Drugs, Bea thought. She must be on drugs. So many of the kids are these days. Not like when I was a girl and we were busy working part-time jobs and getting good grades. We had no time to engage in such dangerous foolishness.
As she pulled close enough to see the girl’s face, Bea could only assume the girl could see Bea’s face as well. She knitted her brow down until she could feel the wrinkling of it. She shook her head firmly and steered into the left lane.
The girl did exactly the opposite of what Bea expected. She jumped right into the path of the moving van.
Bea slammed on the brakes to keep from hitting her. Phyllis rolled forward a few inches and bumped the windshield. She struggled to right herself, shot Bea a resentful look, and jumped down into the litter box, slithering under the passenger seat.
Bea looked up to see the girl leaning over the short, compact hood of the van, pounding on the windshield.
Bea powered the passenger window down to better express her rage.
“What on earth are you doing? You could have been killed!”
Much to Bea’s surprise, the girl reached through the open window and pulled up the lock button. She opened the passenger door and jumped in.
Oh, good God, Bea thought, I’m being carjacked!
“What are you doing? Get out of my van!”
“Ah!” the girl cried. “Why am I stepping in kitty litter?”
“Because you’re someplace you have no right to be! Get out of my van!”
The girl didn’t get out of the van. She slammed the door behind her, then threw herself between the seats and landed on the metal floor of the vehicle, inches from Bea’s recliner. She scooted along on her belly to the back window.
“Drive!” the girl shouted. Shouted! It was alarming. “Please, please, please, I’m begging you! It’s life or death. Drive!”
Bea perhaps heard all of the girl’s words—after all, they were uttered close by, and quite loudly—but did not receive each with the same weight. After the first word, which came off as a barked order, Bea was seized with the idea that this intruder might have a weapon. What if she had a gun? Even the young ones often did these days.
Bea floored the gas pedal, and the van leapt forward. She could hear and feel the blood roar in her ears as her heart pumped faster. Could her heart survive a violent carjacking? Would the old organ hold?
She watched in her rearview mirror as the girl inched along the floor on her belly. When she reached the back window, she lifted her head cautiously, as if it might draw fire. The curtains were open, but they covered a sliver of the window at both outside edges, and the girl made a tiny space between the bunched curtain and the edge of the window. A space no wider than an eye. She pressed her face to it.
Bea could hear the air rush out of the child, even from the driver’s seat.
Then they rounded a bend in the street, and the girl stood—as much as the low roof allowed—and walked to the front of the van.
“Don’t come near me!” Bea cried. “I’ll crash this thing! Don’t think I won’t do it!”
The girl stood frozen a moment, just a foot or two behind Bea’s shoulder. They each watched the other, their gazes locked in the rearview mirror, but neither said a word.
Bea glanced in both side mirrors to be sure there were no other cars to hit. Then she swerved the van sharply, first to the left and then to the right, tires squealing. The girl went flying, hitting her head on the side of the van and sliding to the floor.
“Ow,” the child said. It sounded strangely mournful and weak to Bea’s ears.
“I mean it. You lay a hand on me, I’ll send us both into a crash. I have less life ahead of me than you do, so I have less to lose. I’d end it all right now for both of us before I’d let you hurt me.”
Silence. For several seconds.
Then the girl sat up—gingerly—and plunked into the passenger seat, her feet stretched into the center of the cab to avoid the litter box.
“Why would I try to hurt you?”
Bea glanced over at the girl’s face, and her heart calmed slightly. The child no longer appeared to be on drugs. She was breathing deeply in and noisily out, as though shaking off fear. Her face looked lost. Young. Scared. She looked more scared than Bea felt.
“Well, I don’t know,” Bea said sharply, still dealing with the dregs of adrenaline. “Why would you throw yourself in front of my van? And then jump in against my will? It’s all very strange behavior if you ask me. I thought you were on drugs. I thought I was being carjacked.”
“Carjacked?”
“Yes. Surely you’ve heard of it.”
“With what?” The girl lifted her arms, showing her empty hands. Her clothes did not appear baggy enough to hide anything like a weapon.
“Well, I don’t know,” Bea said again. “How was I to know what you do and don’t have to hurt me with?”
Bea pulled off onto a side street and over to a curb. Even though it was a red curb. She would take her chances with that. She shifted the van into “Park” and set her forehead against the steering wheel.
“You scared the bejesus out of me,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I said it was life or death. I said please.”
“You did?”
“Yes. I did.”
“I must have been too scared to notice.”
“I was in a lot of trouble. You were my last chance. Or I thought you were, anyway. I thought if I didn’t get into the first car that came by, he might come running out and catch me. But then I looked out the back window, and he never came out. He must still have been down.”
“I have no idea what you’re babbling on about,” Bea said.
“I was being kidnapped. I was about to be . . . well . . . kind of . . . sold. Or maybe I already had been sold. I’m not sure.”
“You can’t sell a person,” Bea said. “This is the United States of America.”
“You shouldn’t be able to,” the girl said. “But it seems people still do.”
Bea raised her forehead from the steering wheel. Shook her head as if to toss all this foolishness away.
“Jump out now,” she said, still jangling in her fear. Needing her quiet world back again. Needing to feel safe herself.
But then, after a moment of stunned silence, Bea braved a glance at the girl’s face. Whatever had gone on, the poor kid was genuinely scared. That much this intruder was not fabricating.
“No, please. He might still be out looking for me. Please. Just take me up to the next town. Just far enough away that I know he can’t find me. And then if you still want me out, I’ll go.”
“Oh, I’ll still want you out.”
Bea shifted the van into “Drive” and made an awkward three-point turn on the side street, then a right on the main drag—the Route 1 stretch of town, going north.
This piece of travel coming up would be her first chance in a long while to drive along the water. For most of the drive north to San Luis Obispo, Highway 1 and Highway 101 had run inland, and often together. Bea had been looking forward to the roads splitting again—to driving along the coast with the ocean on her left. It had been a luxury worth anticipating. And now, instead of enjoying it, she had this mess to deal with.
The business district faded away as she drove, morphing into more of a highway setting, amber pastureland on either side, two lanes in each direction. Plenty of cars. Where had all these cars been when this girl was needing a ride?
“Tell you what I’ll do,” Bea said. “Next little town up is Morro Bay. We’ll stop there and find you a police station. I’ll let you off at the station and you can tell them that crazy story you just told me, and maybe they can make sense of it.”
The girl said nothing in reply.
In time, Bea looked over at her face. The bulk of the immediate fear had drained away now, leaving this young thing looking heartbroken and lost.
“Damn,” Bea uttered under her breath. Now she would have to feel sorry for the kid.
“I can’t go to the police.”
“Why can’t you? If it was as bad as you say? Kidnapping is a serious crime.”
“But I don’t know anything that would help them catch the guy. I didn’t get his license number. I don’t know who he was.”
Bea felt her brain flash back to that moment in the BuyMart parking lot, lying on the pavement. The way she had told that nice young man how it wasn’t worth calling the police because she hadn’t gotten a look at her mugger.
“Takes a scammer to know a scammer,” she said, still whispering.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. That’s not a ‘can’t,’ what you just said. You don’t really say, ‘I can’t go to the police’ because you might not have all the info they’ll need. That’s more of an ‘I’m not sure how much good it will do.’ But you said you can’t. Why can’t you?”
A long silence. Bea did not look over at the girl, because she didn’t want to feel sorry for her again. Once you get involved in all that empathy, life just gets so darned complicated.
“Because I’m a runaway. I ran away from the system. So they’d put me in juvenile detention. You know, like jail, but for kids. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong. Except run away. But I had to. This girl was going to kill me. Or at least hurt me really bad. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“My, my,” Bea said. “The world is just full of people who want a piece of your hide, isn’t it?”
She heard a gentle sigh from the passenger seat. Then silence.
Then, “Oh! A kitty. Hello, kitty!”
Bea glanced over to see Phyllis craning her neck out from underneath the seat and looking up at this girl. This child full of unlikely stories. It surprised Bea that Phyllis didn’t stay hidden, because normally the cat was an excellent judge of character.
“I saw the kitty sleeping on your dashboard when you drove up. But everything was so panicky and weird, and it’s like I forgot about the cat or like it didn’t exist at all. Like I dreamed that part. Because, really, that’s not such a common thing. Most people don’t drive around with their cats. Dog, maybe. But not cats. I guess because—”
Bea interrupted the girl’s breathy nonsense.
“Wait. If you’d done nothing wrong, you wouldn’t have been in the system to begin with.”
“No, not that kind of system. I was never in the prison system. It was the child protective system I had to run away from.”
Bea watched the little girl scratch the cat’s head, especially behind the ears. She heard Phyllis begin to utter that familiar, hoarse, uneven purr.
“I guess I don’t blame you for not believing me,” the girl said.
“It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t believe. I’m just taking you to the next town. I don’t have to hear your life story. I don’t have to judge what is or isn’t true. I’m just dropping you off, and we can leave it at that.”
They drove in silence for several minutes. Bea was grateful for the break.
In time she saw Morro Rock in the distance, and the three smokestacks that sat at the edge of the bay. She and Herbert had come here once for an anniversary. To get away from the heat, and enjoy the ocean.
“I’ll say one thing for you,” the girl said, startling Bea. “If you ever do get carjacked, I feel sorry for the guy who tries it. You were really fierce. Threatening to crash the van and kill us both. Wow. Brave.”
Bea squirmed within the observation for a moment, feeling her face redden.
“I can be tough when I need to be,” she said, knowing even as she said it that it had not been true in the past. Not even the fairly recent past.
Bea pulled into one of several gas stations on Morro Bay Boulevard, just off the highway. She didn’t need gas. More like directions. But she didn’t want to get out of the van and leave this strange intruder alone with everything she owned.
Instead she powered down her window and waited for someone to step out of the mini-mart.
“What are we doing?” the girl asked.
“Trying to find someone who can tell us where the police station is.”
“I told you. I can’t go to the police.”
“That’s none of my concern. I said I’d take you to one, and that’s what I’m going to do. I won’t stay around to see if you go inside or walk the other way, because it’s not my business anyway. We’re strangers to each other, in case you need reminding. We’re about to part ways, and then what you do has no bearing on my life after that.”
They fell into awkward silence.
A woman in her forties stepped out of the store and crossed in front of Bea’s van.
“Excuse me,” Bea called. The woman stopped and looked around. “Do you happen to know if there’s a police station around here?”
“It’s just the next block that way,” the woman said, pointing away from the highway. “Right here on Morro Bay Boulevard.”
“Thank you,” Bea said, and powered up the window. “You can walk from here,” she told the girl.
They sat in silence for a time. Too long a time. The girl had her head bowed, looking down at her own lap. Bea wanted this cord cut now. Not a moment later. The girl was a stranger, and Bea intended to keep it that way. Worse yet, she felt herself dangerously close to the line of having to care.
“Go,” Bea said.
The girl sighed and opened the passenger door. Stepped down. She looked back at Bea, her eyes wet with emotion.
“Hurry and close the door before the cat gets out,” Bea said.
The girl did as she’d been told.
Bea pulled out onto the boulevard and headed back toward the highway. Between it and her was a traffic roundabout, and Bea swung around it to the right, planning to pick up Highway 1 north, toward Cambria and Big Sur. Now that was a pretty stretch of coastline.
She glanced at the girl in her rearview mirror. She was walking along with her head down, clearly not in a hurry to get anywhere. Not surprisingly, she was headed in the opposite direction from the police station.
Bea missed the turn for her highway on-ramp while she was watching, and had to take another full loop around the traffic circle. She saw the girl make a right onto a street called Quintana, because there was nothing directly ahead of her but highway. Nothing suitable to pedestrians.
Bea sighed. She swung a right, then pulled up beside the child. She powered the passenger window down.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
The girl shook her head.
“Do you have money for something to eat?”
“Nothing. Not a penny.”
“What will you do, then?”
To Bea’s alarm, the girl dissolved into tears.
“I have no idea,” she sobbed.
For an extended moment, they only considered each other. The girl raised one arm as if to wipe her runny nose on her sleeve. To Bea’s relief, she thought better of it and just sniffed instead.
“All right, all right. We’ll go get some breakfast. I’ll pick up the check. But after that you’re on your own.”
Chapter Eighteen
More Fortified Refined Carbohydrates, Please
While the girl stared at her menu, reading about each and every dish as though she hadn’t yet found anything resembling food, Bea stared out the window at her van. She could see just a few inches of the rear bumper from the window of this nondescript coffee shop, or diner, or whatever one wanted to call the place.
She could still feel a jangle of nerves from her morning fright, and somehow she couldn’t bring herself to take her eyes off the vehicle.
It had never occurred to Bea before this stranger jumped into her van—which was now also her home—what it would mean to lose it. It’s one thing when somebody steals your car. You get a ride home and you figure it out. But if someone stole Bea’s van they would get her vehicle, her home, her cat, and everything she owned in the world. Except those cartons she had stored at Opal’s. Still, those boxes were full of belongings that
held sentimental value but were not especially useful. That’s why she’d left them behind.
“Something interesting going on out there?” the girl asked.
Bea had been lost in thought, and the words startled her. She looked around to see the girl craning her neck to discover what Bea was watching.
“No. Not at all. I was just thinking.” She turned her full attention to the girl. Pulled her thoughts back into the diner. “I can still feel my nerves from that big scare.”
The girl laughed. A rueful sort of laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Bea asked.
“I know all about nerves. If you could have seen the trouble I was in right before I met you . . .”
“Why don’t you try telling me about that, except slowly this time so I can understand?”
So for the next five minutes or so, while they bided their time until the busy waitress could arrive, the girl held court and told her unlikely story. It was like something straight out of a movie. Or maybe there was no “like” about it. Maybe the girl was borrowing from fiction and calling it her life. There were parents who seemed so honest and normal until the moment they were put in handcuffs. There were hardened delinquent girls in group homes who might come after her with knives for no logical reason. Ladies of the night who tried to lure an innocent young girl, and then, when she proved too virtuous, men who kidnapped her against her will.
And of course the crowning touch was that absolutely none of this was the young girl’s fault. All she’d been doing was trying to live a right life.
Bea wasn’t buying a word of it.
You can’t scam a scammer, she thought. As a brand new entry to the world of scammers, she felt like something of an authority.
She almost said it out loud, but just then the harried waitress arrived to take their orders.
Bea ordered fried eggs with bacon, pancakes, and hash browns. The girl only asked for a fruit cup and plain oatmeal.
“No butter, no sugar, no milk,” she said, sounding very much her young age. Unlike someone who had lived through the dangerous hell she claimed. “But if you have raisins I’ll take some.”
Allie and Bea : A Novel Page 12