I drove 200 miles through a blizzard thinking I was saving my mother from freezing to death, but the truth chills me more than the ice. She wouldn’t have been standing there without a script. When I pulled her into my car, her hands were frozen stiff, yet the legal papers she clutched in a plastic bag were impossibly dry. I fought a storm to find her, but it seems she had been placed there to find me.
My name is Isa Miller, and I am thirty-six years old. I have spent the better part of the last decade building a fortress around my life, constructing walls made of silence and distance to keep the chaos of my family at bay. But walls are useless when you willingly open the gate. It started with a vibration on my nightstand at 11:42 at night. I was awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the wind batter the windows of my apartment in Ketaridge. The storm had been forecasted for days—a massive front sweeping down from Canada, promising to bury the state under two feet of snow. When I saw the caller ID, my stomach tightened into a knot that I knew all too well. It was my mother, Denise. I debated letting it go to voicemail. Our relationship had devolved into a transactional rhythm over the years; she called when she needed money, or when she needed to complain about how the world had wronged her, or to guilt me for not being the daughter she had imagined. But the voicemail light never blinked. The phone just kept buzzing, insistent and desperate.
I answered. “Isa?” Her voice was thin, stripped of its usual performative sweetness. It sounded wet and terrified. “I am in trouble.”
“Mom, what is going on?” I sat up, pulling the duvet around my shoulders. The draft from the window was biting.
“My car died,” she sobbed. “I am at a gas station. I do not know where it is. Pine Hollow, I think. North of the city. The heater is dead. My phone is on 4% battery. Isa, I am so cold.”
Pine Hollow. That was nearly 200 miles away, deep in the rural belt where the cell service was spotty even on a clear day. “Call a tow truck, Mom, or the police,” I said, my voice steady, practicing the detachment I had learned in therapy.
“I tried,” she cried, the wind in the background roaring so loud it clipped the audio. “No signal for data. Nobody is answering. There is nobody here. Isa, the station is closed. Please, I have no one else to call. Cara is not picking up.”
The mention of my sister usually made me bristle, but the sound of that wind was visceral. It did not sound like weather; it sounded like violence. I could hear her teeth chattering, a rapid-fire clicking that you cannot fake. “Stay inside the building if you can,” I said, already swinging my legs out of bed.
“It is locked,” she wailed. “I am standing by the pumps. Please, Isa.”
The line went dead. I stared at the phone. Logic told me this was insane. Driving 200 miles north into the teeth of a blizzard was suicidal. But the image of my mother, sixty years old, standing in the dark while the temperature dropped to single digits, overrode the logic. I was the reliable one. I was the one who fixed things. It was the role they had assigned me, and despite my best efforts to resign, I showed up for every shift. I dressed in layers, grabbing my heavy parka, a flashlight, and a thermos of coffee I had brewed earlier. I descended to the garage, got into my Subaru, and pulled out into the white hell.
The city of Ketaridge was a ghost town. The streetlights were halos in the swirling snow, illuminating nothing but the falling ice. Once I hit the interstate, the world disappeared. There was no sky, no horizon, just a hypnotic tunnel of white flakes rushing toward the windshield. My high beams just reflected off the snow, blinding me, so I drove with low beams, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned the color of parchment. The drive was an endurance test. The heater in my car fought a losing battle against the cold radiating from the glass. Every few miles, a semi-truck would barrel past in the opposite lane, throwing up a wall of slush that momentarily blinded me, leaving me steering by memory and prayer.
About an hour into the drive, the isolation began to play tricks on my mind. I checked my rearview mirror. There were headlights behind me. It was a large vehicle, an SUV by the height of the lights. It was following close—too close for these conditions. I tapped my brakes to signal them to back off, but they matched my speed. I accelerated slightly, the tires slipping on a patch of black ice, my heart hammering against my ribs. The lights stayed fixed in my mirror, two glowing eyes in the storm. For twenty miles, they stayed with me. I felt a primal fear creep up my spine, the feeling of being hunted. I told myself I was being paranoid. It was a storm; people caravan together for safety. But there was something aggressive about the way it tracked me, mimicking my lane changes. Then, abruptly, near a jagged exit for a logging road, the SUV signaled right and vanished into the dark. I let out a breath I did not realize I had been holding. The absence of the lights made the road feel even lonelier.
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