Have You Found Her (12 page)

“Okay.” I laughed. “I’ll totally accept that.”

It was almost time to go, and I wanted to use the ladies’ room. “I’ll be right back.” I rose and placed my bag on my seat—my way of saying,
I trust that I can leave this here with you.

“All right,” she said, moving over to the busted old upright piano that was sitting there, somewhat incongruously, hosting a collection of board games with scattered pieces on its bench and top. Her way of saying,
You’ll hear that my hands are occupied, so you know I’m not going through your bag.

She lifted the lid and cracked her knuckles, and as I closed the door to the bathroom across the lounge, I heard her begin to play.

It was Beethoven—fucking Beethoven!—“Für Elise.” She played it perfectly, fluidly; the notes lingered and rushed and got louder and softer as she caressed each key, feet urging the pedals. I froze. She
could not
be playing this right now; she
could not
be playing like this. This was
not believable
. This called into question everything she’d told me about herself so far. How could she have been homeless since the age of twelve, neglected and abused since birth, living in squalor and poverty, and have learned to play the piano like this?

I washed my hands, dried them, and walked out to where she was hitting the crescendo. She swayed a little as she put the finishing touches on it, leaned over with one hand to hit the last note, and put her hands in her lap.

She looked at me. I bugged my eyes at her. Her lips pursed as she tried not to smile.

“Dude,” I said. “You did not just play that like that.”

She sat there with her pursed lips, enjoying my reaction as I continued to stare at her, mouth agape.

“Where the hell did you pick that up?”

She shrugged,
no biggie
. “I used to sell dope to this guy who had a jazz bar in Oklahoma City. Sometimes he’d let me crash there. He showed me how to read music.” She squinted at the sheaf of sheet music on the rack, played a few bars of Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” “Once you learn how to read the notes, you can play just about anything.”

So she’d learned how to sight-read from a jazz and dope fiend in Oklahoma City. “Yeah, I know,” I said, wary. “I took lessons in middle school.” Three years of them, weekly, with practice in between. And I still couldn’t sight-read, or play like that.

“It’s funny, they always got a piano at places like this. They got two at the shelter.” She was right, I realized, though I’d barely noticed them, and had never seen them played. “Maybe they’ll have one at rehab.”

She slid from the bench back to her chair, nonchalant, but I couldn’t be quite as blasé about her virtuosity as she was. Even if she’d had informal lessons, it didn’t explain how she got so good, how she’d stayed so good without practice. The music just seemed to come naturally to her—as natural as quoting the
Tao Te Ching,
as natural as applying physics to the problem of how to sneak a cigarette. I already knew the kid was a prodigy, that she could read a book in a day and discuss it with you the next; I’d noted her vocabulary, I’d read her poems. I’d seen her discussing her meds with the nurses—“Is that the vancomycin? Am I through with the nafcillin?” Now, watching her sight-read “The Rose” off the rack of a psych ward piano, it was like all six sides of the Rubik’s Cube clicked into place.

I turned to her, sheer wonderment all over my face. “You’re a savant, aren’t you?”

Sam drew back and wrinkled her forehead at me. “I don’t play
that
good.”

I shook my head, brushing her off. “You’re a fucking savant. You’re a supergenius. You’re like Good Will Hunting, or somebody. You have an eidetic memory, don’t you.”

Anybody else would have had to ask what
eidetic
meant. “What are you talking about?” she asked, uneasy.

I had not stopped staring at her, my mouth hanging open. She fidgeted a little under my gaze.

“You’re kind of freaking me out,” she said.

Well, vice versa, Einstein.
“I’m sorry.” I shook my head again, trying to dispel the weird feeling I had, a combination of jealousy and possessiveness. Maybe she was smarter than me, but she was still my discovery. I eyed her covetously, and she looked nervously back at me. “I’m just…impressed.”

“Anyway,” she said, breaking eye contact. “I think it’s almost eight o’clock.”

The nurse who’d unlocked the ward for us came into the lounge and made the announcement—“Visiting hours are over in five minutes, please say your good-byes.” I rose slowly from the piano bench, loath to leave Sam again.

“It was great seeing you,” I told her. “Despite the circumstances.”

She rose and hovered next to me. The chiseled line between her eyes was back, deep as ever. “You too.”

“And you know, the circumstances are only going to get better from here.”

She exhaled and put on a brave face. “I know.”

I reached out for a hug, and she reached down to receive it—a loose clasp, brief but satisfying. I slung my bag over my shoulder.

“Hey, Janice?” I turned, and Sam bit her lip. “Can I ask…would you give me your phone number? I wouldn’t use it unless it was an emergency. Just in case I get moved again, or something. I want you to know how to find me.”

“Oh! Uh…” Twelve thoughts at once:
Yes! No. Bad idea, not kosher; then again, none of this is. Say yes, you want to, and she needs you—you’re her mentor. But not twenty-four hours a day. It’s too much; you’re going to regret it when the phone starts to ring. But at least you won’t lose her again.
“Sure.”

She reached into her cargo pants and pulled out the notebook, the one I’d given her two months ago. The tan cardboard back was soft with wear, like a teddy bear.

“I read what you wrote all the time,” she said, and flipped to the back page. She passed me the book, and I scrawled my cell number under my name, adding a smiley face with a ponytail.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling at it.

“You’re welcome.”

The other visitors started to trickle out; the agitated man was taking his leave, agitatedly. I turned to follow, and Sam stopped me. “And, one other thing—do you think, tomorrow, could you maybe bring me something to read? It’s so boring in here, I just…”

Tomorrow
. Another internal argument started to brew. The holidays were over; I had work to do. I couldn’t afford to get back into the habit of visiting her every day. Then again, it hadn’t been every day—we’d just missed two weeks.

“Sure thing,” I decided. “See you tomorrow.”

Of course, tomorrow turned into every day. Every day after work, I ran over to the psych ward to sit with Samantha until visiting hours were over; then I’d run home, burst through my front door, and greedily suck down a joint. Bill tried gently suggesting that I take a break—“Babe, you’re running yourself ragged again; please don’t overdo it.”

“I won’t,” I swore. It was just temporary, anyway. Soon Sam would go to rehab, and I wouldn’t have to visit every day. But today she needed me. She was in crisis; it was even more severe than usual.

She’d called me the night before from the patients’ pay phone. She wouldn’t say what had happened at first, but then she broke down and spilled it.

“This guy, one of the patients, he came into my room, and he started…trying stuff with me.”

“Oh my god.” I’d clenched the phone in my hand until the veins popped. “What the fuck is going on at that place? Who the hell—did you tell the staff?”

“No! No, Janice, please don’t say anything. They’d just make a big deal out of it, and I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to get out of here as soon as I can. Please.”

“Okay,” I’d agreed, unwilling. But it definitely put a jog in my step as I wended my way to see her.

The nurse let the visitors onto the floor, and there was Sam, right by the pay phone, waiting for me, her face pale. I hugged her, briefly, and pulled back to look into her eyes. They were wide, red, and haunted.

“How are you?” I asked, though the answer was apparent—she was terrible. Why did things like this always happen to her? she asked me. She must have invited them. She must have deserved it. She collapsed into a seat next to me, let me put my arm around her. We’d just been talking the day before about the time she was raped in Boston, and the subsequent abortion she’d had; she’d asked the same thing yesterday, too. Why did this always happen to her?

“Please let me tell the staff,” I asked. “It won’t make trouble for you, and they should know what happened so they can isolate the guy.”

“No,” she insisted. “It’ll make it worse. Please, I got enough to deal with. Just let it go.”

It had been a brutal few days—she’d been coming face-to-face with old nightmares, things she’d managed to blot out with heroin and meth and whatever else was handy. Now sober, she was having flashbacks, night terrors, panic attacks; even with the meds, she was a wreck. From the time I got off the elevator every day to the time the nurse escorted me away, Sam stuck to my side, begging me for some kind of answer, some kind of relief. How was she supposed to live with all this? When was this going to get better?

Rehab, I told her. Rehab was going to help her out so much, and then, a year from now, when she graduated…“How about this,” I blurted. “When you graduate from rehab, I’ll take you to Disney World.”

She gaped at me, astonished. “Are you kidding me?”

Are you
kidding
me?
I asked myself.
What the hell are you promising her? Man overboard! Man overboard!

“I’m totally serious,” I replied. “Let’s make a bargain, and shake on it. If you go to rehab and stay sober for a whole year, next winter I will take you to Disney World.”

“For real?” Sam looked awestruck, almost frightened, as the idea dawned on her—I really
was
serious. Me and her, we’d go to Disney World, just like Ashley and her family; we’d ride all the rides and eat all the candy and buy matching souvenir T-shirts. “I…I always wanted to go there, when I was a kid.”

When she was a kid, she was beaten with an electrical cord. When she was a kid, she had to steal her own food or starve. When she was a kid, her parents took them all to Thailand for a few months, so they could make money off the kids while the heat cooled in the States. She could still speak the language, though she didn’t much care to. Samantha had never been a kid, but I would fix that.

“It’s a deal, then.” I extended my hand. “Shake.”

Sam shook my hand, still wary, despite her widening grin. “This is, like, legally binding, right? You’re really serious?”

“Certifiably,” I promised.

“Oh
man
, I am
totally
going to stay totally sober from now on,” she vowed. She straightened her posture, and her face was shining with reverence. “I’m not even gonna huff the air freshener I got stashed in my room anymore.”

I walked home that evening, high off the contact with her happiness. I’d done it; I’d given her something to look forward to, some tangible reward for staying alive and fighting. When I came in that night she’d been terminally despondent; when I left, she was grinning ear to ear. I’d worry about how to tell everyone later—Bill, my family—
Oh, by the way, I’m taking my little homeless junkie to Disney World.
Right now, I wanted to enjoy my success.

Bill was already home when I walked in.

“How was she tonight?” he asked, fixing himself a few fingers of scotch as I lit my post-hospital joint.

I kept my eyes averted and my voice noncommittal. “A little better, I think.”

“That’s good.” He was noncommittal in return. “Have they told her when she’s getting out?”

“Well, she told me probably by next week, but when I ran into Jodi at the shelter the other night, she said it might take longer.”

“Huh,” said Bill, his upper lip thin and tight. His upper lip always tightens when he’s upset; it’s what makes him no good at poker.

I said, “She won’t be there too much longer, I hope.”

“I hope not. It’s been really tough.”

I turned away from him, sucked on the joint. What was tough—me not being home in time to make dinner every night? Was it so hard for him, listening to the secondhand stories, the stories I barely hinted at, sparing him the worst of the details? What about the fact that I was nobly caring for one of society’s most abject castoffs? I took another whopping hit and held it, stern-faced. I was sorry if Bill was feeling neglected, but
he
didn’t have it tough.

I blew out the smoke in a long, thin line over my shoulder, away from him. “It
is
really tough,” I said, short. “She’s had an unbelievably tough life.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe it.”

I looked over at him again. He met my gaze, tight-lipped. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. Just, every time something happens with her, it’s like, you’re running out the door.”

I gave him a frosty smile. “That’s what you do in an emergency.”

“She has a lot of emergencies. I mean, she calls last night, and you’re foaming at the mouth—”

“I wasn’t
foaming at the mouth,
” I fumed. “I was
worried
. That’s what happens when you care about someone.”

Bill looked down at his glass, swirled it. His voice got softer. “You really do care about her.”

“Well…yeah.” It probably wasn’t meant to be an accusation—he sounded more resigned than anything. Like he’d caught me in bed with the mailman, and now he wanted to know,
So, you love this mailman guy, huh
. I felt stung with guilt. “I mean, not like I care about you, Shmoo.” I laughed a little. “I don’t want to have sex with her.”

He didn’t laugh. “That’s good.”

I frowned, turning away again. Of course, the thing with Sam wasn’t sexual. But it was almost romantic, the way I thought about her constantly, talked about her all the time. If she were a man of my age, with her same wit and intellect, I’d probably fall in love with that man the way I did with Sam. And where would that leave Bill? I felt a moment of fear for our relationship, that I could be so easily swayed by someone else. It had happened before, with other boyfriends—I’d met someone new, and I’d moved on. But Sam wasn’t a man, and I loved Bill first and foremost, and there was no question about it in my mind. I was sad that there was a question in his.