My Passenger Left at Highway Speed

I have driven trucks and cabs for thirty years and picked up more hitchhikers than the safety brochures would like. This one stood at the Route 9 junction in hard rain, no coat, and my conscience outvoted my caution.

Young guy, maybe twenty. Soaked through — he dripped on my seat, and remember that detail, because I need you to. Polite. Gave an address out by the grain depot, said his mother would be waiting up. We drove. He answered small talk with small answers, and then, unprompted, somewhere past the quarry turn, he said the sentence I have carried since: 'You should get your heart looked at. Not tomorrow. This week.'

I laughed it off, the way you do, and glanced at the mirror to make some joke about him moonlighting as a doctor.

Empty seat.

Highway speed, doors locked, seatbelt still clipped — clipped, closed, lying flat across an empty seat like it had been buckled over nobody. I braked so hard I flat-spotted the tyres and searched that cab like a madman on the shoulder in the rain. Nothing. Except: the seat was still wet. A man-shaped dampness, cooling.

I am not a superstitious man, but I am an obedient one when the message is that specific. I saw my doctor that week, told her a version of why. She humoured me with an ECG, then stopped humouring me. Blockage, the kind they call a widow-maker when they think you can't hear them. Stented within the month. 'Whatever got you in here early,' the cardiologist said, 'thank it.'

In spring I drove out to the address he gave. An old woman answered. I described him. She held the doorframe and asked, very quietly, whether he had been dry or wet. Wet, I said. She nodded like that meant something ancient, and thanked me for bringing him partway home.