Girls in Trouble (43 page)

“I’ve got a stash,” Anne said, tapping the backpack. “Mars bars, chips. Soda. Maybe we can make it a double feature, sneak into another one, like last time.”

Sara smiled weakly. How could she do this? How could she convince

Anne it was the best thing to do? “Anne—” she said, and as she looked at her daughter’s bright happy face, her mouth went dry. “Sit,” Sara begged.

Anne glanced at her watch. “Okay, but we’ll miss the previews,” Anne said. She plunked down on the bed, bouncing on the springs, making them squeak. “Looks like someone let the air out of you,” Anne said. “Hope it wasn’t my parents. What a fight I had with them this morning over coming here!”

She wanted to say it right, to take her time and sound calm. “I have to
go back to New York,” Sara said. “Just until I can save money, and until I can get some work here.” Anne grew still. “It’s just temporary,” Sara insisted.

“We’re leaving here?” Anne asked uncertainly.

“No, no, of course not!”

Anne’s backpack slid off her shoulder, thunking to the floor, but she didn’t bother to pick it up. “I don’t know what my parents would do if I left—I know they’d try to stop me, they’d make it so rough—” She rubbed one thumb along her fingers, deep in thought.

“Anne—”

“But I don’t know what I’d do if you left me here.” Her voice speeded up. Her shoulders rose with her breathing. “I can always go to school in New York, right? Or maybe I can get a job.”

Sara threw up her hands. “Anne, you can’t quit school! And you’re not listening to me. Even if I thought it was a good idea, which I don’t, I can’t take you. You’re a minor. It’d be kidnapping! And this time, the charges would stick. I have to do everything right!”

“Is leaving me right? I thought we were best friends!”

“Anne! I’m not your best friend!”

Anne’s neck snapped back, as if Sara had slapped her. Her mouth crumpled. “You
are
mv best friend! We think alike, we dress the same—we are the same—”

“Anne, I
can’t
be your best friend! I’m your
mother
—I have to be responsible!” Sara reached to touch Anne, but Anne jerked away from her so hard, she knocked Sara’s brush off the dresser, and then Anne knocked everything else from the dresser, too, keys and loose change and Sara’s Gap knapsack, the same as Anne’s, and then Anne whipped around to face Sara. “My
mother?”
Anne said, incredulous. “I don’t need a mother! I
have
a mother, thank you very much. I need a friend—something I thought you were!”

“Look, I made a lot of mistakes when I was a kid—I’m trying to do things right—”

“Now I’m a mistake?” Anne cried. “I hate you! I wish I never heard of you at all!” Anne sprang up from the bed. She strode to the door and yanked it open.

“Anne! Oh God, I didn’t mean—” Sara cried, but Anne was gone.

* * *

Anne didn’t know where she was going. Her heart was a hard little marble inside of her, rolling crazily around in her chest. She couldn’t go with Sara, couldn’t stay here without her, either. Couldn’t go home and face her parents’ relief when they discovered Sara had left her. She dug in her jeans. Ten bucks. Her just-in-case money Eva always made her carry, because you never knew what could happen.
You never do know,
Anne thought, helplessly. Ten dollars wouldn’t get her very far but at least it was something. She walked along the road, sluicing her tears with her fingers.

She didn’t believe for one moment that Sara would come back. People could say things all they wanted, but it didn’t make them true. She felt so alone. Where was there a place for her? She used to have friends. She used to feel like she had parents. She used to have Sara. She looked out across the highway, at the cars zooming past her.

But she still had a father.

He floated up in her mind, a tracking blip on a radar screen, growing louder, more insistent. She could go find him, show up at his doorstep and present herself and he’d have to take her in because she had nowhere else to go. He had loved Sara, maybe he’d love her, too. Sara had said he lived in Pittsburgh. He shouldn’t be so hard to locate, and she had all the right in the world to find him. And he had no right to turn her away.

She stood out on the road and jabbed out her thumb. Who cared about dangers? What more could happen to her that hadn’t happened already?

Eva was at home waiting for George, waiting for Anne, who was late, and Eva didn’t have to wonder where she was. She knew, all right. And she knew with whom.

Eva had lost her daughter. All this time, all this distance, trying to make sure that that would never happen, and here it was. She had tried so hard not to feel that she and George were just borrowing Anne. Eva was the only mother who didn’t let her child run far on the playground, but who traipsed after her for fear her daughter would be stolen from her. She always tried to know where Anne was. To keep tabs.

Eva remembered once, when Anne was only three, she had taken her to a department store to shop. Anne had been sitting quietly at her feet while Eva looked at dresses, and then, Eva had reached up to get another size, turning her back on Anne for just a second, and when she turned around, Anne was gone.

Never had she been more terrified. She stared across the sea of racks, the milling crowds of people. The air tightened around her. “Lost child!” she shouted, because that was what the magazines all told you to do, but the only thing that happened was that other mothers clutched their children closer to them, averting their faces from her as if what had happened might be catching. The people without kids looked at her as if it were her fault, as if she must be a bad mother not to keep better track of her own child. She finally grabbed a saleswoman, who made an announcement over the PA and sent salespeople out to comb the store, and all Eva could think of was that she had read how people could take children into the washroom and cut their hair in the stall, how they could fit wigs on small heads and inject drugs and the child you had known could walk right past you and you might not even know it. All those thoughts flooded through her, cold as a stream. She sat in the back room, numb with fear, and then after an hour, a saleswoman had led Anne to her by the hand. Anne blinked up) at her and Eva leaped up and then crouched down by her daughter so she was at eye level. She cupped Anne’s face, stroking back her hair, staring into her eyes. “Where were you? Oh honey, I was so worried! Were you scared?” Anne gazed impassively at her and Eva turned to the salesgirl. “Was she crying?”

The salesgirl patted Anne’s head. “She was sitting under a row of evening dresses playing with a beaded hem.”

Eva started. “She was?”

“She said she was there the whole time.”

“I don’t understand. If she was there the whole time, then why did it take you so long to find her? Why didn’t you have me paged sooner?”

The salesgirl gave Eva an impassive stare. “No one in the dress department thought she was missing. She was just sitting happily playing, so they thought her mother must be nearby,” The salesgirl shrugged. “Usually, missing kids cry for their mothers.”

Eva felt as if she had been slapped. As if there must be something terribly deficient in her that her own little girl didn’t know enough to cry like other little girls when her mother wasn’t in sight. She left the store holding Anne’s hand so tightly, Anne began to whimper and complain. “You’re hurting me, Mommy.” A woman walking past gave Eva a funny look, but Eva didn’t care. She kept her hand clamped around Anne’s, and the whole way home, she kept watching Anne in her car seat from the rearview mirror.

By eleven, George was home, but Anne still wasn’t, and Eva’s worry turned to anger, and in a way, she was glad because at least she didn’t feel so helpless. Instead, she felt fueled. Determined, she called Sara, punching down the digits, but no one answered. She leafed through the phone book, calling the friends of Anne’s she could remember—Flor, June—but Flor was out on a date, and when she called June, June’s mother answered and said, “Oh, Anne! We haven’t seen her around here for such a long time!” And then June’s mother told Eva that June had the flu and was’fast asleep.

“I’m calling Sara again,” George said, “she’s as bad as Anne in all this,” and just as he reached the phone, it rang.

“George?” Sara said, her voice tight with worry. “Is Anne there?”

They all met at the police station. It was the second time in her life Sara had been in such a place with George and Eva, but this time, she wasn’t the one in trouble. This time, the cops were polite and concerned. “This way, ma’am,” a cop said. He was young, chewing gum, making it snap and pop. The air about him smelled like Juicy Fruit. Eva and George were already sitting around a desk, talking to a cop who was typing something into a report, and when Sara came in, they didn’t look at her.

Sara sat beside George and Eva. “Maybe we should call people she knows—” Sara faltered and Eva shot her a look.

“Don’t you think we’ve done that already?” Eva said, her voice sharp. “Of course we’ve called. All her friends.”

“Who did you call?” asked the cop, and Eva rattled off names and Sara
sat there feeling lost because she couldn’t remember Anne ever mentioning these people.

“Any other names?” the cop asked Sara and she shook her head, shamed that she couldn’t come up with any.

“What places did she like to go?” the cop asked.

“Bowling,” said Sara. “The movies.”

“What bowling alley?”

Sara blinked. “I don’t know—”

“The Wal-Ex,” George said. “We used to go to the Wal-Ex all the time.”

The cop tapped his pencil. “Any allergies or anything we should know about?”

Something pulsed in Sara’s stomach. She remembered newspaper stories about kids who were lost who needed medication, who could go into shock if they were so much as stung by a bee. Helplessly, she looked over at George and Eva.

“No, none,” said George.

“Scars? Birthmarks? Tattoos?”

Again, Sara felt that same swimmy helplessness. /
know her,
she told herself.
I do.

“A tiny scar, by her right thigh,” said Eva. “She fell from a bike.”

“Was she upset about anything?” the cop said, and Eva looked down at her hands and then at George. “We have some family issues—” she said.

“She was upset that I was leaving,” Sara blurted.

Eva stared at Sara. “You’re leaving? When were you going to tell us this?”

“She wanted to go with me,” Sara said, but to the cop, not to George and Eva because she couldn’t bear the way they were both looking at her.

“You come here, disrupt our lives, get Anne all agitated and confused, and then you just leave and we’re here to pick up your pieces? Is that it?” George said.

“I was coming back! I was going to do the right thing!”

“Is this why she took off?” the cop said. “To go after you?”

Sara turned to the cop. “She doesn’t know my address in New York City. She wouldn’t go there without me. She was just upset.”

“I see.” The cop looked at Sara.

“When will we know something? What will you do?” Eva said.

“Well, with kids, we don’t usually do anything. Not for forty-eight hours. They usually come back.” He stood up and nodded at them. “But we have the report. Look, I’m sure she’s just upset, that she’ll come home, her tail between her legs. I wouldn’t worry. Call us if you hear anything more. And we’ll be in touch.”

“We’ll go every place she’s ever been,” George said to Eva. “I swear we’ll find her.”

They all walked out together, Sara trailing behind Eva and George. No one talked, but then Sara saw George reach out and grab Eva’s hand, pull her close, and then he put his arm about her, and she put hers about him. They pressed together like a seam. When they got to the front door, Eva pulled the door open and then stopped and suddenly began to weep. Her hands flew up to her eyes. “Eva,” George said, and held her, stroking her back, so tenderly that Sara felt like a voyeur, and then Sara saw that George’s eyes were damp, too. “My baby,” Eva said quietly.
My baby,
Sara thought, but she kept silent. She wavered, unsure what to do, and then Eva snuffled, digging into her pocket for a handkerchief, and when she looked at Sara, Eva looked tamped down.

“I’ll help you find her,” Sara said, and Eva held up her hand.

“No, you’ve done enough,” Eva said wearily. “Just go. Go home to New York City the way you planned. Just go and leave us alone.”

“No,” George said. “You stay. Please. Stay and help.”

Eva looked at him, startled. “George!” she said.

“We need all the help we can get, Eva,” he said. “Even if it’s Sara’s.”

They drove around the town, Sara in the backseat. George drove to the bowling alley and went inside, and when he came out his face was so drawn that he didn’t have to say one word, both Sara and Eva knew Anne wasn’t there. They drove to the school, to a mall, to a dozen places Sara didn’t know about, and at each one, she felt more despairing.

Finally, George and Eva drove Sara back to her hotel.

“There’s nothing more you can do,” Eva said. “Just go. We’ll call you.”

“I’m staying,” Sara said.

By Friday morning, Anne was in Pittsburgh. It had taken her two days to get there. The first ride, a woman who barreled down the road in her little white car, took her across two states. At the side of the road, Anne gulped the soda she had packed, which was now warm, the fizz gone. She ate the candy and chips until she began to feel ill from the rush of sugar, the tang of salt, and then she threw them away. Her next ride was with a middle-aged woman who lectured her about hitching until she dropped Anne off at a diner in Virginia, and by then Anne was starving. She sat at the counter and scanned the menu for whatever would be the cheapest and the most filling. “Corn chowder,” she said, which turned out to be watery broth with a scrim of oil across it and not a kernel of corn in sight.

“Could you please pass the salt?” she asked the person next to her, a burly man in a Yankees baseball cap. They started talking, and he told her his name was Charlie, and that he was a trucker.

“Are you crazy traveling alone?” he said. “I have two girls about your age and I don’t even let them out of the house after seven, let alone hitch by themselves.”