Still Empty.
Sitting on the side of the road in the dark, I started to panic. I was as far out in the country as I knew how to go, and I was beyond lost.
Briefly, angrily, I prayed.
I decided I should try to sleep. Things would be better in daylight, I presumed, so I pushed the seat back and tried to take a nap.
I passed out almost instantly. I may have slept for three minutes or three hours; I have no idea. I awoke to sounds – a crunching or howling or snapping or wailing … sounds that faded in and out … in the distance, in the back of my brain, right next to the car….
I snapped awake. Had I been dreaming? Hallucinating? All I heard were crickets.
The sky was turning blue. I sat for a moment, shivering a little, watching the sky brighten. I recognized pre-dawn from the many, many times I’d seen it before after long, hazy nights.
I lit a cigarette and turned on the car. Still empty.
With no clue, I started to drive again. I noticed things I hadn’t before: a humming sound in the engine, a burning rubber smell that could have been psychosomatic, gaping holes in the floorboards beneath my feet.
Those holes had always been there, but I imagined myself stepping through the holes and touching the highway, my leg wrenching beneath me and pulling me to certain death as my bare foot touched the ground below.
I considered shoving my foot through anyway. Not yet, I thought. I’m not giving up yet.
Just as that thought settled into my brain, I rounded a bend and saw it. A thousand yards ahead sat a gas station, lights brightly glowing like a beacon in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Probably Pennsylvania.
I pulled in, stopped by the gas pump and went inside, nearly in tears with relief.
I threw my one dollar and change onto the counter.
The guy stared at me as I stood there, bedraggled and teary, and broke.
“It’s all I have, I don’t know where I am, I’m completely lost and I’ve been driving for hours and I can’t find my boyfriend. I thought I was in Ohio but then I wasn’t where I thought I was and now I’m here and my car is totally out of gas and I’m out of cigarettes and I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do even if I get gas because I don’t know how to get home. But I have to get gas and this is all the money I have in the world, I just don’t know if it’s enough to get me home because I don’t know where I am.”
The guy behind the counter regarded me, wide-eyed, as I blathered.
Without warning, then, a man holding a cup of coffee reached around me and put a five-dollar bill on the counter.
“Get her some gas,” said the world’s kindest stranger.
I hadn’t even seen him walk in. “Really?! Thank you so much! Thank you!”
“No problem,” he said. I did not have the audacity to also buy cigarettes. I put everything I had into the tank.
As I pumped life-saving gas my savior asked, “Where’s home?”
“Pitcairn,” I said.
“Where’s Pitcairn?”
“Um … near Pittsburgh?”
“Get back on this road,” he said, pointing left. “Head east. You’ll get there.”
“Thank you so much,” I said again. “I’ll try.”
He hopped in his car and drove away.
I followed the road east and improbably, eventually, I arrived.
Larry – who came home the next day – never even knew I was gone.