever accent they learned in the places they used to live, before they came here to  attend Franciscan University. I was a Franny when I came here, and I talk like a Franny, but that’s not a culture I belong to anymore. This woman was a Townie.

She was about ten years older than I am, short, and all bundled up for the cold, carrying her groceries in a big canvas bag. I am a little bit face-blind from autism, so I thought I just didn’t recognize somebody who knew me from around the neighborhood. Such things happen from time to time.

“Sure. I’m going near there anyway. Just let me finish getting gas.”

She had come up just as I was topping off the gas in Sacre Bleu, praying we’d have enough for the week. She handed me two one-dollar bills, and then got in the backseat as if she were a child. I didn’t like to pocket the two dollars, but money has been tight all month.

I glanced at her in the rearview mirror as she explained that she’d been asking people to give her a lift since she missed the bus. This is the hour when the buses don’t run normally. All the city routes take a break and ferry students uptown from the high school until almost four o’clock.

That was when I  realized she was not an acquaintance from LaBelle, but a total stranger.

What’s supposed to happen when a stranger gets in your backseat?

A scene from a splatter movie, where the stranger pulls a weapon? Or something out of a pratfall comedy where the trusting autistic lady looks away from her purse for a second and the stranger swipes her wallet? A supernatural horror, where the stranger turns out to be Death Himself or something else?

This particular stranger just sighed with relief about how warm it was inside the car. She’d been wandering around the gas station in front of the grocery store, trying to get a ride, for a long time. She must’ve been freezing– it was one of those deceptively sunny, bone-chilling February afternoons, and all the puddles were glass.

It was nice and warm in my car. Jimmy the mechanic is still borrowing it once or twice a day, and in the mornings when he leaves for the school run it’s miserably cold out, so he turns the heat all the way up to 90 and just leaves it that way. I get in the car to go places in the afternoon, and forget to change it because I’m absentminded. The car was like the house of the Finn Woman in The Snow Queen.

The woman praised my messy old Nissan, and I said that I was lucky to have it. I told some of the long saga of losing the old car I naively named Serendipity and just happening to get a used car of the exact same make and model that I named Sacre Bleu.

“I’ve got a license myself, I just don’t have a car,” said the stranger in my backseat. “It’s so expensive these days, even the down payment!”

We lamented the scandalously high down payments for an ugly used Nissan as we meandered back to LaBelle. I mentioned that I had to get my child from school after I dropped her off. I think that’s how the topic turned to her own child.

“I had to bury my daughter,” she said all of a sudden.

I didn’t know what to say to that, but I tried to make a sympathetic noise.

She told me a horror story, not the kind that gets made into a horror film but the kind that happens in real life. There was an abusive boyfriend involved.

“I’m so sorry,” I heard myself saying. “Drugs are from hell.”

“They are,” said the woman. “These girls today, they get pregnant, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“They do get pregnant awfully young,” I said, because it seemed to be time for me to say something.

“I laid her out the day before my birthday, and on my birthday they cremated her,” said the woman. “I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore.”

I think we spoke some more– or, rather, she spoke, and I tried to make sympathetic noises.

All I really remember is that the sun was so bright, it seemed like it must be springtime. The world must be a glorious place, all full of hope and promise. Those bare trees must be ready to bud and bloom, and the bleak gray grass would go green as the purple crocuses gave way to white clover. But at the same time, the air was so cold it was winter, and the earth was really a dead and deadly thing, and every drop of water was a shard of bitter ice.

I left her on the corner by her home.

She trudged off on her Via Dolorosa, and I went away on mine.