But it didn’t seem like they could hear me.
Then they turned another corner.
Just as they turned, they passed under a streetlight, and I saw that the passenger window was down. The cop who wasn’t driving, who was riding on the passenger side, I could see his arm on the top of the door. He was wearing a dark blue uniform with short sleeves and I could see his elbow. It looked really white.
I figured this was it—my last chance.
So I stopped and pulled all the air I could into my lungs and I yelled, “Wait!”
It must have just about blown out that poor little girl’s eardrum.
The police car stopped.
The cop attached to the white elbow leaned his head out the window. I looked at him and he looked at me and I breathed again, and I knew it was over.
It was really over. Finally, finally over.
“I found this baby!” I called.
And I ran with her, over to the car.
“What about you?” the cop with the very white arms asked me.
We were standing back by the trunk of his squad car, me with the baby still on my hip, and the trunk lid was standing open, and there was water back there. Bottled water, tons of it, on a cardboard tray with plastic over the tops of the bottles.
He pulled one out from under the plastic and handed it to me for the little girl, and I twisted the top off and gave it to her and she took it from me and held it with both tiny hands and drank and drank and drank.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m thirsty, too, please. Thank you.”
He gave me a little smile that looked like I’d made him feel sad with something I’d said, but I couldn’t imagine why, because I didn’t think I’d said anything that would make anybody sad. He had a weirdly big forehead and a hairline that was starting to recede, even though he wasn’t very old.
He handed me a water and I unscrewed the top and drank it all down in one big series of gulps without ever untipping the bottle again.
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve, but then because we were under the streetlight I could see that my sleeve was really dirty, and that the baby was really dirty, and I wondered if that was what he was so sad about.
I accidentally dropped the cap and he picked it up, which made me like him better, because he was a little bit like me. He didn’t just leave litter everywhere like some people do.
He made a three-point shot into the open garbage bin on the corner.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” he said.
His voice was kind of soft, like he liked me, like exactly the opposite of the lady in the all-night market who right away didn’t like me even though she didn’t know me well enough to judge.
Problem was, I’d completely lost track of what we were talking about by then.
“What was the question again?”
“When I said, ‘What about you?’ I didn’t mean would you like water, too. I mean, yeah, also that, but I meant it in a bigger sense. Like, you strike me as somebody’s little girl who needs to get home to her mom, too.”
I think my face got red, but I couldn’t say for a fact because I couldn’t see it. But it was tingly and hot, which was probably a clue.
I guess I thought they would just take the baby from me and I would walk away and go back to . . . whatever. I didn’t know anybody would start looking at my situation.
“I’m older, though,” I said.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, so I was looking down at a wad of gum that somebody threw onto the sidewalk, and wondering how people can do a thing like that when there was a public trash bin on the corner, not even ten feet away.
“Not old enough, though,” he said. “What are you? Fourteen? Fifteen?”
“Sixteen,” I said. I let my eyes flicker up to him and then quick looked away again. “Well, I think. Sixteen around last week, I think, except I don’t know exactly what day it is.”
“Sixteen-year-old girls need to get back to their moms, too.”
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t need to get back to my mom.”
“Don’t you think she wants to know where you are?”
“No, sir. I think if she wanted to know where I was she wouldn’t have kicked me out of the house in the first place.”
“How long you been on the street?”
“Couple months.”
I think I shrugged when I said it.
He opened his mouth to say something, but just then his partner came around to the back of the car where we were standing, and I was relieved because I was totally ready to talk about something else.
He had been doing something up at the driver’s seat of the car, the partner, and I wasn’t entirely sure what, but I figured he was phoning in that they found the little girl from the Amber Alert.
“It’s her,” he said.
And even though he was talking to his partner and not to me, I said, “How can you tell who she is?”
“We have pictures of her on the computer, that her mother provided. Her mother is pretty desperate to get this little girl back.”
That’s when it hit me that I had to give her back, and that it was going to hurt me. I know that sounds incredibly stupid, because, like, how could I not know? But it’s just one of those things that hits you in different ways during different parts of the thing.
I tried to hold the little girl out for one of the cops to take her, and right away she got scared and started fussing.
She said, “Molly, Molly, Molly,” and held even tighter to me. Like she loved me.
I have to admit it made me feel good.
They didn’t take her.
The one who gave us the water, he just
