“Here,” Bodhi said, and handed me a bottle of apple juice. A round, squatty glass bottle. “I forgot. I stole this for her. And this. I thought maybe she was hungry. I don’t know how much she’s on solid food, but . . .”
He held up a box of goldfish crackers and I saw the baby reach out for the box. I don’t know if she knew what they were by the picture, or if she was just hungry and figured it was a box of food.
“Thanks,” I said. And I took the crackers, even though I never, ever took anything he stole, because it was stolen. But it was different this time because it was for the baby and not for me. “How are you going to find a phone where nobody can overhear you?”
“Not sure,” he said. “Maybe my best bet is to flag down a car and get somebody to call on their cell. Anyway, you stay right here.” He covered us up with a sheet of cardboard and the whole world got very dark. “I’ll be right back.”
But he wasn’t right back. In fact, he never came back at all.
That was the last time I saw my friend Bodhi for a really, really long time.
Chapter Three
Brooke: Chop Shops
The door of the police station opened. In came . . . my mother.
I think I said, “No, not that. Don’t do that to me.”
I think I said it out loud.
I did not say those words to my mother, and they were not said loudly enough for her to hear. I think I was talking to some entity or power larger than myself. But that was odd, too, because I’ve never managed to define such a thing in my life. Then again, we all know the old saying about atheists in foxholes.
She moved across the room in a sort of . . . I’m tempted to say waddle, but I’m resisting the word because it seems derogatory. I swear I don’t mean it that way. Just . . . it feels like the only word that really catches the thing right. Let’s say she teetered from one bad knee to the other, pushing her great bulk forward. Toward me. She still hadn’t looked up.
When she did finally look into my face, I looked away.
I got that feeling again. Like I was falling down a well. A very deep well. Maybe a bottomless one. I’d been wrestling with it for hours. Ever since that damned Mercedes drove away without me.
For the first three hours or so, I’d been too much in shock to feel like I was falling. Instead I’d felt empty. Numb. As though everything around me were a movie or a play. An unconvincing one at that.
Now it was beginning to catch up. The truth was just at the edge of catching me. Every time it arrived, such as when I looked at my mother’s face, I found myself losing my grip. On something. Hard to know what. And the feeling that followed was that of a terrifying free fall.
I scrambled desperately to reclaim my denial.
This was not happening. This could not be happening.
She rushed toward me—as best she could rush—and threw her arms around me. It was alarming. Normally she was not big on any kind of touch. Then again, these were not normal times.
Heaven help me, I found the soft bulk of her strangely comforting.
“Any news?” she asked near my ear.
I dropped my face against her shoulder and shook my head.
When I looked up again, I noticed that the few officers in attendance were watching us, their faces warm. As though witnessing a touching scene. It struck me strange, knowing everything I knew about my fraught relationship with my mother. Well . . . I don’t literally mean I thought it was strange. What could they be expected to know? It just caught me off guard. A surprise.
It was the middle of the night. The population of the place had thinned out considerably. There were maybe thirty desks in that huge room, and only five of them were occupied.
The policewoman who had been helping me all night was moving in our direction. And I dreaded her arrival. Because I worried she was going to tell me to go home. I didn’t want to go home. I felt like the police station was the closest I could get to my daughter.
She was strangely tall, the officer. Well over six feet. Reed-thin and elongated, as though someone had stretched her out. Her white-blonde hair was very short. Like a cut a man’s barber would do. She was probably close to fifty, but looked good for it.
Her name was Grace Beatty. She had told me so. Her name tag said “Officer G. Beatty.”
“Now that your mother’s here . . . ,” she said.
I knew where we were going with this. I’d known all along.
I opened my mouth to object, but she talked me down.
“I get it,” she said. “I really do. But you have to give a thought to yourself in a moment like this. It’s important for you, it helps us, it helps your daughter if there’s a sudden development. You need rest. We need you to rest. The whole world needs you to rest right now, Brooke. An actual emotional breakdown is a real possibility in a situation like this, and the best way I know to ward it off is rest and food. And staying hydrated. I know pacing around the precinct feels right, but it’s not really serving any purpose except to wear you down. Go home. Really, Brooke. Go home. We’ll call you the split second we know anything more. That’s a promise.”
Again, I opened my mouth in my own defense. This time my mother beat me to it.
“You don’t have any children,” she said to Grace Beatty. It was not a question. But she made it one. By adding the following throwaway tag. “Do you?”
“I have four,” the officer said, her face soft.
That stopped all the words for a few moments.
“We have the Amber Alert up on all the freeways,” Grace Beatty said. “Just like we said we would. The guys are arranging raids on any known chop shops between here and the Mexican border—”
“I don’t know what a chop shop is,” my mother said. Interrupting. She sounded aggravated. As if the officer had no right to use a phrase that wasn’t understandable to her on its surface.
She had let go of me by then. She’d tried to keep one hand on my shoulder, but I’d just ducked out from under it. Now that she was talking, my ability to view her as a comforting figure was evaporating fast.
It irked me, what she’d said. Because I did know what a chop shop was. I’d had it explained to me earlier that night. And it bothered me that she was forcing the proceedings to slow down because she wasn’t caught up.
“People who jack cars sometimes take them to a warehouse or a garage,” Grace Beatty said. The model of pasted-on patience. Or maybe it was real patience. Maybe it would need to have been pasted on only if it were me. “They take them to these places to break them down, or repaint them, or otherwise disguise them before shipping them somewhere else. They usually file off the VIN number. I mean, this is not the case with every carjacking, of course. Sometimes an individual is just desperate for a car. But the fact that it was a high-end model . . . well, it’s hard to know.”
“Why would you let these shops stay in business?” my mother asked, her voice hard. She had begun speaking to the policewoman as if she were her own daughter. Heaven help us all. “I mean, if you know where they are, why didn’t you shut them down a long time ago?”
“Mom,” I said.
But Grace Beatty waved me off. “No, it’s fine. We keep on top of them as best we can, ma’am. When a thing like this happens, we try to get some information on the street as to where new ones might’ve sprung up, so we can get a fast bead on where the car might’ve gone. It doesn’t always work. But it’s something we can do, and we’re doing everything we can.”