Have You Found Her (21 page)

“Yeah, that day.” Jodi looked pointedly at Sam. “We’re not going to have any repeats of that.”

“I know,” Sam groused, rolling her eyes. “Trust me, I know.”

Watching her face now, I could tell that she did know. She knew this horrible place was her only chance at staying sober; that’s why she chose to come back. She knew better than anybody how few alternatives she had, and in case she forgot, Jodi reminded her—she wasn’t crashing with one of us, not even for a night, not ever. Sam had thought of everything she could to get out of here; she’d told me she’d even fantasized about getting high, just so she could get sent back to Larchmont, until Maria told her she wouldn’t be taken back like that. But now something about her had shifted—she sat up straighter and more still, and she looked farther into the distance. Like she’d accepted her time here as something else she’d survive, another sacrifice she’d make to save her own life.

“I should give you the grand tour,” she said abruptly. “And I want you to meet my roommate, Valentina, the one I told you about. She’s a tranny; her birth name’s Jesus. Me and her get along real well.”

“Cool.” Jodi and Evan and I got up and followed her into the building, a standard-issue five-story Brooklyn limestone. Like the shelter, it was covered throughout the common areas with construction-paper signs bearing inscrutable motivational slogans (
Life become your dream
) and memos about the possession of cigarette lighters (forbidden, in case anyone thought they could keep one hidden). The TV room was a near replica of the shelter’s—the couch with the frayed arms; the sour, permanent smell of potato chips and feet. We peeked into the office—same whiteboard, same desks covered in manila folders. Upstairs, the residents’ rooms were closed. Sam stopped and knocked on her door.

“Valentina.”
Knock, knock
. “Valentina.”

“Mmmmph,” came the muffled reply.

Sam cracked the door, looked in. “Hey, my friends are here. Can I show them our room?”

We craned our necks to look around her, and I saw Valentina, lying curled up on the bed with her back to us. I caught a glimpse of the drawings on the wall—Sam’s work. I wanted to go look at it. “Sleeping,” grumbled Valentina.

“Sorry.” Sam closed the door behind us, dropped her voice. “She’s real sensitive today, ’cause she doesn’t have any visitors.”

“That’s a shame,” I said, casting a look back at the door. “I’m so sorry to hear it.”

“Yeah, the only family she has is, like, a bunch of tranny hookers. Her real family in Puerto Rico disowned her when she came out as a kid, and she had to trick her way to Miami to be with her trans mom.” Sam grinned. “Me and her have a bunch of fun together. The other day we were daring each other to pull the fire alarm at the top of the stairs, and we kept pushing each other away from it, so we invented a new game, King of the Stairs. It’s like King of the Hill, but with stairs.”

We pressed on with our tour, Jodi chastising Sam for courting grievous bodily injury, me looking back at the door one more time. Sam had me and Jodi and Maria looking after her, but nobody had shown up for Valentina today. Poor girl. I wanted to go back, sit down on the bed next to her, and rub her back in circles. Instead I followed after Sam, who pointed out the fire alarm in question. “I said I’d give her five bucks if she pulled it. That would be so funny.”

When we got back downstairs, the entirely unsociable staff was starting to indicate that it was almost time for us to move along. “So, when do we get to talk to you again?” I asked Sam.

She jammed her hands into her pockets, anxiety in her voice. We were leaving, and she’d be here for the next eternity, playing Scrabble with missing pieces with a bunch of bench-dwelling transients. “When I get off orientation. Hopefully by the middle of June. And I’ll write more letters in the meantime. I been writing all the time, since there’s nothing else to do.”

I reached out, and she bent down to hug me. “I can’t wait to read it,” I said.

Jodi and Sam hugged, and Evan shook Sam’s hand good-bye. Another poignant farewell, marred only by the leering toothless guy trying to get hugs from us, too.

“Good-bye!” he called, arms open as he followed us, now fleeing down the front stoop. “Good-bye!”

Two weeks passed in silence—no letters, though I sent a few, enclosing another CD from Bill. I worked peacefully and productively all day long, no phone calls from Sam to field; I beamed at the
FRIENDS
frame on my bookshelf. I went to the shelter on Wednesdays—things were in chaos there. With budget cuts, staff reductions, and space consolidation, the girls were stacked up like cordwood, piling one on top of the other on their way into the lounge, desperate for attention. “Miss, I’m hungry! I’m pregnant! I need my medication! They won’t let me ride the elevator! This bitch stole something out my room!
You
is who I’m calling a bitch, bitch!”

“Ladies, ladies.” You can only say that so many times. It’s not
abracadabra,
it’s not going to do anything magic if you keep repeating it. “Ladies, I know it sucks right now, but try not to get thrown out of here, because it’s a lot better than the alternatives.” They should have seen where Sam was living. She couldn’t even go outside.

The simple gold band I’d bought for Bill shone like a beacon when I dared to wrest it from its hiding place and peek inside its box, where it was nestled next to a matching ring for me. He’d been hinting around about things he wanted for his birthday, various clothing items and obscure Japanese movies on DVD, and I pretended to take note, thinking,
Too bad, you’ll have to get it yourself.
But as the day grew closer, my palms grew clammier. He was going to like his birthday present, right? He wasn’t going to say no, was he?

I was at my computer one night after dinner, poking around online, when the phone rang. Sam.

“Hey there!” My voice rose in undisguised pleasure at the sound of hers. “I was just thinking about you! Are you off orientation now?”

“Not quite, but almost.” She sounded a little guarded, less animated than usual—maybe she was sick again. “I been doing real good, though. I haven’t had any setbacks or anything, so it should be soon.”

“Oh! So this is just a bonus call, then.” I rose from my seat and started pacing. She was still at the halfway house, I hoped; she wasn’t calling from Grand Central station or anything.

“Kind of. They gave me special permission to call you, ’cause…” She paused for a second, and her voice grew even more hesitant. “Now I don’t know how to say it over the phone.”

“What? Say what?”

“Uh, well…” She sounded like she was about to change the subject. “Do you think you’d rather get important news in writing, or by phone?”

I’d rather you stop stalling,
I thought,
and tell me what you called to tell me
. “By phone. Why, what’s up?”

She took a deep breath. “I…I tested positive for HIV.”

Wham.
The news hit me like a crowbar. “Okay,” I said, steadying my voice. “That sucks, but we can deal with it.”

She didn’t say anything. I just heard her breathing, so I continued, as calmly as I could.

“I know a few people living with HIV, and they have to take a lot of meds, but they’re doing all right. Some of them have been totally fine for years, even decades. So you’re going to be all right, okay?”

Bill came into the room, face grave. He looked at me—
Tell me I didn’t just overhear…
I nodded, tears in my eyes. He sat down heavily in the nearest chair, shaking his head.

“Yeah,” said Sam, resigned. “It sucks, though. It’s like, I didn’t have enough to deal with.”

I tried to stay firm. “Look, it sucks, but it’s good that they caught it. Now they can treat it.” Again, no reply. “How’d they find out? You got tested, I guess.”

She sighed. “The pulmonologist, he’s the one who said it. He said, ‘You keep getting real sick, you know, and maybe you should take another HIV test.’ ’Cause I tested negative back in November, when I first came into the shelter; I knew that was one of the first things I had to do when I came in, ’cause of everything I’d been doing. I mean, this isn’t really a surprise, considering my background.” She approximated a chuckle,
huh
. “I was more surprised when the November test came back negative. I was like, ‘Are you sure?’”

I kneeled down, put my forehead to the floor like I was praying toward Mecca, and picked it up again, reeling. I had to get it together and not make this worse, had to tell myself that AIDS was not a death sentence anymore. I couldn’t think of the people I’d known who’d died. I had to remember the ones who were living.

“Well, if you tested negative as recently as November, then they caught it right at the outset, which is great.” Unless that was a false negative. I’d heard about those, but I wasn’t going to mention that possibility to Sam. “Did they tell you your T cell count and viral load?”

“I’ll find out soon.” Another heavy sigh. “I’m still…dealing with it. They just told me yesterday.”

“Oh, babe. I’m so sorry. This isn’t what you need right now. I know it complicates things for you. But I’m not kidding, I promise you, you’re going to get the best possible care, and we’re all going to get through this with you, okay? This doesn’t change anything. You’re going to live a good long time.”

Bill was shading his eyes with his hand, his mouth drawn down in an exaggerated frown. I was still on my knees. Sam sounded like she was spacing out again, staring at a wall or something, her voice distant and flat. “That’s…I hope so.”

“You will.” I struggled to my feet, struggled to keep my voice upbeat. “I promise. And I wouldn’t promise unless I was sure.”

She sighed again. “I know. I…wait a minute.” She put her hand over the phone, had a brief discussion with someone, and when she came back her voice had quickened. “Hey, they say I have to go now. But I’ll write to you as soon as I hear more from the doctors.”

I balled my fist in frustration—they couldn’t give her another two minutes to talk to me right now? This phone call was impeding her recovery from drugs? “T cell and viral load,” I stressed. “Let me know, okay? And listen, hang in there. This isn’t going to change anything. You have to stay strong, and stick with the program, and you’re going to go to college and become a vet, and do all those things you want to do, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks, Janice.”

“Thanks for letting me know.”

I hung up the phone and sank back to my knees, then crumpled all the way down until I was lying on my back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. “Uuuggghhh,” I groaned.

“Oh, babe.” Bill shook his head. He looked as devastated as I felt. “I’m so sorry.”

I groaned again, trying to expunge the sick feeling from my gut, trying to talk sense to myself the way I did with Sam.
Okay, it’s bad news,
I instructed myself,
but not fatal
. I couldn’t start thinking of her as sick, couldn’t picture her dying, but hadn’t I been doing that since the day we met, practically? All those days in St. Victor’s, the times she went missing, the phone call at 2
A.M.
—in truth, I’d grown used to picturing her dead. She’d been on the verge of death for as long as I’d known her. It was a miracle she’d made it this far.

Bill attempted a smile for me. “You sounded great, though; you sounded totally positive. You didn’t sound fazed at all. I’m sure that’s just what she needed to hear.”

“Thanks.” Trust Bill to find the bright side in all of this—
Well, at least
you
were awesome.
And ridiculous as it was, it actually perked me up a little, made me snap to attention. I rolled onto one side. “And you know, I wasn’t lying; she can live a long time, if she takes care of herself. This doesn’t have to inhibit her at all.” Except for the nine thousand pills she’d have to take, and all their side effects. And how was she going to afford them? I’d have to go online and start researching treatment. Hopefully the halfway house was looking at the various aid options. Jodi would probably know; Maria might, too. “I mean, it does suck, but it’s not a huge surprise, really. This is probably the best we could have hoped for, that they’d catch it and treat it fast.”

“I guess this explains why she’s gotten so sick so often.”

“Right.” I thought back to the hand infection, how fast it had become sepsis, how the doctor at the shelter thought Sam might have sabotaged it so she could stay at the shelter, the first safe place she’d ever known. Wrong diagnosis, Doc. Try, “the first stirrings of an autoimmune disorder.”

“So what happens from here? We wait to find out the numbers?”

I rolled back flat on the floor. “That’s all we can do,” I said to the ceiling. Wait. There was nothing else to be done. I couldn’t help Sam in any way—I couldn’t handle her health care, or her social services; I couldn’t even hold her hand over the phone while she dealt with this. I couldn’t do anything, fix anything, call anybody, pay for anything. The only thing I could control about the situation was my own reaction.

Unsurprisingly, I had a hard time falling asleep that night. I lay in bed cursing god, or disappearing photons, or whatever force had conspired to do this to Samantha, whoever or whatever had decided to make her life a cruel joke, starting twenty years ago, on April Fool’s Day, 1985. After one of the worst childhoods imaginable, against tremendous odds, she’d been busting her ass to try to live a decent life—checking into a lockdown detox, persevering through hospitals and psych wards and rehabs, sticking it out in this degraded snake pit of a halfway house—and just as she’s six months sober, what happens? I’d start to doze off and dream that someone was telling me it was a mistake. I saw her empty hospital room, the flat slab of the bed; relived the 2
A.M.
phone call. I was wide awake again.

This wasn’t a dream. This wasn’t a mistake. This wasn’t the movie I’d imagined, where Janice was a hero and everything worked out okay in the end. This wasn’t in the papers or something I read online—“Homeless Kids Face Higher Incidence of HIV Infection, Duh.” This was reality. This was the redhead on the corner, and the scabs on her face were looking more and more like lesions. This was Sam.