To the Woman Who Walked Beside Me
It was indigo dusk as I began the fifteen-minute walk to the 4 train. I’d spent a long day looking for my lost cat, and was so sad and worn out that I didn’t immediately notice the car that came along and drove next to me—slowly—matching my pace for too long. It was a low coupe with impenetrable tinted windows. I was on a desolate stretch: the car the only car, and me the only person. I stared straight ahead; it gunned away.
Evenings like this are the reason mothers worry, why they call, keep tabs. Their anxious questions are meant to train you to see threat and avoid it. I’d never had a mother tracking me from afar. I’d lost her when I was twelve, the age right before independence. But the nature of her death—a murder—had made clear to me the danger of men.
The car rematerialized beside me. Again: slowing, coasting. This time I nervously looked at it sideways, thinking it somehow unwise to show my face. If I didn’t put my face in this story, it wouldn’t be my story. In New York City there’s often a tragedy running along beside you that you don’t want to enter. You stay in your lane, don’t make eye contact, step back from the edge of the platform.
I walked and prayed I wouldn’t hear the window roll down, the door pop open so I could be dragged through it. There was still no one on the street, just closed shops under sallow streetlights. I felt intensely aware of my smallness. Could I fight off a man who picked me up by the waist? Probably not. The whole thing took on an aura of inevitability, fate. I’d just moved to this city, I was broke, no one knew where I was—it seemed like just the moment when a person disappears. As the car sped away the second time, my body heated up with fear, convinced it would return.
“In New York City there’s often a tragedy running along beside you that you don’t want to enter.”
But a block or so away, I saw you. Wearing a long, billowing skirt and a knit cardigan, you were red-haired like my mother was and middle-aged like she now would be. My voice pushed out of me before pride could suppress it. “Excuse me!” I said, the instant you entered earshot. “I think—someone’s following me. There’s this car that keeps driving up. Can you walk with me, please?”
I was ashamed to do this. I was used to being on my own, to protecting myself. You were another woman—also a potential target—but you were older and solid and there would be two of us. You had been walking the other way but immediately nodded, sharp and determined, and turned around to fall into step with me. You looped your arm under mine and I’ve rarely felt such relief.
“Where do you live?” you asked. You had a bit of what was probably a Russian accent. I said I wasn’t sure if I was being stalked but I didn’t want to take chances. “Of course,” you said, in the voice of a woman who also knew what men could do. “You did the right thing,” you said, and patted my arm.
You were so ready to take care of me that I’ve always wondered whether you had a daughter my age. If maybe you lost her, or had to leave her behind. If she ran away, or met a terrible end. Your help had a ferocity to it, an inner urgency. I could feel it through your arm.
I’ve been in New York City now for a decade, have experienced, so many times, moments of intimacy with people I will never truly know. I’ve called 911 for strangers, sent my voice under bathroom stalls to ask sick women if they need help, redirected overwhelmed tourists, talked to a lonely father on the train who radiated more sadness than I could bear to ignore. I have scanned the street for adults who look like the child who seems to be alone, and I have checked the ears of feral cats for the telltale notch that says they’ve been neutered, that a volunteer group is looking out. And I have imagined my lost kitty eating on the back porch of a little old lady who eventually coaxes her inside from the cold.
As we walked along, briskly but slower than the pace of panic, you asked where I was born, kept me chatting so we’d look normal. We didn’t see the car again. We approached a gas station, and there was a taxi parked there. “You have cash?” you asked me, and I did. I forgot all about the train, put myself in your hands. I waited while you leaned into the driver’s window.
“This is my daughter,” you said, sternly, with the pride of an actual mother. “She lives in Manhattan, Upper West Side. You get her home safe.”
You fixed him with a long, level gaze, pushed a twenty at him. I wanted to protest but I already knew your will was stronger than mine. The driver nodded, a universal New York okay-sure-whatever nod. You repeated. “My daughter. You take good care.” He nodded again.
I stepped toward the car and you enfolded me in a hug that felt real. I relaxed into you. I hadn’t been hugged by an older woman in years. I thanked you, and said—because I wanted to play along and please you, because I wanted to say it to someone, because my mother had been dead then sixteen years—“Goodnight, Mom. See you soon.”
I sat quietly in the back of the car on the way home, watching the very last of the sky’s glow fade to black over the Hudson, making my way to my bare, whitewashed, high-ceilinged room. When I got there, I wished I could call my mother, to tell her about you. She would’ve been so grateful.
About the Author
Sarah Perry (she/they) is the author of Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover (Mariner/HarperCollins, February 2025), and After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 2017), which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Recent short work includes a Huffington Post Personals essay that reached 1M+ readers and an essay for Cake Zine that was a nominee for the James Beard Foundation’s 2024 M. F. K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Other essays have appeared in Elle Magazine, and Off Assignment, and the Guardian. More updates can be found on her website and on Instagram at @sarahperry100 Perry holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Columbia University, has taught in the graduate programs at Columbia and the University of North Texas, and was the 2019 McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College. She was a 2020-2022 Tulsa Artist Fellow and currently teaches in the MFA program at Colorado State University.
Read more about our Letter to a Stranger anthology, in which this essay appeared, and Sarah’s latest book, Sweet Nothings, in our newsletter.
Edited by Colleen Kinder.
Header photo by Wes Hicks.
