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.
It was too much responsibility but there was nothing I could do about it by then because it was already too late. I was all she had, and there was no way I was going to let her down—I mean, if I could help it. But at the same time I knew my hands were more or less tied because she was just a baby and she needed so many things and I had nothing for her. I had not one thing this little girl needed to be okay.
Well, that’s not completely true—I had two things she needed. I had a bottle of apple juice and some goldfish crackers, and I knew how to comfort a little kid.
The most amazing and hard-to-believe part of the whole night—for me, anyway—was how I fell asleep. I would’ve bet you money that I never would, not even for a second, because I was too cold and rattled and scared, and the responsibility of this tiny little perfect life was sitting too hard on my head and keeping me awake.
And, you know, I have no idea—maybe I was only asleep for a second. All I know is that when I heard the first one of their voices
