The Stranger Who Followed Us Home

I turned the key. Nothing. I turned it again. A click and then nothing. The heater died with the engine, and I felt the cold start to lean against the glass.

I had a flip phone in my purse, the kind we all had then. I held it up and watched it search for a signal that was not there.

No bars. Not one. I was eleven miles from Hartwell and seven from Sterling and I might as well have been on the moon.

Ava woke up and started to cry, the thin reedy cry a baby makes when something has changed and she does not have the words for it.

Caleb woke next and asked me why it was so dark and why the car was not going, and I told him we were having an adventure, in the brightest voice I owned.

Inside me I was not bright at all. I was doing the math a mother does. How cold is too cold. How long until Mark knows. How far could I carry two babies on ice.

The answer to the last one was not far. I could not carry both of them even one mile on glare ice with the rain still coming. I would go down and take them with me.

So I did the only thing left. I turned on the hazard lights, which still worked off the battery, and I climbed into the back seat and I gathered my children against me.

I put Ava inside my coat against my chest and I pulled Caleb under my arm and I put my back to the cold door and I prayed.

I am a praying woman. I was raised in the second pew of Immanuel Lutheran and I have not left it. But I will tell you my prayer that night was not pretty.

It was not thee and thou. It was Lord, please, somebody, please, over and over, the way you pray when the words run out and only the need is left.

The clock on the dash had died but I counted in my head. A car went by once, the other direction, fast, throwing slush, not slowing. My heart went up and then down.

I thought about the stories you hear. A family found in the spring thaw. I pushed the thought away and it came back and I pushed it away again.

Ava had stopped crying, which frightened me more than the crying had. I kept talking to her, keep looking at me, baby, keep looking at Mama.

And then, through the iced-over back window, I saw a pair of headlights come over the rise behind us, high and wide, the way a truck sits up off the road.

The lights slowed. That was the thing I will never forget. They slowed. Everything in me that had been clenched for an hour let go all at once and I started to shake.

The truck pulled in behind me on the shoulder, and in the red wash of my hazards I saw it was an old Ford, the kind farmers keep running by force of will for thirty years.