Her teeth were what originally threw off my ability to respond. They were badly discolored – yellow, some jagged, one a dark brownish. I made a mental note to not stare. I had to just listen to her and figure out what was going on.
I live in the middle of nowhere. It has been a phenomenally log day. I had been to a morning doctor’s appointment with a friend who needed a driver. From there I ran in to work for a few hours. I ran home to get on a conference call to take minutes. I pushed myself to work until 5pm so I could feel that I carried out my full responsibilities to The System for the day. My head was kind of in that floaty sort of stage when your blood sugar is deciding how to punish you by shutting down stuff. I had just finished boiling angel hair and de-frosting sauce I had frozen in a baggie back when I had some energy and zeal about being quarantined as a nation. I had vowed then to take care of myself since there was no one else jumping to help with that task in the last few decades.
The kids out there in the Land of Cool have devised a word: “Hangry.” It means you are so hungry, truly in need of food (as opposed to wanting to just eat junk) that you get angry. Well, more like cranky. I was moving into that zone. I reached for something in my dish drainer and, as I turned, out of the corner of my eye, saw something in a heap at the end of my driveway. It was colorful and it looked like a person. I put my eyeglasses on. (that’s where we are with midlife vision.)
My brain crunched: Why was a grown woman sitting next to my mailbox, barely off the street? I thought for a moment… I have no prior life experience with this. I pushed the dogs back in the kitchen, lifted the porch gate and called out: Can I help you with something?
“I’m just resting.” Really. On my driveway out in the middle of cow country and she is “just resting.” I walked out to her. For some reason, I forgot we are supposed to wear masks and be six feet apart. She had a small day bag on her the size of a little girl’s back-pack. She had a cell phone and some sort of pink drink. I asked her what the story was.
She claimed her boyfriend kicked her out. He lived in Canastota and she is walking to Syracuse. She claimed she was walking for three hours and wanted to rest because she had no one to give her a ride. A mighty long walk was ahead of her. For a moment I entertained the idea of ….. well, you know …. In a perfectly safe world where no one has a revolver in their day bag or a knife or whatever …. Could I give her a ride? To her credit, she didn’t ask me. But with the voice of a petulant child she kept repeating, “I need to get to Syracuse.” Also, she kept texting someone, then alternating with hanging up on someone else and swearing because her phone was running out of juice. It was concentrated drama.
I asked her one question: You don’t plan to go back to him after he kicked you out, do you? She said, “probably.” I said to her, “No real gentleman treats a woman like this. If you go back to him, you should be taken to the psych ward.” Not my finest moment of compassion. But I was trying to give her a concept that resembled human dignity via my challenge. It was also my deciding point on driving her anywhere: if she, after walking allegedly 3 hours in 80 degree heat, would entertain going back to an abusive situation, then me making any part of this easy for her is not the tough love and real life she needs. Maybe I was a jackass in another life.
I got my phone to help her and brought her a peach iced tea. She drank it in preference to whatever pink drink she had that somehow, in my moral stupor, I had overlooked. Her hair was an admirable shade of red-from-a-box and the tattoos on her arms probably would tell me what was important to her if I stopped to look but I just wanted her back on the road and me back with my cold spaghetti.
My friend’s daughter – an adult – drove by and pulled over to see if this traveler was hurt. Really it was also to tell her she was standing too close to the road. Not much else was happening. I used my cell to call this young woman’s sister, and then her father, and no one answered – a clue for me: a text from her sister. “Is she still there?” That was significant. Meanwhile, for lack of a better idea, I explained the road ahead to her.
First, I told her that when she passes a certain intersection she will find the State Police barracks. I suggested she may talk to them. She said, “They aren’t going to give me a ride to Syracuse.” It is likely that she did not want to interface with the police. (come back to that statement later; it’s brilliant). I replied that maybe they were having a slow day, you never know. Actually, I was hoping that they might have some better ideas for her. As she pointed out, she had no credit card, so Uber and Lyft were not options. Her sister, I found out later, had tried to get a cab for her but was unsuccessful.
At some barely-below-moral-consciousness level I was working other thoughts through my brain. In random order, these are some of them: I’m a hypocrite. I’m not talking to her about Jesus. I’m an idiot. She could stab me right here in my driveway. My neighbor is trimming his hedges out front so I am safe. She’s not raving like a crazy person so I guess that’s good. She’s not ready to get her life together if she thinks she will go back to him. (It never crossed my mind that SHE might be the bad guy, not her boyfriend.) I wonder if the dogs ate my spaghetti yet? How can she make it to Syracuse walking? Reassessing: if it took her 3 hours, as she claimed, to get to my yard from where she started, something is wrong with her math. I’m a bit overweight and I could make it in an hour. I wonder if she used a bathroom lately. I can’t let her inside my house because she is, at some level, unstable. Her insistent verbalizing of, “I just want a ride to Syracuse,” is an attempt at asking me to take her but I just can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to do it.
The next thing I suggested to her was that a couple of miles down the street is a mini mart. She can have another rest break there. She thanked me for trying to help her get in touch with her family. I said one parting thing to her that I hoped would stick in her brain: “If you get to the point where you think of going back to him, I want you to remember This Day. Remember how tired you are. Remember the long walk, your aching feet. Remember how hard it was.” She began walking away. I watched her for a moment, and then looked down at my phone. Her sister had written me a very long text message. What I had presumed was going to be no response told me everything I needed to know: the story was inaccurate.
Key points: Not exactly sisters, step-sisters from childhood but more recently out of touch. Boyfriend did not kick her out. He was at work. She was heading to Syracuse for one purpose: to get drugs. He cared about her and called the step-sister to say that she really needed to go to rehab, to get help.
And there you have it. All the Bad Guys in the story were actually the Good Guys. And by me not driving her to Syracuse, well, perhaps it delayed her getting the drugs she was seeking. So my reticence to drive her was most likely my Guardian Angel putting his hand on my shoulder saying, “Not in the plan.”
Isn’t it curious how even when we think we failed to help someone, we’ve actually done a better thing for them? As I finished reading the text message, I looked up and she had vanished from sight. And that is strange for someone who allegedly walked so slowly that it took her three hours to get to my driveway. I went next door and talked to my neighbor for a few minutes and then walked inside to eat my cold spaghetti.
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