“Oh,” I said. “No. I’m sorry. I have no idea where it is. My friend Bodhi had it. Maybe he put it somewhere so those boys couldn’t find it, but then he never came back. Bodhi, I mean. I think maybe he got arrested. I think if he hadn’t got arrested he would’ve come back.”
“Well, you get in the back seat with her, then,” he said. “You can ride with her on your lap and we’ll put the seat belt around both of you.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, and I could feel myself getting scared. “I’m going? Why am I going? I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t steal her, I just found her. I was trying to get her back to the police, honest I was, but I didn’t have a phone.”
I could feel them both staring at me while I said all that.
“You’re not in any trouble,” one of them said. The water guy. He slammed the trunk and it made the baby jump a little. “We just want to get a statement from you. Where you found her and all that. And maybe it would be nice for her if you stayed with her till her mom came to get her, because she’s obviously attached to you.”
That was pretty literally true in that minute. She was hanging on to my shirt tight with both little hands and doing her best to wrap her legs around my waist but they didn’t quite reach.
She was talking quietly in my ear, saying, “Molly, Molly, Molly,” over and over again.
She didn’t want me to give her to the cops.
“And then I’m free to go?” I said.
“And then I was thinking maybe we talk over some options for getting you off the street and finding you some safer place to live.”
I didn’t answer for a minute, because I was feeling kind of frozen up with fear. I could feel the fear running up and down the middle of me and it felt like little electrical signals if electrical signals could be icy cold.
Bodhi always said you never go to the police, you never leave anything up to them. You never trust them to solve your problems for you, because they’ll only find ways to make them worse. That was one of the first things he taught me, and I believed him. And it had been knocked out of my mind completely by the fact that I had to bring them the baby. But it was back in my mind now.
But right at that minute I was standing under the streetlight with those cops and I was looking at them and they were looking at me, and I decided that Bodhi might have been wrong.
I really wanted him to’ve been wrong.
I got in the back of their squad car and put the seat belt on both of us, me and the baby—the lap belt and the part that goes across your shoulder, both. I had to hold that part down with my hand so it didn’t go right across the baby’s face.
She settled right away and stopped saying my name.
I’d never been on the freeway at night, and I thought the palm trees looked spooky but beautiful and I was amazed by the way the gold reflectors on the lane markers glowed like they were on fire. It was weird, but it was almost as though the world looked . . . pretty. Even my world.
“We’re going to get you home to your mommy,” I said.
“Mommy,” she said back to me, but she wasn’t crying.
She knew the terrible day was over now, too.
She was an amazing little girl. I was going to miss her when she was gone.
Chapter Nine
Brooke: Why Didn’t She Call?
When the phone rang, I very nearly fell off the roof. Twice. Once when I jumped at the sound of the ring. Again as I tried to scramble in through the window. I kicked a shingle off my mother’s roof with the sole of one shoe. As it gave way, I lost my footing.
Meanwhile I was literally unable to believe I’d left my new cell phone in the bedroom. Not brought it out onto the roof with me. It seemed so thoughtless in retrospect that I had no way to frame it in my head. I was just baffled.
I also bruised and badly scraped my shinbone on the window sash when my foot slipped. But I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time.
I just remember that I picked up the phone and I was wondering why my shin hurt.
It was Grace Beatty.
“We have her,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent we have her. She’s dirty and she was a bit dehydrated, but she seems okay. You have to come down and identify her, of course. But she’s wearing red leggings and a striped tunic, and the boys who are bringing her in say she’s the spitting image of your photos.”
The world turned weirdly white and silent for a moment. The way the world goes white before you pass out.
Might have been a long moment, because Grace said, “Brooke? Are you there?”
“Yes. But I think I need to sit down.”
I plunked onto the carpet because walking over to the bed felt like too much.
I was overwhelmed with the joy of what I’d been told. That was part of it. I was also scared by the one-percent part. Granted, it was nearly impossible to think they had found another girl the same age, lost at the same time, in the same general area, wearing the same kind of clothes. And looking exactly like Etta’s photos.
But if it wasn’t her, I would die. Actually possibly die.
“Is she right there? Can I talk to her?”
“She’s not here yet. They’re driving her up. She’ll be here soon, though. So don’t bother waiting. Jump in the car and get down here.”
“I’m on my way,” I said, and clicked off the call.
My shin was surprisingly painful
