She didn’t look like someone who had simply fallen asleep, but like someone who had been forced into silence.
That frightened me more than anything else.
I called an ambulance while holding her upright because I was afraid she might slide out of the wheelchair straight into the mud.
“There’s an elderly woman beside the road,” I cried into the phone. “She’s unconscious. She’s freezing. She’s sitting in a wheelchair. Please hurry.”
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The dispatcher asked where I was. I looked around desperately, but there was nothing around me except rain, darkness, my car, and the woman in the wheelchair.
I gave her my location as best as I could.
“Is she breathing?” the dispatcher asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Barely.”
“Stay with her. Help is on the way.”
I kept talking to her because I was afraid that if I stopped, she might leave this world before the ambulance arrived.
“Please stay with me,” I whispered. “You’re not alone anymore. Please hold on.”
But inside me, alongside the fear, anger was growing.
Who could do something like this?
Who could leave a helpless old woman beside an empty road in freezing rain?
She had no blanket.
No bag.
No phone.
No food.
Not even a note.
Nothing that suggested someone wanted her to be found.
Nothing that said she mattered to anyone.
It looked as though someone had placed her there and expected the night to finish the job.
When the ambulance finally arrived, red lights flashed across the wet road and colored the mud around us crimson.
Two paramedics ran toward us.
One checked her pulse.
The other lifted her eyelid and shone a flashlight into her eye.
The first paramedic looked at me, then at the empty road behind me.
“Is this how you found her?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Alone?”
“Completely alone.”
His expression changed.
It was no longer only concern.
It was suspicion.
They wrapped her in thermal blankets and carefully lifted her from the wheelchair.
I watched them put her into the ambulance, and for a moment I thought my part was over.
