SOME PEOPLE
CAMERON WALKER
The stroller was on the side of the offramp. Marisa cut through two lanes and pulled over before she realized she’d touched the steering wheel. Her blinker was on, though, its dependable metallic heartbeat indicating that some part of her had known what she was doing. Still, thank God there hadn’t been any cops around.
The stroller was empty. Marisa sighed. Relieved, maybe, but the brief daydream of herself as a baby-rescuing superhero had vanished, too. Who was she kidding? Forty years old, forty-seven pounds overweight, still in Fresno—she should be used to snuffing out the person she thought she’d be by now.
Nice stroller, though. Black, not too dirty. A blanket and a Tupperware packed with goldfish crackers sat in a mesh pocket. Marisa wheeled the stroller back to the truck and drove home imagining how it had ended up on the Highway 41 exit. Had someone been rummaging through the trunk of their car for a diaper or a lost toy, and forgotten to put the stroller back in? Was it a tired young mother out for a walk--and when she realized she had almost wandered onto the freeway, she snatched up her baby and ran? It was possible. Sleep deprivation was a bitch—the years between now and when her girls were babies accordioned together, and she felt that same itch on the insides of her eyelids, the feeling that she was moving through honey. Sweet, maybe, but impossible to get anywhere.
At home, Marisa left the stroller in the truck and thumped her way through the screen door. George was in his chair, slack-faced and snoring after driving back from the overnight shift at Avenal. The remote was still in his hand—their younger daughter Amber likely already found him like this and turned the TV off.
Marisa got on the computer in the kitchen and picked through Craigslist. It took her a while to find the lost & found section, but there it was, under “community”. Lost German shepherd, Lost Yorkie, lost green card, lost white tackle box, even a post that said, “IM LOST!!!” Marisa clicked on that one first, but it turned out to be a chihuahua mix, its owner writing in all block letters. Just like a chihuahua, she thought, acting bigger than it needed to be. Nothing about a stroller.
She began writing her own ad. Then the same blackout certainty that gripped her on the highway came down upon her; the words were posted and Marisa was spackling tuna on low-carb crackers ten minutes later. A police car eased past the dusty window over the sink. She glanced out at her truck, but the stroller wasn’t visible. Maybe Marisa’s older daughter had asked her cop friend to check on them. Small comfort. She couldn’t even think of Jade without her top molars finding the bottom ones and bearing down.
At the library, Amber sat next to Milo Vargas. He downloaded college applications for her while she searched the job listings for him. Neither of them liked people to know what they were up to—borrowing each other’s dreams was safer. Amber would have done almost anything to get out of here. Anything except what Jade did.
“Warehouse worker,” she said to Milo. “Wait—minimum high school diploma.”
“For a warehouse?” Music—something emo—was leaking from his headphones. Amber was surprised Milo heard her. He slunk over to the printer and came back with a sheaf of papers. “Here’s the FAFSA. Your parents have to sign it, though.”
Amber ignored this impossibility. “Fishing guide in Juneau?” she said. “No experience needed.” When Milo didn’t respond, Amber clicked on a listing that had just come up in the jobs section: “SHE’S LOST,” it said.
Lost my Daughter, 19. Missing since April. Pregnant!!! Black hair, hazel eyes, 5’7”? (see photo). If U find her, tell her I have a stroller for her.
There was no photo. “Some people,” Amber muttered. She clicked away, then returned. She couldn’t help herself; this was her problem, always wanting things to be right. Repost this in “Missed Connections,” she wrote back. And your photo didn’t come through. Try resizing it in Adobe and uploading again. Amber resisted saying that the person should rewrite the post to sound like less of a nut.
This woman sounded just like her mother, except that her mother would never have written this. Her mother said that she would never speak to Amber’s sister, Jade, again. Besides, her mother barely knew how to check email. “Make your password something you can remember, something important to you,” Amber would tell her. But either nothing was important to her mother or, like she said, she just couldn’t remember.
When the cop was gone, Marisa went outside and unfolded the metal skeleton of the stroller. There was the small brief miracle of all of the stuck parts aligning themselves and turning into something that worked, something that could carry a baby. Her daughter Jade had transformed, too, in pregnancy, the round of her belly soft and satisfied as newly-risen dough. Marisa had called her a lard-ass before she’d realized. “Look who’s talking,” Jade said.
The two of them had shouted at each other in front of the Greyhound station. The sound of Jade’s raspy voice saying, “How could you let me turn out like you?” still strobed through Marisa now in the late afternoon, the October sun too low, too knowing.
That night, the cop had pulled up next to the Greyhound. Must have been a friend of Jade’s for him to do what he did. “Ma’am,” he said, standing between Marisa and her daughter, holding his palm up. “Ma’am.” Marisa couldn’t stop herself from crying, from clutching first at Jade, then at the bus driver, then at the edge of the bus’s door.
The cop had stepped toward her. A small man, he lifted Marisa to the curb so the bus that held her daughter could pull away.
Cameron Walker is a writer based in California. Her short fiction has appeared in Terrain.org, District Lit, and New South. Her essay collection, Points of Light, is forthcoming from Hidden River Press.