The Umbrella My Son Gave Away

We found out three days later, from the woman who ran the Robin Street shelter, a steady, no nonsense woman named Louise who called us directly once Deputy Collins connected the dots, that Molly had in fact been the woman at the bus stop. She had left the shelter that morning against Louise’s advice because she’d had a doctor’s appointment in town and no one to drive her, and the storm had caught her walking the last four blocks. She had not planned to be seen by anyone. She had certainly not planned to be photographed being kind to, by a stranger’s twelve year old son, and have that photograph reach the one person in the state she was hiding from.

Louise asked, carefully, if we would be willing to meet Molly, once things settled, so Molly could thank Tyler herself. I said yes before I had thought it through, and two days later Louise drove her the forty minutes into Maple Ridge on a quiet weekday afternoon, no cameras, no neighbors, just the four of us at our kitchen table with a pot of coffee and a plate of the sugar cookies I keep meaning to stop baking and never do.

Molly was quieter than I expected and steadier than I expected in the same breath. She held her coffee mug with both hands the way you do when your hands need something to do besides shake. She told us, in pieces, the parts she was ready to say out loud. That she had been with Cole since she was twenty three. That the bruises had started small enough to explain away, a grip too tight during an argument, a shove that could be called an accident if you wanted badly enough to believe him, and that by the time she stopped wanting to believe him she was already four months pregnant and already afraid of what leaving would cost her. That she had planned her exit for six weeks before she managed it, packing one bag at a time into her sister’s car trunk so nothing in the apartment would look different to him.

“I picked Robin Street because it was two towns over and he’d never once heard me mention it,” she said. “I thought that was far enough.”

Tyler, sitting across the table in his socks with a cookie he had not touched, asked her the only question that seemed to matter to him. “Are you scared all the time, or just sometimes?”

Molly looked at him for a long moment before she answered. “I was scared all the time before I left,” she said. “Now I’m only scared some of the time. That’s still better. I didn’t know it could get better until it did.”