Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. I’ve just been unusually emotional since the incident.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I can relate.”

  Then she put her head down and pitched back into her food. And I put my own head down and ate, too.

  It helped.

  “I know you’re going to try to get me to go back to that foster home,” she said.

  It was several minutes later. She had just downed the last bite of her dinner. Set down her fork. She wiped her mouth with her napkin and stared straight into my eyes. Possibly for the first time ever. No, not literally the first time. There had been that one time at the police station. But it had been short.

  “I met her,” I said.

  “‘Her’ who?”

  “That foster mother.”

  “Oh. Her.”

  “I don’t like her,” I said.

  “I don’t either.”

  “I think she hit you.”

  She quickly looked away again. She didn’t answer.

  “Did she hit you?” I asked. I felt it was an issue I needed to press.

  At first, nothing. Then she muttered something so quiet as to be inaudible.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “With a broom handle,” she said. A little louder this time. “Ten times.”

  “That’s abuse.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Just tell your social worker. Maybe she can put you someplace better.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Maybe. It’s the maybe part that I’m worried about.”

  “How about dessert?” I asked her.

  We had been quiet for a while. Nursing a pall that had fallen over the table. Over our attempts at conversation.

  She let out a long, loud syllable. Something between a groan and a growl.

  “I’d really, really like that,” she said. “But I couldn’t fit one more bite of food down there. I’m not used to eating such big meals.”

  “Take it to go, then.”

  No answer. I looked up to see her staring at my face. As if she were doing math in her head. As if the answer were hiding in my eyes.

  “I can really do that?” she asked. Her voice sounded awed. “It’s not cheating?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  “There’s no cheating, Molly. I’m offering to buy you dessert. Get something that doesn’t melt, like a piece of pie. Take it home for later.”

  But my voice stuck on the word “home.” I looked away again, embarrassed.

  “This is weird,” I said after a time.

  “What part of it is weird?”

  “Taking you out for a meal and getting to know you a little, and then I’m supposed to take you back to that . . . crate. And just leave you there in that awful industrial neighborhood in the dark by yourself. Like somehow I’m supposed to pretend it’s a suitable place for you to live.”

  She didn’t answer for a long time. I was looking down at the table. I wasn’t sure I wanted to brave a look at her face.

  When I finally did, it seemed to unstick her ability to speak.

  “You could talk to my social worker,” she said. “That lady cop knows who she is. You could ask her if she’d put me someplace better, but if she isn’t sure she can, or you don’t think she will, you can’t tell her where I am. You have to promise not to tell her where I am unless she can put me someplace better.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I think I can do that.”

  Actually, it worried me. It might be against the law to know where a runaway foster teen is living and refuse to say. And what if something terrible happened to Molly in the meantime? But I agreed to try because I had to do something. After everything she had done for Etta and me. Even if I did think she’d done it too slowly.

  I caught the waitress’s eye, and she came to our table, pulling two dessert menus out of her apron pocket.

  She held a menu out in my direction. I waved it away.

  “Nothing for me,” I said.

  Molly grabbed hers and ran her finger down the items. If she was really absorbing all those dessert choices, she was a lightning-fast reader.

  “I’ll have a piece of the chocolate peanut butter pie to go,” she said. And she handed back the miniature menu.

  “Coming right up, hon.”

  The waitress retreated, and I sat frozen in my own thoughts. Or lack of thoughts. And my own sense of inadequacy.

  “I’m back living at my mother’s house for a time,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  It was clear from her tone that she had no idea why I was telling her this.

  “If I had my own place, you’d be welcome on my couch for a couple of days.”

  But my face burned with shame when I said it. Because it might have been a lie. I didn’t mean for it to be. I wanted it to be true. But I’m not sure it was true.

  “Right,” she said. “Got it.”

  “It’s just . . . if you knew my mother. She’s so negative. She’s just against everything. I couldn’t even ask an old college friend to stay for a few days without her pitching a fit.”

  “Right,” she said again. “I get it.”

  I got a sickeningly uncomfortable sense that she did get it. All of it. All the subtext. All the parts I was trying to keep under wraps.

  She was not a stupid young woman. Not by any means. She got me. And that was an unfortunate turn of events.

  We sat in my car. In the dark. Near the trash-filled vacant lot where she had been living.

  She was holding the little Styrofoam to-go container on her lap. Running her finger back and forth along the edge of it. It made a strange squeaking sound.

  I knew she didn’t really want to get out of the car and go back to that awful place. Who would? I felt like a beast for even bringing her back there.

  “Maybe I could take you to an inexpensive motel,” I said. “Pay for a night.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “You’ve done enough. Just talk to my social worker for me.” But still she didn’t get out of the car. “There’s just one thing, though. You said you wanted to take me out to eat so you could talk to me. You know, tell me all kinds of things about that night when I had your little girl, and how you felt about all that. But then you sort of . . . didn’t.”

  “True,” I said.

  We sat in silence for an awkward length of time.

  “I guess the truth is . . . ,” I began. Then I paused. And wondered if I even knew. “I guess I really said what I needed to say in the note. How thrilled I am to have Etta safely back and how much I appreciate the fact that you kept her so comforted. And how that was the answer to something almost like a prayer for me. And that I’m sorry I got it so wrong that first night at the police station. That was what I wanted to say, but I said it all in the note. But it didn’t feel like enough somehow. I needed more. I guess I wanted to talk to you in person to see how you felt about all of it.”

  “Oh, I get it,” she said. Her voice sounded more sure of itself. Suddenly. “You want me to forgive you.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “That’s just so typical. People always say they’re sorry for what they did to you, and maybe they are, but they just want to tell you so they’ll feel better, not so you will. Fine. I forgive you. There, are you happy now?”

  She opened my passenger door and stepped out into the night.

  I jumped out, too. Called after her.

  “Molly!”

  I didn’t think she would stop. She was stomping away fast. Very determined to get me out of her life again. But I was wrong. She paused. To see what else I had to say, I suppose. I walked closer.

  She was standing in the vacant lot, in the dirt. Next to a discarded sofa. A massive thing with no cushions. I got as close as I thought she’d let me. In other words, I stayed a few steps back.

  “I guess I’ve got no right to ask you this,” I said.
>
  She was still facing away. As if just about to resume stomping off.

  “Probably not,” she said.

  But if I could just break through that one brick wall. If I could just understand why she was out there. What she had done to bring it on. Then maybe the idea of inviting her closer into my life to help her wouldn’t feel so terrifying.

  “What?” she asked. When she got tired of waiting.

  “Why did your mother make you leave? What happened?”

  “What difference does it make? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Something must’ve happened.”

  “You think it’s my fault, don’t you? You just don’t get it at all.”

  “No. I don’t get it. So tell me. Help me get it.”

  She breathed out a sigh that was almost more of a snort. I could tell she was angry. “My mother just has these things she’s prejudiced about,” she said.

  “I don’t understand that. That doesn’t make any sense. What kind of mother throws her kid out on the street because of prejudice?”

  “You’re going to have to tell me,” she said. “Because I have no idea.”

  Then she walked away into the night.

  When I got home, my mother was in the living room. Watching TV. Blaring the volume, as always.

  When she saw me, she hit the mute button. The silence felt stunning.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. Her voice was loud and hard. As it usually was, but even more so.

  “I just had dinner with a friend.”

  She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

  My gut instinct was to run. Trot up to my room and leave her behind. I didn’t. I sat on the couch with her. She was clearly taken aback.

  “I just wanted to tell you something,” I said. And paused. My voice was soft, and I watched her face change as a result of it. Become even less comfortable. My mother liked the familiar. Conflict was familiar. This moment was not. “I wanted to tell you . . . thank you. For being a better mother than some. Making sure I had a roof over my head all those years.”

  “And now,” she said.

  “Yes. And now.”

  She continued to study my face for clues. Clues to what, I had no idea.

  “You’ve been drinking,” she said.

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. It was a bitter sort of laughter. I couldn’t believe communication with her was so impossible. Even when I was sincere, and really trying.

  “I have not been drinking.”

  “Let me smell your breath.”

  I leaned over and breathed into her face. She sniffed audibly.

  “You’re on drugs,” she said.

  I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. It was all so absurd.

  “How can you even say that?” I asked. “Are things really so horrible between us that you can’t believe I would say thank you for putting a roof over my head?”

  “Well, you never did before. And you’re laughing like a fool when nothing is funny. What’s so darned funny? Nothing that I can see.”

  “Us,” I said.

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  Then I went upstairs, checked in on my sleeping baby, and put myself to bed.

  While I was waiting for sleep, I tried not to imagine how it would feel to sleep in a crate with openings between the slats. In a bad neighborhood. In the dark and cold. Alone. At age sixteen.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Molly: Different Kind of Home

  It was a day or two later, and I was just minding my own business, going out in the morning looking for stuff to recycle. The sun wasn’t really on me yet, because it was early, and it was cold, and I didn’t have anything like a jacket.

  I was thinking I’d have to take money out of Bodhi’s wallet and buy something when we got into the really deep, cold part of winter. Better LA than Utah, but it was still cold enough that you needed some kind of jacket.

  For the first block everything was okay, but then I noticed how a car was following me.

  I turned a corner, kind of fast, and did a quick look over my shoulder. I sort of looked and tried to pretend I wasn’t looking at the same time. Then I looked where I was going again, but I heard the car turn the corner behind me, so I walked faster. And while I did that, I was sort of reacting to what I’d seen in my brain, almost like I looked so fast that I didn’t really see what I saw until a second later.

  It was a real nice car, as in a luxury car like rich people have, but it had the craziest paint job I’d ever seen. This midnight-blue base, but then half the hood was yellow. And not an exact half, either. Not with a ruler right down the middle. I mean like somebody was spraying yellow paint over the hood of this really nice car and then just changed their mind for some reason.

  Right around the time I was thinking that made the person following me some kind of insane freak, I heard somebody call my name. I jumped a mile.

  “Molly!”

  It was a lady’s voice, so just for a second I didn’t run.

  I stopped and turned around, and it was that Brooke lady, the one whose baby I found. I couldn’t believe she was driving that crazy car. The last time I’d seen her, when she took me out and bought me turkey and mashed potatoes and pie, she’d been driving a different car. The other one was old and not a luxury car and not what a rich person would drive at all, but at least it had a normal paint job.

  She had her window down, so I walked right up to her driver’s side door, which meant I had to walk out into the street, but there was nobody coming because there was nobody else out at that hour.

  The whole driver’s side of the car was yellow, and a nice, neat yellow, too, like a real paint job. Like if you only saw the car from where I was standing you’d almost think it was a perfectly normal bright-yellow car. If you didn’t look at the hood. And if there even is such a thing.

  “Did you talk to my social worker?” I asked her right off the bat, before she even had time to say anything, because if she hadn’t done that one simple little thing for me then I didn’t want to hear whatever she’d come to say.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it good news? Will I like it?”

  “No.”

  I turned and walked away again. Up onto the sidewalk and back to my normal route past all the trash bins that might’ve had bottles or cans. I didn’t know why she came and I didn’t really want to hear why, because I was mad.

  I could hear her driving along behind me.

  “Molly!” she called again.

  And this time, because now both her windows were down, I heard the baby girl in the back seat, and she was calling my name, too. It was a little bit quiet, but I could hear her saying “Molly, Molly, Molly,” and it melted all my mad away. I could just feel it turn to water and pour out of me, like I was all leaky and full of holes.

  I turned around, and the lady pulled over to the curb and stopped, and I could see the baby in the back seat, in a car seat sort of like the one I’d found her in, but newer. Then I wondered why I hadn’t seen her the first time I walked up to the car, but I hadn’t walked very close, and the light had been in my eyes from that direction.

  I tried to open the door to jump into the back with her, but it was locked. I should’ve known. The lady was all paranoid about driving in a bad neighborhood with her kid, not that I blame her. When she saw I was trying to get in, I heard her unlock all the doors. It made this clunking sound, and I saw the lock button pop up.

  I got in and started talking to the little girl, and I heard the clunk of the doors locking again. The baby had this big smile and her eyes were all wide to see me, and it was the best thing that’d happened to me in as long as I could remember, just that look on her face.

  I played clapping games with her for a minute, and she was just as bad at them as she’d been that night when I taught her, but she always knew to clap against my hands when I held them out to her. It was hard, though, because her seat was strapped in backward, the way the safety people say y
our baby is supposed to ride. We had to sort of clap sideways. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her mom watching us in the rearview mirror.

  “What did my social worker say?” I asked her, because I was still a little bit mad about that. “Does she just not care at all that somebody was beating me with a broom handle?”

  “She wasn’t that bad,” Brooke said.

  “How bad was she?”

  “She just has a different perspective on the things that can go wrong in foster homes. She says she takes allegations of abuse very seriously. But she feels they have to be proven. She says it’s common to find there’s been corporal punishment in a placement. But it’s also common, if a teen doesn’t like a foster home, to make up something they think will be a deal breaker.”

  “Got it,” I said, even madder now. “So she thinks I’m lying.”

  “She just wants to investigate the situation. Try to prove who’s telling the truth.”

  “How do you prove a thing like that? Nobody was there watching it happen.”

  “I guess she wants to talk to the other foster kids in the home. About their experience.”

  “They won’t tell her the truth.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because they know all about the system and how things go. They know if they tell on her they still might not get taken out of the home, and then that terrible lady knows they ratted her out, and things get even worse for them.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute and neither did she. And I wasn’t clapping with the baby and she wasn’t smiling anymore, because she knew we were talking about something dead serious, and she knew I was mad.

  “You think I’m lying, too,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “Me? Me? I’m the one who told you right off the bat I thought she hit you. Before you ever said a word about it. I brought it up.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s right. I forgot about that. How did you know, anyway?”

  “It was something she said to me. But now I don’t remember her words exactly.”

  I waited around without talking for a minute in case she wanted to say more, but she didn’t.