It was faced away from me, the car seat, so I was looking at the back of it, and that made it hard to know if it was a good find or not.
Then I went to that place in my head where I got kind of frozen up inside, which I pretty much always did when I thought something good was about to happen, because once you let yourself believe something good is about to happen, it can also not happen. Any idiot knows that.
I got up to it, and I looked down, and I was still kind of nervous because I was about to see if I’d found something worth real money or not.
And then, when I looked, I was shocked by what I saw. Really shocked.
This little girl was looking up at me with these huge brown eyes. She was being real quiet, but you could see she’d been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and her nose was all snotty right down to her lip, but she wasn’t crying anymore. Just sitting real quiet.
She looked up at me, and she didn’t really look scared of me. She didn’t really look happy to see me, either, though. She just looked confused, like she couldn’t figure out the world at all in that minute, and, let me tell you, I really know how that feels.
I said, “What are you doing out here all by yourself?” but it was kind of a stupid thing to say, because she was just a baby. I mean, not a baby baby, not a little baby, probably old enough to toddle around on her feet, but not the age of a kid who would answer me back in a full sentence.
She just stared at me with those big eyes.
“Where’s your mommy?”
“Mommy,” she said, and wrinkled up her face like she was going to start crying again.
“Oh, no, baby, don’t cry. Don’t cry, little girl. We’ll find her. We’ll find your mommy.”
She looked up at me with those big eyes again, and her face straightened out like she could maybe stop crying and believe me. Trouble was, I didn’t know if what I’d just told her was true or not.
“First let’s get you all unstrapped here,” I said to her, because I had a feeling she might’ve been strapped in there for a while. I can’t say for a fact why I thought I knew it, other than the way you could tell she’d been crying for a long time with nobody wiping her nose. “I know all about little girls,” I told her while I unclipped her, “because I’ve got two little sisters. They’re a lot bigger than you now, but they weren’t always. They used to be just about your size and I used to help take care of them a lot and right now I just miss them so damn much I could . . .”
The word I was heading for was “cry.” But I looked down at those huge brown eyes and I figured I’d better not do it—I’d better not even say it—because she was looking to me for reasons to stay calm, so all I said was “Sorry for the cussing. Don’t repeat stuff like that.”
But she had no idea what I was saying, I could tell.
I pulled her up into my arms and she accepted me right away. Just like that. Sometimes a little kid her age won’t want to go to a stranger. They’ll fuss and try to get back to their mom. Of course that’s a different situation because it means their mom is right there to go back to. This little girl had been strapped in a car seat on an empty sidewalk in the dark, so if she hadn’t decided to be okay with going to me, what better choices did I figure she had?
I got kind of panicky, just all of a sudden, because it came over me in a big way that I had her now, and she was my responsibility. I couldn’t just put her down and walk away, so what was I going to do?
I walked around in circles calling stuff out into the dark.
“Hello? Hello-o? Mom of this little girl? Parents of this little girl? Are you around here? Somewhere? Anywhere?”
I had to ask, because I couldn’t just walk away with her. What if they’d only set her there for a second to get something out of the car or go into a building? Well, the answer to that, of course, was they would be terrible parents to do it, but I still couldn’t walk away with their kid.
But I stood there with her, her cheek down on my shoulder and her little fingers holding tight to the back of my shirt, and just listened for an answer, and let me tell you, there was nothing and nobody out there. This was a pretty industrial part of the city. Not literally downtown, where the office buildings are, because that’s nicer, but definitely a business-y part of the city, mostly machine shops and warehouses, and nobody actually lives here except people who’re on the street. We live everywhere, especially places where other people don’t, because that way there’s nobody to call the cops on us to drive us out of the neighborhood. And it’s not a place you really want to be at night, so it’s not like there were people walking by or anything.
I just stood there in the middle of the sidewalk for a minute, holding her, and I got this spooky feeling like in those movies where the star character realizes they’re the only person left alive on the earth.
“Okay,” I said to the little girl. “Next idea. We have to find a phone and call the police and report you missing. Or . . . found, I guess I mean. Report you found.”
But, finding a phone
