Rami drove the night taxi, the long quiet shift when the city thinned out into dark roads and farther stars. It was nearly three in the morning, and he was thinking of going home, when his headlights found a woman standing at the edge of the road where there was nothing — no house, no bus stop, no town for miles. She lifted one hand. Rami slowed and stopped, because that is what you do for someone alone on an empty road at night.
She climbed into the back seat without a word. In the mirror Rami saw a pale, gentle face and a long coat dark with rain, though the night was dry and no rain had fallen for a week. "Cold night," he said kindly. "Where can I take you?" She only looked out the window, water dripping quietly from the hem of her coat onto the floor of his cab.
They drove. Rami tried again, gently. "Long way to be walking. You have family waiting?" The woman did not answer, but in the mirror her eyes met his, and they were not frightening. They were sad — the deep, tired sadness of someone who has been looking for something for a very long time and cannot remember where they left it.
The road unwound ahead, black and shining. The car grew colder and colder, until Rami could see his own breath. Still the woman sat quietly, dripping, watching the dark fields slide past as if she were searching every one of them for a light she knew.
At the crossroads Rami glanced into the mirror to ask, one more time, which way to turn — and the back seat was empty. The woman was simply gone. No door had opened. The car had not slowed. There was only the dark, wet shape her coat had left on the seat, and a silence so complete he could hear his own heart.
He stamped on the brake. The taxi shuddered to a halt in the middle of the empty road. With shaking hands he turned and looked. And there, leading from the rear door across the floor of his cab toward the front — toward him — was a line of small, wet footprints, glistening in the dashboard light. As he watched, frozen, another one appeared. Then another. Slowly, patiently, the footprints were walking toward him.
Rami's first thought was to run. But he made himself sit still and look — really look — and he saw that the footprints were not coming to harm him. They were coming to lead him. Each new print appeared a little to the side, then another, turning, pointing — not at his throat, but at the windshield, at the road ahead, at a narrow turning he had never noticed before, half hidden behind a leaning tree.
"You're not chasing me," Rami said softly to the empty air. "You're showing me the way. You're lost, aren't you? You've forgotten the road home."
The wet footprints stopped. And though no one was there, Rami felt something in the cold air that was almost like relief — the feeling of someone, at last, being understood.
So Rami did not drive away from the strange turning. He drove toward it. The little road wound between dark fields and over a small stone bridge, following nothing but the faint wet shine that seemed to lead him on, until at last his headlights swept across an old house with a lamp still burning in an upstairs window — a lamp someone had left lit, year after year, for a traveler who had never come home.
As the taxi stopped, the cold lifted all at once, and the wet footprints faded from the floor like breath from a glass. The dripping was gone. The sorrow was gone. In the rear-view mirror, for just a moment, Rami thought he saw the pale gentle face again — but now it was smiling, the way you smile when you finally see your own front door. Then it was only an empty back seat, and the soft, ordinary dark of an ending night.
Rami sat a while in the quiet, looking at that warm lit window. Then he turned the taxi around and drove slowly back toward the city, toward morning. He never picked up a passenger at that lonely roadside again. But on cold nights he liked to think that somewhere, in a house with a lamp in the window, a long journey had finally, gently, come to its end.