My uncle tells this story, and his uncle told it to him, and somewhere back in the chain of telling there is presumably a man who is not passing on a story but reporting something that happened to him, and I think about that man sometimes.
The road is Route 9, westbound, about twelve miles outside of Garfield Junction. You know the stretch if you've driven it: the long flat section between the junction and the river bridge, where the shoulder is wide and the nearest light is the occasional farmhouse window set back half a mile from the road. It is the kind of road that exists after midnight and barely exists at all before ten.
The version my uncle tells:
He was driving back from a job — late, tired, rain starting — when his headlights caught a figure on the shoulder. A young woman, early twenties, dark hair, no bag, no apparent means of being where she was. Standing on the shoulder of Route 9 at 1 AM in the rain.
He stopped. He tells me he's not sure he would stop today, but this was a different time and she was standing alone in the rain and he stopped.
She got in the back seat. She gave an address in Garfield Junction — a house on Elm Street, she said, number twenty-four. She said thank you. She didn't say anything else.
He drove to the address. She was quiet the entire way, and he didn't push conversation; he was tired and she seemed to prefer the silence. He pulled up at number twenty-four Elm Street and turned to tell her they'd arrived.
The back seat was empty.
He sat in the car for a moment. Then he got out, because there is a version of you that takes rational action even when you don't quite feel rational, and he knocked on the door of number twenty-four.
An older woman answered. She looked at him with an expression he couldn't parse — not quite surprise, something more weary than surprise.
"There was a young woman in my car," he said. "She asked me to bring her here. I don't know where she went."
The woman looked at him for a long moment. Then she said: "What did she look like?"
He described her. Dark hair, early twenties, a blue cardigan, wet from the rain.
The older woman said: "That's my daughter."
She told him her daughter had died on Route 9 twelve miles west of town. Twenty years ago tonight. A car accident, the rain, the flat stretch of road near the river bridge.
She said: "She comes home sometimes." She said it the way you say a thing you have had time to make peace with. "She always makes it to the door. She hasn't made it to the door in a few years. I was starting to wonder."
She thanked him. She started to close the door. Then she stopped.
"She was wet?" she said.
"Yes," he said. "From the rain."
The older woman looked at him and then past him, at his car at the curb, and her expression was no longer at peace with anything.
"It hasn't rained in three days," she said.
My uncle drove home. He checked the weather. She was right. It had not rained in three days. The back seat of his car was dry.
The passenger had been wet.
He has driven Route 9 many times since. He says he watches the shoulder. He says he's seen her twice more, standing in that flat stretch, and both times he did not stop, and both times he is not sure he made the right decision.
"She wants to get home," he says. "She's been trying to get home for twenty years."
He takes a different road now, when he can. Not because he's afraid. Because he's not sure his nerve would hold a third time, and she deserves better than someone who drives past without stopping.