I fell silent. The whole world fell silent, from the feel of it. I got the impression I’d said too much.
“I guess that might’ve sounded like a lot of gibberish,” I said.
“Not at all,” she said. “I hear what you’re saying.”
We turned the corner, and I saw the police station two blocks down. I wanted her to go faster. There was one stoplight between us and there. I didn’t want her to miss it.
She missed it. Almost purposely, from the feel of the thing. The light went yellow, and she could have sped up. It would’ve been a legal run. She was apparently just a very cautious driver.
I opened her car door and jumped out.
“Thank you,” I yelled, already slamming the door.
I ran the rest of the way. Sprinted. Sailed. My chest hurt from the exertion. My shin hurt every time I jarred it.
I didn’t care. I just ran.
“Oh my goodness,” Grace Beatty said. “What happened to you?”
She was looking down at an area below my knees. So I looked down, too. My jeans were soaked through with blood where I’d scraped my shin.
“Oh,” I said. “Running for the phone.”
“Through barbed wire and land mines?”
“Long story,” I said.
I could barely breathe. I could barely talk. Also I didn’t want to talk. I wanted her to hurry up and tell me where Etta was.
She pointed to the chair by her desk and I sat in it.
“You’ve beat her here by a little bit,” she said, “but it won’t be long. Sit down and I’ll tell you a few more of the details.”
I didn’t answer. Just nodded. At least, I think I nodded. I meant to. I couldn’t feel my butt touching the chair. I was nearly outside my body. But I felt my shin ache and throb.
“One of the patrol cars was driving around the area searching for her, and a girl ran up to their car and said she found this baby. Teen girl. Living on the street from the look of it. Said she found Etta strapped into her car seat on the sidewalk.”
“Oh my God,” I said. I was just barely able to breathe after my sprint. And now the story was taking away my ability to breathe again. “She was strapped into the seat all that time? Oh, my God. That poor girl! And she had nothing to eat and drink and nobody—”
Grace interrupted. “From what I can gather she found her last night. Maybe not all that long after you reported it.”
I said nothing. Possibly for a long time. My brain was swirling. My mouth was wide open. I could feel it. I could feel a new emotion gathering up inside me like a storm gaining power. It wasn’t fear or grief, which had been such constant companions. It was rage.
“Why. Didn’t. She. Call?”
I was trying hard to be calm, because I didn’t want to take it out on Grace Beatty.
“We’ll know more when they get here. We’re going to take a full statement from the girl. Right now what the guys tell me is that she was afraid of some boys. She said they were trying to take Etta away.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. I couldn’t get my brain to straighten out. I couldn’t process information. I was searching for the end of the rage as though it were light at the end of a long, deep tunnel. I couldn’t find it. “Why would they take her?”
“She says they wanted to try to ransom her back to you.”
“That . . .” I started to say, again, that it didn’t make sense. But I wasn’t sure. “Does that make sense? Right now this is sounding like something you hear from an unreliable narrator. Is this a reliable person?”
“No idea,” Grace said. “I haven’t even met her yet.”
Then her eyes left me. Moved to an area above my head and behind me. She tossed her head in the direction she wanted me to look.
I turned around and saw a blue-uniformed officer holding Etta.
She was absolutely filthy. As though someone had purposely rolled her in mud and then let her dry out.
Then I was moving across the room to her. But I couldn’t remember standing up. She hadn’t seen me yet. She was craning her neck. Looking down the long corridor, with its blinding fluorescent lights.
She was calling, “Molly! Molly! Molly!”
The officer turned his body in such a way that she would be facing me. So she would notice me.
“Look,” he said. “There’s your mommy.”
“Mommy!” Etta cried.
I realize, looking back, that I rewrote history in that moment. I decided she had always been saying “Mommy.” That she had never said “Molly” at all.
I took her in my arms and carried her over to Grace Beatty’s wooden chair. Sat her down there and fell to my knees in front of her. Threw my arms around her.
Absolutely, utterly lost it.
I mean, I just fell apart in that moment. I sobbed so hard I couldn’t breathe.
I kept saying, “I was so scared.” Over and over and over, I said it. “I was so scared.”
A few minutes later I would remember how to talk to Etta. Comfort her. Ask her how she felt. But in the moment “I was so scared” was the only thing I remembered how to say. And sobbing was the only thing I remembered how to do.
“You might want to take her over to the emergency room,” Grace Beatty said. “Just to be on the safe side. Just to be sure she’s none the worse for wear. While you’re gone, I’ll see what that girl has to say.”
I bristled at the mention of her. That girl who had held my daughter for twenty-four hours without calling. While I lost my mind. While I went through every kind of hell imaginable.
I said nothing about it.
I moved for the door, Etta on my hip. Then I stopped. Turned back.
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t have a car. My car wouldn’t start. A neighbor drove me here.”
“I’ll take you,” the uniformed officer said.
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
I followed him out to the parking lot, out back, still carrying my child. Probably too tightly.
“I was so scared,” I said as he opened the passenger door for me. Inviting us to sit up front.
“I can imagine,” he said, and walked around to the driver’s side.
We drove away.
The city slid by outside the car windows. I didn’t look directly. I was staring at the face of my child in the darkness. Waiting to pass under another streetlight. And then another. So I could see her more clearly.
“What do you think of this girl?” I asked a few blocks later. “The girl who found Etta? Does she seem on the level to you?”
“Not sure what you mean by ‘on the level,’” he said. He had a deep voice. Everything he said sounded flat. Matter-of-fact.
“Well. Like . . . this story about why she didn’t call the police for twenty-four hours. You believe it?”
“Hard to know what to believe,” he said.
I think he was about to say more. I might have cut him off.
“That’s what I was thinking. There’s a strong correlation between homelessness and mental illness, isn’t there?”
I watched his brow furrow. He had a big forehead and a receding hairline. Lots of frown lines.
“I wouldn’t really say a strong one,” he said, “no. I’m not saying it never happens. But I think it’s something that’s changed over time. Used to be not so many people lived on the street, and when they did, you could more or less tell why. Addiction or mental illness. But these days you got the majority of your people with, like, one paycheck standing between them and the street. So nowadays, could be anything. Medical bills. Job loss. You know.”
“Is she on the street with her family?”
“No. She was alone. She said her mother threw her out.”
“Ah,” I said. Nodding to myself. “So some kind of behavioral thing.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am . . .”
He paused for a strange length of time. I looked away from Etta for a change. It was hard, but for a second I did it. I watched his b
row furrow down even farther.
“What?”
“Seems like you already made up your mind you don’t like this girl. And you haven’t even met her yet.”
“She had my baby for a day without calling. A day! Do you know how much I suffered during that day?”
“Can’t really say as I know, ma’am, no, but I’m a father, so I can imagine. I’m a father of a girl not much younger than this teenager we’re talking about. And maybe that’s swaying my opinion here. I look at her and I see my own kid. Only . . . you know. Like they say. ‘There but for the grace of God.’ I don’t know this girl well enough to tell you to like her. I can’t even tell you for a fact that you should believe her, because how do I know? But two things I can tell you, because I saw them with my own eyes. One, she ran after our squad car, screaming to get us to stop. She’d been running so long she could hardly breathe. And carrying that heavy toddler. So it looked to me like she wanted your little girl back home.”
“Oh,” I said.
It’s a terrible thing to say, but I was disappointed. I wanted my anger. Maybe I even needed it.
He didn’t go on to say more. So I asked, “What’s the other thing?”
“She loves your little daughter. That I can tell you. That I know.”
I felt my head rock back against the headrest. I was shocked that he would say such a thing.
“She can’t love her,” I said, my voice hard.
Etta squirmed on my lap because I sounded angry.
“Why can’t she?”
“She only knew her for a day.”
He chewed on the inside of his lip for a minute. We were stopped at a signal, at a well-lit intersection. And I saw him doing it.
Then he asked, “How long did it take you to love her?”
I didn’t answer.
We didn’t say another word the whole rest of the way there.
Chapter Ten
Molly: Where Did the Dark Go?
I was sitting under those really bright fluorescent lights, talking to that lady cop. Sometimes for a minute I felt like I could just talk to her, pretty much like I’d talk to anybody, because I’d be sort of forgetting for a minute that she was a cop.
But I really hated those terrible lights. We used to have them at my school, and they made my eyes hurt. Actually they sort of made my brain hurt but that’s a hard thing to try to explain to somebody who’s not sensitive about stuff like that.
But back to that lady cop. She didn’t wear a uniform, which is probably why I kept forgetting. She was really tall, and her hair was really short, and I think there might’ve been a minute in there where I was thinking maybe she was family, as in, like . . . one of us. Bodhi would’ve known—Bodhi always knew. He was never stupid about anything like that, like I always am. But then she said something about having four kids of her own and then I figured I was guessing wrong. Still, you never know, because lots of different kinds of people have kids, especially these days.
“So how do you know so much about babies?” she asked me.
She sat back in her chair and sort of drilled right into me by looking into my eyes. We’d been sitting quiet for a few seconds, so it surprised me. Also because we hadn’t been talking about me right up until just then.
“I had two little sisters,” I said.
I was feeling shy for reasons I couldn’t quite figure out, and like I wanted to leave that bright room all of a sudden.
“Had?”
“Well. Sort of had. They’re not dead, if that’s what you mean. I guess they’re still my sisters, but I don’t see them anymore.”
“So what happened that you ended up leaving home?”
I looked down at my hands and I was ashamed of how dirty they were. I wondered if my face and hair were just as bad. I felt ashamed talking to this lady because she was all clean and respectable and I didn’t even have a mirror to see what a mess I must’ve been.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I said.
“Okay. No problem. We’ll talk about something else. Are you hungry?”
My eyes came right up to hers. I didn’t mean for them to, and I didn’t ask them to, but the food thing just got a really big reaction out of me when it came up.
“Yes, ma’am. Starving.”
“Okay. I’ll send somebody out for takeout. You like pizza?”
“Yes, ma’am. I love pizza.”
A slice of hot pizza almost sounded too good to be true. I didn’t want to look forward to it, because I thought she might be lying about it, because it felt like nothing as good as that could exist in the world anymore, or at least not anywhere near me and my rotten luck.
“What do you like on your pizza?”
“Anything but pineapple,” I said. Then I thought it over, about whether I was brave enough to ask. And then suddenly I was just really brave, like all the brave I’ve ever needed to be, and I said, “Can I please use your bathroom to wash up?”
“Of course,” she said.
Probably doesn’t sound like much, but it’s hard for me to ask people for stuff like that sometimes, because I have to sound like I think I deserve it or something.
And then when she answered me I remember being really surprised that something could be that easy.
We got up and I followed her down the hall and it was still bright with all those fluorescent lights. I felt like I just couldn’t get away from that, like I’d come out of the dark in more ways than I could really count up, but not all of them were good.
She stopped at one of those restrooms that are not just for men or just for women. Just one plain single restroom, no stalls or anything, and anybody can use it. She held the door open for me and then reached in and turned on the light, which was on a timer.
“Thank you,” I said.
I locked myself in.
It was still really bright, and I was avoiding looking at myself in the mirror, because I was afraid of what I would see.
I looked around to see if there was a window, but there wasn’t.
I know that sounds like a weird thing to say, because there was pizza coming, and they wanted to get me off the street. But they also wanted me to have no control over what would happen to me next, and besides, nothing is scarier than the thing you haven’t seen yet. It was actually harder to think about moving forward into whatever unknown situation they had planned for me than to ditch out and go back to what I knew.
What I knew was terrible, but at least I knew it, and there’s something that’s almost a comfort in that.
I used the toilet and then stood at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. It wasn’t really a mirror. It was shiny metal like the kind Bodhi said they had in jail. It made me wonder if I was under arrest. I mean not literally, but . . . you know. Being underage and everything, I wasn’t sure if I was free to go or not.
I washed my hands and face, but there wasn’t anything I could do with my hair, because I didn’t have a brush or a comb. It was all tangled and matted with dirt, and that made me ashamed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Just as I opened the door again I wondered if that lady cop would be right there waiting for me, and if she wasn’t whether I should just walk out the door. If I walked out the door I’d be free, but still on the street, and if she was there I’d have to go to whatever they had planned for me.
I honestly didn’t know which I wanted. I couldn’t decide.
I opened the door and she was there, so that was that. No decisions to be made.
Then I looked down the hall and saw the baby again. She was being carried in the door by a lady who I figured must be her mother, and that nice cop who gave us water was walking in beside them.
She was older than I thought she’d be, to have a kid so little like that.
When the lady saw me, she held the baby tighter, like maybe I would try to steal her away or something, which I thought was pretty crappy. I mean, if I didn’t want her to have her kid back she wouldn’t have h
er. I worked hard to get her back to her mom.
When the baby saw me she started saying my name.
“Molly, Molly, Molly.”
Not like she was trying to get to me. She didn’t reach out for me or anything. She was with her mom and she wanted to stay with her mom, which any idiot could understand, but she wanted me there, too.
Little kids are like that. They want everybody they love all together in one room with them, and they can never understand why anybody has to leave.
I looked at the mom, right in her eyes, and just for a flash of a second she looked back. Then she looked down at the linoleum, and it hurt me. I felt it like a burn in my stomach, because I expected her to be grateful for what I’d done and she wasn’t. She’d already decided she didn’t like me, just like everybody else always did.
So that sucked.
“How’d she check out?” the lady cop called down the hall to her.
And the mom gave her a thumbs-up as an answer.
She walked off into a room with the uniformed cop and I followed the lady cop back to her desk so she could ask me more questions and hopefully feed me pizza before too long.
So that was my first experience with the lady, that baby girl’s mom, and it wasn’t good.
“I hope you like anchovies,” the lady cop said, “because I got double anchovies.”
I guess I had a weird look on my face. I’d never tried anchovies but I figured I wouldn’t like them because, so far as I could tell, nobody did. I wasn’t even sure why they existed if everybody hated them.
I lifted the lid on the box, sort of slow and careful, like anchovies might bite.
“Well, you said anything but pineapple,” she said, and she was smiling too much.
I didn’t know what she thought was so funny until I got the lid of the box lifted up and saw it was a regular pepperoni pizza.
“Oh, you were just kidding me,” I said.
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