Shelter Us: A Novel (10 page)

Carro?
My car. “Oh, um . . .” I try to think of the Spanish words for “repair shop,” but I have no luck. “
Está roto
.” It’s broken.

“
Ay
.” She nods in understanding. “
¿Y los niños? ¿Como están?
” She never fails to ask about the boys.

“
Bien. Oliver está en la escuela. Izzy está con su abuela
.” She nods and smiles. “
¿Y su hija?
” I ask about her daughter, who is eighteen and lives in El Salvador with Carmen’s mother.

“
Está embarazada
,” she says, motioning a big pregnant belly. “
Un bebe
” she adds, to clarify for me. Joy and sadness vie for dominance in her expression. She is going to be a grandmother, but will she get to meet this grandchild?

“Wow, that’s . . .
excelente
.” I wish I could say more. I wish I could tell her the reason I’m going downtown, ask her what she makes of the whole thing. But we sit in companionable silence, having exhausted her English and my Spanish. After fifteen minutes, a bus comes and we get on. Carmen waves to someone she knows and sits down next to her, and they begin chatting in Spanish I’d never comprehend.

“Excuse me, how do I go downtown?” I ask the bus driver.

She keeps her eyes on the road. Her bland voice is the opposite of my urgency. “Get off at Fourth and Colorado and transfer to the express.”

I take a seat. The bus is mostly empty. Two older white women with reusable grocery bags get off in Santa Monica at Fourth and Wilshire in their quest for heirloom tomatoes and organic sugar snap peas at the farmers’ market. They are replaced by young Latino men with baseball caps, faces forward, eyelids drooping.

I transfer to the express as directed. Two rows up, a young woman holds her baby in a Winnie the Pooh fleece blanket. Across the aisle, an elderly man sits with his hands folded in his lap, a windbreaker zipped to his neck.

After we’ve gone a few more minutes, the old man leans over. “I’m going to the Museum of Contemporary Art,” he says. His voice is sandy, coated with experiences.

“Oh. I love MOCA,” I reply.

“Mocha?”

“That’s what they call it.” I raise my voice so he can hear over the bus’s engine.

“What’s that?” He holds up his hand to his ear and leans into the aisle.

“The museum—they call it MOCA.
M-O-C-A
. It’s the acronym. The nickname,” I shout, leaning toward him.

“Oh.” He nods. He looks out his window. I’m above the engine, and its loud white noise fills my head. We are making decent time. It’s 9:30 a.m. The late-for-work drivers own the road. A rusty Honda Civic is next to us below my window. I can see only the passenger seat, strips of duct tape holding it together. In the next lane a lady drives a black Mercedes sedan so new that its license plate hasn’t arrived from the DMV.

The bus follows the same path as we did to the car show. When we approach the underpass, I get up and stumble to the right side of the bus to get a glimpse of the sidewalk where I saw her the first time. No mother and baby today. We continue the route uphill. We reach the first stop, and the driver calls back to the old man that this is the museum stop. He nods and pulls himself to his feet, holding the chairs in front of him. His vein-dappled hands grasp the tops of the seats as he moves down the aisle toward the front of the bus. I notice a cane on the seat next to where he was sitting.

“Excuse me, sir, your cane!” He doesn’t turn around. I pick it up and bump my hip on the seat as I try to catch up to him. “Excuse me, sir.” I touch his arm.

His body jumps as though shocked. He looks at my hand.

“You forgot this.” I hold up the cane.

“Whoops. I always forget I need the damn thing.” He takes it and continues down the aisle.

As he makes his way down the steps to the sidewalk, on instinct I decide to get off, too. I emerge and look around, half expecting to see the mother and baby mere seconds after my arrival downtown, as though they’ve been waiting for me. The bus pulls away, and the old man moves toward the steps to the museum. He turns around, waves at me, and winks. “Have a lovely day.”

C
ity Hall
and its emphatic white tower call me to walk in that direction. I imagine the people inside hurrying around with briefcases, conferring in hallways, speaking to reporters, feeling important. My feet reverberate on the cement sidewalk, which is spotted with black stains. I cross my arms, clutch my purse tight, and resist the temptation to turn around and go home. I look for shapes that might be them.

A sour-smelling man sits on the sidewalk in my path. Deep creases line his leathery skin. The wrinkles in his knuckles are darkened with soot. They remind me of Izzy’s hands after he’s played in dirt: pudgy and caked with mud. I picture Izzy’s creamy, pinkish skin that emerges after the white lather of soap, the pale brown water in the sink. I wonder when this man last got to wash his hands.

“Got any food, lady?” he calls in a voice louder than I would have expected. It flusters me for a second; then I remember the granola bar I keep in my purse for “emergencies.” An internal voice admonishes,
Don’t open your purse in front of him
. But recalling my mom, I take out the granola bar and hand it to him. “Sorry, it’s all I have.” He grabs it. Instead of eating it, he puts it in his pocket.

Something about that pisses me off. I expected him to tear into it, gulp it down, or at least offer some gratitude. It was, after all, my snack. “You’re welcome,” I say to the air and continue down the hill. As I march along, I begin to worry that this is a sign. Maybe she will
be angry, too. Maybe she hates me for having given her a shitty lunch box, for having enough food that I could give it away. My pace slows, my strides get shorter. Maybe I should turn around, go back to where I belong. I stop walking. But I’ve come so far. My feet move again.
It’s okay
, they say,
keep going
.

I reach the corner. D
ON’T
W
ALK
. I press the button and wait for the light to change. I look around, get my bearings. The man on the sidewalk is now eating the granola bar. Oh. He may have been waiting for a little privacy.

The light changes, but I hesitate, held back by growing timidity. What am I doing? What do I think is going to happen? That I’ll magically find them and change their life? I don’t know the first thing about how to help or what to do. I am clueless about soup kitchens and shelters or any other services. I should have done research or something. So why did I feel compelled to come? Is it what I imagine my mom would do, or would want me to do? Am I trying to follow in her footsteps? A different question that’s been whistling in my subconscious finally swells up with sound: Will helping them save me from the darkness I’ve lived in since Ella died? Will my own hurt shrink? I cringe and ask myself,
Am I using them?
I miss the green light as I debate myself. I press the button again.

Okay, let’s say I am using them to feel better. Would that be wrong? They obviously need help. They don’t belong here. But why help them and not someone else? The baby, for starters. That’s obvious. But there’s something more. It’s hard to explain, but she’s different. It’s as though she has just barely lost her hold on the ordinary world, missed the last rung by inches. Maybe she could reach it again with a little boost. Maybe I’m the one to give her that.

Oh, who am I kidding? I barely have a grasp myself. I should go home and forget this folly. I start to turn back—then something catches my eye. Across the street, moving behind the street lamp—could that be? Yes, it is; yes, a stroller. My heart begins to race. I squint to get a better view.

I can’t believe it. After all this time.

I
recognize
the Lightning McQueen lunch box on the back of the stroller, and the woman’s profile, and her baby’s blanket, as they make their way down the sidewalk. I don’t know what to do. I want to run over to her. I want to run back up the hill.

A car trying to make a right turn while the light is still green beeps at me, so I run the rest of the way across the street. The artful, clever phrase “What the fuck am I doing?” pounds in my head. I have never felt so out of place. I am untethered. A brief burst of courage carries me. I am almost next to her. “Excuse me? Hello, miss?” I call out.

She turns around and looks at me. We are standing no more than three feet apart. She calls to my mind how Bibi might have looked at that age—young, alone with a baby, an outsider from the mainstream, with no resources but a visceral self-confidence. I get a closer look at her baby, a little boy, asleep in the stroller under an Elmo blanket. Her face registers confusion, then recognition. After a few seconds, she says, “Oh, here you go,” and offers me Oliver’s lunch box. “Sorry you had to come back for it.”

She thinks I’ve come for the crusty old lunch box.

“No, no,” I protest, taking a step closer. “No, I don’t need . . . That’s not why . . .” I stammer. “You can keep it.”

She puts it down. “Okay.” We stand there for a moment, looking at each other shyly. She is wearing the same sweatshirt she had on the first time I saw her, but it looks clean. She must have a place to
wash her clothes. Her fingernails are clean, too, so unlike those of the man on the sidewalk. I’m dying to know what her story is. “Is there something you want?” she asks.

I consider how to answer her question in the cold shadows of the old buildings. The filtered sunlight evaporates before it reaches these dirty cement sidewalks. I’m used to sunshine in my LA. Even here, far above us, the sky is brilliant blue and sunny, but the warmth doesn’t make it down this far. I think about Oliver and Izzy, at this moment the sun touching their skin, Izzy playing at the club with Joan, Oliver on the preschool playground. This woman’s child is wrapped in a blanket up to his chin, dozing against the cold of the concrete’s shadows. “I just, um, I just wanted to see if you’re okay.” The moment I say it, I want to take it back.

She considers me. Her eyebrows wrinkle as she tries to figure out what my game is. We stand facing each other in awkward silence. I realize I’m staring, so I look down at my hands. With no better ideas, I open my purse and pull out my last $20 bill. “Here, please take this.” Even as I hand it to her, I’m ashamed—by the act itself, by how little it is in the scheme of things. It’s not going to change her life. It’s not even going to get them a place to sleep tonight. It’s guilt money. But I don’t know what else to do.

“Um, okay. Thanks,” she says. She puts it in her pocket. She looks at her feet. I look at my feet, too. I am horrified by my lack of creativity, my utter helplessness to fix her problem. I was a lawyer. I should know what to do. But I’m useless—who cares if I can prevent a shopping center from being built on a wetland?

She breaks the uncomfortable silence. “Okay, then—bye.”

I guess that’s it. “Bye,” I reply, then head back toward the crosswalk. I’m cold to the bone and want to get the hell home, where I can have a shower and a good cry. I walk toward the museum bus stop, berating myself with each stride:
Really? You came all the way down here, on the freakin’ bus, you actually found her . . . and that’s it? You’re done? That’s pathetic. That’s completely pathetic, Sarah
.

“Wait!” she calls. “Excuse me, ma’am?” I turn around and see
her walking toward me, pushing the stroller. Her voice is clear and articulate. “I just wanted to say, I don’t know why you’re doing this, but I really appreciate it.” Her voice grows quieter as she speaks, until it almost breaks and she seems taken by surprise by the tears that threaten to form.

And just like that, she saves me. My heart wants to spill out onto the square of sidewalk, flood the street with gratitude for making me feel like I’m not a fool, like what I’ve done is not nothing, when I know it is. “You’re welcome,” I mumble, embarrassed by how little it takes to be appreciated. For another moment we stand there, not knowing what to do next. A young black guy with a McDonald’s to-go bag walks past us. I smell whatever is leaking grease through the paper bag, and my stomach rumbles. I point toward the McDonald’s a couple doors down and ask her, “Would you like to have breakfast with me?”

She tilts her head, examines my face, trying to distill my motivation—
What does this lady want?
—but hunger or curiosity outmatches whatever reticence she has. “All right.”

I open the door for her, and she maneuvers the stroller through. I follow, transported by the smell of deep fryers, salt, and cooking meat. The door closes, and a sensation of butterflies—at once giddy, strange, and familiar—overwhelms me. While waiting to order, I recognize the feeling: the Ferris wheel, just as the ride begins.

I
haven’t
been to McDonald’s in years; it is a point of pride that my kids do not recognize the Golden Arches. I feel fairly traitorous to be here.

“I’ll have coffee, please,” I say, my head tilted up at the illuminated menu. “And an Egg McMuffin.” Oh, guilty pleasure. I step aside to make room for the young lady, the object of my obsessive searching. She orders the same things I did.

“Anything else?” the cashier prompts, following protocol. She looks to be about forty years old, dark-brown complexion shining under fluorescent lights. Her fingernails are thick and long, to the point of curling at the ends, painted royal blue to match her eye shadow. Her eyelashes are heavy with layers of mascara.

“Maybe he’d like the yogurt parfait?” I say to my companion, pointing to her baby.

She looks at me, then back up at the menu. She agrees. “Okay, I’ll have the yogurt, please.” After a moment, she adds, “And another Egg McMuffin. And hash browns. Please.” The cashier looks up from beneath her nearly closed eyelids, then back at the register, and punches in our order.

We go to a corner table where there is room for the stroller. I carry our plastic trays. I sit down across from her, unwrapping the paper from my McMuffin. I peel melted cheese off the paper and eat it, then take a small bite of the sandwich, scalding a small patch of skin on the
roof of my mouth. “Careful, it’s hot,” I warn. She unwraps hers, closes her eyes like she’s praying, and the steam evaporates while she sits still. She opens her eyes, catches me looking at her, and then takes a bite. She lifts the coffee cup to her mouth and sips it, then sets it back down. She pauses, breathes, the urgent ache of hunger eased.