I bombed out on finding a phone.
I went to the corner store, but the guy had already closed it up for the night. He didn’t keep what you might call regular hours, just gave up and went home when there was nobody coming in. And there were no pay phones around there. There were probably no pay phones anywhere in the city, because who needed them? Everybody had a cell phone except Bodhi and me.
I didn’t want to walk back to the all-night market, because I had the girl on my hip, with her head on my shoulder, and the car seat hanging from one hand, and it was too heavy. It was too much for me. Plus there was an even more important reason. It was a bad neighborhood and it was only getting later, and I was willing to risk myself by walking down the streets here, but I wasn’t willing to risk somebody else’s little baby girl.
I took her back to where Bodhi and I had been hiding at night. It was a huge wooden shipping crate in the far corner of a vacant lot full of trash, made up of slats with a tiny bit of room in between, that you could’ve seen the stars through if you could see the stars in the city. But it was handy for seeing if anybody was coming, and the empty slots were too narrow for them to see us. When I say it was huge, I mean for a crate. For a place to stay it was pretty damn small, but Bodhi and I slept wrapped around each other anyway. But only because it got a little bit cold. We didn’t like each other like that.
I left the car seat outside because there was no room for it and sat inside with the girl and waited for Bodhi to come back. Sometimes he would come back too late and with too much money—a scary amount of money, like forty dollars—and I would be worried about where he got so much.
I held her tight in my arms and said, “Come back, Bodhi, come back, Bodhi, come back, Bodhi,” over and over and over.
And the little girl said “Mommy” and “Horsey,” in no particular order, and I never did know which one she was about to say next.
Bodhi got back probably an hour later.
He stuck his head in and looked at me and looked at the girl, and got this strange expression on his face, like life was just so completely surprising and he couldn’t decide if he should like that about life or not.
He had this way of tilting his head like a curious dog if something struck him strange, and he did that.
He was experimenting with different ways to have a beard, which meant he had to find a way to shave every day or two, but I guess it was worth it to him. Right now it was a little square soul patch under his bottom lip, but with the rest of his beard poking out around it because it was near the end of the day. But it was all kind of wispy and light, his beard hair, because he was young, too. Not as young as me. I think he was around nineteen but I never asked.
“Well,” he said, and his voice was super familiar so it made me feel better. “Who. Is. This?” He made his voice kind of high and light on the last word, which was nice, because it made the baby less scared of him.
“You need to go find a phone,” I said. “Maybe run down to the all-night market and ask the lady there to call the police. Tell her we found a baby just all by herself on the street and they have to come get her and figure out who her mother is and how to get her home.”
He frowned, and the baby fussed a little because it scared her.
“And what if her mother dumped her on purpose?”
I actually hadn’t even thought of that, and then I was wishing I didn’t have to think of it now.
“The police still need to come and get her. You know. And get her a foster home or something. Whatever they do with kids.”
But then I got worried because I didn’t really know what they do with kids, and if what they do is okay for the kid, and the weird thing was that I already cared what happened to this one, even though it had only been an hour or two. But there was nothing I could do about it. She wasn’t my baby and I had to turn her over to the police, and there was just no other answer to a question like that one.
“The police,” he said. Like the words tasted bad in his mouth when he said them. “I kind of hate to call the police. I just now finished outrunning a couple of them.”
“Again?”
I said it like I was mad, but really it scared me, because if Bodhi got arrested then what would I do?
“Gotta make a living,” he said.
“You can get lost before the police show up.”
“Hate to bring them here,” he said. “Might be the end of our good hiding place.”
“Just tell them we’ll meet them on the corner. When I hear a car pull up or voices or whatever, I’ll come out. They won’t see where I came from behind all the junk.”
For a minute he didn’t do anything at all. Just froze there with his head in the crate and his body out, like he was thinking about things. Then he gave us a little salute like an army man, and his face was gone.
The whole Bodhi was gone.
He got back maybe half an hour later, but time is a weird thing to try to judge,
