I got that sickening feeling again. The falling. This time I couldn’t scramble back to denial. I was too tired even to try. I just let myself fall. I let my entire existence hit rock bottom.
“When a thing like this happens?” my mother parroted back, emphasizing that the words were not believable to her. “You’re telling me a thing like this has happened before?”
“Oh yes,” Grace Beatty said. “Carjackings tend to happen fast, and it’s not all that unusual for a child or a pet to go unnoticed in the back seat. Of course, the children are more helpless. We actually like it a lot when a jacker finds out the hard way that there’s a big German shepherd or pit bull in the car. We think of that as help dispensing our justice.” She stopped talking. Scanned our faces. Seemed to realize she’d pulled the conversation off track. That her story was the wrong mood for the wrong audience. “But in cases like this . . .”
“If it’s happened before,” my mother asked, interrupting again, her voice thin and almost whiny, “what did they do with the children?”
“Three times out of four they just put them out of the car when they discover them. The fourth time they might try to ransom them back to the parent. They can usually find a registration in the glove compartment. They know how to get in touch.”
It struck me, with a panic I felt in my throat and lower intestines at the same time, that the phone was unmanned at home. Also that my child, my baby, the love of my life, might be out on the street at night alone. Or in the hands of a ransoming criminal. I had no idea which felt worse.
But my mother was still grilling the officer.
“And if it was just a crazed individual needing a car?” I heard her ask. As if far away. As if I were hearing her voice echo down a long tunnel. “And if he never takes it to one of those chopper places? And if he never calls us wanting money to give her back? Then what?”
“Well, then we really have to earn our paychecks,” Officer Beatty said. “But let’s try to be optimistic and believe we’ll get a good, clear early break.”
And, with that, I fell even deeper. Past the false bottom of my first well. To a whole new depth. One I’d never even known existed in the world.
“We have to call a cab,” my mother said as we walked out the door together.
“You didn’t drive my car here?”
“Oh my goodness, no! I would never drive your car. I’d be thinking the whole way that it was just about to explode.”
I let it go by. I was too tired. Too far down the well.
“If we need to make a phone call,” I said, “why are we walking out onto the street?”
“You don’t have your phone with you?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you bring your phone with you?”
“I did.”
“Well, where is it now?”
I experienced a sudden flash of anger. It surprised me. I hadn’t felt it coming. “If I knew that, Mom, we wouldn’t have a problem!” I shouted at her.
I watched her rock back a step. Her eyes looked as though I might actually have hurt her. I saw her try on the idea of shouting back. Saw her anger rise up, then fall away again. She was experiencing a rare moment of humanity. This disaster was bringing out the best side she had.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. It was sitting in the console of your car.”
“Oh,” she said. Quietly. Then, “I see.”
We stood on the dark street together. Not talking. The mood seemed to sink further. I think it was coming down on both of us. The fact that we were somehow supposed to move forward from this moment. Draw a post-disaster breath.
“I’ll go inside and ask that nice policewoman to call us a cab,” she said.
I watched her move her huge, fragile body back to the police station door. It surprised me to hear that she thought Grace Beatty was nice. She hadn’t treated her as though she thought so.
I looked up and saw actual stars. And I was angry at them. For shining. As though nothing had happened. I was angry at life for going on. They say it always does, but this seemed like too extreme an example.
“Just one thing,” I heard my mother’s voice say. She was standing at the door to the station, one hand on the door pull. “I still don’t get how he could drag you out of the car. You had your seat belt on.”
I pulled a big breath. The blank denial came back to save me. For a minute, anyway.
“It just all happened really fast,” I said.
“But you did have your seat belt on.”
“Yes.”
To this very day I haven’t corrected the lie. To this very day, I feel guilty and uncomfortable about the lie. But in that moment, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
The most astonishing part of later that night is the fact I slept. Even briefly. It might only have been a minute or two, but it still amazes me.
I hadn’t meant to. There was nothing purposeful about it.
I’d just been lying on the bed. I’d brought the kitchen phone into my room and plugged it in. There was an old-fashioned phone jack in there, but I’d never used it. Because I had my cell.
I thought I was awake the whole time. But when the phone rang, it startled me out of a dream. Just as well. It was a terrible dream. I was thrashing through water that was jet black and felt as thick as quicksand. Every minute or two I’d get a quick glimpse of my baby’s car seat. I’d push desperately in that direction, but the blackness of the waters would close in again and it would be gone. I could barely move through the stuff.
The ringing sent my heart up into my throat. I guess that’s kind of an old cliché, but in that moment I really understood what it meant. I felt it.
I grabbed up the phone, my mind filling with horrible ideas. Not really visual images. More like concepts. This growly, deep-voiced monster would tell me he had Etta. He might threaten to hurt her. I’d hear her crying in the background. And die inside.
By the time I got the phone to my ear, my heart was pounding so hard I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t speak.
“Brooke?” I heard on the line.
It was the voice of Grace Beatty.
All that breath rushed out of me at once. Too much breath to have held in those poor lungs of mine, by all rights. Those horrid images of the monster who was about to own my life, my heart and soul—they flowed out of me. I felt like nothing without them. They had taken me with them as they exited. There was nothing left.
I tried to speak. But what came out was more of an unintelligible grunt.
“We didn’t find her. I didn’t call to say that. I know it’s best to say that right up front, as fast as possible.”
The bedroom door flew open. So hard it swung back and hit the wall. I jumped. My mother stood in the open doorway, panting. She looked into my eyes and asked a direct question with her own.
I shook my head.
She began to cry.
I don’t think I’d ever seen my mother cry. I don’t think I’d ever gotten the impression that she cared that deeply about anything. In retrospect, I guess I should have known better.
Then I burst into tears, too.
I think I hadn’t cried yet, though I had been so numbed by shock as to not trust my own memory. I think I’d been so overwhelmed with fear that it had drowned out the sorrow underneath.