A Stranger in the Night

The upside of this pandemic, I’m told, is that we’re all becoming more empathetic. This week—Week Eight of lock-down— I learned I have a ways to go.

Ten p.m. Sunday night, my husband and I were nestled in our couch, watching television, when we heard a voice that wasn’t part of the show’s dialogue. Someone behind us was calling out. It sounded like, “Help me.”

We looked at each other. We silenced the TV. I ran to the sliding glass door, which opens onto a deck that overlooks a deep wooded ravine. My husband switched on the deck light.

In the blackness beneath the deck railing, a man’s face loomed deathly white. He looked to be in his twenties. Receding dark hair, matted with rain. Beard stubble.

Awful possibilities raced through my mind. A shooter? A psychopath? “Who are you?” I blurted, electric with fear. “Why are you here?”

He looked at me as though he didn’t know the answer to either one of those questions. Then: “Jason. Jason B***n.”

While I struggled to process this information (Was he a neighbor’s son? A friend of my boys?) my husband—remembering that this human being had cried for help—spoke to him gently. “Jason, I want you to come over here”—he pointed to the corner of the house, away from the cliff—“and stay there until I come out and meet you, okay?”

Watching my husband shrug on his jacket, I said, “We should call the police. We don’t know what he is carrying, or what he is capable of.” I added, “He may be sick.”

“That’s clear,” said my husband. Flashlight in hand, he headed out.

I called our township police and shared what little I knew. Then I peered out the windows by the front door. Jason sat on our front steps, a towel draped over his head. He rocked back and forth as my husband spoke to him. A cold rain continued to fall. Suddenly, badly, I wanted to offer him comfort. A cup of hot tea. Some homemade cookies. A blanket.

I was putting together these things when I heard a new voice, loud and aggressive. The police. “Hey! Jason! What are you doing here, buddy? Where’d you come from? How’d you get here?”

Having taken the same tack, I winced. But then an older, confident, deeper voice intervened. “Jason, you live with your brother, right? If you tell me his number we’ll give him a call.” And: “You look pretty cold, Jason. I’ve got the heat cranked in my car. Let’s get you in the car and go meet your brother.”

When they left, my husband came in and related what he could. Jason had been reading the Bible—the Book of Job. God had tested Job, and Jason felt like God was testing him. He had left his house, where he lives with his brother, around 1:30. He’d borrowed his brother’s car, a red Subaru. He’d parked it but couldn’t remember where. He’d been walking for some time. His mom was at the hospital five minutes’ drive from us. She was on a ventilator.

Perhaps he was on something; more likely, he was off something. Yet I could well see myself in this young man. If the person I loved most in this world were on life support and I could not visit, I, too, might wind up wandering the woods in the rain and the dark, crazed with grief and loneliness.

I think of all the people who struggle with mental illness, and how isolating that is in the best of times. I think how profound their exile has become, now that all of us have retreated into our homes. And I shudder to think how few among us may find the courage and compassion to rise above our fear and furnish them comfort, in whatever small ways—a towel, a cookie, a patient ear—we can manage in the moment.

May you be one of them. In this moment—in our shared dark hour of the soul—especially.