Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Read online

  “People who jack cars sometimes take them to a warehouse or a garage,” Grace Beatty said. The model of pasted-on patience. Or maybe it was real patience. Maybe it would need to have been pasted on only if it were me. “They take them to these places to break them down, or repaint them, or otherwise disguise them before shipping them somewhere else. They usually file off the VIN number. I mean, this is not the case with every carjacking, of course. Sometimes an individual is just desperate for a car. But the fact that it was a high-end model . . . well, it’s hard to know.”

  “Why would you let these shops stay in business?” my mother asked, her voice hard. She had begun speaking to the policewoman as if she were her own daughter. Heaven help us all. “I mean, if you know where they are, why didn’t you shut them down a long time ago?”

  “Mom,” I said.

  But Grace Beatty waved me off. “No, it’s fine. We keep on top of them as best we can, ma’am. When a thing like this happens, we try to get some information on the street as to where new ones might’ve sprung up, so we can get a fast bead on where the car might’ve gone. It doesn’t always work. But it’s something we can do, and we’re doing everything we can.”

  I got that sickening feeling again. The falling. This time I couldn’t scramble back to denial. I was too tired even to try. I just let myself fall. I let my entire existence hit rock bottom.

  “When a thing like this happens?” my mother parroted back, emphasizing that the words were not believable to her. “You’re telling me a thing like this has happened before?”

  “Oh yes,” Grace Beatty said. “Carjackings tend to happen fast, and it’s not all that unusual for a child or a pet to go unnoticed in the back seat. Of course, the children are more helpless. We actually like it a lot when a jacker finds out the hard way that there’s a big German shepherd or pit bull in the car. We think of that as help dispensing our justice.” She stopped talking. Scanned our faces. Seemed to realize she’d pulled the conversation off track. That her story was the wrong mood for the wrong audience. “But in cases like this . . .”

  “If it’s happened before,” my mother asked, interrupting again, her voice thin and almost whiny, “what did they do with the children?”

  “Three times out of four they just put them out of the car when they discover them. The fourth time they might try to ransom them back to the parent. They can usually find a registration in the glove compartment. They know how to get in touch.”

  It struck me, with a panic I felt in my throat and lower intestines at the same time, that the phone was unmanned at home. Also that my child, my baby, the love of my life, might be out on the street at night alone. Or in the hands of a ransoming criminal. I had no idea which felt worse.

  But my mother was still grilling the officer.

  “And if it was just a crazed individual needing a car?” I heard her ask. As if far away. As if I were hearing her voice echo down a long tunnel. “And if he never takes it to one of those chopper places? And if he never calls us wanting money to give her back? Then what?”

  “Well, then we really have to earn our paychecks,” Officer Beatty said. “But let’s try to be optimistic and believe we’ll get a good, clear early break.”

  And, with that, I fell even deeper. Past the false bottom of my first well. To a whole new depth. One I’d never even known existed in the world.

  “We have to call a cab,” my mother said as we walked out the door together.

  “You didn’t drive my car here?”

  “Oh my goodness, no! I would never drive your car. I’d be thinking the whole way that it was just about to explode.”

  I let it go by. I was too tired. Too far down the well.

  “If we need to make a phone call,” I said, “why are we walking out onto the street?”

  “You don’t have your phone with you?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you bring your phone with you?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, where is it now?”

  I experienced a sudden flash of anger. It surprised me. I hadn’t felt it coming. “If I knew that, Mom, we wouldn’t have a problem!” I shouted at her.

  I watched her rock back a step. Her eyes looked as though I might actually have hurt her. I saw her try on the idea of shouting back. Saw her anger rise up, then fall away again. She was experiencing a rare moment of humanity. This disaster was bringing out the best side she had.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. It was sitting in the console of your car.”

  “Oh,” she said. Quietly. Then, “I see.”

  We stood on the dark street together. Not talking. The mood seemed to sink further. I think it was coming down on both of us. The fact that we were somehow supposed to move forward from this moment. Draw a post-disaster breath.

  “I’ll go inside and ask that nice policewoman to call us a cab,” she said.

  I watched her move her huge, fragile body back to the police station door. It surprised me to hear that she thought Grace Beatty was nice. She hadn’t treated her as though she thought so.

  I looked up and saw actual stars. And I was angry at them. For shining. As though nothing had happened. I was angry at life for going on. They say it always does, but this seemed like too extreme an example.

  “Just one thing,” I heard my mother’s voice say. She was standing at the door to the station, one hand on the door pull. “I still don’t get how he could drag you out of the car. You had your seat belt on.”

  I pulled a big breath. The blank denial came back to save me. For a minute, anyway.

  “It just all happened really fast,” I said.

  “But you did have your seat belt on.”

  “Yes.”

  To this very day I haven’t corrected the lie. To this very day, I feel guilty and uncomfortable about the lie. But in that moment, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  The most astonishing part of later that night is the fact I slept. Even briefly. It might only have been a minute or two, but it still amazes me.

  I hadn’t meant to. There was nothing purposeful about it.

  I’d just been lying on the bed. I’d brought the kitchen phone into my room and plugged it in. There was an old-fashioned phone jack in there, but I’d never used it. Because I had my cell.

  I thought I was awake the whole time. But when the phone rang, it startled me out of a dream. Just as well. It was a terrible dream. I was thrashing through water that was jet black and felt as thick as quicksand. Every minute or two I’d get a quick glimpse of my baby’s car seat. I’d push desperately in that direction, but the blackness of the waters would close in again and it would be gone. I could barely move through the stuff.

  The ringing sent my heart up into my throat. I guess that’s kind of an old cliché, but in that moment I really understood what it meant. I felt it.

  I grabbed up the phone, my mind filling with horrible ideas. Not really visual images. More like concepts. This growly, deep-voiced monster would tell me he had Etta. He might threaten to hurt her. I’d hear her crying in the background. And die inside.

  By the time I got the phone to my ear, my heart was pounding so hard I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t speak.

  “Brooke?” I heard on the line.

  It was the voice of Grace Beatty.

  All that breath rushed out of me at once. Too much breath to have held in those poor lungs of mine, by all rights. Those horrid images of the monster who was about to own my life, my heart and soul—they flowed out of me. I felt like nothing without them. They had taken me with them as they exited. There was nothing left.

  I tried to speak. But what came out was more of an unintelligible grunt.

  “We didn’t find her. I didn’t call to say that. I know it’s best to say that right up front, as fast as possible.”

  The bedroom door flew open. So hard it swung back and hit the wall. I jumped. My mother stood in the open doorway, panting. She looked in
to my eyes and asked a direct question with her own.

  I shook my head.

  She began to cry.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen my mother cry. I don’t think I’d ever gotten the impression that she cared that deeply about anything. In retrospect, I guess I should have known better.

  Then I burst into tears, too.

  I think I hadn’t cried yet, though I had been so numbed by shock as to not trust my own memory. I think I’d been so overwhelmed with fear that it had drowned out the sorrow underneath.

  But when my mother cried, there was no holding it in anymore.

  Meanwhile Grace Beatty was talking. And I was only half hearing her.

  “. . . so they raided this chop shop in San Diego. Not far from the border. And we recovered your mother’s car. They were already halfway through repainting it, but they hadn’t filed off the VIN yet, so we got them dead to rights. The San Diego PD has them in for questioning, but the guys running the shop seemed surprised to hear about a child. Could be an act, but our colleagues down there don’t think so. They think whoever dropped the car off didn’t share much. Just got his money and left. So we have the car. And we’re still doing all we can to find your daughter, I swear. But I’m afraid this development doesn’t put us any closer. But of course I had to call and tell you.”

  I was falling again. And every one of her sentences was echoing down the well to me. From farther and farther away.

  “Of course,” I said. “Thank you.”

  And it was amazing, because I said it like a real person speaks in a normal situation. I have no idea how that happened.

  “Are you doing okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not.”

  It was the most honest answer I could find.

  “If you have a doctor, you can call. I’m sure you could get a prescription for some kind of sedative.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  But only because I wanted the conversation to be over. Only because I wanted anything that required anything from me to stop. I had nothing to give to the world in that moment. Literally nothing. Couldn’t everybody see that?

  I knew I would not call the doctor or take any sedatives. What if my baby needed me?

  “Okay,” the officer said. “Well . . .”

  “I know you’re doing all you can,” I said. Or somebody said. It didn’t really sound like me. Or feel like me. But it was my lips and my breath, so who else could it have been?

  “Stay by the phone. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Bye.”

  I gently hung up.

  I purposely didn’t look at my mother. But at the edge of my vision I saw her rush across the room to me. She lowered herself onto the edge of my bed and wrapped me up in her huge arms. I didn’t resist. I had nothing in me to mount a resistance. Even if I’d wanted to.

  I mostly didn’t want to.

  “They’ll find her, Brooke,” she said. “It’s their job, and they’re good at it. It’s what they do.”

  It may have been their job. They may have been good at it. But they don’t find every child who goes missing. And we both knew it.

  We just couldn’t bring ourselves to say it out loud.

  About an hour later I crawled out onto the slant of roof outside my bedroom window. The way I used to do when I was a child.

  I sat with my knees up tight to my chest, my arms wrapped around them.

  I spoke a few words out loud.

  It wasn’t praying, exactly. Because I wasn’t sure if I believed in God or not, or what kind of God I believed in if I did. But more importantly than that, God just wasn’t who I was talking to in that moment.

  I said a few words into the night to whoever had her. Whoever was with her. If in fact anybody was with her.

  I said, “Please be gentle with her. Please don’t hurt her. Please comfort her when she cries. Please don’t let her be too scared. She’s a good girl. She’s totally innocent. She doesn’t deserve anything bad from anybody. Please take good care of her and get her back to me.”

  Then I sat still, as if listening. As if waiting for the night to say something in reply.

  Nothing came back to me except silence.

  Chapter Four

  Molly: Brave Girl, Quiet Girl

  It took me a long time to figure out that Bodhi might not be coming back right away like I expected. I don’t really exactly know how long it took me, because I didn’t have a watch—and if I’d ever had one, I’d have sold it for food a long time ago—but it might have been hours. Literally hours. Because you know how there are these situations where time stretches out? Like, ridiculously long? It was that sort of a thing, and so no matter how much time went by I kept thinking maybe it wasn’t as much time as it seemed like it was.

  Or maybe I just really didn’t want to know what was right there to know.

  I gave the baby about half the apple juice and a handful of the crackers. I was thinking it was too bad Bodhi stole apple juice, because I had an apple in my pocket, and I could’ve given her some of that, but now what was the point? It was just apple and more apple, and the only difference was whether she had to chew it up or not. Something different with a different kind of nutrient for her would’ve been better, but it wasn’t his fault, because he didn’t know. The crackers I knew would keep her happy but they were mostly empty calories.

  Then she started to cry again, because it was dark in there, in that dirt hole under the flat cardboard boxes, and it was getting cold. And the cars that went by on the freeway over our heads were making these weird loud thumping noises, and it was scary. It was scary even to me, and I’m mostly grown.

  So I started telling her she was a brave girl. I said, “Brave girl, brave girl,” over and over, and then after a while I sort of started to sing it. Two notes, the first one higher than the other.

  At first it didn’t seem to make any difference to her. She was probably too young to understand what it even meant to be a brave girl. But still, I think if you repeat something over and over to a baby, especially in that singsongy kind of a voice, it soothes them. I think it’s almost hypnotizing for a kid.

  So after about a hundred “brave girls” she stopped crying and fell asleep.

  I stayed awake for a long time, even though it was the middle of the night and I was drop-dead tired. I was so tired that all the muscles in my arms and legs felt like they were buzzing, like with electricity, and my stomach felt all rocky and bad, and my eyes felt like they were full of sand.

  I stayed awake and held her tight and rocked her just the tiniest little bit, even though she was asleep, because I didn’t want her to be scared. Even in her sleep, I didn’t want her to be scared. You can be scared in your sleep—believe me, I know.

  I started thinking about how Bodhi told me he had just finished outrunning a couple of cops, and then I started worrying about what if they saw him again while he was walking around looking for a phone. After you run away from the cops you really want to keep your head down, at least until after their shift changes, and here I’d sent him out to make a call. What was I thinking? I mean, that’s no way to treat your best friend, except for the fact that I’d had absolutely no choice but to ask him to go.

  I started thinking how scared I would be if he never came back, which it was starting to dawn on me might be happening. I don’t mean it like I was thinking of myself and not him, because that would make me a lousy friend, and because if he’d been arrested, then it sucked much worse to be him that night. I thought of that first—of him first—and then after that I thought of how much it would suck for me, too.

  I mean, going forward it would be the worst, because he was my only friend since we’d left Utah, and I’d never lived one full day on the street without him, and I wasn’t even sure I knew how. But even more, it was the worst just in that moment because I didn’t dare come out of hiding with the little girl, because I didn’t want those three horrible guys to get her, but there was no phone in here,
and I started getting panicky not knowing what to do. She would get more and more scared, and her diaper would get dirty, and she had nobody to depend on but me.

  It was too much responsibility but there was nothing I could do about it by then because it was already too late. I was all she had, and there was no way I was going to let her down—I mean, if I could help it. But at the same time I knew my hands were more or less tied because she was just a baby and she needed so many things and I had nothing for her. I had not one thing this little girl needed to be okay.

  Well, that’s not completely true—I had two things she needed. I had a bottle of apple juice and some goldfish crackers, and I knew how to comfort a little kid.

  The most amazing and hard-to-believe part of the whole night—for me, anyway—was how I fell asleep. I would’ve bet you money that I never would, not even for a second, because I was too cold and rattled and scared, and the responsibility of this tiny little perfect life was sitting too hard on my head and keeping me awake.

  And, you know, I have no idea—maybe I was only asleep for a second. All I know is that when I heard the first one of their voices it scared me up out of a weird dream.

  I was sitting in a tree outside my family’s house in Utah—in the dream, I mean—and I was some kind of big bird. Like an eagle or a hawk, just looking down on them living their lives, and I guess I was thinking it was sad how they were just going on without me like nothing much had changed. Like I was a number in a math problem and they could just subtract me and get a different total and move on. Why I was a bird, I have no idea, but you know how dreams are.

  Then I heard it.

  “Yoo-hoo.” The words were drawn out real long, like singing. But let me tell you, it’s a song I never wanted to hear again as long as I lived. If I ever turned on the radio and heard a thing like that, I’d be gone. I’d run screaming out into the night.

  Well, I was out in the night all right, but there was no place to run.