Shelter Us: A Novel (9 page)

“I wanted to invite that homeless woman here, and you said no.”

“Wait, what? That’s completely different!”

“Not really.”

“Sarah, this is your father we’re talking about.”

“Yes, and he has a home, a family, and plenty of money to pay for a first-rate hotel anywhere in the world. That poor woman”—my voice involuntarily breaks at the mention of her—“has nothing, and you wouldn’t let me invite her into our home.”

“Why are we talking about her?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Because I want to. Because they’re still out there.”

Robert looks at me for a long moment. I hold his gaze. “Sarah,” he starts, then stops. We both know there are a hundred arguments he could make to tear mine apart. None of them is worth it. He pulls his eyes away first. “Okay, honey, I’m going to go take a shower,” he says, defeated. “It was a long day. Do what you want.”

I will.

T
he next
morning I call Bibi and ask if she can watch Izzy for a couple hours while Oliver’s in school. I don’t explain why—it’s too complicated to tell her that I’m on a quest to look for a homeless woman downtown and I don’t want to drag Izzy into it. Something—seeing my dad, quarreling with Robert—has galvanized me. I can’t explain it, not even to myself. It’s just something I know I have to do. Like bearing down in labor. I can’t not.

“It’s a miracle!” she exclaims. “My swim trainer just canceled on me. Bring Izzy here. I have some brand new watercolors I’ve been saving for him and Oliver.” Bibi’s gift is seeing miracles in the mundane.

I hurry into the bathroom. My jeans, shirt, and sneakers from yesterday are on the floor. I put them on. I splash water on my face, skip the lotion that’s supposed to keep the wrinkles at bay. I forgo makeup. I don’t want to appear too fancy. This is not a difficult look for me to achieve. I swipe a toothbrush across my teeth, just enough to get the taste of sleep out of my mouth, then hurry downstairs. “Time to go, boys!”

When both of my children are ensconced in their morning activities, I head for the freeway.

I
plan
to take the same route as when we went to the car show. I don’t have any better plan. I realize that this is a fool’s errand, and that I have no idea where they’ll be. They may not even be in Los Angeles anymore. Maybe they hopped a bus to Riverside or Orange County. Maybe they headed west to Santa Monica and they’re at the park overlooking the Pacific, ten minutes from my home. I speed past the exits at Arlington, Western, and Hoover. And even if I find them, what will I say? What will she say?

I walk down a street and spot them. She has found privacy of sorts, sitting in a narrow pathway between two buildings, resting on a stack of wooden crates. Her eyes are closed; her left arm rests on the blue plastic handle of the stroller, gently rocking it at a steady tempo. Any mother would recognize that pose, that pace, and know its meaning: her baby is almost asleep
.

I don’t want to startle her or wake the baby. I freeze
.

At that moment, she opens her eyes and turns toward me. She looks at me defensively. Her hand stays on the stroller. She squints at me, wonders what I want
.

I take a few steps toward her. I point to a box next to her. “May I sit?” She nods permission. We inhabit the awkward silence for a minute. Words ricochet in my brain, nothing worth uttering
.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“I was worried about you. I wanted to see if you were okay.” She says
nothing. My words reverberate in the hidden passage we occupy. What is okay about any of this?

The alley reeks. Orange peels and trash soak in puddles by our feet. She opens her mouth to speak. “I don’t remember what okay feels like.” She covers her face with her hands. Her shoulders cave in, and she lifts her knees to her chest. She curls her body into itself, as small as she can make it
.

I lift my arm and reach to console her. She doesn’t flinch. After a few minutes, she sits up, wipes her eyes with her palms. “Sorry,” she says
.

“It’s okay,” I say
.

I watch this scene play like a bad movie in my head and miss the exit. Crap. I get off the next exit and find myself on Maple. I’ve never come this way before. A green sign with arrows points to the fashion district, straight ahead. The street is lined with old buildings that appear barren inside, but their painted exteriors call up their history, faded images of a thriving hub. I begin my search.

I drive three or four blocks, and suddenly the streets come alive. Families and couples walk up and down sidewalks lined with stores selling wedding dresses, skinny jeans, Dodgers and Lakers gear, suitcases, toys, backpacks, quilts, perfume, shoes, three-piece suits, and jewelry—everything glittering. A man standing by a sign that says P
ARK
, $5 A
LL
D
AY
waves a flag up a steep driveway. I pull into the garage at his direction.

I descend a graffiti-coated stairwell and emerge onto the street where the colors and smells penetrate deep. I feel like Dorothy arriving in Oz, where the world goes from black-and-white to Technicolor. Bras in hot pink and turquoise and twenty more colors mock my quiet lingerie drawer. The aroma from a hot-dog cart triggers saliva in my mouth. I promise myself I’ll buy one on my way back.

I walk under a sign that says S
ANTEE
A
LLEY
, into a pedestrian shopping bazaar. I revel in the sensory overload, let it scrub clean the quotidian contents of my mind and the residual stress from my father’s appearance yesterday. I buy Oliver and Izzy kiddie sunglasses for $5 each, certain that I’m getting the tourist price.

I reemerge from the shopping alley to the street. A tiny, puff-of-cotton cloud hangs at an angle at the edge of the sky. A man rides a bicycle built for two alone. A white moving truck with no signage rolls along the street. A gleaming, creamy Cadillac tries to parallel park. Men wheel metal carts piled eye-high with flattened cardboard boxes. More stalls, more vendors: Toy cats that squeal when stepped on.
Comida china
and fresh-fruit cups. Tuxedos on mannequins the size of Izzy. A tiny pink flower girl dress—I stop in my tracks, staring at the promise of tulle. Against my better judgment, I walk into the store. I stand in front of the flower girl dress, reach out to touch it. A woman walks up to me. “I give you good price.” For a moment too long, I think about buying it. Sensing an opening, she continues, “For your little girl? She’ll like. Good price.”

Suddenly the room is spinning, and I reach my hand out to the woman to keep from falling. I lean down to let the blood come back into my head. When the dizziness passes, I stand up and take a deep breath. “Not today,” I say, and I hurry out of the store back toward my car, searching for the right parking lot, past the now-nauseating scent of cooked meat. Nowhere is safe.

I
get back
in my car and cruise toward the city streets where I first meant to go. I see people lying on blankets next to shopping carts, but no one with a stroller. I prowl up Olive a couple miles. I don’t see them. I cruise back down Grand, still searching. At a red light, I check that my doors are locked. Now that I’m here, I laugh at the ludicrousness of my daydream on the freeway. I’m too scared even to stop the car, let alone get out of it and walk down an alley toward a strange homeless woman. This whole place feels hostile, foreign.

The light-headedness returns, and I realize I’ve had no breakfast. I need to stop somewhere to eat, to think. After a couple blocks, I find a corner café that looks to be part of the downtown renaissance. In other words, I’ll be okay in there. Inside, the vibe hovers between “professional chic” and “not-so-starving artist.” The coffee is gourmet. The menu is written with artistic flourishes on a chalkboard. The young man who works there sports a spike of black hair and mascara that set off his dark eyes. I order a coffee and a donut and settle into a booth with white leather seats and gleaming chrome trim.

I take a bite of the donut, forgetting my mission for the moment. I like being here alone, far from my normal habitat. No moms wearing designer yoga pants, diamond earrings, and Gucci sunglasses buying bagels for soccer team snack duty.

A muscular black guy in a tight gray T-shirt sits in another booth reading
Variety
. A middle-aged Latino man in a white apron sweeps
the floor. Outside, a young white couple with tattoos covering their arms and necks walk past. I watch them sashay down the sidewalk. Large white trucks are parked on the opposite curb, poised to film a movie or a commercial.

I drain my coffee, lick my sugary fingers, and go back to my car. Locked safely inside, I notice very few homeless men or women on the street. I am—grotesquely—disappointed. Those I do see look like they’ve been on the street much longer than the woman I met; something is missing from their eyes. Some barrier has been built between them and the functioning world around them, something that makes the thought of striking up a conversation with one of them preposterous. Yet I didn’t feel that with her. She seemed still “of this world.” How long would it take to go from regular person to dead inside? Is that why I care so much about her, because she seems reachable? Or is it just that I can’t stop thinking about saving her baby?

The car’s clock warns me that it’s time to leave to pick up the boys. I roam a few more blocks on my way to the freeway but don’t see them. A confession—I’m a little relieved that I didn’t find them. Part of me silently prayed that my pilgrimage would be in vain, that I would return to my home with an empty car, yet still get to congratulate myself for the effort.
I’ve done my best
, I can console myself. I can move on.

But another part of me, ancient and primal, will not let this go.

F
or the next
two weeks, I try to behave as though I’ve moved on, as though the turn of the calendar to March has cleaned the slate. It’s the exact opposite.

Every day they appear to me, her pushing the stroller, feeding her baby. Every day I push them away. I come up with reasons why it’s foolish to think about helping them. I try to keep my mind on what I need to do, to focus on what’s in front of me, what’s tangible. I do the laundry, but while pouring the liquid into the machine I become desperate to know where she washes their clothes. I pick up a box of diapers from the supermarket shelf and worry about how she can possibly afford them. I load the dishwasher, throwing away unholy volumes of uneaten food. I put away toys. I sweep the floors of sand carried home from the sandbox. None of this movement is enough to cover the buzzing in my head, the urgent sense that I’ve got to try again to find them.

The doorbell rings. Joan is here for her Grandma & Me date with Izzy, and she’s taking Oliver to school, too. My car is in the shop, finally getting the dent banged out of the fender. I have been hanging on to that dent for more than a month, like a souvenir.

I take a breath before I open the door. “The boys are almost ready,” I say, stepping back from the door to let her in. “Boys! Grandma’s here! Get your socks and shoes on!” I offer this “socks and shoes” request daily, as though one day they will magically finish dressing of their
own volition and I will not need to go into their closets to find socks that match and don’t irritate them with itchy seams or loose elastics.

I walk into their room and immediately forget that I’m on a sock-finding mission, and instead start picturing where I could set up a portable crib for that homeless baby. There’s room in the middle, maybe. Could this house be their haven?

This is insane. I have to look for them again. I have to find them. As soon as Joan and the boys leave, that’s what I’ll do. I feel the hot, sultry relief of giving in to compulsion.

I grab two sets of socks and shoes and flit downstairs, my gait quick now that I have a mission. Marching into the playroom, I say, “Let’s go, kiddos,” sit down in front of them, and get to work. Left feet, right feet, socks and shoes, done. Two boys are up and ready to go. I hug them, kiss their heads, and say, “I’ll see you later.” I stand at the doorway, waving and watching them cruise away, until they turn a corner and I know they can’t see me anymore.

I dash back into the kitchen, grab my purse, and run out the door, only to be greeted by the sight of my empty driveway.
Shit shit shit
. How could I have forgotten my car was gone at the same moment I was watching Joan drive off with both of my children?
Fuck fuck fuck
.

Just when I think things can’t get worse, I hear Susie’s front door open and close. I do not want to deal with that woman. I am done with her sham smiles and fake hellos. A quick glance tells me it isn’t Susie stepping through the door. It’s Carmen, her housekeeper. She waves.

“
Como está,
Mrs. Sarah?”

I’d like to say, “I’m terrible, Carmen. I’m angsty and frustrated and have just been thwarted in the one thing I wanted to do,” but instead I say, “
Bien, gracias,
¿
y usted?
” I always remember to use
usted
, the formal “you,” with housekeepers.

“
Ay, estoy un poco enferma
,” she says, pointing at her nose and throat. “
La señora no me quiere en la casa
.” I can understand this much Spanish. She’s sick. She probably just got there, two hours on the bus, and now Susie is sending her home.

“
Lo siento
. Feel better, Carmen.”

“
Gracias
.” She waves and walks away, checking her watch, rushing down the sidewalk, and then it dawns on me that I’m not stuck here at all. The bus! Why not? I lock my front door and jog to the bus stop, catching up to Carmen. I sit down next to her, catching my breath.

“
¿Adónde va
, Mrs. Sarah?” She looks at me with some confusion.

“Downtown,” I answer. “Um,
yo voy al centro
.”

“
¿No tiene carro?
”