“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “Molly wasn’t there.”
“Where Molly?”
“I’m sorry, honey. I don’t know.”
I texted Grace Beatty on her cell phone before driving away. Because I knew she would be off shift by then.
She’s gone, I typed. She ran away.
No answer.
I drove most of the way back to West LA before I heard the tone of her text coming through. Fortunately I was off the freeway and waiting at a stoplight when I heard it.
It said: Damn. I hate it when that happens.
I drove the rest of the way home without answering her text. I mean, what do you say in response to a statement like that?
I heard another text come through a few minutes later, but I was driving, so I didn’t dare look.
As I pulled into my mother’s driveway I stopped and read. There was more than one. They were fairly long.
I’ll never understand this fascination with the street. Had one guy tell me it was addictive. Can you believe that? Homelessness. Addictive. He said it was because you had zero responsibilities. Nothing to do all day. He couldn’t hack having any structure in his life. Makes no sense to me at all.
Then the second one:
If you still want to try to find her, I’ll give you an address. I’ll find it and send it in the next text. Ask for a young man named Denver Patterson. He might know something regarding her whereabouts. Bring ID.
She hadn’t yet sent the text with the address.
I didn’t get out of the car. I sat there typing an answer. Even though I could hear Etta getting squirmy in the back.
I typed: This young guy needs me to bring ID before he’ll talk to me?
Her answer was nearly immediate:
No, but his jailers will expect it.
I sighed and took Etta out of her car seat. Carried her into the house.
“Where Molly?” she asked me.
“I don’t know, honey,” I said.
But I couldn’t hide my irritation from her. I wondered how long it would be before she forgot to ask. Or at least stopped asking. Whether she forgot or not.
I stuck my head into the kitchen. My mother was not around.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief and carried Etta upstairs.
I heard another tone from my cell phone and looked down at it. Grace Beatty had texted me the address.
I set Etta in front of her toy basket and sat on the edge of the bed.
I don’t know about this, I typed in reply.
What don’t you know?
I don’t know about going to a jail. See, this was my problem with the whole situation to begin with. These were not the people I meant to bring into my life. If you know what I mean.
Then, while I was waiting for her answer, I worried that she would know what I meant. Or that I would. Because, if you really dissected that statement, I did not come off well for making it. I also wondered how true my statement had been. The homeless youth aspect might have been a problem with the whole thing. But I’m not sure it was the problem.
A tone made me jump.
If it helps or changes anything, this kid is in jail for stealing about seven dollars’ worth of food. Everybody has to eat.
I sat for a strange length of time, waiting for the whole situation to settle inside my gut. It never did.
I’ll sleep on it, I typed back to her.
But it turned out to be a mostly figurative statement. Because bedtime came and went that night, and I didn’t get much sleep at all.
When I told the lady at the jail I was there to see Denver Patterson, her eyebrows arched up high. Then she laughed a short little burst of a laugh.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
I had the baby on my hip, even though I didn’t want to bring her into a jail. Because I hadn’t wanted to leave her at home with my mother. I figured she’d dump her at preschool.
Hell, I might as well be honest: I didn’t want to leave her. Period.
“Just surprised he’s such a popular guy,” she said.
I filled out a form and showed her my driver’s license.
She buzzed me through a door into a stark-looking hallway. There was only one open door, and I walked through it. It led me into a room full of tables, most empty. A guard was watching over a woman and child sitting with a man who was clearly an inmate.
I sat for a time, feeling more nervous than the situation likely required.
Then I heard a voice, and it made me jump.
“Hey there, girl! Good to see you again!”
I half stood, Etta and all, and looked around. A young man was standing behind me. Hair buzzed short. Clean shaven. He was wearing a jumpsuit, but it was not the inmate orange the movies had conditioned me to expect. More of a pea soup green. His face looked bizarrely cheery. You know—under the circumstances.
“We’ve never met before,” I said.
“I was talking to the little one.”
He reached out to pat her on the head, but I flinched us both away. He got the message and took his hand back.
I found myself surprisingly furious that someone I’d never met or even seen before could claim to know my baby daughter. It made me feel as though life had spun hopelessly out of my control.
“Sit down,” he said. Expansively, with a sweeping gesture to go along. As though he were a host making me welcome in his home.
Reluctantly, I sat.
“How do you know my daughter?” I asked him.
If that girl had brought Etta down to the jail during the time she claimed to be hiding, I would be furious. I would abandon trying to find her. Or maybe I would try to find her just to tell her I was furious.
“I was there,” he said. “Right after Molly found her. I swiped her a bottle of apple juice and a box of goldfish crackers. That’s why I’m in here.”
Then I felt stupid. Because it was quite obvious who he was. He was the friend of Molly’s who I read about in her statement to Grace Beatty. The one who went off to call the police and never came back. I guess I hadn’t connected the two because this boy was in jail. It hadn’t occurred to me that his incarceration had begun so recently. And then, of course, there was the name difference to throw me off.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
“Okay.”
He had a quirky grin on his face. As though everything was funny to him. Even in a place like that.
“If you got arrested for stealing apple juice and crackers . . .”
I paused, and he jumped in.
“And two candy bars for me.”
“Then how did Molly have the apple juice and crackers to give to my daughter?”
“Well,” he said. “It’s like this. I got away with it. Or at least, I thought I did. The lady saw me take ’em, but I was a much faster runner. But then I was out looking for a phone and I ran into two cops who were out looking for me.”
I sat still and quiet for a minute. I was wondering what I owed him. For going to jail so Etta could have apple juice and crackers. And how I could possibly repay such a debt.
“I was hoping you knew where I could find Molly.”
“Molly, Molly, Molly,” Etta said.
“Oh. She’s not in that foster place anymore?”
“No. She ran away. You didn’t know that?”
“I did not know that, no. I did know that the place they put her bites.”
“Any idea where she might have gone?”
“Possibly.”
“Any chance you’ll tell me?”
“Not much of one, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll tell on her. And get her put back there. I know you will.”
“You can’t possibly know anything about me.”
“I know you’re one of them,” he said. He waved his hand in a stylized arc on the word “them.” Like a magician pointing out a magic trick. Or distracting me from one. “You’re establishment. You believe in the power structure
s. You think they know best.”
“Actually,” I said, “I met that woman who was supposed to be her foster mom. And I didn’t like her at all.”
“But you’ll still try to turn her in.”
“No. Not necessarily. Not if she doesn’t want to go back.”
For a moment I scanned back over my words and wondered. Could I really find her on the street, thank her . . . then leave her on the street? Then again, who was I to force her to be someplace she didn’t want to be? Especially when she would just take off again.
“Then why do you even want to find her?”
“I just need to . . . I never really thanked her properly. When I saw her at the police station that night, I made a mess of things. I just need to tell her how much I appreciate what she did.”
He was staring into my eyes like a laser as I spoke. I got the eerie feeling that he was something of a human lie detector. That he could see right through me with his X-ray vision.
Fortunately I was telling the truth.
“Well, then,” he said. “If that’s really how it is, I might have a thought or two on where Molly could be hanging out.”
“Molly, Molly, Molly,” Etta said.
Chapter Fourteen
Molly: Special Delivery
I thought about going back, but I didn’t go back.
I don’t mean to that awful foster family, because I never thought about going back there, not even one time and not even for a second. But I thought about going back to that lady cop and asking her to call my social worker and see if she could put me someplace better.
I never did, because I was afraid I was in trouble for running away, plus I was afraid nobody would believe me and everybody would believe that terrible lady, and they’d send me back to her, and then I hate to even think how much trouble I’d be in.
It was cold without Bodhi, and I’d been sleeping by myself in the cold for maybe a week. I know people think it never gets cold in LA, but they don’t know. If they don’t live there, they don’t know, and if they do live there they still don’t know, because at night in the winter they’re inside their house.
As soon as it got the tiniest bit light, I’d go out on the street and start picking up bottles and cans, because I wanted to use as little of Bodhi’s money as I possibly could—partly because it needed to last for nearly three months, and partly because it was his. It was one thing to eat off it if I needed it, but that didn’t mean I was supposed to sit around on my butt all day like a slug and just waste it. He spent months saving up that money so maybe we could get some kind of place. Just a cheap room at a weekly motel, maybe, where we’d have a shower and a heater and a bed.
But he was right, what he said to me at the jail. He was kidding himself, and I knew that was true because even at the really cheap weekly motels you wouldn’t be able to stay much more than a week for around two hundred dollars.
I hated to even think about what he might’ve done to get that kind of money, so that was another good reason to spend it as slow as possible.
Besides, if you’re not going to walk around looking for stuff to recycle, then what the hell would you do all day? It’s not like I had a TV set or a bunch of fun hobbies.
It took about a week for other homeless people to start asking about Bodhi when I saw them on the street, because I guess before that they just figured he didn’t happen to be with me that one time, or the time after it.
I felt like I didn’t really know any of the people who lived in the neighborhood with us, but somehow they all knew Bodhi. Everybody knew Bodhi.
There was something about that seventh day—that was when everybody seemed to notice how long it had been since they’d seen Bodhi with me.
I’d spent all day walking around, and then cashed in what I found at the big, nice market that closes at night. I’d had a really good day, so I bought a hard roll and a little bit of salami at their deli, and then put it together on my way out of the store and ate it on the walk back.
An old man with a long beard was living on the hill inside the freeway fence, which was sliced open, and he called to me, “Hey, what happened to your boyfriend?” when I went by.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I called back.
Then I kept walking, because I had a bad idea that maybe this was the kind of guy that, if you’re going to tell him you’re single, you better keep walking.
A minute later I turned a corner and ran into those three guys. The Three Musketeers.
“Well, well,” the supposedly smart one said.
I had about three bites of sandwich left, and I wolfed it down without hardly chewing, because I was worried they would take it away from me or knock it out of my hand onto the dirty sidewalk. If they were going to kill me, at least I was going to eat my sandwich first.
“What?” I said. I was scared, but I was doing my best to make them think I wasn’t. I have no idea if it was working or not, but I tried.
“What happened to that baby?” the dumb guy said.
He had hair that was really red—or actually orange like a carrot, but people still call that red—and I’d never noticed that before. He always had it stuffed under a knit cap, but it was getting longer and shaggier, and it was sticking out and curling all around his face.
“I gave her back to the police,” I said. “What do you think?”
“Did you know we were looking for her?”
I don’t know which one said that, because I was purposely looking down at the sidewalk. I didn’t want to look at them because I didn’t want them to see that I was scared, but maybe looking down wasn’t good, either.
“No,” I said, real nice and casual. “How would I know that?”
I looked up, because I sort of had to, because if something was coming at me I needed to see it. I could see the freeway out of the corner of my eye, off to our left and up over our heads, and I could see the cars really well, which was good. If we could see them then all those drivers could see us, and it was still daylight—kind of late toward dusk, but light enough for the drivers to see us. That didn’t absolutely guarantee they wouldn’t do something terrible to me, but it was a step in the right direction. It helped me like my chances a little better.
The smart one was looking into my face, and his eyebrows were all pressed down, and he walked a few steps closer to me, which I didn’t like. But what was I supposed to do?
“How long did you have her?” he asked me, and I could smell his breath. It didn’t smell good.
“Like, maybe ten minutes,” I said. “The cops were out driving around looking for her and one of them saw us right away. It was like no time at all.”
“Are you stupid?” he asked me. Still too close.
“No, we’re the stupid ones,” his stupid friend said. “I told you it was a waste of time. Pounding up and down the streets and the police already had her back for hours. What a waste of good energy.”
“Speaking of waste,” the smart guy said right into my face, “why did you give her back? That was a gold mine right there. Why did you give her back if she was worth her weight in gold?”
“What choice did I have? The cops saw me with her.”
“You could’ve run away. You know how to run away from the cops, right? Your boyfriend sure knows how.”
“She was heavy,” I said. “You’re not the one who was lugging her around. You can’t run fast when you’re carrying a little kid like that. Besides. How was she a gold mine? The only ones who knew who her parents are were the police. And what was I supposed to do? Go up to them and say, ‘I’d like to ransom this little girl back to her mom, so please hook me up?’”
Then I decided I should’ve kept my mouth shut, because I wasn’t supposed to know it was a ransom thing with them, and I wasn’t supposed to know that it was just a mom, not a set of two parents.
I waited, but fortunately none of that seemed to stick with them, or to ring any alarm bells in their heads.
“You’re supposed to play it
cool,” the smart guy said. “You bide your time. Two or three days later the parents go on the TV news with this impassioned plea to anyone who’s seen their kid. We would’ve been smart enough to bide our time. But you blew it for us.”
I remember thinking his idea was still pretty stupid, because none of us owned a TV, or probably knew where to go to watch one. But I didn’t say so, because he was still right in my face and I didn’t want to piss him off.
Then all of a sudden the quiet one opened his mouth. And I think I was right about him being a little dangerous, because I noticed that when he finally did say something, everybody listened.
“Look,” he said, “just leave her alone, okay? She didn’t know we were looking for the kid. How could she’ve known that? Our timing was just wrong.”
I waited to see how that would settle in with his two friends, and a minute later the guy with his face right up to mine moved it away, and they all cut around me and kept walking.
I started shaking, which I guess I’d been smart enough not to do when they were watching, and I ran all the way home.
Well, to that crate. Home was a really stupid thing to call it.
I was still shaking when I got there, and when I opened up the crate and climbed in I saw there was something in there that hadn’t been there before. It scared me, even though it was only some folded-up sheets of paper, because nobody should have been in there to leave anything, and besides, I was scared to begin with.
I opened up the papers.
There was just a little last bit of sun coming in at a slant between the boards of the crate, and I sat where it would fall on the paper. There were two sheets, with writing on the front and back—loopy handwriting like the kind they teach you in school.
It said on the first line, “Dear Molly,” so I knew it was for me, and then I got a little panicky again, because nobody was supposed to know I was here. Only Bodhi was supposed to know our spot.
I started reading to see who knew, and what they wanted to say to me.
Dear Molly,
Your friend Denver told me where you might be staying. I went and saw him in jail. At first he didn’t want to tell me, but I think I convinced him that I only wanted to say a better thank you for everything you did for Etta.
Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Page 14