Encountering a Stranger in Crisis

Problem solving in a lonely world

Last night, around 8pm on a steamy walk through a quiet neighborhood in Birmingham, Daniel and I passed a Kia that appeared to have lost power in the middle of the road. Inside, a figure was shuffling around with the overhead light on, presumably calling AAA. We continued on by, but turned around halfway up the street. Looking back from that distance, something felt off. 

“Should we go back and see if they need help?” I asked Daniel, already knowing that he was thinking the same thing. 

When we got to the window of the Kia, loudly announcing ourselves with hellos, it took the woman inside several moments to realize we were talking to her before she rolled down the window. “I just need to get my car to start,” she said with effortful nonchalance, as if we were already mid-conversation. 

The woman, maybe in her 50s, looked like a doll, with a round, porcelain face and enormous blue eyes surrounded by a frazzle of white blond hair. Shining vertically down the center of her forehead was an enormous black bruise.

“Are you ok?” I asked. 

“Yes,” she said deliberately. She just needed to get home. Right around the corner. A few streets over. 

Assessing the immediate concern that she was blocking a hard-to-see intersection in the waning light, we offered to help push the Kia to a better spot up the block. Daniel took charge, talking her through putting the car in neutral and turning on her hazards, instructions she gamely followed with several seconds pause to locate the gear shift. But our pushing was brief and ineffective. Walking around to the front of the car, we realized the front right tire was obliterated, only a few shreds still clinging to the rim. The left tire was intact, but hanging onto its axle at a desperate angle. The front bumper was gone altogether.

“You’re not going to be able to drive anywhere in this car unfortunately,” Daniel told her. “You need a tow.”

The woman said again that she lived only a few streets over. “I just need the car to start.” She wasn’t attempting to call a tow trunk, didn’t seem to have a phone at all. It took several minutes to convince her that driving was out of the question, but that we would help her figure out what to do next. 

Information emerged from her in short bursts as she seemed to identify facts that might be important, a light briefly animating her eyes with each statement. Yes, she had an accident. She hit a light pole. Not a person. Definitely not a person. It happened… yesterday. Also she went to the ER yesterday. Because she fell… twice. She’s been falling lately. But they didn’t help her at the hospital. No, they just sent her home. 

Her words slid into one another, and I could see her brain lagging in its efforts to connect thoughts to sentences. Was she concussed? Medicated? Drunk? 

“I asked for help,” she said triumphantly.

“Good for you, that’s good,” I told her. 

She smiled broadly, and then the light went out of her face and she slumped toward the steering wheel. “But they didn’t help.”

Was anyone at home where she lived? Yes. Should we call them for her? Definitely no. Was there a friend we could call instead? “I don’t have any friends,” she replied, shaking her head emphatically. Her tone was factual, no trace of self pity. 

By this point, the guy whose house we were in front of came out to join us, a white guy in flip flops. We quickly shared what we knew, still gently eliciting more information from the woman in the car, but the pieces didn’t fit themselves into a coherent picture. Was this an emergency? The woman herself didn’t seem to think so, but it became increasingly clear that she needed help, medical help, beyond what any of us could provide. 

The neighbor took a deep breath. “Let me ask you this and please answer truthfully. If the cops come, are you going to be ok with that?” 

My heart melted for this stranger, this other stranger who had jumped into problem solving with us. Though we hadn’t said anything about it to one another, none of us wanted to get cops involved. Cops can make things worse. Best practice is don’t talk to cops. Even an ambulance would likely create a financial burden for this woman who looked like bill paying didn’t come easy under the best of circumstances. But what else do we do in these situations, on a dark street in Alabama, but call 9-1-1? I was grateful he asked her for consent, and I didn’t know what we’d do next if she said no. 

But she nodded. “Yes,” it was ok to call.

While the neighbor stepped away to call EMS, I leaned on her side mirror, holding her gaze and smiling whenever she looked up at me, scanning my face for clues about where she was and what she was supposed to be doing. She looked impossibly small sitting there, though she seemed to be making more cognitive connections, coming back online for longer stretches. Did her feet even reach the pedals? Everything about her was tender and vulnerable. Like a child, or a bird.

“Someone is on their way to help and we’re going to stay with you until they come,” I said, hoping to anchor her in time and space.

“I’m sorry,” she said several times. “I’m making a scene. I don’t want to make a scene.” 

“It’s ok,” I said, and meant it. “It happens to everyone sometimes.” 

“Thank you,” she said. And again, “I’m sorry.”

Suddenly, tears flashed to the corners of her eyes, emotion breaking through her impassive exterior for the first time. “I ruined my car,” she said. I could see the reckoning threatening to flood her, how deeply unstable her life was, how much work it was to get through her days. And now she had no transportation.

She swallowed hard and got quiet again. Then: “I feel drunk, but I’m not.” 

“Ok,” I said, really hoping that was true. “Someone is coming who will help you figure out what’s wrong,” and I really hoped that was true, too. It really wasn’t fair to say. I didn’t know if she would get real help.

After several moments, another thought bubbled up from the depths, as if spoken by someone else. “I’m diabetic,” she said dreamily. 

I felt a surge of hope. Maybe this night wasn't going to reroute her life in quite the way I feared. Maybe there was a shortcut to getting her back to baseline. I called to Daniel, who was peering in the back window of the Kia where pieces of the broken car were shoved into the backseat. “Hey, do you know what someone looks like when their blood sugar drops? Is that what this is?” I was acutely aware of my naiveté, my lack of experience mitigating true crisis, how insulated I’ve been from so many kinds of trouble.

Did she need insulin? Yes. Did she have some with her? No. Did she have some at her house? Yes, but not enough. She never had enough. Did she want juice? No. 

The neighbor, off the phone now, brought some fruit from his house. The woman’s eyes exploded with wonder like a Looney Tunes character as she put a piece of cantaloupe in her mouth and slowly chewed. She accepted a sip of water, holding the proffered cup steady with both hands.

But then she placed it on the dash and announced, “I think I’m going to go to sleep now.” 

A current of electricity surged through the three of us standing in the street. The shit, suddenly getting real. “That’s not a good idea,” the neighbor said quickly. “Let’s stay awake until the medics come.” It seemed to be taking them a while, but I knew that time was bending around us with its own logic now. 

As she had all along, the woman obliged with good nature, turning to sit cross legged in the driver’s seat, facing us through the open window. She blinked slowly, wondrously, and seemed to catch a few notions that evaporated before she could fully grab hold of them. She sat like that in silence for a moment, observing her surroundings, the inside of the car, her shirt. Then she suddenly announced to none of us and all of us, “I look abused, but I’m not.”

My heart jumped. Among the many possible issues that may have led to this moment in the busted Kia in the middle of the street, abuse had not been on my list. But now, I heard a woman accustomed to explaining the marks on her body.

It was a statement I had spoken a version of myself in the past when anticipating my friends’ concern about a controlling boyfriend. This isn’t as bad as it looks. But what did I think it looked like exactly? By trying to preempt their worries, I only underscored their validity. 

I wanted to hold the woman, to put my body close to hers. To transmit warmth and safety through my skin to hers. “Thank you for telling us,” I said instead.

Then, after a long pause, she offered another revelation. “I don’t think I’m ok.” 

It was so accurate, so clearly true. She wasn’t ok. But there was so little clarity in the assessment. Her aloneness was palpable, thick and dizzying. Who was she? What had happened to her? And what would happen to her next?

The THC gummy I had taken an hour earlier announced itself, and I felt a familiar feeling of overwhelm surge through my nervous system. The medicine had wrenched open my heart – was this all going to be too much to bear? Sitting down would feel good, but I didn’t want to leave her line of vision, to break the narrow channel of consistency we were threading across the ocean of her disorientation. If there was anything I did know how to do, it was to be with her. Stay, I breathed. You are just right for this moment. 

I didn’t know her story – couldn’t – and it didn’t matter. Here we all were anyway, strangers keeping each other company in this infinitely stretching and looping moment until the sirens of a fire truck finally cut through the night.

“Um, hey,” she said, mustering focus before our vigil was broken by its arrival, “Can we not put this… put this on… the website?” 

And despite her struggle to form the request, I knew what she meant. It was 2024, and she was in crisis, in public. Maybe not for the first time. At the mercy of whatever factions showed up. Can we not put this on the website, guys?

The medics arrived and languidly hopped down from their perch, plopping industrial laptops on the hood of the Kia and surveying the scene. They were gentle with her despite the blaring red truck lights pulsating over the scene. A cop arrived shortly behind them, and soon they were passing around words in low tones. “Intoxicated,” they said confidently.

No one gave her a breathalyzer, but they pricked her finger for a blood sugar test. Then they stood around and spent a long time watching her shuffle through her wallet trying to locate an ID that never surfaced. They clacked on their laptops some more and couldn’t pull her up in the system.

Our part was over, our help no longer needed, but I felt obliged to witness until the end. The cop, a Black woman with braids to her waist and a heavy fringe of lashes lining her tired eyes, struck up a conversation with Daniel and the neighbor. She said that she’d just come from a horrific scene at a park across town. Four people shot. A car peeling out from the violence hit and killed a pedestrian and the gunfire spilled into the adjoining neighborhood.

“It’s real, real bad,” she said. “Every day. I’ve been doing it seven years and it doesn’t get better.” She seemed to be recuperating there on the curb. Whatever our little scene involved was a welcome break from the carnage, and it did not warrant much urgency. “At the end of the day,” she said, “I just gotta leave it all at work and go home to my family. I can’t keep thinking about it when I’m with them.”

Best practice is don’t talk to cops. Best practice is also to listen to people when their hearts are breaking.

“At least I’m in it for the right reasons,” she sighed. “‘Cause not everybody is. Some people think it’s all writing tickets and hassling people. Not everybody just really wants to help.”

I’m glad she’s the one who showed up tonight, I thought.

An ambulance arrived and the fire and rescue guys got ready to transfer the woman from her car to a stretcher. Surrounded by uniforms, the woman caught sight of Daniel for the last time through her fogged up windshield and held up a hand toward him. He threaded his way to her and reached for her through the open window. They held hands like that for a moment, everyone suspended briefly in red light until their grasp broke, and everyone clicked back into the choreography of their work.

I’m glad it was him who showed up tonight, too, I thought.  

May she know love wherever she goes from here. May she be not alone. 

Photo by Daniel