Personal Experience Stories From Around The World
Night has its own kind of quiet, and it isn't silence. It's the sound a city makes when it believes nobody is listening: traffic lights cycling for no one, tires hissing on wet asphalt, vending machines outside closed gas stations lighting empty forecourts like small, humming shrines.
I've driven a cab through those hours for twenty-six years. I know which streets flood and which corners the patrol cars like to park on. I know that between two and four in the morning the fares get strange. Not dangerous, usually. Just unmoored. People who missed the last train. People carrying the worst news of their lives. People who need to be somewhere and can't tell you why.
It had been raining since dusk that night, and the radio had been silent for hours. I'd noticed around midnight and told myself Lorraine must be on a long break, and then I kept telling myself so, hour after hour, the way you do with small wrongnesses at the edge of exhaustion.
At ten past three I was parked outside the bus depot on Calder Street, engine ticking, finishing a thermos of coffee gone lukewarm, when the back door opened.
I hadn't seen him coming. That happens. Stare into rain long enough, and the world stops registering unless it moves fast. He was simply there: a man in a dark work jacket, hair plastered to his forehead, sliding across the seat and closing the door with a soft, careful click, as if he didn't want to wake anyone.
"Morning," he said. "Or still night, I guess. Hard to tell."
"Hard to tell," I agreed. "Where to?"
"Fourteen Harrow Lane."
My hand had been reaching for the meter. It stopped halfway.
I knew that address the way you know a name from an old headline. Harrow Lane was out past the reservoir, at the end of a road the county had given up resurfacing. Number fourteen was a two-story clapboard house with boarded windows and a yard gone to knee-high weeds, and eleven years ago a family had died inside it. Since then it had sat empty, because nobody would buy it and nobody could quite bring themselves to knock it down. Teenagers dared each other to touch the front door.
I had my own reasons for never driving that road anymore.
"Harrow Lane," I said carefully. "Out by the reservoir?"
"That's the one."
I looked at him in the mirror. There wasn't much to see. The dome light had been dead for years, and the angle caught only his jaw and the shine of his wet hair. Not young, not old. He sat with his hands on his knees, patient, the way tired men sit when they're nearly home.
Drunk, I decided. Or confused. Or one of those kids who go hunting ghosts with a phone flashlight and a bottle, though he didn't look like a kid, and he didn't smell like drink. He smelled like rain, and under the rain something else, something coppery and old, like a coin held too long in a sweating hand.
I could have told him no. Twenty-six years, and I've told plenty of people no. But there's a rule you learn on nights: you don't leave a confused man standing in the rain outside a bus depot at three in the morning. You take him where he's going, or you take him somewhere better. I figured I'd drive out toward the reservoir, talk to him on the way, and if it came to it, talk him out of it at the mouth of the lane. Maybe call someone.
So I put the cab in gear.
For the first few miles neither of us spoke. The wipers thudded. The meter stayed dark; I hadn't started it, and I didn't think of it again.
"Slow night?" he said eventually.
"Dead," I said, and immediately wished I'd chosen another word.
He laughed, softly. "Same for me. I work the overnight at the distribution warehouse. Forty minutes each way. I've got the whole drive memorized, down to which radio stations fade out where. You get to know a road, doing it every night."
"You do," I said.
"You must know all of them."
"Most."
"That's a good thing to be good at." He said it warmly, with no irony at all. "Nobody thinks about it, but somebody has to know where everything is at three in the morning."
It was such an ordinary thing to say. People are kind to their drivers sometimes, when it's late, and they're grateful. I felt the tension in my shoulders ease, which I understand now was the worst thing that could have happened.
"You got family?" I asked. It's the kind of question you ask.
"Wife and two kids. Nora's six. Sam just turned three." His voice took on the softness people get. "Nora lost her first tooth Tuesday. She wanted to leave it out for the fairy, but she's scared the fairy will come in through the window, so she's decided the tooth goes on the porch. Leah said fine. So there's a tooth in a little envelope on the porch rail, and the porch light stays on all night to keep an eye on it."
I smiled. I actually smiled.
"Leah leaves it on for me anyway," he said. "You'd think I was coming home from a war."
Something moved at the back of my mind, like a fish turning under dark water.
I knew that. Not the tooth, the way he said it. You'd think I was coming home from a war. I knew the little lift at the end, and the pause before war, as if he were proud of the joke and embarrassed to be proud.
"Tired?" I said, mostly to hear my own voice.
"Always. But it's a good tired. You know? The kind that means you did something."
The rain had thickened. We'd crossed the river, and the streetlights had begun to thin the way they do past the edge of town, one every few hundred yards, each a pale island in the black. I kept my eyes on the road. I noticed I'd been keeping my eyes on the road for some time. Not looking in the mirror. As though some part of me had made that decision on its own and didn't care to be asked why.
My license was clipped to the sun visor, the way the city requires: laminated card, photo, name. I glanced at it now, half hoping.
The sun had bleached it blank years ago. The photo was a pale smear. The name was gone.
So he couldn't have read it, I thought, and understood a second later that I'd been building an explanation. That some part of me had been waiting, ready, with a reason he might know what came next.
"Thanks for doing this, Walt," the man said.
The wipers went across the glass, and back.
I had not told him my name. Nothing in the cab said it. The dispatch sheet was shut in the glove box; the card on the visor was a white rectangle. I said nothing. My hands, I noticed, had gone very cold on the wheel.
"You took me home that night too," he said.
Not unkindly. Almost fondly, like a man reminding an old friend of a good time they'd once shared.
And I remembered him.
Not his face. That was the thing: I had never really had his face. I remembered the voice, tired and warm and unhurried. I remembered the joke about the war. I remembered the hand on the door, careful, so as not to wake anyone. I remembered the same depot, the same rain, the same hour, and the dome light already dead, so that all I'd ever seen in the mirror was a jaw and a plastered forehead. I remembered spending eleven years arranging my life so that I would never have to see it more clearly than that.
I remembered pulling up in front of fourteen Harrow Lane. The porch light burning yellow. A small white envelope on the rail. The man paying me, tipping too much, saying, "Goodnight, Walt," because back then the card on my visor still had my name on it.
I remembered watching him climb the steps and open the door and stop.
He stood on the threshold for a long time, the door wide, yellow light spilling out around him. Then he stepped inside, and the door swung slowly shut behind him.
I'd been writing up the trip in my log. That's all. My head was down, the pen moving, when I heard it from the house: a dull, heavy sound, like something dropped. Then quiet.
I told myself it was a chair. A television. I told myself people make all kinds of noise in their own homes at three in the morning, and it wasn't my house, and it wasn't my business. And I pulled away from the curb.
Two blocks on, someone started hammering on the trunk.
He was in the middle of the road, running, his dark jacket shining black and wet. He dragged the back door open and fell across the seat, and he said, "Drive, please, hospital, please," and I drove. God help me, I drove. I ran every light between Harrow Lane and St. Anne's. I could hear him breathing behind me, a wet, dragging sound that got slower and slower, and I kept my eyes on the road because I could not, I could not, look in the mirror.
Near the end, he spoke. Very quietly, like a man asking a small favor.
"Is the light still on?"
I didn't know what he meant. I said, "Hold on, we're almost there," and he didn't answer, and the breathing stopped somewhere along Grafton Avenue, and I drove the rest of the way anyway, because I didn't know what else to do.
They took him out of my back seat at the emergency entrance. It was too late for that to matter. The company replaced the upholstery afterward, twice, and both times the same patch behind my seat turned dark and damp again by morning and never quite dried.
The police found the rest of it at Harrow Lane.
A detective asked me if I'd seen or heard anything at the house. I said no. It was the only lie I have ever told to a police officer, and I have told it every day since.
The man in my back seat let me sit inside that silence for another mile. Then he said, gently, as if I'd asked, "It's all right. You're only driving."
I stopped the cab.
I don't remember choosing to. The tires bit gravel on the shoulder, the wipers thudded on, and the engine idled, and I sat with both hands locked on the wheel. Ahead of me, the road ran on toward the reservoir into a darkness the headlights couldn't finish.
Slowly, I turned around.
The back seat was empty.
No jacket. No wet footprints. The door was locked, the way it always is, the way I had locked it myself before we ever left the depot. There was only the seat, and the dark patch on the vinyl where it never dries, shaped very much like a man sitting with his hands on his knees.
The meter was dark. I had never started it.
I don't know how long I stayed there. Long enough for my breathing to slow. Long enough to understand that he had never been angry, in eleven years, not once, and that this was the worst part. He hadn't come to accuse me. He had only wanted what he'd wanted that night: a ride home, from someone who knew where everything was at three in the morning.
The radio, silent since midnight, cracked open with static.
"Walt? You there, honey?"
It was Lorraine. Lorraine, whose funeral I had stood at the back of two winters ago, my hat in my hands.
The static rose and fell like breathing. Then her voice came again, warm and tired and perfectly ordinary, as though she were reading me a fare off the board.
"You've got another passenger waiting at the cemetery."
End