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.”
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