Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Read online

  Then the din of the TV drowned out everything again.

  I buckled Etta securely into her car seat in the back of my mother’s car. But I left my own seat belt undone, just out of spite.

  I suppose it was a tiny act of rebellion.

  Etta fell asleep in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. But it was okay. We were together.

  The movie was cute and funny, and the laughter of the older children was improving my mood. Tired as I was, I had discovered that being home with my mother was far more tiring than going out and finding a moment of peace.

  I draped my arm around my little girl’s shoulders, and I could feel the slight vibration of her snoring.

  Every now and then my love for that child hit me so hard I felt bowled over. Like a turtle knocked upside down onto its shell, unable to right itself. This was one of those moments.

  I watched the rest of the movie and savored that small feeling of everyday joy. Or maybe it wasn’t small at all. Maybe it was everything.

  Or, most likely of all, maybe it was small and everything at exactly the same moment.

  My plan was to put on my seat belt to drive home.

  I had Etta strapped into her car seat, still snoring like a miniature soprano buzz saw. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of my mom’s Mercedes, trying to get my own belt done. Sounds easy enough, but I was wearing a big, long sweater, and the folds of it kept getting in the way.

  I go back to this moment a lot.

  It wasn’t much of a struggle before I gave up. It wasn’t that frustrating. Which makes it even harder to explain after the fact. To myself or anyone else.

  As best I can figure after the fact, it was this: In that moment, I was happy. I was out in the world with my child, enjoying one of those perfect moments made perfect by the simple fact that I had her. I was in a state of joy, which felt increasingly rare.

  When that moment of slight frustration arose, I didn’t want to spoil anything.

  I drove away with my seat belt undone.

  I was stopped at a red light when it happened. And the best I can say to describe the ordeal is the most trite statement of all: it happened very fast. What I’m about to describe in some flawed detail happened in a matter of seconds. Single-digit seconds. Six or seven, tops.

  A whole life changed in six or seven seconds.

  I saw the shape of a person moving fast toward my car window. Purposefully. It startled me, because it was clear that he was coming right for my driver’s side window.

  He pulled his arm back as though he was about to throw a punch. I swear he looked as though he would punch the car window, except he was a couple of steps too far away for that.

  The arm came forward again.

  I saw a small object sail toward the window. Toward my head.

  But it was so small. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but it seemed too small to be afraid of. Too small to do me much harm. And yet I was instantly afraid, because of the violent intention behind someone hurling a small object at me.

  The window shattered. And I do mean shattered. In slow motion.

  The window turned from solid glass to a sea of glass pebbles. And just for a flash of a second, they didn’t fall. They just hung there in the air between me and the outside world.

  I realize that’s not entirely possible. But it’s what I saw.

  Then all at once the pebbles were bouncing all over my lap. All around my feet.

  My brain felt frozen. My gut felt frozen. The sudden fear had taken me outside of myself somehow. I felt as though I were watching this violent moment play out from a short distance away, both physically and emotionally.

  I punched hard on the gas pedal to get out of there.

  I knew as I did it that it would send the Mercedes out into the intersection, and I had no idea if a car might be coming. But I had to do something. There was an arm reaching into my car. A strange, dangerous arm. I instinctively felt that anything I did would be better than doing nothing at all.

  The gloved hand on the end of that arm grabbed the steering wheel and pulled hard, and the car veered around in a half circle.

  Then the hand opened my door from the inside.

  I was still punching the gas pedal in my panic. But the guy was not getting left behind. He was staying with the car. Part of me was mystified. Another part of me could see that he was simply bracing his armpit over the top of the door and he had one foot braced on the bottom of it.

  He was riding along.

  I looked once at his face before it was all over. I had a distant, detached thought that said I should see his face. To be able to describe it. All I saw was a dark ski mask.

  The driver’s door was fully open by then, and that was the end of that.

  If only I had been wearing my seat belt. If only I had taken that extra minute to put on the seat belt. I could have stayed with the car. It would have been hard to pull me out of the car.

  I felt my foot come off the accelerator.

  I felt myself out in the air of the night.

  I landed on my hip on the tarmac.

  I looked up.

  The driverless car had slowed, but not stopped. The door was still yawning open. The dark shape of a man was jumping in.

  I heard the tires scream on the pavement as he roared away.

  I sat up in the middle of the street.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw a car stop for me, its driver step out and run in my direction. But I didn’t look. I just watched my mother’s Mercedes speed off.

  I was having this thought, this feeling. Noting that I was alive. That I continued to exist beyond that desperate moment.

  The car was just a car. It was a thing. Only a thing. My life was a life, and I was alive. It would be hard to tell my mother I’d lost it, but—

  And then it was there. In my head. In every part of me. Fully there, and it seemed unimaginable that it had taken even that split second to arrive.

  Next thing I knew I was on my feet, but with no memory of standing up. And I was chasing the car down the dark street. Through an intersection, where my ears were assaulted by the blaring horns of cars that almost hit me. Almost ended my life in that moment.

  But they sounded far away.

  My chest caught fire, but I just kept running. The Mercedes was moving ten times faster than I was, its red taillights fading into the distance. But I couldn’t stop running. I couldn’t bring myself to stop.

  To admit that it was over.

  And I was screaming at the top of my lungs. I knew because my throat was strained and sore. But my voice sounded distant and small to me.

  I was screaming, “Etta!” Over and over and over.

  Chapter Two

  Molly: Because of a Banana

  I just wanted a damn banana and I just had this feeling like it was not too much to ask from my life. Like life owed me one little stinking banana after everything else it gave me.

  It was dark, but I didn’t know how late it was—just that it was dark, and I was walking back from the recycling place—but I only had one dollar and forty-two cents. That’s it. From a whole day of going around picking up bottles and cans. One dollar and forty-two cents. It just wasn’t a very good day recycling-wise.

  I stopped at the corner store, and I was looking at everything they had to eat, and it was all the same crap I ate every day. Well. Every day I was lucky enough to eat.

  Chips. Jerky, but that’s expensive. Nuts, but they’re so salty. But at least they’re pretty cheap and they have some protein.

  I looked up at the guy behind the counter, who made me nervous. I sort of knew him, but not in a good way, because he used to offer me food and say he would trade me. I kept saying I had nothing to trade and he would only laugh this creepy laugh and he would never tell me straight out what he meant.

  After a while it was my friend Bodhi who told me what it meant. Bodhi wanted to help me so he went in and told the guy he was my boyfriend and threatened to beat him up, and after t
hat the guy was mostly just mean and rude to me.

  Bodhi was not my boyfriend. He just said that to try to help.

  Anyway, the corner store guy still made me nervous. He was old and bald—literally old not just old compared to me like everybody is—seventy, maybe, so it was extra creepy when you thought about it.

  On the counter in front of him was a plastic container of bananas. They had never been there before—at least, not that I’d ever noticed. They actually looked kind of disgusting, because they were completely green, but all of a sudden none of the other food in that place looked like food to me at all. It all sounded salty and dry and old and not fresh and not something I wanted. Not even anything I could bring myself to choke down.

  I think I hadn’t had a single fruit or vegetable since I left Utah with Bodhi.

  I walked up to the counter but I never took my eyes off the guy because he made me nervous. And he never took his eyes off me—believe me when I tell you that—but for different reasons.

  “How much?” I said, and pointed at the green bananas.

  “Dollar fifty.”

  “A dollar fifty? For one banana? It’s too much!”

  “Then don’t buy one.”

  But by then I wanted one so bad that it was more like I needed it. You know how that can happen? How all of a sudden a thing gets to be more than just the thing it is, and then all of a sudden it feels like everything that’s wrong in your life? Not having bananas felt like everything that’d gone wrong in my life since I had to leave home, and, let me tell you, that’s a whole big bag of wrong.

  He opened his mouth to say more and I knew what he was going to say so I walked out before he could. I have to be worth more than the price of a banana, even a too-expensive one, and the day I lose that I think I’d rather just be gone from this world.

  I decided to walk to the all-night market.

  Problem was, it was kind of a stupid idea, because all of a sudden I was feeling it in every cell of my body how I’d been eating nothing but junk food—empty calories, my mom would say—and feeling like I needed actual nutrition that my body could use for actual health. Full calories. But at the same time I knew it was a long walk to the all-night market and by the time I got there and back I would’ve walked off the calories two or three times over. But by then it was a thing I couldn’t let go of in my head. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that.

  So I got into the market and right off the bat this older lady in a company polo shirt and apron started following me around, and not on the sly, either. Real obvious, like “Here I am, you little punk kid, and I’m watching everything you do.” But I wasn’t doing anything, so it made me mad—I was just walking over to the produce section to look at their bananas, and there’s no law against doing that as far as I know.

  I found the bananas and looked at them, and they looked really nice—nice and yellow and ripe but not with brown spots yet—but I wasn’t sure if it was okay to take one off the bunch. I turned around and that lady was still staring at me with her hands on her hips, her face set hard like she hated me. How can you do that to a person? Hate them when they haven’t even done anything to you?

  “I’m not going to steal,” I said to her, real nice and loud. There was nobody else in the store to crane their necks around and wonder what we were fighting about—at least, not that I could see. “It really sucks that you’ve already decided I’m going to steal and you don’t even know me. That sucks, you know? I would never do that to you—or, actually, I’d never do it to anybody.”

  She didn’t bother to answer, just stared at me with her hands on her hips, which also sucked.

  They do this to you when they can tell you’re on the street. The younger and dirtier you are, the more you get this everywhere you go. And I’m always thinking, Damn it, I’m the same person I was when I lived at home with my parents like a regular kid, like everybody else, but I can’t show them that, and they’ll never see it, and the whole thing just sucks.

  And, by the way, I didn’t ever steal. Bodhi stole when he needed to, but I never ate anything he stole, because it wouldn’t have been right.

  I took my money out of my pocket, the dollar bill, and the forty-two cents in change, and I held it out for her to see, even though she was a pretty long way away.

  “I have enough for a banana,” I said, “and I’m going to buy it, I’m not going to steal it, and I just need to know if it’s okay to take one off the bunch and just buy the one.”

  I probably should have gone ahead and done it and not even stopped to ask, because I couldn’t afford a whole bunch, and if she said no I would’ve walked all that way for nothing.

  “There are some loose ones there in the corner,” she said, and pointed over to the left-hand side of the bin where the bananas were sitting.

  I found a real nice one, and weighed it, and looked at the price per pound, and did the math in my head, and figured out I could afford an apple, too, and picked one out. And the whole time she never stopped staring at me. I got a Fuji, because that’s my favorite kind. I hadn’t had a Fuji apple since I left Utah with Bodhi.

  I took them both to the checkout counter, and the woman took my money and asked me if I wanted a bag, but I said no because I figured they wouldn’t last that long and it was just another thing to throw away. Just more trash on the street in LA, and I felt like I was living in a world overflowing with trash.

  Just as she handed me back my eighteen cents change, kind of dropping it into my hand so her clean hand didn’t touch my dirty one, she said, “Sorry, hon.”

  Which I guess was nice.

  I said, “That’s okay,” but it wasn’t completely true. I mean, it was and it wasn’t, but I figured it was better than if she hadn’t said that.

  I ate the banana on the long walk back. I could never bring myself to call that place Bodhi and I had been living “home” because that would’ve been ridiculous. It was never anybody’s home and never could be. It was just a place to hide at night. It was good—the banana, I mean—but it didn’t last long enough, and when it was gone I wasn’t sure it had been worth everything I’d gone through to get it.

  I dropped the peel into a trash bin on a corner because I don’t like to litter. Not that one more piece of trash would make much difference around where we’d been living, but it was just a thing that mattered to me.

  I decided to save the apple, so I put it in the pocket of my pants, which was sort of a weird and bad thing, because there shouldn’t have been room for an apple in my pants pocket. When I left Utah I would’ve had to mash an apple up into applesauce to get it to fit in the pocket of those pants.

  Then I looked up, and on the sidewalk on the next block I saw something, but I didn’t know what kind of a thing it was. It was under the streetlight, and it didn’t look like trash.

  I walked closer, and kept looking at it, and when I got closer it started to look like a kid’s car seat, like the kind my mom used to use with my little sisters to strap them proper into the car. I guess she used one with me, too, but I was little so I don’t really remember.

  Anyway, here’s the thing: It wasn’t trash—or, at least, it didn’t look like trash. It looked like a nice, new one that nobody in their right mind would throw away, but I figured when I got closer I would see a strap that got broken, or some other thing that would explain why somebody pitched it. But this other little voice in my head said, No, maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s a real find and maybe I could sell it. Take it to a pawnshop or something, and Bodhi and I could have the best meal we’ve ever had since we’ve known each other.

  I didn’t know Bodhi when I had a family and a house.

  Sometimes Bodhi came back with money at night but we never spent much of it on food. He was saving it up so we could get a real place to live. I knew probably it would never happen but anyway that was the plan, and it gave us a way to not be completely hopeless about everything.

  It was faced away from me, the car seat, so
I was looking at the back of it, and that made it hard to know if it was a good find or not.

  Then I went to that place in my head where I got kind of frozen up inside, which I pretty much always did when I thought something good was about to happen, because once you let yourself believe something good is about to happen, it can also not happen. Any idiot knows that.

  I got up to it, and I looked down, and I was still kind of nervous because I was about to see if I’d found something worth real money or not.

  And then, when I looked, I was shocked by what I saw. Really shocked.

  This little girl was looking up at me with these huge brown eyes. She was being real quiet, but you could see she’d been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and her nose was all snotty right down to her lip, but she wasn’t crying anymore. Just sitting real quiet.

  She looked up at me, and she didn’t really look scared of me. She didn’t really look happy to see me, either, though. She just looked confused, like she couldn’t figure out the world at all in that minute, and, let me tell you, I really know how that feels.

  I said, “What are you doing out here all by yourself?” but it was kind of a stupid thing to say, because she was just a baby. I mean, not a baby baby, not a little baby, probably old enough to toddle around on her feet, but not the age of a kid who would answer me back in a full sentence.

  She just stared at me with those big eyes.

  “Where’s your mommy?”

  “Mommy,” she said, and wrinkled up her face like she was going to start crying again.

  “Oh, no, baby, don’t cry. Don’t cry, little girl. We’ll find her. We’ll find your mommy.”

  She looked up at me with those big eyes again, and her face straightened out like she could maybe stop crying and believe me. Trouble was, I didn’t know if what I’d just told her was true or not.