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.
I jumped when I heard it, and that woke the baby, because we were all wrapped around each other, cuddled really close together to keep her warm and not so scared. But when she felt me jump like that, she not only woke up, but she woke up scared to death again, and she started to cry. She started kind of slow, but I could tell the crying was going places, because kids can build up a lot of steam behind a thing like that, and if she got too loud then I knew it was all over. But it made me scared to know that, and she could feel it, being so close and all, so that didn’t help.
I started whispering in her ear, but so quiet. It was so quiet I wasn’t sure she could even hear me. It was more like making the words with my lips against her ear, but then just this tiny breath of air that was the sound.
I said, “Brave girl, quiet girl.”
The noise of the cars on the freeway going over our heads was a good thing, because if we only made little noises, then the thumping of their tires on—actually I have no idea what the tires were thumping on—would drown us out.
She said it back to me, just as quiet, which really surprised me. She stopped her run-up to that big cry and whispered back to me, “Brave girl, kiet girl,” right in my ear. She didn’t really get the kw sound in quiet—I think she was too young to have gotten the hang of that sound—but anyway I knew what she meant so what difference did it make?
Then I heard “Molly,” also real long and singy, and then “Bodhi. Where are you?”
I knew the voice and I knew it was one of the wild boys, the Musketeers. The one who was really smart and actually had a lot of schooling and wanted to make sure you knew it.
“Brave girl, quiet girl,” I whispered again.
“Brave girl, kiet girl,” she whispered back, and I was so proud of her it almost made my chest explode. Because I knew she was doing more than just imitating the words like a parrot, she was really working hard to be brave, just like I was asking her to do.
It hit me in that minute that I would have to give her over to the police as soon as I could—unless those boys took her away from me, which was too awful to think about—and then I’d be alone. No Bodhi, no little girl, and already I knew I would miss her, which was weird because it’d only been a couple of hours, but I could feel how it was that way whether I wanted it to be or not.
“We’re going to find you,” I heard one of them say, the dumber one. He wasn’t singing. He meant business. But the good news was that his voice came from a little farther down the block, like they had already passed us.
It was a good hiding place Bodhi had found for us—at least, I hoped it was—but then I wondered how much of a sitting duck I would be if I didn’t have him to figure out stuff like this for both of us.
I heard some banging noises at the end of the block, so I lifted up the flattened cardboard, but just the tiniest bit you can possibly imagine. Like an inch, like just enough to see under it with one eye. Two of them were crossing the empty street to the next block, and the one I thought was dumb was already across, and he had a big stick that he was banging against a row of dumpsters. Then he flipped their lids open and shouted “Ha!” each time, but of course we weren’t in there.
There was a billboard on the other side of the freeway that I could see through that little slit, and it had this really nice expensive luxury car on it that probably cost like a million dollars. Well, not really, but you know what I mean. Just a whole lot. There was a light aimed up at the billboard so people could see it in the night, but it kept flickering on and off.
It’s weird, I know, but when I look back on that night, I always think of that car, and see it behind my eyes. Like, it’s there, it’s gone, it’s there, it’s gone. I think I was stunned by the idea that all over this city—hell, all over the world—people have so much money that you can just show them a picture of a pretty thing like that and they’ll run out and spend a million dollars on it. I mean, somebody must, or they wouldn’t keep putting up the billboards, because they’re not free to put up. I wondered how it would feel to see a thing like that and just go out and buy one, and whether I would ever know how that felt, even once in my whole life.
The boys turned the corner, and I breathed out a big bunch of air I must’ve been holding in. I waited a minute or two just to be safe, and then I started talking to the little girl.
“Is your diaper wet?” I asked her, not really expecting she would answer me. It was more like talking to myself.
But she understood me, and she shook her head no.
I thought it was kind of amazing that she could hold it so long, but I guess looking back that’s kind of a weird thought because I had no idea how long it had been. I had no idea how long she’d been sitting in that car seat, or how long it had been since I found her there. But a few hours at least.
“You want some more apple juice?”
Then I wished I hadn’t asked her that, because the more apple juice I gave her, the more she was going to need to go. But you have to give a kid stuff to drink, because the littler they are, the more you can’t let them be dehydrated. I knew that from the time one of my little sisters was throwing up and had diarrhea. The doctor said it’s really important not to let them get dehydrated, so I figured diaper rash was less dangerous than that.
She reached right out, and I opened the bottle again, but I had to sort of turn her over so she was more facedown, because you don’t want that juice going down into her lungs and choking her. Well, not choking, exactly, because she could breathe around it, but it would make her cough something fierce. And coughing is loud, but also it wouldn’t be good for her.