Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Page 9

  At the last minute he honked his horn at us, like he was mad that we got in his way, and he swerved around us and kept going.

  I just stood there in the middle of the street, waiting for somebody else to come by, but nobody did.

  After a time I walked over to the curb with the little girl and sat down and just fell apart. Just freaking fell apart. I started crying even harder than she’d been crying because nobody would stop for us and I had no idea what to do.

  And it was a funny thing because when I started crying really hard she started trying to pull herself together.

  “Molly,” she said, and pointed to my heart.

  I was crying too hard to say anything back.

  “Brave girl,” she said. “Kiet girl.”

  I couldn’t believe she did that. I mean, she was, like, two. It was such an amazing thing for such a tiny kid to do, to pull herself together and start comforting me like that. She was just such an amazing little kid.

  Unfortunately, because it was so sweet and amazing it just made me cry even harder.

  I sat there on the curb with one arm around her and my face pressed into my knees and cried and cried and cried. And she just mostly watched me, so far as I know.

  She was being pretty quiet. Pretty amazingly quiet, considering everything.

  Then I looked up and there was a police car turning the corner.

  Now, the bad news was that it had gotten to our street and then turned the corner the wrong way without ever shining its headlights on us—and now it was leaving.

  I grabbed up the baby in my arms and I ran like I’ve never run before. I mean, never in my whole life did I ever run like that, even though I was thirsty and hadn’t eaten or slept, but I had to put all that out of my head and make it not matter. I had to overcome it all.

  The police car was going pretty slow, like they were looking for something, but they also had a big head start on us. But I was actually getting a little closer—gaining a little ground.

  My lungs were aching like they were on fire, and I had this stitch in my side that was killing me, and the baby was heavy, but I just kept running and yelling.

  I was yelling, “Wait! Police! Wait!”

  But it didn’t seem like they could hear me.

  Then they turned another corner.

  Just as they turned, they passed under a streetlight, and I saw that the passenger window was down. The cop who wasn’t driving, who was riding on the passenger side, I could see his arm on the top of the door. He was wearing a dark blue uniform with short sleeves and I could see his elbow. It looked really white.

  I figured this was it—my last chance.

  So I stopped and pulled all the air I could into my lungs and I yelled, “Wait!”

  It must have just about blown out that poor little girl’s eardrum.

  The police car stopped.

  The cop attached to the white elbow leaned his head out the window. I looked at him and he looked at me and I breathed again, and I knew it was over.

  It was really over. Finally, finally over.

  “I found this baby!” I called.

  And I ran with her, over to the car.

  “What about you?” the cop with the very white arms asked me.

  We were standing back by the trunk of his squad car, me with the baby still on my hip, and the trunk lid was standing open, and there was water back there. Bottled water, tons of it, on a cardboard tray with plastic over the tops of the bottles.

  He pulled one out from under the plastic and handed it to me for the little girl, and I twisted the top off and gave it to her and she took it from me and held it with both tiny hands and drank and drank and drank.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m thirsty, too, please. Thank you.”

  He gave me a little smile that looked like I’d made him feel sad with something I’d said, but I couldn’t imagine why, because I didn’t think I’d said anything that would make anybody sad. He had a weirdly big forehead and a hairline that was starting to recede, even though he wasn’t very old.

  He handed me a water and I unscrewed the top and drank it all down in one big series of gulps without ever untipping the bottle again.

  I wiped my mouth on my sleeve, but then because we were under the streetlight I could see that my sleeve was really dirty, and that the baby was really dirty, and I wondered if that was what he was so sad about.

  I accidentally dropped the cap and he picked it up, which made me like him better, because he was a little bit like me. He didn’t just leave litter everywhere like some people do.

  He made a three-point shot into the open garbage bin on the corner.

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” he said.

  His voice was kind of soft, like he liked me, like exactly the opposite of the lady in the all-night market who right away didn’t like me even though she didn’t know me well enough to judge.

  Problem was, I’d completely lost track of what we were talking about by then.

  “What was the question again?”

  “When I said, ‘What about you?’ I didn’t mean would you like water, too. I mean, yeah, also that, but I meant it in a bigger sense. Like, you strike me as somebody’s little girl who needs to get home to her mom, too.”

  I think my face got red, but I couldn’t say for a fact because I couldn’t see it. But it was tingly and hot, which was probably a clue.

  I guess I thought they would just take the baby from me and I would walk away and go back to . . . whatever. I didn’t know anybody would start looking at my situation.

  “I’m older, though,” I said.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, so I was looking down at a wad of gum that somebody threw onto the sidewalk, and wondering how people can do a thing like that when there was a public trash bin on the corner, not even ten feet away.

  “Not old enough, though,” he said. “What are you? Fourteen? Fifteen?”

  “Sixteen,” I said. I let my eyes flicker up to him and then quick looked away again. “Well, I think. Sixteen around last week, I think, except I don’t know exactly what day it is.”

  “Sixteen-year-old girls need to get back to their moms, too.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I don’t need to get back to my mom.”

  “Don’t you think she wants to know where you are?”

  “No, sir. I think if she wanted to know where I was she wouldn’t have kicked me out of the house in the first place.”

  “How long you been on the street?”

  “Couple months.”

  I think I shrugged when I said it.

  He opened his mouth to say something, but just then his partner came around to the back of the car where we were standing, and I was relieved because I was totally ready to talk about something else.

  He had been doing something up at the driver’s seat of the car, the partner, and I wasn’t entirely sure what, but I figured he was phoning in that they found the little girl from the Amber Alert.

  “It’s her,” he said.

  And even though he was talking to his partner and not to me, I said, “How can you tell who she is?”

  “We have pictures of her on the computer, that her mother provided. Her mother is pretty desperate to get this little girl back.”

  That’s when it hit me that I had to give her back, and that it was going to hurt me. I know that sounds incredibly stupid, because, like, how could I not know? But it’s just one of those things that hits you in different ways during different parts of the thing.

  I tried to hold the little girl out for one of the cops to take her, and right away she got scared and started fussing.

  She said, “Molly, Molly, Molly,” and held even tighter to me. Like she loved me.

  I have to admit it made me feel good.

  They didn’t take her.

  The one who gave us the water, he just looked around and said, “Where’s that car seat? You still have it?”

  “Oh,” I said. “No. I’m sorry. I
have no idea where it is. My friend Bodhi had it. Maybe he put it somewhere so those boys couldn’t find it, but then he never came back. Bodhi, I mean. I think maybe he got arrested. I think if he hadn’t got arrested he would’ve come back.”

  “Well, you get in the back seat with her, then,” he said. “You can ride with her on your lap and we’ll put the seat belt around both of you.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, and I could feel myself getting scared. “I’m going? Why am I going? I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t steal her, I just found her. I was trying to get her back to the police, honest I was, but I didn’t have a phone.”

  I could feel them both staring at me while I said all that.

  “You’re not in any trouble,” one of them said. The water guy. He slammed the trunk and it made the baby jump a little. “We just want to get a statement from you. Where you found her and all that. And maybe it would be nice for her if you stayed with her till her mom came to get her, because she’s obviously attached to you.”

  That was pretty literally true in that minute. She was hanging on to my shirt tight with both little hands and doing her best to wrap her legs around my waist but they didn’t quite reach.

  She was talking quietly in my ear, saying, “Molly, Molly, Molly,” over and over again.

  She didn’t want me to give her to the cops.

  “And then I’m free to go?” I said.

  “And then I was thinking maybe we talk over some options for getting you off the street and finding you some safer place to live.”

  I didn’t answer for a minute, because I was feeling kind of frozen up with fear. I could feel the fear running up and down the middle of me and it felt like little electrical signals if electrical signals could be icy cold.

  Bodhi always said you never go to the police, you never leave anything up to them. You never trust them to solve your problems for you, because they’ll only find ways to make them worse. That was one of the first things he taught me, and I believed him. And it had been knocked out of my mind completely by the fact that I had to bring them the baby. But it was back in my mind now.

  But right at that minute I was standing under the streetlight with those cops and I was looking at them and they were looking at me, and I decided that Bodhi might have been wrong.

  I really wanted him to’ve been wrong.

  I got in the back of their squad car and put the seat belt on both of us, me and the baby—the lap belt and the part that goes across your shoulder, both. I had to hold that part down with my hand so it didn’t go right across the baby’s face.

  She settled right away and stopped saying my name.

  I’d never been on the freeway at night, and I thought the palm trees looked spooky but beautiful and I was amazed by the way the gold reflectors on the lane markers glowed like they were on fire. It was weird, but it was almost as though the world looked . . . pretty. Even my world.

  “We’re going to get you home to your mommy,” I said.

  “Mommy,” she said back to me, but she wasn’t crying.

  She knew the terrible day was over now, too.

  She was an amazing little girl. I was going to miss her when she was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  Brooke: Why Didn’t She Call?

  When the phone rang, I very nearly fell off the roof. Twice. Once when I jumped at the sound of the ring. Again as I tried to scramble in through the window. I kicked a shingle off my mother’s roof with the sole of one shoe. As it gave way, I lost my footing.

  Meanwhile I was literally unable to believe I’d left my new cell phone in the bedroom. Not brought it out onto the roof with me. It seemed so thoughtless in retrospect that I had no way to frame it in my head. I was just baffled.

  I also bruised and badly scraped my shinbone on the window sash when my foot slipped. But I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time.

  I just remember that I picked up the phone and I was wondering why my shin hurt.

  It was Grace Beatty.

  “We have her,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent we have her. She’s dirty and she was a bit dehydrated, but she seems okay. You have to come down and identify her, of course. But she’s wearing red leggings and a striped tunic, and the boys who are bringing her in say she’s the spitting image of your photos.”

  The world turned weirdly white and silent for a moment. The way the world goes white before you pass out.

  Might have been a long moment, because Grace said, “Brooke? Are you there?”

  “Yes. But I think I need to sit down.”

  I plunked onto the carpet because walking over to the bed felt like too much.

  I was overwhelmed with the joy of what I’d been told. That was part of it. I was also scared by the one-percent part. Granted, it was nearly impossible to think they had found another girl the same age, lost at the same time, in the same general area, wearing the same kind of clothes. And looking exactly like Etta’s photos.

  But if it wasn’t her, I would die. Actually possibly die.

  “Is she right there? Can I talk to her?”

  “She’s not here yet. They’re driving her up. She’ll be here soon, though. So don’t bother waiting. Jump in the car and get down here.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said, and clicked off the call.

  My shin was surprisingly painful but I paid it no mind.

  I ran for the bedroom door, screaming for my mother. I knew she had likely gone to bed, even though it was barely eight o’clock. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now except this.

  “Mom! Mom! They found her! Hurry! We have to get down there!”

  She came spilling out into the brightly lit hallway, the soft skin of her face lined from the pillow. She was wearing the most absurd pajamas. Loud and gaudy, with blindingly colorful tropical flowers on a black background.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Oh dear. I’ll have to get dressed. I’ll only slow you down. Just go. Don’t wait for me. I’ll take a cab and meet you there.”

  I ran down the stairs two at a time. Then I realized my car keys were still up in my bedroom. In my purse. I flew up the stairs, only one at a time because my shin hurt. Grabbed the purse. Ran down again. Almost tumbled down in my haste.

  I sprinted out into the driveway. Opened the door of my old car, whose driver’s door always made a discordant metal-on-metal sound when opened. Dropped into the driver’s seat. Scrambled for my keys. Found them. Dropped them in the dark at my feet. Found them again.

  My hands trembled as I tried to fit the key into the ignition. It took about four tries to get it right.

  I turned the key.

  Nothing. Not a sound. Not even a grinding of the engine trying to turn over. Damn it, it wasn’t even trying! Not a click. Just perfect silence.

  I did away with the silence.

  I screamed at the car. Cursed it. Called it every name in the book. Pounded its dashboard. Got out and viciously kicked the tires with my good leg.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and nearly jumped out of my body.

  “I’ll call a cab,” my mother said.

  She was standing behind me in the driveway in those ridiculous pajamas. In the dark. Looking vulnerable and enormous.

  “Too slow,” I said.

  I ran out into the street and stuck my thumb out to passing cars.

  At that moment it was my mother’s turn to lose it. We switched roles. I stood, fairly calmly, hitchhiking. She yelled at me the way I’d been yelling at the car.

  “Oh, no you do not, little girl! You get back here this instant! If you don’t know by now what a dangerous world this is, then I don’t know what I can say to convince you. Your daughter needs you to get there in one piece, so you get back here and wait for that nice, safe cab!”

  She paused her diatribe. Maybe to see if I would obey.

  A car pulled over that I recognized as Mrs. Ellis’s from three doors down the street. I knew her by her dark-maroon BMW, with its custom plates. I have no idea what the
y were supposed to have said. It always looked like a random jumble of letters to me. But I guess Mrs. Ellis knew.

  She powered down her passenger window.

  “Darling, are you all right?” she asked me.

  “My car won’t start and I have to get to the police station right away. They found Etta!”

  “Found Etta?” Both words carried a distinct curiosity. “How on earth did you manage to lose her?”

  But by then I had opened her passenger door. By then I was already in the car.

  “Well, yes,” she said, probably accepting the inevitability of her next move. “By all means let’s get you there.”

  As we sped away, her passenger window remained down. I could hear my mother still screaming at me.

  Fortunately I could no longer make out the words.

  “I think I just couldn’t bear that,” Mrs. Ellis said.

  We were stopped at a stoplight. At the intersection of a palm-tree-lined boulevard. But there was nobody coming in either direction. I was wishing she would just run the light. Just brazenly run it. But I guess that wasn’t in her nature.

  “You would bear it,” I said.

  It was an answer that left no room for doubt. At least, not my doubt.

  “I picture a situation like that with my own children, when they were so little like that. And I think I just couldn’t do it.”

  I stared at the side of her face. Long enough that it made her nervous. I could tell.

  “What would you do, then?” I asked.

  “Well . . . fall apart, I suppose.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  The light changed. Finally, finally. We drove on.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say is something I see very clearly from here. And maybe you don’t see it. Because it’s not happening to you. You have no choice but to live through whatever’s happening. I mean . . . as opposed to what? If you’re going to continue to live, then you’re going to deal with it. You have no choice. You can say, ‘I’m going to fall apart now.’ And you can do that. Whatever falling apart looks like to you. But when you’re done, it’s still right there to deal with. And then you look back and see that what you called falling apart was just another way of dealing with it. We deal with everything, because, short of actually deciding not to live anymore, we don’t have any other option. Not one damned option.”