New York has a lot of stories. Stories people tell each other, stories that have been forgotten, and stories hardly anyone believes. I want to tell you a story here that is true, even if many people doubt it.
This story circulates among night-shift nurses, bartenders, cabdrivers, and the people who still look out at the street instead of only down at their phones. Every December, sometime between the Thanksgiving parade and Christmas, a yellow cab shows up that’s different from all the others.
It has no license plates. No commercial sign. The paint is old but well kept, like it’s been freshly polished over scarred metal. And the driver is always wearing the same red scarf.
They say the cab doesn’t stop if you wave like crazy. You can’t just hop in and yell, “Downtown, please,” like with the others. It only stops for those who step right up to the curb, keep their hand down, and wait until the headlights slow, until the car pulls up beside them like a yellow predator cat.
Then the passenger door opens by itself, and the driver, a man with dark eyes and that red scarf, turns his head just a little to the side.
And if you then say, “Take me home,” it will accept you as a passenger.
It doesn’t matter what the meter shows (most of the time it doesn’t show anything at all). It doesn’t matter where your real address is, whether in Queens, in the Bronx, or in an apartment on the 35th floor above Fifth Avenue. The driver with the red scarf will not take you there.
He takes you to the place where you once truly felt at home and happy. To the place where you last believed in miracles.
Not everyone remembers the ride afterward. Some only remember the scarf, a faint breath of frost in the car, a smell of old coffee. But in the stories that go around, the same people always show up.
An old lady.
A banker.
And then, one very cold December day, a woman named Claire.
***
The old lady was the first one people talked about.
Her name was Margaret, she was seventy-seven years old, and she had been living for thirty years in a small apartment on the Upper West Side that sometimes smelled like cookies and always like old books. Her grandchildren lived in New Jersey, her husband had died eight years earlier. She had learned to live with the silence. She would turn on the TV when she couldn’t stand the silence, and turn it off again when she noticed.
One Sunday in Advent, she stood on Broadway in the evening for the first time in a long while. The air was so cold that her breath turned visible. She had watched a Christmas movie on TV, one of those old ones with black-and-white kisses and big gestures and fake snow, and suddenly she absolutely had to go outside. Just to look at the lights a bit, she had told herself. Maybe get a hot chocolate.
When she had frozen enough, she wanted to go back. She stood at the edge of the street, watching the stream of lights pass her by. Cabs, Ubers, delivery trucks.
The yellow car without plates slowed down as if it had recognized her.
The door clicked, swung open a little. Margaret put a hand on the frame and leaned in. The driver didn’t look at her, just straight ahead, but there it was: the red scarf, carefully wrapped around his neck, the ends neatly laid over the dark coat.
“Take me home,” she said without thinking.
“Of course, ma’am,” the driver said quietly.
The city outside slid past, but differently than usual. The lights grew softer, the billboards blurred. Margaret watched Broadway grow narrower, saw the tall buildings shrink into lower ones, glass fronts turning into shop signs with old-fashioned lettering.
She only realized where they were when she saw the movie theater.
“Rivoli,” it said on the sign. The letters were red, not LED blue. There was only one screen, not eight. Couples stood in front of the entrance, the women in coats with fake-fur collars, the men in hats. On the poster: a movie from 1964.
Her first kiss.
She felt it again on her lips, even though she hadn’t thought in decades of the boy who had tasted of popcorn and mint candies. She saw the line in front of the ticket booth, heard the murmur, the girls’ giggling.
The driver pulled up right in front of the entrance. Margaret stared out of the window.
“Is… that possible?” she whispered.
“It’s your memory, ma’am,” the driver said. “Not mine.”
She turned to him. “Will you come with me?”
For the first time she really saw his face. He had dark eyes with little lines in the corners. Maybe forty, maybe a hundred. The red scarf glowed in the twilight as if it were made of a different fabric than the rest of the world.
“I can’t go in,” he said. “I just drive.”
She didn’t understand, but she nodded. She got out. The cold didn’t bite anymore. As she walked toward the entrance, a young woman was suddenly at her side who looked like her at sixteen, with a pink striped scarf and a nervous smile.
Margaret smiled back.
No one knows how long she was there. Hours, minutes, years.
When she finally returned to her real apartment—you found her the next morning sleeping peacefully in her armchair—she told no one about the cab. But weeks later, in the nursing home, she whispered to the nurse:
“If you see him, the one with the red scarf, say: Take me home. But think carefully before you get in.”
***
The banker’s official name was Daniel McKay, but everyone called him Dan or Danny, though the word that fit him best was “accelerated.”
He had always had somewhere to be. In meetings, at conferences, catching flights, on calls. His life was the calendar on his smartphone, precise as clockwork. When he described himself (which he rarely did), it was as “efficient.”
On the evening he saw the yellow cab without plates, he was, for once, on foot. The firm had held its Christmas party at the Four Seasons, with too much champagne and too many jokes about bonuses. He had left early, officially because of an early flight, in truth because the smiling hurt.
It wasn’t snowing, but the air smelled like it might. Dan walked down Park Avenue, tie loosened, coat open. His head hummed from the alcohol and from something else that was closer to sadness than he liked to admit.
The yellow car appeared out of the traffic as if it had cut a hole in time. It rolled up right in front of Dan, but didn’t quite stop. It was more of a hesitation.
Dan stopped walking. His hand didn’t go up, but his gaze snagged on the red scarf flashing inside the car.
The door swung open.
“Taxi?” the driver’s voice asked, without turning around.
Dan should have said “Upper East Side,” or just given his address. He could have walked away. Instead he heard himself say:
“Take me home.”
The word tasted strange, as if it came from another language.
“Sure,” said the driver.
The ride was short. Too short to get from the Four Seasons to his apartment, but long enough to blur the city. The signs outside turned into stripes, the honking of the cars grew quieter. Dan, who could usually orient himself at every intersection, suddenly had no idea where they were.
When the car stopped gently, he looked through the window and felt his breath catch.
“That’s gone,” he said automatically.
In front of him stood a brick building, three stories high, with a stone staircase whose railing showed peeling paint. The sign over the door was familiar. “Public Library.” Some of the letters had fallen off. In his head he saw how it used to look, golden, gleaming.
He had been ten the first time he slipped between those shelves. Had hidden there when his parents were too loud. Had buried himself in stories that smelled of the sea and adventure.
Years ago, the building had been torn down. In its place now stood a luxury apartment complex with a winter garden and concierge. Dan knew that because he had personally run the numbers on whether the investment would pay off.
And yet the library stood in front of him, exactly as it used to.
“How…?” He fell silent.
The driver gave a small shrug. “You wanted to go home,” he said. “Not upstairs.”
Dan let out a short laugh. “Is this a dream?”
“That’ll become clear,” said the driver. “Inside.”
Dan got out. The cold sliced at him, but it felt honest. When he stepped into the library, the smell of old books hit him so strongly it almost made him dizzy.
He spent—depending on who you ask—twenty minutes or twenty years there. He sat at “his” table, ran his hand over the gouges in the wood, found a children’s book in which someone had scrawled “Daniel” in awkward letters. Maybe it had been him. Maybe not.
When he came back outside, the yellow cab was gone.
In its place stood only a modern SUV, in front of a glass building filled with expensive apartments. The library had vanished as if it had never existed.
Dan typed his resignation that evening.
He did not mention the cab.
***
Until the thing with Claire happened, it was just legends, stories passed along in bars. “I know someone who knows someone…”
Claire was the first one who asked the driver where his home was.
And the last one who ever did.
Claire was in her late thirties, a graphic designer, Italian, in New York for eight years. She had come here with one suitcase, a portfolio, and the idea that in cities you can reinvent yourself.
The city had taken her in, sometimes lovingly, sometimes brutally. She had slept in shared beds in Brooklyn, served coffee in SoHo until she had enough gigs to say “freelance” without her bank account laughing.
She wasn’t unhappy. But she wasn’t happy either. It was as if she were running all the time without noticing that the treadmill was turned all the way up.
On that December evening, she was really just tired.
Her last client—a start-up that wanted a Christmas campaign that was “edgy” but please without any risk—had bombarded her with revisions all day. “Can Santa look less male?” “Can we change the color? Not so red, but still Christmassy.”
When she left the office, it was just before midnight. The snow that had been forecast was really falling now. Big, slow flakes that glistened in the streetlights.
She walked along West 23rd, heading toward Seventh Avenue. The trains were still running, but she was too wiped out for the subway. “I’m treating myself to a cab,” she muttered.
She was standing on the corner when the yellow cab without plates peeled out of traffic.
She saw it right away. Not just because of the missing signs, but like when you happen to look into a window at night and catch a stranger’s moment.
The headlights slowed. The car rolled up to the curb. The door swung open.
Claire stepped closer, her boots scraping over the half-frozen slush. It was noticeably colder right next to the cab.
“Taxi?” the driver asked.
She could only see his shadow, the outline of shoulders, a profile. And the red scarf. It really was bright red, and it looked warm.
“Take me home,” Claire said.
She didn’t know why she said the words in Italian. She took orders in English, dreamed in English. But here, at this curb, under these yellow lights, Italian came out of her.
“Of course,” the driver said, and to her surprise he answered in Italian too. Accent-free, as if it were his own language.
She slid into the back seat. The interior smelled like something between coffee and cold air. The radio was off. Outside, the snow was getting heavier.
“So where are we headed?” she asked weakly, more out of habit.
“Home,” he said. “Where else?”
She rested her head against the cold window. The city lights slid past. She tried to follow their route, but after two corners she was lost. Were they downtown? Uptown? The street signs blurred. Once she thought she saw “Houston Street,” then “110th” again. Maybe she was imagining it.
“Been driving a cab long?” she asked at some point, just to break the silence.
“Longer than anyone ought to be counting,” he said.
His voice was calm, almost friendly. There was nothing threatening about it, nothing supernatural. If she closed her eyes, she could have taken him for a regular driver who’d been doing night shifts for years.
“And always with the red scarf?” She heard herself laugh. It sounded hollow.
“The scarf stays,” he answered. “Everything else changes.”
She rolled the words around in her head. “Everything else changes.” Yeah. Apartments, jobs, friends. Phone numbers. Parents getting older.
Claire closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them again, Manhattan was gone.
Instead of endless facades, she saw small houses. A wide sky, way too big for the city she knew. Streetlights, but different: lower, yellower, with glass globes. In front of one of the houses stood a bus stop with a green sign. It was night, but the darkness was different, softer, less chewed up by neon.
She blinked. Her heart started racing.
She knew the street they were driving down. Not from New York. From… a town in Tuscany she hadn’t seen in many years.
“You can’t be serious,” she whispered. “This can’t…”
The driver said nothing. He turned at an intersection Claire could have driven in her sleep. Past the bakery that had long since closed for the night, a small restaurant that used to be packed all the time. It was as if time had slowed down a little here.
When they reached the next corner, she saw the house.
Yellow facade, reddish-brown roof. And the balcony, yeah—the balcony with the old folding camp chair where she used to sit for hours, feet up on the railing, headphones on, shutting out the world.
Her childhood bedroom was the window on the left.
Claire pressed her hand over her mouth.
“How…?” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“You wanted to go home,” the driver said softly.
“But this is Italy,” she blurted out. “That’s… thousands of miles. And besides, none of us live there anymore. But that there was my room. The balcony…”
In the left window, a light flickered. For a moment she saw the outlines of posters on the wall that she knew by heart. A band whose name she’d already forgotten. A movie poster. A hand-lettered sign.
Her throat tightened.
“I’m dreaming,” she murmured.
“Maybe,” the driver said. “Maybe not. Sometimes it doesn’t make a difference.”
She stared at the house.
It wasn’t perfect. The plaster was cracked. The door handle sagged a little.
That was what “home” had once felt like. Small, cramped, annoying. And at the same time infinitely big, because she’d believed from here she could go anywhere.
Claire breathed in, out. She felt her face grow hot. She felt tears she hadn’t seen coming.
“How long have we…?” She broke off. She didn’t even know what question she’d been trying to ask.
“As long as you need,” the driver said. “The meter’s not running.”
“Can I… go up?”
He nodded. “You should. Otherwise it would’ve been a very long ride for nothing.”
His tone was almost dry.
Claire opened the door. The air outside wasn’t as cold as in New York, but the smell was different. More earth, less exhaust. Snow and coal heat and… childhood.
She ran up the stairs, three steps at a time, like she used to. The front door creaked softly as she pushed it open. She knew exactly where the loose tile in the hallway was, the one you couldn’t step on too hard if you didn’t want to wake anyone.
Her old room key wasn’t in her pocket. But when she pressed down on the handle, the door opened anyway.
The room was… her room. Not exactly the way she’d left it, not down to the last detail, but close enough that it hurt. The bed was still there, with the old bedspread covered in colorful circles. The bookshelf with the books. “La Storia” by Elsa Morante in a worn-out edition, open somewhere in the middle as if she’d just stopped reading.
She half laughed, half sobbed.
She stayed there a long time. She sat on the bed, lay down, stood up again, moved from one shelf to the next. She picked up the old book—the paper felt exactly the way it used to. She read a paragraph just to see if the words were still there. They were.
At some point, when she sat down at the desk, she noticed something.
Someone had scratched into the desktop with a ballpoint pen: “Home is what you always carry with you.”
She had written that at sixteen, in a fit of melodramatic teenage philosophy. She ran her finger over it. The grooves were still there to feel.
She didn’t know how much time had passed before she went back down the stairs. Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe a whole night.
Outside, the yellow cab was waiting.
The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror as she got in. The red scarf was like a marker in reality.
“Thank you,” she said hoarsely. “I…”
She couldn’t find words big enough.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
They pulled away. The road stretched out. The small town faded behind them. The sky narrowed again, cut up by high-rises that sank into the snow like dark teeth.
Claire watched as the world became Manhattan again.
“You do this every year?” she asked after a while. “Drive through the whole city? Bring people… home?”
“Only during Advent,” he said. “Only at night. Only when they really mean it.”
“And you?” She held his gaze in the rearview mirror. “Where’s your home?”
It was a spontaneous question. Maybe it was the leftover sixteen-year-old in her that said it. The part that believed you should be allowed to ask anything.
In the mirror she saw his eyes change for a moment. As if she’d opened a door that had been closed for a long time.
He smiled.
It wasn’t a creepy smile, not a sinister one. More… quiet, old, a little surprised. The way people smile when you show them a forgotten photo.
“That’s a good question,” he said.
The city around them was getting louder again. They were back in Manhattan, right in the middle of traffic. Horns, sirens, the bright laughter of people standing outside bars, the smell of hot dogs drifting in through the slightly open window.
The driver steered the car over to the curb. Suddenly they were on the corner where Claire had gotten in. West 23rd, Seventh Avenue. As if no time had passed.
“Here?” she asked, puzzled. “But…”
“Way home’s a circle,” he said. “Not a line.”
She looked at the meter. It showed nothing but black. No numbers.
“How much…?” she began.
“This one’s on me.”
She reached for the door, then stopped.
“But you didn’t answer my question,” she said. “Where’s your home?”
The red scarf flashed for a moment as he lifted his shoulders.
“In the stories, the good ones—the ones that make people’s eyes light up until one day they forget them and stop believing in them.”
Later she was never sure whether she actually heard something in that moment. Or if it was just her own heart speaking.
She got out. The door closed.
She stood for a moment on the sidewalk, her hand still on the cold handle. The snow was falling thicker now, dancing in the streetlights.
The yellow cab pulled away, slipping back into the stream of cars. For a moment she could see through the windshield—the red scarf moving slightly.
The car kept going as if nothing had happened. It blended in with delivery trucks and other cabs, grew smaller. Then the city lights swallowed the car.
“Take me home,” she whispered into the cold air.
Traffic roared. Lights flickered.
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