Yin & Yang

Some stories chill your blood and restore your faith in humanity in the very same breath. This is one of them. I wasn’t there for it, I heard it from my mother when I was still fairly young, and I’m sure there are details that have slipped through the cracks of her retelling. But the parts that stayed with me are the parts that mattered most.

More than a year after my father’s accident, my mother decided it was time to get him discharged from the city where he’d been recovering and bring him home. The journey was only five or six hours. We had a car, but no one to drive it, so she found a driver willing to make the trip out to our hometown and then head back to the city on his own.

For reasons I don’t quite know, they ended up leaving late in the evening. My father’s body and mind were only partially functioning after the accident, so my mother alone was responsible for both of them. To make things worse, it was raining heavily that night, and severe waterlogging just outside a town on the way brought the car’s engine to a dead stop. It was around 9 pm, late enough for that stretch of highway on the outskirts, and the road was mostly deserted. My mother and father climbed out and tried pushing the car to help the elderly driver get it started again, but nothing worked. Eventually they gave up and parked it on the roadside to wait for help. The driver decided it was a lost cause, said he’d walk to the nearest town, and left.

One car did drive by, with four men inside who apparently knew my father, all of them likely drunk. Instead of getting out to help, they suggested my father stay put while my mother went with them into town to find a mechanic. Something about it didn’t sit right with her, so she declined and stayed where she was. They drove off, thankfully. But that left her stranded, with no idea what to do in the middle of the night, alone on a highway with my father.

In the distance, she spotted a paid phone booth. They walked to it through the pouring rain, soaked to the bone. Back home, my sister and I were waiting for them to arrive, with only our grandmother for company. The room that held our phone was locked, something my mother always did and I’ve never once understood why, which meant we had no way of picking up even if it rang.

Once she reached the booth, she dialed home anyway, hoping against hope that if we somehow picked up, we could alert the rest of the family and get help moving. But of course, there was no reaching us.

The family that ran the phone booth had been watching. The woman of the house came out and asked what had happened to my father and to her. My mother told her the whole story. The family, who had a teenage son and daughter, walked back with her to the car, carried the luggage themselves, fed my parents dinner, gave them dry clothes to change into, and put them up for the night without a second thought.

The next morning, they found public transport and made it home by bus. We sent someone else out later to retrieve the car.

I think about that night sometimes, even though I never lived it myself, the dark, the rain, the helplessness, and then the people who showed up in the middle of it. It feels like yin and yang made manifest, the universe’s own counterbalancing forces at work. I hope, someday, I can be that person for someone else: refuge in their darkest hour, the debt paid forward.