Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  But she was so resistant. I couldn’t overpower her without hurting her.

  My right ear was aching from her screaming into it. It felt as though she were jamming knives through my eardrum.

  I almost lost it. I was right on the edge of losing it. I almost blew like an old steam boiler. But, at the last minute, I realized what was happening. I understood how much my fury was driving hers.

  I stopped fighting her. I stopped struggling.

  I sat down on the seat in the back, next to her car seat. I let her remain suspended above it. I stopped trying to buckle her in.

  I sighed deeply. Tried to let some of my rage flow away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not mad at you, baby. I’m mad at that lady.”

  “Lady?” she asked.

  Her demeanor transformed immediately. Every muscle in her body seemed to go slack. She sank down into her car seat.

  “Yes, the lady we were just talking to. She wasn’t very nice and I guess I’m still upset about it.”

  She reached out and took hold of a strand of my hair. She didn’t pull it angrily. Neither did she stroke it tenderly. I was left unclear as to whether it was a loving gesture or not. I suppose she just wanted to connect with me.

  “You’re always welcome with me, Etta,” I told her. “I promise you that. You’re my daughter, no matter what.”

  We sat for a moment in silence. The mood in the back of that car felt strangely peaceful. The silence echoed in my right ear, which was still stinging from its recent abuse.

  I looked back at the house. But there was no outward sign of life. It was just a gray house. It no longer showed its true nature in any way.

  I sighed again.

  “We should go find Molly,” I said after a time.

  “Molly, Molly, Molly.”

  “But before we go get her, you have to be strapped in. Is it okay if I strap you in now?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  And I did, without issue.

  We drove away from that house, and from that experience.

  I got lost on the way back to the coffee place, which didn’t help my mood in the slightest. It took maybe twenty minutes to get back there. To finish what should have been a three-minute drive.

  I had navigation, but I didn’t remember the name of the coffeehouse, and all the streets seemed to dump me where I didn’t want to be.

  And then, when I finally found the place, Molly wasn’t there. It piled onto all the other elements of my morning and left me feeling as though I was living a nightmare. There seemed to be no way to break its grasp.

  I sat in the car outside the coffee place for a minute or two, staring through the window. I could see every table in there. I don’t know why I thought staring longer would somehow make her appear.

  It occurred to me that she might be in the restroom, so I waited. I was trying to avoid taking Etta out of her car seat again. But the waiting did not pay off.

  I couldn’t just drive off without her. What could I do? I had no plan for this, and my brain was tired, and I was too upset to think clearly. It was all too much.

  Finally I got out, and took Etta out of her seat, and we went inside. No Molly. We checked the restroom, but it was locked. We waited there to see who would come out.

  “You need a key for it,” the young girl behind the counter called to us.

  “Maybe there’s somebody in there,” I called back.

  “Nope. I’ve got the key.” And she held it up for me to see, on its long strip of polished wood.

  “Thanks anyway,” I said, and we walked outside.

  I stood blinking in the sun. I was so utterly without a plan.

  “Molly?” I called as loudly as I could. It was a long shot. But I didn’t know what else to try.

  “Molly?” Etta called. With less volume, but all the volume her little lungs could muster.

  It broke my heart in ways I could never describe or explain.

  We stood in the sun for a few minutes more. Helpless. That was the feeling. Helpless against my life in that moment.

  Then I buckled Etta back into her car seat and we started driving around. Aimless. And yet panicky at the same time. I couldn’t leave this little city without Molly. But I had no idea where to begin looking.

  We started by just driving around the block.

  “You tell me if you see Molly,” I said to Etta.

  “Molly,” she said back to me. But not as though she saw her.

  Then we drove around two blocks at once.

  Why hadn’t I given her my cell phone? Of course, then I wouldn’t have had one, but I could have stopped at a pay phone, or borrowed a phone. I shook the thoughts away because they were of no use to me now.

  Then for a while I just drove. Just aimlessly drove.

  My gut was still buzzing with anxiety from my talk with that woman. The dark cloud that had settled over me at her doorstep had only gotten darker. And now I had lost Molly. And the panic of that fact, mixed with everything else . . . well, it was a very bad combination. I’ll leave it at that.

  Finally, for lack of any better options, I drove by her mother’s house again.

  “Molly!” Etta cried as soon as we turned that last corner.

  But I had eyes. And I had already seen her, too.

  She was sitting on the curb in front of her family’s home. Leaning on her bent knees. Elbows pressed to the new jeans I had bought her. Her head was so low as to be nearly between her knees, like a person who’s trying not to be sick. She seemed to be gazing blankly down at the pavement.

  I pulled up. Reached over and swung open the passenger door. Nearly hit her with it, though I hadn’t meant to.

  She looked up, and I unloaded on her.

  “What the hell are you doing, Molly? Why didn’t you just stay at the coffee place? The plan was I’d come pick you up at the coffee place! You said you didn’t want to be here. So I looked every other place in town before I looked here. I’ve been driving around forever!”

  Or anyway, it felt like forever.

  She only blinked at me. Clearly hurt.

  “Get in the car,” I barked at her.

  She did.

  We drove away. Back toward the interstate. I couldn’t get out of that town fast enough. When I saw the cars zipping along the highway in the distance, I felt myself breathe for what felt like the first time in a long time.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” she said.

  “Then why didn’t you just stay put where I was supposed to meet you?”

  “I kept running into people I knew.”

  “And for that it was worth our getting separated indefinitely?”

  My voice had come up to a near screech. Etta started to cry. I realized I was losing it in a big way.

  I stepped on the brake and the car behind us blared its horn. I pulled over to the curb and shifted into park. In a red zone. I rested my forehead on the steering wheel and closed my eyes.

  Silence reigned. Even Etta was silent. Everybody was waiting to see what I would do next. Even me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Molly. “I’m not mad at you. Well, I’m a little mad at you. But not mostly.”

  I heard her let out a long, slow breath. Relief.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “I thought you were pulling over to tell me to get out of the car. Who are you mad at mostly?”

  “Your mother.”

  “Oh. So you did talk to her.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re both going back to LA.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  I looked up again. Through the windshield. Watched the cars stream along the I-15.

  “I can’t say you didn’t warn me,” I said.

  “What did she say?”

  “Something about the devil. Quite a bit about the devil, actually.”

  “Yup. That’s my mom. Did she tell you I could come home if I didn’t bring the devil with me? I meant to war
n you about that, but then I got all scared and all the thoughts dropped out of my head. But she said it, right?”

  “She absolutely did say that.”

  “You know what that means?”

  “I didn’t at first. But as we were talking I figured it out.”

  “And you know I can’t do that, right? I mean, literally can’t?”

  “Of course you can’t. Nobody can. You can’t change who you are. It was wrong of her to ask you to try. Now come on. Let’s go home.”

  I shifted into drive again and pulled carefully into the traffic lane. Headed for the on-ramp.

  “Easy for you to say,” Molly said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you have a home to go to. I have to go back to that crate on the street.”

  “No, you don’t. No way. I’m not dumping you back there.”

  “So where do I go?”

  “I have no idea. But I’ll figure it out. I’ll come up with something. I don’t know. I’ll talk to your social worker. Or find some kind of program or some kind of group home or . . . I don’t know, Molly. I can’t think right now. I’m too upset. I need more time to think. All I know right now is that I’m not throwing you back out on the street. Bad enough that happened to you once in your life. It’s not going to happen with me.”

  Another long breath out of her.

  “Thanks,” she said. And left it at that.

  Then we were all quiet for a time. I accelerated to seventy on the interstate, and we drove southwest, toward home, for many miles without talking.

  “I ran into Gail,” she said. Just out of nowhere. Her voice sounded grave and dispirited.

  “At the coffee place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So that’s why you didn’t stay there for me to pick you up.”

  “Right.”

  “So we both had a really terrible day.”

  “You can say that again,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty

  Molly: Ouch

  We were on our way back through that little corner of Arizona, the one you might miss if you blinked, and I was feeling like I shouldn’t talk to her because it seemed like she was falling apart at the seams. Kind of driving and falling apart at the same time, but she was still doing a pretty good job of driving anyway. I mean, she wasn’t scaring me. The bad stuff was mostly a thing that looked like it was happening on the inside of her.

  I wasn’t exactly what you might call on top of the world myself, but I swear she looked worse than I felt, and I wasn’t even sure I knew why.

  While I wasn’t talking to her, I was thinking about what she’d said about getting me someplace to live, but I didn’t figure it would work out that way.

  Nothing against her personally, but it reminded me of Bodhi when we started getting to be friends. The way he said to me, “Come on, Molly, we’ll go someplace better, and don’t worry about anything because you’ll always have me looking after you.”

  It’s not that he turned out to be a liar, because he wasn’t, and it’s not like he ever really betrayed me on purpose. More like he just couldn’t do everything he said he could—like he just sort of overestimated his own power to work things out and made a bunch of promises too big to fill. I figured it would be like that with Brooke, too.

  I looked over at her, and I was surprised to see her looking back—like we each snuck a look to size the other up, and at exactly the same time, and then we both got caught.

  Then she had to look back at the road again, because . . . well, you know. She was driving.

  “I feel like I shouldn’t talk to you,” I said to her a little later.

  “Why not?”

  “You seem so upset.”

  “I don’t know that talking to me would make it any worse.”

  I squirmed around a little in my seat and then I said, “I guess what I mean is, I feel like I shouldn’t ask you about it. About why you’re so upset. Or maybe I’m just afraid to ask about it, because I have this crazy idea that it’s sort of a nice thing for me, like a compliment to me. You know, like you actually care that my mom was bad to me or something, but now that I’ve gone and said all that out loud I’m worried you’ll tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re not entirely wrong,” she said, and then she brushed her hair back off her forehead with this big sweep of her hand, like her fingers were a comb. “But you have to understand that there’s some of my own situation mixed into it.”

  I didn’t know which part of her own situation, and I didn’t want to ask, but I knew she was telling the truth, because anytime a person gets that upset about somebody else’s situation, it’s a little bit their own situation, too. That’s one of those things that other people don’t always seem to notice, but I think you can pick up on stuff like that if you’re even halfway paying attention. Or anyway, that’s what I always figured and it seemed to work for me.

  I watched some more of Arizona slide by the window, and then she started talking about it again on her own.

  “I don’t have to tell you how much I love my daughter. At least, I don’t think I do.”

  “No, you don’t. I know it.”

  “I suppose it shook my faith. You know. To see how something can come between a mother and a daughter like that. And it might be a little bit about how I almost lost Etta. I think at this point in my life there’s a piece of that in everything. Every feeling, everything I go through.”

  “I can understand that,” I said.

  And I really could, because, you know, we’ve all almost lost something. If we’re lucky. If we’re not so lucky then there’s no “almost” about it.

  “Was she with another girl?” she asked, and for a minute I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Was who with another girl?”

  But before she even answered, I figured out who she must mean.

  “Gail,” she said. Kind of quiet, like Gail’s name was a bomb she had to be careful to set down real gently.

  “Oh. That. Right. No. She was with Jason Miller, which is, like, so weird I can hardly process it in my brain.”

  “Is he just a friend? I hope?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Does she like boys, too?”

  “I didn’t think so. But you never really know about somebody. People can always surprise you. But I’m kind of sitting here trying to decide that no, she doesn’t. You know, like trying really hard to believe she doesn’t, because I really don’t want what happened to be anything I can’t handle. Because I really don’t feel like I could handle that. It’s hard even just talking about it like we’re doing.”

  I watched her wrinkle up her forehead before she answered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after some wrinkling. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m glad you brought it up. At least, I think I am. If you brought it up for the reason I think you brought it up, then I’m glad, even though I hate talking about it. But I think the reason you want to know is because you feel bad for me if it happened like that, because you know how hard it is to see your ex with somebody new. At least, I think you know.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “I figured you must, because I figured everybody must. Except maybe the luckiest person in the whole world who I guess fell in love with their high school sweetheart or something and then they never broke up again and were still together when they died. I wonder how often that happens.”

  “Not often,” she said.

  I could hear the baby snoring in her car seat in the back, which meant it would be another long night of not being able to get her to sleep. I wondered if we would stop at a motel again or just keep driving.

  “When Etta was gone,” she said, “I drove over to see my ex-husband. Because I felt like I had to tell him. And he was in bed in the middle of the day with some new woman he’s been seeing.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Yeah. Ouch. So I know.”

&
nbsp; “Well, anyway, it was nice of you to care how bad my day was. And that’s one more thing we have in common—we both hate bumping into our exes. Except maybe the whole world has that in common, I don’t know.”

  “It’ll do for something in common,” she said.

  I thought that was a nice thing to say—a small nice thing, but still nice. Almost like she was trying or something.

  We stopped at a motel, so that was the answer to that question. It wasn’t anything like the last motel. It was in a newer section of Barstow, and all on concrete, and it was a big box of a place that looked just like the big box of a place on either side of it. I wondered how she even chose it, since there were a bunch and they all looked alike and their signs all said they had vacancies, but I did see her staring at her phone while we were waiting at a stoplight, so maybe she figured out that this was the cheapest one.

  We hauled all that stuff for the baby out of the trunk again and she hung all these different straps on my shoulders and took a few herself, and then she hauled the baby out of the car seat.

  Etta was still pretty deep asleep from all the driving.

  “I’ll take her if you want,” I said, because I could see Brooke was tired. Not even just tired in her body, although probably that, too, but more like all the way down to her spirit she just seemed exhausted.

  “Maybe she’ll sleep straight through,” she said.

  But I don’t even know why she said that, because we both knew it would never happen that way. Anybody who knows anything about babies would know it would never happen that way, because they don’t sleep all day and then all night. One or the other—and even that’s only if you’re really lucky—but definitely not both.

  She handed the baby over, and I let her sleep on my shoulder, but then, as we were walking to the office, she started waking up.

  I could see Brooke’s face in the light that was shining outside the office door, and I swear she looked like she was about to cry. Like it was all just too much for her. It kind of scared me, what with her being the grown-up and all.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You just get a good night’s sleep. I’ll stay up and take care of her.”

  She stopped walking and looked at me for a long time. Like she’d never met me or something. Like she was trying to figure out who I was and how I could be the way I was being.