The Stranger Who Followed Us Home

My car died on Route 9 at eleven at night in an ice storm, and I had two babies in the back seat and no one in the world coming for me.

That is the plain fact of it, and for nine years I have not been able to say it out loud without my hands going cold.

I was forty one years old that winter. I am fifty now. The babies in the back seat are a boy of eleven and a girl of nine, and they do not remember any of it.

I remember all of it. I have carried that night the way you carry a stone in your coat pocket, reaching for it without meaning to, year after year.

My name is Dana Holt. I live outside Hartwell, Nebraska, where the county roads run straight to the edge of the sky and the nearest stoplight is twenty two miles away.

Hartwell is a feed store and a grain elevator and three churches and a diner called the Wagon Wheel that has been open since before I was born.

I grew up here, married here, and raised my children here. I know almost everybody, which is why it has gnawed at me so long that I could not find one man.

Let me tell you about the night, because the night is where all of it starts.

That December my husband Mark was working the overnight shift at the ethanol plant out past Dawson, forty minutes gone from home.

We needed the money. Caleb was almost three and Ava was four months old, and babies are expensive in ways nobody warns you about.

My mother had called that afternoon feeling poorly, and she lived alone over in Sterling, and I told her I would bring the children by so she would not be by herself.

The weather report said freezing rain after ten. I thought I would be home long before ten. I was wrong about that the way you are wrong about weather in Nebraska.

We stayed too long at Mama’s. She was lonesome more than sick, and Ava fell asleep on her chest, and I did not have the heart to pull her away.

By the time I loaded the children back into the car it was past ten thirty and the rain had already started to glaze the steps.

I should have stayed. I know that now. But I wanted them in their own beds, and I thought I knew that road better than any storm.

Route 9 out of Sterling is a lonely stretch. No houses for long runs, just fence line and corn stubble and the dark coming down on both sides.

The rain was freezing onto the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it. I slowed to a crawl. The headlights threw back a wall of silver.

Then the engine coughed. It had been running rough for a week and Mark kept saying he would look at it on his day off. The day off never came.

It coughed again, and then it just quit, the dash lights flickering, the power steering going stiff in my hands as I guided it onto the shoulder.