“Well. Like . . . this story about why she didn’t call the police for twenty-four hours. You believe it?”
“Hard to know what to believe,” he said.
I think he was about to say more. I might have cut him off.
“That’s what I was thinking. There’s a strong correlation between homelessness and mental illness, isn’t there?”
I watched his brow furrow. He had a big forehead and a receding hairline. Lots of frown lines.
“I wouldn’t really say a strong one,” he said, “no. I’m not saying it never happens. But I think it’s something that’s changed over time. Used to be not so many people lived on the street, and when they did, you could more or less tell why. Addiction or mental illness. But these days you got the majority of your people with, like, one paycheck standing between them and the street. So nowadays, could be anything. Medical bills. Job loss. You know.”
“Is she on the street with her family?”
“No. She was alone. She said her mother threw her out.”
“Ah,” I said. Nodding to myself. “So some kind of behavioral thing.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am . . .”
He paused for a strange length of time. I looked away from Etta for a change. It was hard, but for a second I did it. I watched his brow furrow down even farther.
“What?”
“Seems like you already made up your mind you don’t like this girl. And you haven’t even met her yet.”
“She had my baby for a day without calling. A day! Do you know how much I suffered during that day?”
“Can’t really say as I know, ma’am, no, but I’m a father, so I can imagine. I’m a father of a girl not much younger than this teenager we’re talking about. And maybe that’s swaying my opinion here. I look at her and I see my own kid. Only . . . you know. Like they say. ‘There but for the grace of God.’ I don’t know this girl well enough to tell you to like her. I can’t even tell you for a fact that you should believe her, because how do I know? But two things I can tell you, because I saw them with my own eyes. One, she ran after our squad car, screaming to get us to stop. She’d been running so long she could hardly breathe. And carrying that heavy toddler. So it looked to me like she wanted your little girl back home.”
“Oh,” I said.
It’s a terrible thing to say, but I was disappointed. I wanted my anger. Maybe I even needed it.
He didn’t go on to say more. So I asked, “What’s the other thing?”
“She loves your little daughter. That I can tell you. That I know.”
I felt my head rock back against the headrest. I was shocked that he would say such a thing.
“She can’t love her,” I said, my voice hard.
Etta squirmed on my lap because I sounded angry.
“Why can’t she?”
“She only knew her for a day.”
He chewed on the inside of his lip for a minute. We were stopped at a signal, at a well-lit intersection. And I saw him doing it.
Then he asked, “How long did it take you to love her?”
I didn’t answer.
We didn’t say another word the whole rest of the way there.
Chapter Ten
Molly: Where Did the Dark Go?
I was sitting under those really bright fluorescent lights, talking to that lady cop. Sometimes for a minute I felt like I could just talk to her, pretty much like I’d talk to anybody, because I’d be sort of forgetting for a minute that she was a cop.
But I really hated those terrible lights. We used to have them at my school, and they made my eyes hurt. Actually they sort of made my brain hurt but that’s a hard thing to try to explain to somebody who’s not sensitive about stuff like that.
But back to that lady cop. She didn’t wear a uniform, which is probably why I kept forgetting. She was really tall, and her hair was really short, and I think there might’ve been a minute in there where I was thinking maybe she was family, as in, like . . . one of us. Bodhi would’ve known—Bodhi always knew. He was never stupid about anything like that, like I always am. But then she said something about having four kids of her own and then I figured I was guessing wrong. Still, you never know, because lots of different kinds of people have kids, especially these days.
“So how do you know so much about babies?” she asked me.
She sat back in her chair and sort of drilled right into me by looking into my eyes. We’d been sitting quiet for a few seconds, so it surprised me. Also because we hadn’t been talking about me right up until just then.
“I had two little sisters,” I said.
I was feeling shy for reasons I couldn’t quite figure out, and like I wanted to leave that bright room all of a sudden.
“Had?”
“Well. Sort of had. They’re not dead, if that’s what you mean. I guess they’re still my sisters, but I don’t see them anymore.”
“So what happened that you ended up leaving home?”
I looked down at my hands and I was ashamed of how dirty they were. I wondered if my face and hair were just as bad. I felt ashamed talking to this lady because she was all clean and respectable and I didn’t even have a mirror to see what a mess I must’ve been.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I said.
“Okay. No problem. We’ll talk about something else. Are you hungry?”
My eyes came right up to hers. I didn’t mean for them to, and I didn’t ask them to, but the food thing just got a really big reaction out of me when it came up.
“Yes, ma’am. Starving.”
“Okay. I’ll send somebody out for takeout. You like pizza?”
“Yes, ma’am. I love pizza.”
A slice of
