It had been a long week and I was really tired. It was the end of the month and people had been running out of food and household supplies and I had been doing a lot of extracurricular running around. It's just me. I will go above and beyond the call of duty to help another person. It's what makes me good, and bad, at what I do. I admitted to myself that it was making me tired and bringing me down. I had to start looking out for myself. I was already over an hour late getting home, and I had one more delivery to make. I had swung by our outreach building where we store our donations to pick something up. I decided to text my family to let them know that I was OK and would be home soon.
Let me set the scene: It was 8:30 or 9 o'clock at night, so dark. It was snowing big, fluffy snowflakes, and it was cold enough that the snow stayed on the roads and sidewalks making everything deceptively slippery. I was sitting in my car bathed in the vaguely orange glow of a streetlight at the edge of the parking lot. A couple of people were trudging along the sidewalk as I typed.
When I looked up the two walking people were standing by my car, peering in my window.
Let me further set the scene. I was in the city of Lorain, Ohio. Lorain was a hub of the steel industry, and when US Steel collapsed, so did Lorain. The downtown is mostly empty storefronts, bars, and criminal defense attorneys. Lorain is depressed, and not just economically. For being a reasonably small city it has all the urban blight, decay, and crime as it's bigger cousin Cleveland, but with less positive assets. (Apologies if any of you folks are from Lorain, but, really, am I wrong?)
I felt a certain sinking feeling as I saw those people standing by my car. It was with something of a sense of misgiving that I rolled down my window.
It was a young couple, a woman and man. As soon as I opened my window the woman started talking. Please, she said. I'm 5 months pregnant and I'm having really bad pain. When I get home I think I'll need to call an ambulance. Please. Could you give us a ride home?
Another thing I need to point out. I was not in a particularly good neighborhood, but instead a rather sad area with abandoned houses and houses you just wished no one had to live in. Across the street from our building is a junkyard and a few vacant lots. It's on a corner. There's a self-serve car wash about a block away. In other words, pretty isolated.
I had two simultaneous thoughts: 1) This could be the beginning of a really horrible crime, and 2) I really just want to go home.
I gestured with my phone. Is there someone I could call for you? Would you like to use my phone to call somebody? ("And just keep it if you want," I thought.)
The woman looked down at me. "Can't we just get a ride? Please?"
She didn't look particularly pregnant from my vantage point, but she was wearing a winter coat. It occurred to me that this would be the perfect cover story to lure a kind-hearted soul into trouble. Despite my general peace-loving nature, I'm a huge fan of Criminal Minds. I know how this works.
I looked into the pleading brown eyes. I pictured myself saying "Sorry," rolling up my window, and driving away.
"Alright," I said.
I was chuckling to myself as they climbed into the back seat of my car, gushing thank-yous. As I said before, I was delivering stuff to my aftercare clients so my front seat was stuffed with toilet paper, paper towels, laundry detergent, and dish soap. In the back seat I had a bag of donated shoes. They were destined for Goodwill, but I hadn't dropped them off yet and the bag had somehow upended. There was a big sheet of black plastic leftover from a mattress I had hauled a few days before.
They said it was only about 5 blocks away. Now, about where we were headed...I was driving down a somewhat well-used thoroughfare that is crossed by little residential streets. A railroad track cuts through the area so most of these little streets dead-end into the railroad right-of-way, a no-mans-land of scrub and trees. Again, the perfect place for a crime.
As we were driving the woman kept up her nervous chatter. She had suffered a terrible kidney infection prior to getting pregnant, so now she was always worried about her health. She was having these really bad cramps and she didn't know why. She and the young man (baby daddy?) sat in the back, holding hands. I came to their street and he told me to turn left. As soon as I did, he said "Sorry, I was wrong. I meant right." There were a few houses with lights on, and at the end was a church. I pulled into the empty parking lot to turn around. "Please don't have a gun," I thought. I'm really scared of guns. I wondered if they tried to rob me if I could buy them off with toilet paper. It's a precious commodity. You can't buy it with food stamps.
Once we were headed in the right direction, the woman said to me "You're really nice. You're family is really lucky. Do you have kids of your own?" I glanced back at her in the rearview and told her I was probably old enough to be her mother. "I'm 22!" she chirped. Yes, I was definitely old enough. "You don't look it, ma'am!" the young man added. I smiled and thanked him.
He indicated that they were going to the house at the end of the street, again right where the road met the woods. Sure, I was kinda nervous, but mostly tired, and kinda resigned. Again I found myself hoping that they didn't have a gun. I would be happy giving them anything I had.
At last I reached a house with lights on and a row of cars parked in front. The young man directed me to the end of the row to park, right by the woods. They thanked me, slipped out of the car and stumbled up to one of the lit-up doorways. Before they got out I wished them good luck with everything.
And that was that.
I didn't want to tell my family what I had done that night. I thought they might be upset about my recklessness. When I told a co-worker a few days later she confirmed it. "What?!? That was crazy! You were lucky! You shouldn't have even opened your car window all the way...just a crack!" Later, in a text message, she reminded me NOT to pick up strangers.
What is that saying? Something about God looking after children and fools.
No regrets. But it's definitely time to start working on my boundaries.
