I sat up.
Etta was still fast asleep in her toddler crib. I wondered how long it would take me to get her back onto some kind of normal sleep schedule.
I dressed quickly and made my way down into the kitchen.
I knew my mother was awake because I smelled coffee brewing. Or having been brewed. It smelled like something that could rescue me.
I stuck my head into the kitchen.
My mother was sitting at the table, reading the morning paper. There was a darkness in her face. Something even darker than usual. I figured she was about to slam me over the information in my note.
Her face came up, and the look in her eyes seemed to confirm that approaching storm. But when she spoke, she kept her words even and calm.
“There’s coffee.”
That was all she said.
“I have to go check on Molly first.”
“Oh, she’s long gone.”
I just stood there a moment. Trying to process what I had heard. As the words became absorbed into my body, into my cells, they seemed to tingle going through me.
“What do you mean she’s gone?”
She offered a twisted frown. “Oh, come now, Brooke. How many different things can that mean?”
I tried to talk around a deep anger that seemed to be rising up in my throat. Like something solid and real, blocking important passages. “Let me put it another way, then. Why is she gone?”
“Because she doesn’t belong here, and you know it as well as I do. You will not be bringing a homeless person into my house. I don’t know what you were thinking.”
“She wasn’t in your house. She was only in your garage.”
I felt like I was chewing the words as they came out of me. My molars wanted to grind together every chance they got.
“That makes no difference and you know it. It’s all my property.”
I opened my mouth to blow my stack. To really let loose on her. But that would do no good, and I knew it. She would only match me angry for angry.
I breathed. Counted to ten. Tried to keep my words measured.
“Did you get my note or didn’t you?”
“Of course I got it.”
“And then you went and did the exact opposite of what I asked you to do.”
“I’m not a trained seal, you know. I’ll do what I want to in my own home, not what you order me to do in some note.”
“Okay,” I said. Still working hard on the calm thing. “That’s it.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning Etta and I are out of here. We’re moving out. We want nothing to do with you anymore.”
She snorted. A derisive sound. “Don’t be ridiculous. You have no savings. Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. But we’re going. She’s fast asleep right now. So will you be here in case she wakes up? I have to go out and look for Molly.”
She sat back sharply in her chair. I heard the whump of her great bulk hitting the back of it. “Well, that’s one impressive announcement,” she said. “We’re moving out, we can take care of ourselves. We want nothing to do with you ever again. Now please babysit.”
I saw her point. I mean, that was one angle from which to look at the thing. From my angle, it didn’t seem like too much to ask. Here I was going off to try to fix the mess she had created.
“Fine. I’ll go wake her up.”
“No, don’t do that, Brooke,” she called after me. I was already halfway to the stairs. “That’s silly to take it out on the baby. Just go.”
“Thank you,” I said. But they were a tense couple of words.
I grabbed her keys off the shelf near the garage door.
“But you can’t take my car,” she said. “A man from the automotive paint shop is coming over to get it this morning. Finally.”
I sighed deeply. Tried to let go of the rage I was feeling. Tried to let it drain away. It felt like it wanted to hurt somebody. Probably me. That’s usually how rage goes.
I set her keys back down on the shelf. Tried to remember where mine even were. Upstairs in my room, in my purse. That’s what I finally came up with.
I walked upstairs and quietly let myself back into my bedroom. Grabbed the purse without waking Etta.
As I walked through the kitchen again on my way out the door I said, “Keep an eye out. She can climb out of that bed.”
“Oh dear,” my mother said. “When did that happen?”
“Life turns on a dime,” I said. And spun around to leave again. Then I stopped myself. Turned back to her. “Just how long ago did you throw my guest out of here?”
She snorted again. “Guest. Some guest.”
“Just answer the question, please.”
She glanced at the watch on her massive wrist. “Oh, a good two hours ago, I would say.”
I felt all the wind go out of me when she said that. It was a figurative feeling. Nothing really rushed out of me, breath or anything else. Well . . . hope, maybe. I lost most of my hope that I could catch Molly.
She would probably have made her way back to that terrible crate in that terrible neighborhood by now. I could go find her there. Hopefully. But then what? Where would I take her? If I took her to a motel, I would be spending the tiny bit of money I had to find a new place for Etta and me.
Oh, who was I kidding? I had no money to find a new place for Etta and me. But I was going to move all the same. I had really meant it when I said I wanted nothing more to do with my mother.
I had a lot of figuring to do.
When I got to the crate, I could tell someone was inside. I walked over and knocked, strangely confident that we would work this out in no time at all. At least the short-range parts of it.
We could all go to a motel for a couple of nights. She could watch the baby while I found a job. I would just tell her that my mother’s actions had nothing to do with Molly’s welcome with me. In my life.
An old man stuck his head out of the crate. It startled me a few steps backward. He had a long, wispy gray beard, like the old men in fairy tales, and a brown sweater with holes.
“Yes?” he asked. A bit grandly, as though he were answering an actual door. At an actual house.
“Where’s Molly?”
“No idea,” he said. He voice was cigarette-rough and raspy. “Nobody I know has seen her for days.”
“She didn’t come by here this morning?”
“Well, you woke me out of a sound sleep, so it’s hard to say.”
I rummaged around in my purse and found a pen. I had no real paper to write on, but I had a car insurance bill in there, so I used the envelope. I would have to mail it in using a plain envelope.
I wrote down my first name and phone number.
“When she comes back here, will you please call me?”
I held out the paper to him. He only stared at it. As though it were something alien in his life.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Let me just get out my iPhone 6.” His tone of voice rang with sarcasm.
Of course I did not mention that the world had moved quite a way on in iPhone models. That would have been needlessly cruel.
I dug up some change from the bottom of my purse. I had no idea what a pay phone would charge to make a call from the south side to West LA. So I gave him all the quarters I could find. About four dollars’ worth.
“Thank you,” he said.
He took the money. But I had to wave the phone number under his nose to get him to take that, too.
“If she comes back here, do you even give her this spot back?”
Not that I wanted her to keep needing it. I just couldn’t help wondering.
“Finders keepers,” he said.
Then he pulled his head back in and closed the end of the crate.
I walked back to my car, wondering.
Wondering how long it would take him to spend those quarters on food. Or cigarettes, or liquor. If he would bother to find a way to call without the benefit of those quarters if he
saw her.
If he would ever see her.
Wondering how long it would take me to find Molly if she had to go to some undetermined new place to squat. If she could be anywhere in the city.
If it was even possible to find her if she could be anywhere.
Wondering if I would ever see Molly again. And, if not, if I would ever forgive myself for the careless way in which I had lost her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Molly: Stupid
It was about two weeks later when I went to see Bodhi—two weeks after Brooke’s mother kicked me out.
When the guard led Bodhi into the visiting room, I swear I didn’t recognize him. He looked like he’d gained about forty pounds, and almost all of it in his cheeks. The cheeks on his face, I mean.
I tried to think how long it had been since he got put in here, but I could only remember that it was the same night as I found Etta. But I had no idea how long ago that had been, and I couldn’t wrap my brain around figuring it out, either. One part of my brain said maybe only a little handful of weeks but it didn’t feel like that at all. It felt like something that happened years ago, like maybe in another lifetime or something.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make, even though I’m doing a terrible job at it, is that I thought he couldn’t possibly have been in jail long enough to gain so much weight, but there it was right in front of my eyes. I wondered if they had him on some kind of medication that made him blow up with water weight or if he was going through some other unexpected jail thing like that.
The fact that he wasn’t thin as a whip made him seem less Bodhi-like to me, like something so basic had changed that I wasn’t sure who he was anymore. Because never eating and constantly moving had been so much the heart of his Bodhi-ness, and I couldn’t quite figure out who I had standing in front of me without that clue. It was like a guiding star, like the North Star that the sailors used to use to guide their ships, but after it suddenly winked out and stopped shining.
I guess jail changes a person, but that’s only me guessing, because jail was the one terrible thing I’d managed to avoid so far.
Believe it or not, all this was going on in my brain between the time he walked through the door and the time he sat down at the table with me.
He gave me a frown, which also seemed weird, because Bodhi wasn’t much of a frowner. It seemed like maybe I was witnessing the one time since I’d known him that everything didn’t seem funny to him.
“Why did you run away from that lady’s house?” he asked me. “And who took over our crate while you were back in Utah?”
I know it sounds weird to say, but the one obvious explanation for how he could know all that just really didn’t occur to me at first, and I don’t even know why not. It just didn’t click into my brain. All I could think—or I guess really it was more like a feeling—was that he somehow had powers he shouldn’t have, and had never had before. Maybe it was because it seemed like he’d changed so much.
“How do you know all that?” I asked him, and I think my eyes were wide. They felt really wide.
“That lady came around looking for you. Well, not looking for you here at the jail. She knew you weren’t here. But she was looking for you and she came to ask me if I knew anything about where you’d gone. And this was a while ago now. Like, almost two weeks, I think. So all this time I’ve been worried about you.”
“Sorry,” I said.
Then I didn’t say more because I couldn’t think of what else to say.
“I can’t think of her name, though. But you know who I mean.”
“Brooke.”
“Right. Brooke. Why did you run away from her? I think she really cares about you.”
I snorted, and it came out through my nose, and it felt weird. I wanted to be really sure he knew I didn’t believe what he’d just said, but somewhere deep down I really wanted to believe it, but I was trying to blow that wanting out of me, too, because I was tired of believing good things and then getting let down.
“She doesn’t care about me,” I said. “She just doesn’t want to have to feel guilty.”
“She wants to help get you into a foster home or something.”
“Right, exactly. She wants to turn me back over to my social worker so they can put me in that awful home, or if I’m super lucky maybe another home, and then if it’s someplace terrible again she won’t have to worry or feel bad about it, because she will have washed her hands of me by then.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She seemed really worried. Maybe you should let her help.”
We both just sat there for a minute, and I was trying to get used to the fact that these were all some pretty un-Bodhi-like things to say. In the old days he would have said Brooke was the establishment, and my social worker was the establishment, and we could get by just fine on our own without all their crap. He would’ve said, “Never go to people like that when they say they want to help you, because they have no idea what real help even looks like, and they’ll only find a way to make it worse.”
“You want me to go into a foster home?” I asked him.
I wanted to ask a lot more, like did they have him on some kind of drug, or was he getting some on his own in there, or was there some other reason why it seemed like he’d changed? But I didn’t want to seem like I was criticizing him, so I just asked the one thing about the foster homes.
I was still thinking he’d be out pretty soon and then we’d go back to making our own way, just like we always had. It wasn’t what you might call great, what we had, but we managed, and in some ways it was better than what I’d had since. At least with him nobody ever locked me into a closet or anything, and nobody ever got my hopes way up and then dropped me all the way down to rock bottom again. Every day was pretty much what I expected it would be, and there’s something to be said for that.
“Might be worth a try,” he said.
“But what about us? You’ll be out soon, and—”
He didn’t even let me finish the sentence. He jumped right in and said, “I’m going to Kentucky when I get out.”
“Oh. Okay. Can I go to Kentucky, too?”
I could tell by the look on his face that the answer was no, but I didn’t know why yet. But that was when the buzzing-and-tingling thing started, all through the bones and muscles in my arms and legs and then into my belly. I felt like I was falling down a well, and I mean I actually felt the falling in my body even though I was sitting on a chair.
I always figured at least I had Bodhi.
“Here’s the thing about that,” he said, and then he made me wait a really long time to hear what the thing about that was. Or it seemed like a long time, anyway. Then he raised his hands and spread them wide and did this sort of gesture with them, like he had just stepped onto a Broadway stage and was about to start singing a show tune. “I have a boyfriend!” he said, and his voice was energetic and came up to a high note at the end, and just in that second he seemed Bodhi-like again. “Isn’t that just the best thing? For me, I mean. I realize it’s not so great for you, but I hope you’ll still be happy for me. I mean, we both knew this would happen sooner or later, right? One of us was bound to meet someone.”
It had never in a million years occurred to me to think like that. Not that I thought neither one of us would ever meet anybody as long as we lived, but I thought we were friends and would keep being friends no matter what. I didn’t know a new person would be the end of everything for Bodhi and me.
“You met him in here?” I asked.
“Yup. He got out yesterday and I might get out in three weeks even though that would be an early release, and then we’re going. So that’s why I felt so much better that you had this Brooke person. I really think you might be fine with Brooke. Give it another try.”
I just sat a minute, still feeling like I was falling. Or maybe I was feeling it again—it was hard to tell the difference. I wasn’t thinking about falling while he was talking, but if I’d been doin
g it that whole time, then that was one deep-ass well, let me tell you.
“What’s in Kentucky?” I asked after a while.
“His uncle has a horse farm there and we can go work. And there are apartments over the barns. And the air is really clean and the grass is greener than anything you ever see in LA.”
“Sounds nice,” I said.
Then we just sat for a really long time. I mean, seriously, it might have been three or four whole minutes. We were mostly looking away from each other, like down at the table, and it was starting to get awkward.
“So where’ve you been sleeping for the last couple of weeks?”
I was so not thinking he was about to talk again, and so when he did I jumped out of my seat. Only a couple of inches, but I actually jumped, like enough that anybody could see it, and that was pretty embarrassing.
“Oh. That. I found a camp. There’s like a whole big camp of homeless people between the freeway and the river. Well, you know, what they call the river but really it’s just a big concrete trench. Some people have tents, but I don’t have a tent, but there are some older ladies there and they sort of look after me, and one of them gave me a tarp. And I strung it up so it’s sort of like a tent.”
“You never told me who stole our spot.”
“That old guy with the superlong beard who used to live on the other side of the hole in the freeway fence.”
“Oh,” he said. “Edward.”
And that was a pretty Bodhi-like thing, too. We both lived in that neighborhood the same amount of time—or actually I was there a few days longer after he got arrested and went to jail—and he knew the names of all the other people who lived there and I just knew stuff like their beards and where they slept.
I didn’t answer, because I was busy thinking about that, and how different it made us. Maybe we were always too different all along, and maybe I should have seen this coming.
I hadn’t, though.
“You don’t want his spot,” he said.
“No. I don’t. I don’t know how he managed with all that noise and all those exhaust fumes, and anyway it’s better at the camp. A couple of the older ladies look after me.”
Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Page 23