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.
“First let’s get you all unstrapped here,” I said to her, because I had a feeling she might’ve been strapped in there for a while. I can’t say for a fact why I thought I knew it, other than the way you could tell she’d been crying for a long time with nobody wiping her nose. “I know all about little girls,” I told her while I unclipped her, “because I’ve got two little sisters. They’re a lot bigger than you now, but they weren’t always. They used to be just about your size and I used to help take care of them a lot and right now I just miss them so damn much I could . . .”
The word I was heading for was “cry.” But I looked down at those huge brown eyes and I figured I’d better not do it—I’d better not even say it—because she was looking to me for reasons to stay calm, so all I said was “Sorry for the cussing. Don’t repeat stuff like that.”
But she had no idea what I was saying, I could tell.
I pulled her up into my arms and she accepted me right away. Just like that. Sometimes a little kid her age won’t want to go to a stranger. They’ll fuss and try to get back to their mom. Of course that’s a different situation because it means their mom is right there to go back to. This little girl had been strapped in a car seat on an empty sidewalk in the dark, so if she hadn’t decided to be okay with going to me, what better choices did I figure she had?
I got kind of panicky, just all of a sudden, because it came over me in a big way that I had her now, and she was my responsibility. I couldn’t just put her down and walk away, so what was I going to do?
I walked around in circles calling stuff out into the dark.
“Hello? Hello-o? Mom of this little girl? Parents of this little girl? Are you around here? Somewhere? Anywhere?”
I had to ask, because I couldn’t just walk away with her. What if they’d only set her there for a second to get something out of the car or go into a building? Well, the answer to that, of course, was they would be terrible parents to do it, but I still couldn’t walk away with their kid.
But I stood there with her, her cheek down on my shoulder and her little fingers holding tight to the back of my shirt, and just listened for an answer, and let me tell you, there was nothing and nobody out there. This was a pretty industrial part of the city. Not literally downtown, where the office buildings are, because that’s nicer, but definitely a business-y part of the city, mostly machine shops and warehouses, and nobody actually lives here except people who’re on the street. We live everywhere, especially places where other people don’t, because that way there’s nobody to call the cops on us to drive us out of the neighborhood. And it’s not a place you really want to be at night, so it’s not like there were people walking by or anything.
I just stood there in the middle of the sidewalk for a minute, holding her, and I got this spooky feeling like in those movies where the star character realizes they’re the only person left alive on the earth.
“Okay,” I said to the little girl. “Next idea. We have to find a phone and call the police and report you missing. Or . . . found, I guess I mean. Report you found.”
But, finding a phone . . . that was not nearly as easy around here as I’d just made it sound, and I so completely knew it.
I bombed out on finding a phone.
I went to the corner store, but the guy had already closed it up for the night. He didn’t keep what you might call regular hours, just gave up and went home when there was nobody coming in. And there were no pay phones around there. There were probably no pay phones anywhere in the city, because who needed them? Everybody had a cell phone except Bodhi and me.
I didn’t want to walk back to the all-night market, because I had the girl on my hip, with her head on my shoulder, and the car seat hanging from one hand, and it was too heavy. It was too much for me. Plus there was an even more important reason. It was a bad neighborhood and it was only getting later, and I was willing to risk myself by walking down the streets here, but I wasn’t willing to risk somebody else’s little baby girl.
I took her back to where Bodhi and I had been hiding at night. It was a huge wooden shipping crate in the far corner of a vacant lot full of trash, made up of slats with a tiny bit of room in between, that you could’ve seen the stars through if you could see the stars in the city. But it was handy for seeing if anybody was coming, and the empty slots were too narrow for them to see us. When I say it was huge, I mean for a crate. For a place to stay it was pretty damn small, but Bodhi and I slept wrapped around each other anyway. But only because it got a little bit cold. We didn’t like each other like that.