Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Page 6

  “Sorry. I’m going back to the police station.”

  “They’ll call if they know anything.”

  “Don’t argue with me about this. Please.”

  I made it clear by my tone that my nerves were currently existing along a very thin thread, and were not to be disturbed. For about the hundredth time since the incident, I resented the fact that people didn’t make these observations about me on their own.

  “Well,” she began, “take my ca—” She stopped before the r sound in car had made it out of her mouth, and just stood there looking sheepish and more than a little bit sad. “Call a cab,” she said.

  I could not contain my irritation.

  “I’m not going to call a cab, Mom. I have a car. And I’m not made of money.”

  “I’ll pay for the cab.”

  “I have a car. I intend to drive my car.”

  “But your car is so dangerous. See, you never believe me when I tell you the world is dangerous, but now you see.”

  I lost it. Granted, I was on a thin thread to begin with. But this sort of twisted My-Mother logic set me off every time.

  “See? What do I see, Mom? What would you have me see? I didn’t get into a dangerous situation in my car. I got into it in your car. You convinced me your car was safer. But you were wrong, weren’t you? For once in your life can you just admit you were wrong? Turns out my car would have been safer because no one would want it!”

  The last few words came up to a full-throated shout.

  My mother’s defenses crumbled before my eyes. She stumbled over to the kitchen table. Sank down into a chair. Dissolved into tears.

  Then, of course, I felt like eighteen different kinds of human trash.

  I settled next to her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just so . . .”

  “No, we might as well get it all out. You think it’s my fault.”

  “I don’t think it’s your fault.”

  She raised her eyes to mine. A scary sob escaped her. Something that just took over her whole body.

  “But it is my fault,” she said.

  Then she set her face down on her forearm and cried it out.

  “It’s not your fault, Mom. It’s not your fault that criminals take nice cars right out from under you and sell them to illegal chop shops. It’s only the fault of the guy who took it.”

  She waved me away without raising her head.

  “You sure you want me to go?”

  She waved me away again.

  I took her at her word. She needed to get it all out of her system. She neither needed nor wanted me to sit there with her while she did. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. And who was I to tell her she wasn’t letting it out correctly? I certainly wouldn’t have wanted anyone doing that to me at such a time.

  Besides, I could barely keep my own head above water. How could I help my mother when I couldn’t even help myself?

  Grace Beatty took one look at me and I could tell she was shocked.

  Maybe I should have glanced at myself in a mirror before driving over. Instead I looked into the mirror of her face and I was shocked, too. It hit me in a new and different way that I was in bad shape.

  She rose and walked over to meet me. As she did, her face morphed into a mask of pity. Or it might have been empathy, and I was just primed to see everything the worst possible way.

  “Brooke,” she said. “You don’t look so good. Did you get any sleep at all?”

  “Not so you’d notice, no.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not the plan, Brooke.”

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stomach anything.”

  I was seized with a feeling. Or maybe I should even call it an insight. I was punishing myself. Making myself feel as bad as I possibly could. Not because I really blamed myself, although I could have buckled my damn seat belt. More because it seemed like my job to feel terrible. The idea that I could offer myself any form of comfort seemed downright treasonous. Etta was gone. I belonged at the bottom of the emotional well until I got her back again. Nothing got to be good in the meantime. Not even the tiniest bit good.

  She lifted a light jacket off a row of hooks by the door.

  “Walker,” she said, and a male cop’s head shot up. “I’m gone, okay? We’re going to go get some breakfast.”

  I followed her out the door like a faithful dog.

  I opened my mouth to speak as we walked down the concrete steps of the station together.

  She cut me off.

  “No arguments, Brooke. I get it. You don’t have to tell me how hard it is to stomach anything. I know. All you have to do is pick the food that sounds least impossible to stomach and put away as much of it as you can bear.”

  “Try to stay away from sugar,” she said as we picked up our menus. “I’ve seen people really go off the rails at a time like this if they eat sweets on an empty stomach. I know it’s kind of the opposite of what I said on the walk over here, but protein is your friend right now. Get eggs if you can manage it.”

  She was raising the bar for me. In increments. I wondered if she was doing it consciously and on purpose.

  We were sitting in a booth on benches covered with bright red vinyl. I stared out the window at the neighborhood waking up. People drove by in their cars on their way to work. Bustled by on foot with their shoulders hunched forward as if to keep the world away. Waited at bus stops, seemingly trying to ignore the other riders.

  Once again I felt shocked and insulted that life was daring to go on while my Etta was gone.

  “That menu’s not going to read itself,” Grace Beatty said, her voice matter-of-fact and even.

  “Right,” I said. “Sorry.”

  I guess I’d fallen into a pattern of seeing her as my authority figure. As if I were a little girl. I felt I needed to answer to her. Maybe I needed her to be the big, strong authority. Because I needed to believe she was big enough and strong enough to find my little girl and bring her home.

  I trained my eyes to the menu, absorbing nothing.

  “So it’ll take a couple of days to get the car back,” she said. “There’s an evidence procedure we need to go through. Then if you want it as soon as possible, you’ll have to go down to San Diego to pick it up. Lots of red tape involved in getting it brought back up here. The good news is, I’m told the chop shop had already replaced the broken window. Thing is, though, you’ll need to take it to a paint shop pretty much first thing. They were halfway through repainting it in what I’m told is a pretty ridiculous shade of yellow. You won’t want to drive it much until that gets sorted out. You’ll probably want to call your mother’s insurance company and see if they’ll cover that. They’ll try not to. They’ll say paint jobs aren’t covered, but this is a specific damage as a result of it being stolen. If I can help with—”

  I shot her a desperate look. She stopped talking immediately.

  We held our menus awkwardly for a moment. In silence.

  “But why are we talking about the car?” she asked, her voice quiet. Almost reverent. Just at the edge of shame.

  “Right,” I said, grateful that she had read my look correctly. “Why are we talking about the car?”

  The waitress came, and Grace ordered coffee only. The waitress had a pot in her hand and poured us each a cup as I ordered. It dawned on me in that moment that Grace had already had breakfast. She worked the night shift. This coffee shop excursion was only for me.

  I ordered two eggs, scrambled, with rye toast. At the edge of my vision I saw Grace nod at me. As if I had just made her very proud.

  “When do you get off shift?” I asked when the waitress had left.

  I was counting the hours since I’d first walked into that police station. It seemed like a lot of hours in a row for her to have to work.

  “About an hour and a half ago.”

  “Then why were you still there when I g
ot there?”

  “I didn’t want to stop looking for your little girl.”

  That just sat on the table for a minute. This amazing, shiny thing that I could only stare at in awe. I opened my mouth to express gratitude, but she beat me to speaking.

  “Tell me more about her. About what she means to you.”

  “Etta.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that help?”

  “It doesn’t help us find her, no. But sometimes it helps the grieving parent. And I really do want to know.”

  I took a big, deep breath and started to cry again.

  “You have four of your own,” I said. “Don’t you need to get home to them?”

  “Oh, honey. They are so grown and gone it’s not even funny.”

  Part of me had been genuinely concerned for her. And them. I think. Another big part of me was just avoiding steering the conversation to my own truths.

  Then I went there anyway.

  “She means everything to me. She’s all I have.”

  “You have your mother.”

  I snorted and rolled my eyes. “That’s a net minus.”

  “Got it.”

  I pulled another deep breath. It shook going in. Wavered.

  I was going to tell her real things. I could feel it. Even though I hardly knew her. Because she had asked for real things. And because this disaster had stripped away everything fake. It was not a time in my life for small talk.

  And because this tall, lanky officer was suddenly one of the most important people in my world.

  “I always wanted kids,” I said. “Always. Ever since I was a little girl myself. But I married a man who didn’t want them. It was so stupid, looking back. We were in love, and we thought the problem would take care of itself somehow. He thought I’d change my mind, I thought he’d change his mind. Neither one of us did, of course. I mean, other than us, who didn’t see that coming? Finally I could feel how much my time was getting short. You know. My biological clock. I was in my late thirties. I didn’t want to miss my chance. So I just went ahead and got pregnant. Purposely. Even though I knew it would ruin the marriage.”

  She waited. Respectfully. In case I was just winding up to say more. But I had never felt so unwound in my life.

  Finally she spoke.

  “Did you tell him what’s happening with his daughter?”

  “No. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want any part of raising her. Or fatherhood. You know. In general. He feels like I tricked him. I guess in some ways I don’t blame him. I stopped using birth control and didn’t tell him. I guess he was tricked. And I don’t even have a way to justify myself. Except that desperate people do desperate things. Which isn’t a very good justification now that I hear myself say it out loud. We don’t speak at all.”

  “He’s still the father. He still might want to know.”

  “Oh, no. You weren’t there. He is not the father, according to him. I had to let him off the hook completely on that. I had to assure him that this child was one hundred percent my daughter. My responsibility.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Yeah. Well. I guess life is just a series of our own choices catching up with us.”

  We sat silent for a moment. I wondered how what I’d just said applied to this moment. What had I done to deserve what was happening now? I felt as though if I’d ever made a mistake that big, I would remember it.

  An uncomfortable thought rose up out of me. I could feel it stick in my throat, wanting to be said. I was too tired to hold it back.

  “I heard somewhere . . . some statistic. About how if a child isn’t found in the first twenty-four hours . . .”

  “I want you to get thoughts like that out of your mind,” Grace Beatty said. Her voice was firmer now. “I know it’s not easy to avoid going there, but do your best. Statistics are for big groups of people. They don’t mean much to the individual. Some people get their kids back after longer searches. Why couldn’t you be one of them? Besides, it hasn’t been twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours.”

  My food came.

  I couldn’t seem to taste it.

  I drowned the eggs in ketchup the way I’d done as a child. I forced down what I could.

  “I want you to remember one thing,” she said a few minutes later.

  I was pushing the last of my eggs around on the plate. So I wouldn’t have to eat them. She was watching me do it. So I don’t know who I thought I was fooling.

  Meanwhile I sensed a pep talk coming. And she wasn’t going on with it, so I figured she was waiting for me to confirm that one was welcome.

  “What do you want me to remember?” I asked, still staring at the uneaten food.

  “It’s just now getting light. If he put her out of the car in the dark, this is the time somebody might notice. She might have gone unnoticed in the dark. This is when we’re most likely to get the break we’ve been waiting for.”

  I said nothing.

  I guess I was supposed to find it encouraging. In fact, I’m sure I was.

  But all I could think of was my precious little girl all alone on a dark street. All night. Would she be wandering around? Or still strapped into her car seat? She would be terrified, wondering where I was. No question about that. Would she ever be the same after a night like that one? Would she ever stop being afraid? Or would she spend the rest of her life with a separation anxiety that no amount of therapy could entirely undo?

  But in a way it didn’t matter, because it was too late to change that part of the equation. I just wanted her back. I would have to deal with the ugly specifics of the trauma after that.

  Grace Beatty’s cell phone rang, and it startled me. I had been reaching for my coffee mug, and I nearly upended it. My heart leapt up into my throat the way it had done on the last phone call. It pounded dangerously as she pressed the screen to answer.

  “Yes,” she said.

  A pause. One that nearly killed me.

  “Yes, she’s still here.”

  Pause.

  “What do they have so far?”

  Long pause.

  I asked her with my eyes if my daughter had been found. She shook her head just the tiniest bit.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ll be right back there.”

  She clicked off the call.

  “There’s been a break in your case. We still don’t know where Etta is. But they arrested your carjacker on a tip from the guys at the chop shop. They’re questioning him right now.”

  She threw a twenty down on the table and grabbed me by the elbow.

  “Come on. We have to get back. We’ll stay on the phone with San Diego until we hear what he has to say.”

  We sprinted all the way back to the station. Ran as though our lives depended on it. I could feel my lack of sleep, but it didn’t matter. I had sheer adrenaline on my team and nothing was going to hold me back.

  I sat in a hard wooden chair beside her desk, leaning forward onto my knees. Waiting. Trembling and waiting.

  She was on the phone with the police in San Diego.

  The suspect, I had been told, was in an interrogation room, being questioned by two detectives. The room had one-way glass, or a one-way mirror. I hadn’t quite gotten which. But an officer was outside the room, watching and listening, just like in the cop shows on TV. And that officer was on the other end of the phone with Grace Beatty. So we could hear a secondhand account of what the suspect said the moment he said it.

  “He says he put her out of the car,” Grace said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with one palm.

  “Where?”

  “That’s what they’re still trying to find out.”

  “But in West LA, right? I mean, right after he drove away, right?”

  I wanted to believe she was in a fairly safe neighborhood. And maybe even a familiar one.

  Then I heard my mother in my head. Actually heard these words repeated i
n her voice.

  All of LA is a bad neighborhood. The whole world is dangerous. Not like when I was a girl.

  That was the problem with my mother. I could never fully get her voice out of my head.

  Meanwhile Grace wasn’t answering me. Just listening with her brow furrowed.

  I couldn’t take the waiting. The words just burst out of me.

  “Tell me what he’s saying! Please! Tell me something! I’m dying here.”

  She covered the mouthpiece of the phone again.

  “He’s not being very specific about where he left her. He doesn’t remember exactly where he got off the freeway. But he’d been driving south for a good twenty minutes at least before he knew the baby was even there. Apparently she slept through the jacking. Either that or she was too scared to cry.”

  “So it could be anywhere?”

  I was talking around the image of my baby too frozen with fear to cry. Or I was attempting to talk around it, anyway.

  “They’re working to narrow it down with him right now.”

  My mind filled with geography. At least twenty minutes south of the spot where he took the car and my daughter from me.

  Had he taken the 405 Freeway toward San Diego? I had no idea.

  But I did know one thing. The neighborhoods got a good bit scarier as he headed south. It was not West LA all the way through.

  Chapter Six

  Molly: Stress

  I slept like a rock after those boys went away, and who would’ve guessed it, right? I mean, I was so scared about the whole thing, and the weight of being responsible for this baby was sitting on me like an elephant having lunch on my chest, but also I was tired. I mean, really, really tired.

  Tired isn’t always about how much you moved your body, although that too, because I had been all over that neighborhood all day. But the baby slept like a rock, just like me, and all she’d done was sit strapped into her car seat and then get carried around by yours truly.

  I really think it’s the stress that takes it out of you.

  Anyway, I was sure I’d never even close my eyes for a split second and then the next thing I knew I was having this dream, and a thing that happened in the dream shocked me awake. I was dreaming I was in this dark hole, just like I really was, sleeping hugged tight with this little girl, like I really was, and then all of a sudden somebody picked up the cardboard and found us. In the dream I had this big shot of fear, this jolt, because I figured it was one of those boys. That’s what jogged me awake, that jolt of fear. But then I looked up and it was my mother looking down on me, shaking her head. And, now, that part was weird, because I was already sort of awake. But you know how sometimes you’re so deep asleep that if something jolts you out of it the dream takes a second or two to fade away?