“First let’s get you all unstrapped here,” I said to her, because I had a feeling she might’ve been strapped in there for a while. I can’t say for a fact why I thought I knew it, other than the way you could tell she’d been crying for a long time with nobody wiping her nose. “I know all about little girls,” I told her while I unclipped her, “because I’ve got two little sisters. They’re a lot bigger than you now, but they weren’t always. They used to be just about your size and I used to help take care of them a lot and right now I just miss them so damn much I could . . .”
The word I was heading for was “cry.” But I looked down at those huge brown eyes and I figured I’d better not do it—I’d better not even say it—because she was looking to me for reasons to stay calm, so all I said was “Sorry for the cussing. Don’t repeat stuff like that.”
But she had no idea what I was saying, I could tell.
I pulled her up into my arms and she accepted me right away. Just like that. Sometimes a little kid her age won’t want to go to a stranger. They’ll fuss and try to get back to their mom. Of course that’s a different situation because it means their mom is right there to go back to. This little girl had been strapped in a car seat on an empty sidewalk in the dark, so if she hadn’t decided to be okay with going to me, what better choices did I figure she had?
I got kind of panicky, just all of a sudden, because it came over me in a big way that I had her now, and she was my responsibility. I couldn’t just put her down and walk away, so what was I going to do?
I walked around in circles calling stuff out into the dark.
“Hello? Hello-o? Mom of this little girl? Parents of this little girl? Are you around here? Somewhere? Anywhere?”
I had to ask, because I couldn’t just walk away with her. What if they’d only set her there for a second to get something out of the car or go into a building? Well, the answer to that, of course, was they would be terrible parents to do it, but I still couldn’t walk away with their kid.
But I stood there with her, her cheek down on my shoulder and her little fingers holding tight to the back of my shirt, and just listened for an answer, and let me tell you, there was nothing and nobody out there. This was a pretty industrial part of the city. Not literally downtown, where the office buildings are, because that’s nicer, but definitely a business-y part of the city, mostly machine shops and warehouses, and nobody actually lives here except people who’re on the street. We live everywhere, especially places where other people don’t, because that way there’s nobody to call the cops on us to drive us out of the neighborhood. And it’s not a place you really want to be at night, so it’s not like there were people walking by or anything.
I just stood there in the middle of the sidewalk for a minute, holding her, and I got this spooky feeling like in those movies where the star character realizes they’re the only person left alive on the earth.
“Okay,” I said to the little girl. “Next idea. We have to find a phone and call the police and report you missing. Or . . . found, I guess I mean. Report you found.”
But, finding a phone . . . that was not nearly as easy around here as I’d just made it sound, and I so completely knew it.
I bombed out on finding a phone.
I went to the corner store, but the guy had already closed it up for the night. He didn’t keep what you might call regular hours, just gave up and went home when there was nobody coming in. And there were no pay phones around there. There were probably no pay phones anywhere in the city, because who needed them? Everybody had a cell phone except Bodhi and me.
I didn’t want to walk back to the all-night market, because I had the girl on my hip, with her head on my shoulder, and the car seat hanging from one hand, and it was too heavy. It was too much for me. Plus there was an even more important reason. It was a bad neighborhood and it was only getting later, and I was willing to risk myself by walking down the streets here, but I wasn’t willing to risk somebody else’s little baby girl.
I took her back to where Bodhi and I had been hiding at night. It was a huge wooden shipping crate in the far corner of a vacant lot full of trash, made up of slats with a tiny bit of room in between, that you could’ve seen the stars through if you could see the stars in the city. But it was handy for seeing if anybody was coming, and the empty slots were too narrow for them to see us. When I say it was huge, I mean for a crate. For a place to stay it was pretty damn small, but Bodhi and I slept wrapped around each other anyway. But only because it got a little bit cold. We didn’t like each other like that.
I left the car seat outside because there was no room for it and sat inside with the girl and waited for Bodhi to come back. Sometimes he would come back too late and with too much money—a scary amount of money, like forty dollars—and I would be worried about where he got so much.
I held her tight in my arms and said, “Come back, Bodhi, come back, Bodhi, come back, Bodhi,” over and over and over.
And the little girl said “Mommy” and “Horsey,” in no particular order, and I never did know which one she was about to say next.
Bodhi got back probably an hour later.
He stuck his head in and looked at me and looked at the girl, and got this strange expression on his face, like life was just so completely surprising and he couldn’t decide if he should like that about life or not.
He had this way of tilting his head like a curious dog if something struck him strange, and he did that.
He was experimenting with different ways to have a beard, which meant he had to find a way to shave every day or two, but I guess it was worth it to him. Right now it was a little square soul patch under his bottom lip, but with the rest of his beard poking out around it because it was near the end of the day. But it was all kind of wispy and light, his beard hair, because he was young, too. Not as young as me. I think he was around nineteen but I never asked.
“Well,” he said, and his voice was super familiar so it made me feel better. “Who. Is. This?” He made his voice kind of high and light on the last word, which was nice, because it made the baby less scared of him.
“You need to go find a phone,” I said. “Maybe run down to the all-night market and ask the lady there to call the police. Tell her we found a baby just all by herself on the street and they have to come get her and figure out who her mother is and how to get her home.”
He frowned, and the baby fussed a little because it scared her.
“And what if her mother dumped her on purpose?”
I actually hadn’t even thought of that, and then I was wishing I didn’t have to think of it now.
“The police still need to come and get her. You know. And get her a foster home or something. Whatever they do with kids.”
But then I got worried because I didn’t really know what they do with kids, and if what they do is okay for the kid, and the weird thing was that I already cared what happened to this one, even though it had only been an hour or two. But there was nothing I could do about it. She wasn’t my baby and I had to turn her over to the police, and there was just no other answer to a question like that one.
“The police,” he said. Like the words tasted bad in his mouth when he said them. “I kind of hate to call the police. I just now finished outrunning a couple of them.”
“Again?”
I said it like I was mad, but really it scared me, because if Bodhi got arrested then what would I do?
“Gotta make a living,” he said.
“You can get lost before the police show up.”
“Hate to bring them here,” he said. “Might be the end of our good hiding place.”
“Just tell them we’ll meet them on the corner. When I hear a car pull up or voices or whatever, I’ll come out. They won’t see where I came from behind all the junk.”
For a minute he didn’t do anything at all. Just froze there with his head in the crate and his body out, like he was thinking about things. Then he gave us a little salute like
an army man, and his face was gone.
The whole Bodhi was gone.
He got back maybe half an hour later, but time is a weird thing to try to judge, especially at a time like that when you’re scared and nervous and wanting it to go by fast.
“Bad news,” he said. “We have to move.”
“Move? You mean permanently?”
“No, maybe not permanently. But as long as you have that kid. You know those three guys who call themselves the Three Musketeers?”
I knew them all right—well enough that my blood got a little bit colder thinking about them—and he knew I knew them. It was just the way you start a sentence, not a serious question. They were on the street like us, but also not like us because they were meaner. They lived in the basement of an abandoned building three or four blocks over, and everybody avoided that block because they were bad news.
“What about them?”
“They were in the store trying to steal some candy, but the lady wouldn’t take her eyes off them. She was following them around with I think a gun in the pocket of her apron. And when I asked her to call the cops and told her why, they heard me. I didn’t think they would hear me. But then I was outside a minute later and I heard them say they want the kid.”
My blood went from cool to frozen, just really fast like that. I could see the sky past Bodhi’s head, and I actually could see a couple of the brightest stars.
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they want her?”
My voice was real quiet, like a scratchy whisper, like they were right outside the crate listening and maybe hearing everything I said.
“They figure she’s worth a lot of money because her parents’ll want her back. They want to try to ransom her back to her parents. And I’m pretty sure they know where we hide. So we need to move. Like, now.”
“Wait. No. That’s stupid. They don’t even know who her parents are.”
“Well, they’re going to try to find out. Watch for an Amber Alert or find something in the paper about it or something like that. Anyway, they’re going to take her now and figure that out later, so we need to move.”
But after he said that I was so scared I almost couldn’t move. But I did move, anyway, because anything else, anything that wasn’t getting out in time, would’ve been just too awful to think about.
“Get the car seat,” I said as we rushed out of our crate.
But I didn’t say it because it was worth money. That didn’t matter anymore. I said it because I didn’t want to leave anything behind that they could use to see where we’d been. I figured it was better if they felt like we could be just about anywhere. I figured it would only get their mouths watering too much to see a sign that they’d just missed us.
We hurried down the street together, but I had no idea where we were going, and he couldn’t have either, and it was a really lost feeling.
I would’ve told you, just before that happened, that I couldn’t possibly have felt more lost in this big, crazy world but I would’ve been wrong.
Bodhi found us a place to hide under a freeway overpass. There was this really steep hill going up under it, and then the hill kind of flattened out at the top. And it was sort of cave-like under the iron structure of the bridge, getting smaller and smaller at the back.
In a way it scared me because if they found us here we’d be pretty cornered, but it was a good hiding place, too.
There were all these sheets of flattened cardboard, like big cartons flattened out, and a hollow space under them that could make it look like they were lying flat with nobody underneath them. I wondered if somebody had hidden there before. You know, like dug it out as a place to hide. In this city it was a pretty good bet.
I hoped nobody was about to come back and claim the spot.
“Here,” Bodhi said, and handed me a bottle of apple juice. A round, squatty glass bottle. “I forgot. I stole this for her. And this. I thought maybe she was hungry. I don’t know how much she’s on solid food, but . . .”
He held up a box of goldfish crackers and I saw the baby reach out for the box. I don’t know if she knew what they were by the picture, or if she was just hungry and figured it was a box of food.
“Thanks,” I said. And I took the crackers, even though I never, ever took anything he stole, because it was stolen. But it was different this time because it was for the baby and not for me. “How are you going to find a phone where nobody can overhear you?”
“Not sure,” he said. “Maybe my best bet is to flag down a car and get somebody to call on their cell. Anyway, you stay right here.” He covered us up with a sheet of cardboard and the whole world got very dark. “I’ll be right back.”
But he wasn’t right back. In fact, he never came back at all.
That was the last time I saw my friend Bodhi for a really, really long time.
Chapter Three
Brooke: Chop Shops
The door of the police station opened. In came . . . my mother.
I think I said, “No, not that. Don’t do that to me.”
I think I said it out loud.
I did not say those words to my mother, and they were not said loudly enough for her to hear. I think I was talking to some entity or power larger than myself. But that was odd, too, because I’ve never managed to define such a thing in my life. Then again, we all know the old saying about atheists in foxholes.
She moved across the room in a sort of . . . I’m tempted to say waddle, but I’m resisting the word because it seems derogatory. I swear I don’t mean it that way. Just . . . it feels like the only word that really catches the thing right. Let’s say she teetered from one bad knee to the other, pushing her great bulk forward. Toward me. She still hadn’t looked up.
When she did finally look into my face, I looked away.
I got that feeling again. Like I was falling down a well. A very deep well. Maybe a bottomless one. I’d been wrestling with it for hours. Ever since that damned Mercedes drove away without me.
For the first three hours or so, I’d been too much in shock to feel like I was falling. Instead I’d felt empty. Numb. As though everything around me were a movie or a play. An unconvincing one at that.
Now it was beginning to catch up. The truth was just at the edge of catching me. Every time it arrived, such as when I looked at my mother’s face, I found myself losing my grip. On something. Hard to know what. And the feeling that followed was that of a terrifying free fall.
I scrambled desperately to reclaim my denial.
This was not happening. This could not be happening.
She rushed toward me—as best she could rush—and threw her arms around me. It was alarming. Normally she was not big on any kind of touch. Then again, these were not normal times.
Heaven help me, I found the soft bulk of her strangely comforting.
“Any news?” she asked near my ear.
I dropped my face against her shoulder and shook my head.
When I looked up again, I noticed that the few officers in attendance were watching us, their faces warm. As though witnessing a touching scene. It struck me strange, knowing everything I knew about my fraught relationship with my mother. Well . . . I don’t literally mean I thought it was strange. What could they be expected to know? It just caught me off guard. A surprise.
It was the middle of the night. The population of the place had thinned out considerably. There were maybe thirty desks in that huge room, and only five of them were occupied.
The policewoman who had been helping me all night was moving in our direction. And I dreaded her arrival. Because I worried she was going to tell me to go home. I didn’t want to go home. I felt like the police station was the closest I could get to my daughter.
She was strangely tall, the officer. Well over six feet. Reed-thin and elongated, as though someone had stretched her out. Her white-blonde hair was very short. Like a cut a man’s barber would do. She was probably close to fifty, but looked good for it.
Her name was Grace Beatty. She had told me so. Her name tag said “Officer G. Beatty.”
“Now that your mother’s here . . . ,” she said.
I knew where we were going with this. I’d known all along.
I opened my mouth to object, but she talked me down.
“I get it,” she said. “I really do. But you have to give a thought to yourself in a moment like this. It’s important for you, it helps us, it helps your daughter if there’s a sudden development. You need rest. We need you to rest. The whole world needs you to rest right now, Brooke. An actual emotional breakdown is a real possibility in a situation like this, and the best way I know to ward it off is rest and food. And staying hydrated. I know pacing around the precinct feels right, but it’s not really serving any purpose except to wear you down. Go home. Really, Brooke. Go home. We’ll call you the split second we know anything more. That’s a promise.”
Again, I opened my mouth in my own defense. This time my mother beat me to it.
“You don’t have any children,” she said to Grace Beatty. It was not a question. But she made it one. By adding the following throwaway tag. “Do you?”
“I have four,” the officer said, her face soft.
That stopped all the words for a few moments.
“We have the Amber Alert up on all the freeways,” Grace Beatty said. “Just like we said we would. The guys are arranging raids on any known chop shops between here and the Mexican border—”
“I don’t know what a chop shop is,” my mother said. Interrupting. She sounded aggravated. As if the officer had no right to use a phrase that wasn’t understandable to her on its surface.
She had let go of me by then. She’d tried to keep one hand on my shoulder, but I’d just ducked out from under it. Now that she was talking, my ability to view her as a comforting figure was evaporating fast.
It irked me, what she’d said. Because I did know what a chop shop was. I’d had it explained to me earlier that night. And it bothered me that she was forcing the proceedings to slow down because she wasn’t caught up.
Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Page 3