"I'm taking these to make a donation for the battered women's shelter on the long island." And so I am. It's the
day before Christmas. I'm on my way out of the city for the holidays, so I'm driving across the bay bridge. A
flake of wet snow's blowing out at the world through my open window. The bay is calm. There's an old black
woman walking along the edge of the road up ahead. She's carrying two boxes of clothes and waving her free
arm. Crows are perched on her shoulders and her hair is white and wild. She hasn't even looked at passing cars. I
stop and roll my window down. She points at the boxes. "Hello," I say. She looks at me and says nothing. Her
accent's thick. I nod and smile in what I hope's like a friendly way. "I must give these to somebody," she says.
She's very old. She has a black feather headdress sewn to her elaborate green, beaded sari. "Anybody will do."
"I'll take them," I say and smile. I settle the boxes into the back seat and get into the driver's seat. The old
woman doesn't speak. I start to drive away. Only then does she speak. "If you know the way," she says, "don't
stop. I have no road. It's not worth sending gifts up there. They have a lot of TVs." So I drive on. I'm not sure
where she's talking about, exactly. Just over the hills you can see the city lights, and over toward Long Island
the lights of towns. We're headed in that direction, this way, so I slow and turn into the main road heading to
Long Island. I should be heading to the east side of Long Island, where I'm booked to stay. An hour in the car I
realize I can't remember what town it is, specifically, that my brother moved to. I spend the next hour getting
lost and driving north, it seems. Turned off an inlet that should be an inlet, and found a main road that wasn't a
main road so I turned back. On through industrial neighbourhoods I go. The cars behind me are getting closer
and I can even hear them. I decide to turn in and ask for directions at one of those big shopping malls - for some
reason I don't feel like taking a detour down one of the smaller roads until I've found a place. The mall's
strange, because of its location. It's ringed by a highway, but there's a huge parking lot in the middle of it. It
looks like an old airport used to have its exit ramp on the mall parking lot.