I know I’d said that already, but I said it again. I have no idea why.
“You should go see that Brooke lady. Tell her you’re okay at least. See what she has in mind to help you.”
“But once you let somebody get started helping you like that, you kind of get thrown into a situation, and then you just lose control of the whole thing. You know, because you’re a kid and all. I learned that already.” I learned it from you, I thought, but I didn’t say that. “And then it can be a bad situation and you can’t back out again. And that lady, she just wants to feel like she’s a good person, but once they send me off she’ll forget all about me. I tried to think once that she would actually care about me but I’m not getting let down again.”
He raised one eyebrow, and that was also a very Bodhi thing to do. Which made me sad, because if the real Bodhi was here now, then I knew how much I would miss him when he was gone.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She came into a jail to find you. Twice. You know how much people hate to go into jails? If there’s any chance she cares enough to help you, then I think you need to at least go see for sure.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I will.” But it was making me sick to my stomach to think about it. “I need to go now,” I said.
Which was a really stupid thing to say, because what did I want him to think? That I had an important appointment or something? But it was just too hard to be there with him, and that was what I was really trying to say.
I stood up and he stood up, and he looked really sad, so I stopped looking.
“We okay?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
But we weren’t, and he wasn’t a stupid guy, so I’m sure he knew it.
“Come see me one more time before I go?”
“Yeah, okay.”
But I didn’t really mean it and I didn’t plan to do it.
“Promise,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, like “Do you promise?” It was more like an order, like “I want you to make me that promise right now.”
I sighed. Because now I would have to do it.
But maybe I had to anyway, I don’t know, because after all it was Bodhi, and even though we were coming apart now, we had a lot of friend history from while we were together.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll come one more time. I promise.”
But I still wasn’t sure. On the one hand, it wasn’t like me to promise a thing if I wasn’t sure I was going to do it. But then this other part of me was like, Everybody lets everybody down, so why can’t I?
It was changing me, getting let down so much.
After I left the jail I made a really stupid decision, and I mean stupid even for me. I decided I would go out to Brooke’s mother’s house and give Brooke one more chance to care about me for real.
It was stupid for a couple of reasons, one on top of the other. First of all, getting from the jail to West LA was not a simple thing. People who go everywhere in cars just have no idea how hard a thing like that can be. I couldn’t just sit down in a nice bucket seat and turn a key, or press a button with a smart key in my pocket. I couldn’t just shift into drive and fly all over the place at sixty miles an hour.
First I had to panhandle to get money for the bus, and it took me the whole rest of the morning, because people just brushed by me and wouldn’t listen.
I was on the boulevard, a few blocks down from where I used to walk around looking for bottles and cans, and there were some office buildings there, so there were plenty of people on the street. And I was trying to tell them that I was stranded here and I needed to get all the way to West LA on the bus before I could be okay, but most of them had already made up their minds not to listen to me. I guess I’d gotten pretty dirty again, and even though I still had the hairbrush and I’d used it that morning, I think my new jeans and sweatshirt looked pretty bad. Anyway, my point is, they knew before I even opened my mouth that I was on the street, so they knew it was about money and they didn’t want to hear a word of it.
It took me two hours to raise ninety-five cents. I knew it was two hours because I was standing in front of an office building with big, high windows and a clock in the lobby. And then a youngish guy in a nice suit came out and actually listened to me, and opened his wallet and gave me a five-dollar bill.
I thanked him a lot, and my eyes kind of stuck on him after he walked away, and I couldn’t stop watching him go, because that doesn’t happen every day—you know, finding somebody who wants to be helpful and nice. But anyway, he was already mostly gone, so there was no point just standing there staring.
So then I could do the second stupid part, which was riding all those buses all over the city, and getting all those transfers, and getting on the wrong bus and getting lost once.
Except, the whole time I was riding there I was thinking those hadn’t been the stupid parts at all. I figured the real stupid part was thinking maybe I’d find something good there, at Brooke’s mother’s house.
Then I had to get off the bus about a mile from where they lived, and walk the rest of the way. It was late afternoon by then, and I was thinking I’d spent most of a whole day on this, and that what she had to say had better be good.
But then when I saw the house I got scared and almost didn’t go up to it, because I knew if I knocked on the door her mother might answer. I really never wanted to see her mother again after all the things she said to me that morning when she threw me out. She was not a nice lady, and that’s putting it mildly. But I’d come so far to get there, so I just stood on the sidewalk on their block and thought about it.
I decided she wasn’t really that much worse than everybody else, because even though she’d said some very bad things about me because I lived on the street, I knew everybody else felt the same way but didn’t say it. I could see it in their eyes anyway so what’s the difference?
So I walked up to the house and I knocked, and while I was waiting for somebody to answer I was thinking, Please let it be Brooke, over and over and over in my head.
Brooke’s terrible mother answered the door.
She had this look on her face when the door first swung open, like she was okay with whoever was knocking, but then she saw me and that look disappeared. And then she looked like she’d just taken the lid off the trash can and gotten a whiff of some fish that had been in there a few days.
“I thought I’d made myself perfectly clear,” she said.
“I just want to talk to Brooke. We can go talk someplace else, okay? I just need you to tell her I’m here.”
She said something I wasn’t expecting at all. I mean, I really never once saw this thing coming.
She said, “Brooke doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Oh,” I said. And right away I felt really tired because now I would have to go look for her someplace else, and that was just so much work. “Where does she live now?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” she said.
I thought it was a very strange way to say a thing, and, also, I didn’t really believe her.
“I know you know,” I said, and it was a little bit like standing up to her, so it made my heart thump really hard in my chest and in my ears.
“I really, honestly do not know where Brooke is. Apparently I’m such a terrible person that I don’t deserve to know. Apparently Brooke and my granddaughter want nothing to do with me ever again. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”
But she never finished the sentence. She just slammed the door in my face. Or maybe she finished the sentence by slamming the door in my face. It’s one of those things that I guess depends on how you look at it.
And then I had to start all over to get back to where I’d been staying. The walking and then the panhandling and then all the buses, because my stuff was there, and I actually had a little bit of stuff now, and it was too much to walk away from. And anyway it was mostly all from Brooke and that made me not want to walk away from it, even though I would’ve denied
that if somebody tried to make me say it out loud.
And besides, those ladies looked after me. I wanted to tell them how stupid I’d been to try to go all the way out there to West LA like maybe somebody in that house really cared about me.
I was hoping maybe they could teach me to be smarter next time.
Phyllis was there waiting for me when I got back. Usually she went to sleep early, so that’s how I knew she was waiting up for me. I don’t know what time it was, but it took me forever to get home, so more or less the middle of the night.
Other than Phyllis there were just a few middle-aged guys standing around a trash can with a fire in it, just like you see in movies with homeless people or hoboes. I think that’s what you call a cliché, but it’s also what was happening. Everybody else had gone to sleep.
Phyllis was something like the queen of that place. Or maybe “queen” is the wrong word. Maybe she was almost more like an elder, except I know you’re not supposed to borrow words like that because they belong to Native Americans and I try not to be disrespectful. Just, right now I can’t think of a better word.
“Where you been?” she asked me.
I couldn’t really see her face in the dark, but then this big web of lightning lit up the sky and then I saw her, and she didn’t look mad. So I relaxed some. A big wind was coming up, and you could feel the energy of a storm. It was one of those nights that’s a really good time to have four walls and a door to close.
She had a couple of teeth missing and the ones she had didn’t look so good, but otherwise she kept herself clean and looked pretty okay. I think she was older than sixty.
“I went to see Bodhi,” I said.
“All day?”
“And then I went to see that lady I was telling you about. To see if she actually cares anything about me.”
“And does she?”
“I don’t know. She moved away and even her mother doesn’t know where she is.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that’s that, then.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Just then the thunderclap caught up from that big thing of lightning. That was a pretty long time later, which meant it was far away, which was fine with me.
I sat down just inside her real tent. It had the flap end propped up so you could see the concrete river and the storm blowing our way. The river had some water starting to flow. I could barely see it but I could hear it, so it must have been raining pretty good, you know, farther upstream.
Phyllis was sitting cross-legged with her hands on her knees, palms up, which made it look like she was meditating or something.
“I saved you a can of soup,” she said.
“Where did we get cans of soup?”
“Willie brought a couple dozen.”
“Did he steal them?”
I was trying to decide if I could eat them if they were stolen.
“I don’t think so. The cans are dented and they’ve got no labels. So I don’t think they can sell them in that shape.”
“So they were giving them away to him?”
She snorted in a way that sounded half like laughing. “They don’t give nothing away to us or anybody else,” she said. “They throw it all in the dumpster and Willie goes diving.”
“Got it,” I said. “I’d like some soup. Thanks for saving it. What kind of soup is it?”
“Surprise soup,” she said. “Because it’s got no labels.”
She pulled a can out of the pocket of her sweater and started opening it with this really vicious-looking can opener. It didn’t have a little wheel. It had something more like a hooked blade that kept scooping in and tearing the tin of the lid. I’d actually seen it before but I swear I thought it was for self-defense.
She carried the open can over to the guys by the fire, and they heated it up for me by holding it out over the flames with this thing that looked like a wire hanger twisted into a long handle.
While they were heating it up she came back and sat with me.
“Thing is,” I said, “now I’ll always wonder.”
“No, you’ll know when they bring the can back what kind it is.”
I laughed, and it felt good to laugh about something. “No, not that. I meant I’ll always wonder if that Brooke lady cared about me at all.”
We watched the dark clouds roll in for a minute, looking kind of scary. A good storm always looks safer and better through a double-pane window.
“Maybe she wants to care about you,” she said.
“Yeah. Maybe. That’s kind of how it seemed when I was with her.”
“People like that don’t mean no harm, hon. There’s just so many of us, and they each figure there’s only one of them. They get overwhelmed. Don’t take it personal.”
“I don’t,” I said.
But I kind of had, until she said that.
Then I saw the guy who was warming up my soup pull the can back in and touch the sides of it real carefully, and then he waved to me.
“You run and get that,” Phyllis said. “We’ll talk more in the morning if you like.”
I took the soup from the man, and he gave me a rag to hold it with because it was hot. I told him thanks, and he had a hat on, and he tipped it to me. It made me feel like I was in a really old movie or something, but also it was nice.
“Mind the edges,” he said, because the can was raggedy where the top had come off, and it’s not like we had spoons.
I sat on the dirt under my tarp, and the rain just let go. Just all at once like that. Like somebody opened a trapdoor in the sky and all this water fell at the same time.
My tarp tent didn’t have a bottom to it, so right away the mud started to flow, so I squatted on my sneakers and let it roll right under me. I drank the soup and it was really hot, and even though it was only vegetable, it was good.
I squatted there and sipped at it and watched the lightning and listened to the thunder, and when the lightning lit up the world, I could see how much water was flowing down the river, and it was scary because there was so much.
I didn’t sleep that night, but I was grateful, because the world looked beautiful in that big storm, and because I knew that somewhere in the world there was somebody who didn’t have a can of hot soup, and I did.
You’d think I’d be feeling sorry for myself, but somehow that just wasn’t the kind of night it was and I couldn’t even tell you why.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Brooke: Where Molly?
Etta and I had moved, quite temporarily, to the home of that friend I’d been telling Molly about. Caroline. And the irony just drips off this next piece of information: our accommodations were in Caroline’s garage. At least it had access to a close bathroom, just off the laundry room on the other side of the kitchen door. But it was still hard to avoid the feeling that the universe was having a laugh at my expense.
Caroline stuck her head in through the door into the garage. From the kitchen.
“You’re back,” she said.
“I am.”
“Did you find her?”
“No.”
She sighed. Then she came in and sat on the cot next to me. She reached for Etta, and I let Etta go to her. She bounced the baby on her lap as she stared at me. I sensed a lecture coming. I’m not sure how I was able to sense that. She had never lectured me before.
“I think it might be time to give up looking for her. It’s like a needle in a haystack in this massive city. Shouldn’t you be looking for an apartment instead?”
I took it as a shot to the gut. Like someone had slammed a rifle butt into my midsection. Well. Not someone. Caroline.
I had found an apartment that morning. I had no idea how to afford it, but I had it. Meanwhile I hadn’t known I was wearing out my welcome so fast.
“I found one,” I said. “This morning. Before I ever started looking for Molly.”
Etta interrupted. “Where Molly?” she asked. Insistently. Piercingly.
She’d been asking it a lot lat
ely. I was no closer to an answer for her.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I told my little girl, “but I don’t know right now. But I’m still trying.” Then, to Caroline, “I can move in next week. The first is next week. But if it’s really a problem having us here, I understand. We can go to a motel for these last few days.”
We didn’t really have the money for a motel. But we didn’t really have the money for any of the things I had planned. It was all a matter of sinking deeper and deeper into debt.
Still, if we weren’t wanted . . .
“Oh, no, honey,” she said. “Brooke, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just want to see you get your life back together.”
“I’m working on it,” I said.
“Well, I should say so!”
I thought we’d leave it at that. Even though what she’d just said didn’t feel entirely true. She wanted me to get my life together, but she also wanted her garage back. So she meant it in a number of different ways. At least, that’s what my gut was telling me. She just didn’t want me to take it badly. She didn’t want my reaction to her subtext to come up for discussion. She didn’t want to have to feel bad because of what she really meant. Which was just human, I guess, but it still hurt a little.
She’d just come from the hair salon, and her hair was shockingly short. Stylish, but short. She could pull it off. I couldn’t have. But it reminded me of Grace Beatty. It made me think maybe I should call Grace or drop in to see her. Maybe she could be some help in my search for Molly. Probably not, actually. But it couldn’t hurt to ask.
Meanwhile I wasn’t keeping up my end of the conversation with Caroline. So she plunged back in.
“What kind of job did you get?”
“Nothing very good. Just retail sales like last time. Standing on my feet all day in a department store. Making sure no one takes more than three items into the changing room. Mundane stuff.”
“Still, though. It’s still good. I mean, you start your new job on Monday, and you can move into your own place on the first. Sounds like you’re all set.”
“But I’m not, Caroline. I’m not set at all. Because the job will cover rent and food and gas but it won’t cover childcare. Why do you think I’m trying so hard to figure out where Molly is? If I have to take Etta back to day care—and I will have to, if I want to actually show up at this job—then I’ll fall into a pit of debt, and in just a couple of months it will bury me.”
Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Page 24