But when my mother cried, there was no holding it in anymore.
Meanwhile Grace Beatty was talking. And I was only half hearing her.
“. . . so they raided this chop shop in San Diego. Not far from the border. And we recovered your mother’s car. They were already halfway through repainting it, but they hadn’t filed off the VIN yet, so we got them dead to rights. The San Diego PD has them in for questioning, but the guys running the shop seemed surprised to hear about a child. Could be an act, but our colleagues down there don’t think so. They think whoever dropped the car off didn’t share much. Just got his money and left. So we have the car. And we’re still doing all we can to find your daughter, I swear. But I’m afraid this development doesn’t put us any closer. But of course I had to call and tell you.”
I was falling again. And every one of her sentences was echoing down the well to me. From farther and farther away.
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you.”
And it was amazing, because I said it like a real person speaks in a normal situation. I have no idea how that happened.
“Are you doing okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not.”
It was the most honest answer I could find.
“If you have a doctor, you can call. I’m sure you could get a prescription for some kind of sedative.”
“Okay,” I said.
But only because I wanted the conversation to be over. Only because I wanted anything that required anything from me to stop. I had nothing to give to the world in that moment. Literally nothing. Couldn’t everybody see that?
I knew I would not call the doctor or take any sedatives. What if my baby needed me?
“Okay,” the officer said. “Well . . .”
“I know you’re doing all you can,” I said. Or somebody said. It didn’t really sound like me. Or feel like me. But it was my lips and my breath, so who else could it have been?
“Stay by the phone. We’ll be in touch.”
“Bye.”
I gently hung up.
I purposely didn’t look at my mother. But at the edge of my vision I saw her rush across the room to me. She lowered herself onto the edge of my bed and wrapped me up in her huge arms. I didn’t resist. I had nothing in me to mount a resistance. Even if I’d wanted to.
I mostly didn’t want to.
“They’ll find her, Brooke,” she said. “It’s their job, and they’re good at it. It’s what they do.”
It may have been their job. They may have been good at it. But they don’t find every child who goes missing. And we both knew it.
We just couldn’t bring ourselves to say it out loud.
About an hour later I crawled out onto the slant of roof outside my bedroom window. The way I used to do when I was a child.
I sat with my knees up tight to my chest, my arms wrapped around them.
I spoke a few words out loud.
It wasn’t praying, exactly. Because I wasn’t sure if I believed in God or not, or what kind of God I believed in if I did. But more importantly than that, God just wasn’t who I was talking to in that moment.
I said a few words into the night to whoever had her. Whoever was with her. If in fact anybody was with her.
I said, “Please be gentle with her. Please don’t hurt her. Please comfort her when she cries. Please don’t let her be too scared. She’s a good girl. She’s totally innocent. She doesn’t deserve anything bad from anybody. Please take good care of her and get her back to me.”
Then I sat still, as if listening. As if waiting for the night to say something in reply.
Nothing came back to me except silence.
Chapter Four
Molly: Brave Girl, Quiet Girl
It took me a long time to figure out that Bodhi might not be coming back right away like I expected. I don’t really exactly know how long it took me, because I didn’t have a watch—and if I’d ever had one, I’d have sold it for food a long time ago—but it might have been hours. Literally hours. Because you know how there are these situations where time stretches out? Like, ridiculously long? It was that sort of a thing, and so no matter how much time went by I kept thinking maybe it wasn’t as much time as it seemed like it was.
Or maybe I just really didn’t want to know what was right there to know.
I gave the baby about half the apple juice and a handful of the crackers. I was thinking it was too bad Bodhi stole apple juice, because I had an apple in my pocket, and I could’ve given her some of that, but now what was the point? It was just apple and more apple, and the only difference was whether she had to chew it up or not. Something different with a different kind of nutrient for her would’ve been better, but it wasn’t his fault, because he didn’t know. The crackers I knew would keep her happy but they were mostly empty calories.
Then she started to cry again, because it was dark in there, in that dirt hole under the flat cardboard boxes, and it was getting cold. And the cars that went by on the freeway over our heads were making these weird loud thumping noises, and it was scary. It was scary even to me, and I’m mostly grown.
So I started telling her she was a brave girl. I said, “Brave girl, brave girl,” over and over, and then after a while I sort of started to sing it. Two notes, the first one higher than the other.
At first it didn’t seem to make any difference to her. She was probably too young to understand what it even meant to be a brave girl. But still, I think if you repeat something over and over to a baby, especially in that singsongy kind of a voice, it soothes them. I think it’s almost hypnotizing for a kid.
So after about a hundred “brave girls” she stopped crying and fell asleep.
I stayed awake for a long time, even though it was the middle of the night and I was drop-dead tired. I was so tired that all the muscles in my arms and legs felt like they were buzzing, like with electricity, and my stomach felt all rocky and bad, and my eyes felt like they were full of sand.
I stayed awake and held her tight and rocked her just the tiniest little bit, even though she was asleep, because I didn’t want her to be scared. Even in her sleep, I didn’t want her to be scared. You can be scared in your sleep—believe me, I know.
I started thinking about how Bodhi told me he had just finished outrunning a couple of cops, and then I started worrying about what if they saw him again while he was walking around looking for a phone. After you run away from the cops you really want to keep your head down, at least until after their shift changes, and here I’d sent him out to make a call. What was I thinking? I mean, that’s no way to treat your best friend, except for the fact that I’d had absolutely no choice but to ask him to go.
I started thinking how scared I would be if he never came back, which it was starting to dawn on me might be happening. I don’t mean it like I was thinking of myself and not him, because that would make me a lousy friend, and because if he’d been arrested, then it sucked much worse to be him that night. I thought of that first—of him first—and then after that I thought of how much it would suck for me, too.
I mean, going forward it would be the worst, because he was my only friend since we’d left Utah, and I’d never lived one full day on the street without him, and I wasn’t even sure I knew how. But even more, it was the worst just in that moment because I didn’t dare come out of hiding with the little girl, because I didn’t want those three horrible guys to get her, but there was no phone in here, and I started getting panicky not knowing what to do. She would get more and more scared, and her diaper would get dirty, and she had nobody to depend on but me.