I didn’t care. I just ran.
“Oh my goodness,” Grace Beatty said. “What happened to you?”
She was looking down at an area below my knees. So I looked down, too. My jeans were soaked through with blood where I’d scraped my shin.
“Oh,” I said. “Running for the phone.”
“Through barbed wire and land mines?”
“Long story,” I said.
I could barely breathe. I could barely talk. Also I didn’t want to talk. I wanted her to hurry up and tell me where Etta was.
She pointed to the chair by her desk and I sat in it.
“You’ve beat her here by a little bit,” she said, “but it won’t be long. Sit down and I’ll tell you a few more of the details.”
I didn’t answer. Just nodded. At least, I think I nodded. I meant to. I couldn’t feel my butt touching the chair. I was nearly outside my body. But I felt my shin ache and throb.
“One of the patrol cars was driving around the area searching for her, and a girl ran up to their car and said she found this baby. Teen girl. Living on the street from the look of it. Said she found Etta strapped into her car seat on the sidewalk.”
“Oh my God,” I said. I was just barely able to breathe after my sprint. And now the story was taking away my ability to breathe again. “She was strapped into the seat all that time? Oh, my God. That poor girl! And she had nothing to eat and drink and nobody—”
Grace interrupted. “From what I can gather she found her last night. Maybe not all that long after you reported it.”
I said nothing. Possibly for a long time. My brain was swirling. My mouth was wide open. I could feel it. I could feel a new emotion gathering up inside me like a storm gaining power. It wasn’t fear or grief, which had been such constant companions. It was rage.
“Why. Didn’t. She. Call?”
I was trying hard to be calm, because I didn’t want to take it out on Grace Beatty.
“We’ll know more when they get here. We’re going to take a full statement from the girl. Right now what the guys tell me is that she was afraid of some boys. She said they were trying to take Etta away.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. I couldn’t get my brain to straighten out. I couldn’t process information. I was searching for the end of the rage as though it were light at the end of a long, deep tunnel. I couldn’t find it. “Why would they take her?”
“She says they wanted to try to ransom her back to you.”
“That . . .” I started to say, again, that it didn’t make sense. But I wasn’t sure. “Does that make sense? Right now this is sounding like something you hear from an unreliable narrator. Is this a reliable person?”
“No idea,” Grace said. “I haven’t even met her yet.”
Then her eyes left me. Moved to an area above my head and behind me. She tossed her head in the direction she wanted me to look.
I turned around and saw a blue-uniformed officer holding Etta.
She was absolutely filthy. As though someone had purposely rolled her in mud and then let her dry out.
Then I was moving across the room to her. But I couldn’t remember standing up. She hadn’t seen me yet. She was craning her neck. Looking down the long corridor, with its blinding fluorescent lights.
She was calling, “Molly! Molly! Molly!”
The officer turned his body in such a way that she would be facing me. So she would notice me.
“Look,” he said. “There’s your mommy.”
“Mommy!” Etta cried.
I realize, looking back, that I rewrote history in that moment. I decided she had always been saying “Mommy.” That she had never said “Molly” at all.
I took her in my arms and carried her over to Grace Beatty’s wooden chair. Sat her down there and fell to my knees in front of her. Threw my arms around her.
Absolutely, utterly lost it.
I mean, I just fell apart in that moment. I sobbed so hard I couldn’t breathe.
I kept saying, “I was so scared.” Over and over and over, I said it. “I was so scared.”
A few minutes later I would remember how to talk to Etta. Comfort her. Ask her how she felt. But in the moment “I was so scared” was the only thing I remembered how to say. And sobbing was the only thing I remembered how to do.
“You might want to take her over to the emergency room,” Grace Beatty said. “Just to be on the safe side. Just to be sure she’s none the worse for wear. While you’re gone, I’ll see what that girl has to say.”
I bristled at the mention of her. That girl who had held my daughter for twenty-four hours without calling. While I lost my mind. While I went through every kind of hell imaginable.
I said nothing about it.
I moved for the door, Etta on my hip. Then I stopped. Turned back.
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t have a car. My car wouldn’t start. A neighbor drove me here.”
“I’ll take you,” the uniformed officer said.
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
I followed him out to the parking lot, out back, still carrying my child. Probably too tightly.
“I was so scared,” I said as he opened the passenger door for me. Inviting us to sit up front.
“I can imagine,” he said, and walked around to the driver’s side.
We drove away.
The city slid by outside the car windows. I didn’t look directly. I was staring at the face of my child in the darkness. Waiting to pass under another streetlight. And then another. So I could see her more clearly.
“What do you think of this girl?” I asked a few blocks later. “The girl who found Etta? Does she seem on the level to you?”
“Not sure what you mean by ‘on the level,’”
