I left the car seat outside because there was no room for it and sat inside with the girl and waited for Bodhi to come back. Sometimes he would come back too late and with too much money—a scary amount of money, like forty dollars—and I would be worried about where he got so much.
I held her tight in my arms and said, “Come back, Bodhi, come back, Bodhi, come back, Bodhi,” over and over and over.
And the little girl said “Mommy” and “Horsey,” in no particular order, and I never did know which one she was about to say next.
Bodhi got back probably an hour later.
He stuck his head in and looked at me and looked at the girl, and got this strange expression on his face, like life was just so completely surprising and he couldn’t decide if he should like that about life or not.
He had this way of tilting his head like a curious dog if something struck him strange, and he did that.
He was experimenting with different ways to have a beard, which meant he had to find a way to shave every day or two, but I guess it was worth it to him. Right now it was a little square soul patch under his bottom lip, but with the rest of his beard poking out around it because it was near the end of the day. But it was all kind of wispy and light, his beard hair, because he was young, too. Not as young as me. I think he was around nineteen but I never asked.
“Well,” he said, and his voice was super familiar so it made me feel better. “Who. Is. This?” He made his voice kind of high and light on the last word, which was nice, because it made the baby less scared of him.
“You need to go find a phone,” I said. “Maybe run down to the all-night market and ask the lady there to call the police. Tell her we found a baby just all by herself on the street and they have to come get her and figure out who her mother is and how to get her home.”
He frowned, and the baby fussed a little because it scared her.
“And what if her mother dumped her on purpose?”
I actually hadn’t even thought of that, and then I was wishing I didn’t have to think of it now.
“The police still need to come and get her. You know. And get her a foster home or something. Whatever they do with kids.”
But then I got worried because I didn’t really know what they do with kids, and if what they do is okay for the kid, and the weird thing was that I already cared what happened to this one, even though it had only been an hour or two. But there was nothing I could do about it. She wasn’t my baby and I had to turn her over to the police, and there was just no other answer to a question like that one.
“The police,” he said. Like the words tasted bad in his mouth when he said them. “I kind of hate to call the police. I just now finished outrunning a couple of them.”
“Again?”
I said it like I was mad, but really it scared me, because if Bodhi got arrested then what would I do?
“Gotta make a living,” he said.
“You can get lost before the police show up.”
“Hate to bring them here,” he said. “Might be the end of our good hiding place.”
“Just tell them we’ll meet them on the corner. When I hear a car pull up or voices or whatever, I’ll come out. They won’t see where I came from behind all the junk.”
For a minute he didn’t do anything at all. Just froze there with his head in the crate and his body out, like he was thinking about things. Then he gave us a little salute like an army man, and his face was gone.
The whole Bodhi was gone.
He got back maybe half an hour later, but time is a weird thing to try to judge, especially at a time like that when you’re scared and nervous and wanting it to go by fast.
“Bad news,” he said. “We have to move.”
“Move? You mean permanently?”
“No, maybe not permanently. But as long as you have that kid. You know those three guys who call themselves the Three Musketeers?”
I knew them all right—well enough that my blood got a little bit colder thinking about them—and he knew I knew them. It was just the way you start a sentence, not a serious question. They were on the street like us, but also not like us because they were meaner. They lived in the basement of an abandoned building three or four blocks over, and everybody avoided that block because they were bad news.
“What about them?”
“They were in the store trying to steal some candy, but the lady wouldn’t take her eyes off them. She was following them around with I think a gun in the pocket of her apron. And when I asked her to call the cops and told her why, they heard me. I didn’t think they would hear me. But then I was outside a minute later and I heard them say they want the kid.”
My blood went from cool to frozen, just really fast like that. I could see the sky past Bodhi’s head, and I actually could see a couple of the brightest stars.
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they want her?”
My voice was real quiet, like a scratchy whisper, like they were right outside the crate listening and maybe hearing everything I said.
“They figure she’s worth a lot of money because her parents’ll want her back. They want to try to ransom her back to her parents. And I’m pretty sure they know where we hide. So we need to move. Like, now.”
“Wait. No. That’s stupid. They don’t even know who her parents are.”
“Well, they’re going to try to find out. Watch for an Amber Alert or find something in the paper about it or something like that. Anyway, they’re going to take her now and figure that out later, so we need to move.”
But after he said that I was so scared I almost couldn’t move. But I did move, anyway, because anything else, anything that wasn’t getting out in time, would’ve been just too awful to think about.
“Get the car seat,” I said as we rushed out of our crate.
But I didn’t say it because it was worth money. That didn’t matter anymore. I said it because I didn’t want to leave anything behind that they could use to see where we’d been. I figured it was better if they felt like we could be just about anywhere. I figured it would only get their mouths watering too much to see a sign that they’d just missed us.
We hurried down the street together, but I had no idea where we were going, and he couldn’t have either, and it was a really lost feeling.
I would’ve told you, just before that happened, that I couldn’t possibly have felt more lost in this big, crazy world but I would’ve been wrong.
Bodhi found us a place to hide under a freeway overpass. There was this really steep hill going up under it, and then the hill kind of flattened out at the top. And it was sort of cave-like under the iron structure of the bridge, getting smaller and smaller at the back.
In a way it scared me because if they found us here we’d be pretty cornered, but it was a good hiding place, too.
There were all these sheets of flattened cardboard, like big cartons flattened out, and a hollow space under them that could make it look like they were lying flat with nobody underneath them. I wondered if somebody had hidden there before. You know, like dug it out as a place to hide. In this city it was a pretty good bet.
I hoped nobody was about to come back and claim the spot.