Have You Found Her (27 page)

“Me too. I mean, I don’t want to push her, but—”

“You’re going to have to. We both will.”

Maria was right. I was going to have to be more forceful. Just the day before, one of the doctors had dropped by when I was there, and Sam asked if I could “give them a minute.” And I thought,
Take all the time you need; I’ll just be right here listening and asking questions.
But then I realized she wanted me to leave the room. “Oh,” I said, hopping up from my chair. “Sure, I’ll be in the lounge.” I sat in the lounge for ten minutes, my face hot with mortification and resentment. How dare she ask me to leave? What did she have to discuss with the doctor that she couldn’t discuss with me? What was I, chopped liver? I had to compose myself before I walked back into her room with a smile.
So, what’d he say?

“So I’ll nag her again tomorrow,” I said to Maria. “And you stay on her, too.”

“Right.” She touched my arm, the signal to go back into the room. An almost wifely gesture, from my co-parent.

I didn’t know what I would I have done without Maria, without somebody holding my hand through this every step of the way. At least Maria was right there next to me, going through the same experience. Jodi, meanwhile, was busy with her new job and her own kid, and though she tried to call and visit when she could, she lived way out in Brooklyn with no car; it was more than an hour and a half by subway to get to the hospital. “And frankly,” she’d told me over the phone, matter-of-fact, “I can’t really handle what’s coming. I can’t stand to watch. You know, besides my son, I’ve got a daughter only a year older than Sam. I’ve seen what happens to these kids before, and I know I’m not going to be able to bear losing her like that.”

I looked across the hallway of the Intensive Care Unit, through the open door of the room there, saw the crib, the electrodes, the monitors. The toddler sleeping fitfully, its thumb in its mouth. Poor baby.

I put on my brave face to match Maria’s and reentered Sam’s room, smiling. “So, kid, you smelling any better?”

By the next week, Sam was looking so much better that the doctors moved her from Intensive Care back to the teenagers’ floor, and started saying that magical word—
home
. Home! Our visits, and my phone calls with Maria, took on a celebratory air—she’d managed to kick meningitis while severely compromised—look how strong she was! That was Sam for you: give her odds, and she’d defy them for you. If anybody was going to exceed her doctors’ expectations, it would be Sam.

She was full of plans for her release. “It’s gonna be a week or two before I can go back to work, but I already called and they said to come in whenever I’m feeling better, so that’s good. And Maria said she was gonna get us tickets to see a Yankees game. I never seen a ball game in person—closest I ever been to Yankee Stadium was to cop some dope on a Hundred Eightieth Street first week I was in town. It’s gonna be so cool.”

“I bet it is.” I smiled—I could afford to again. I didn’t have to watch her monitors and worry, or writhe with her through a spinal tap, or nag her about the health-care proxy—not right now, anyway, since she was on an upswing. “Did you give that money to Valentina?”

I’d taken the liberty of giving Sam $150 to give to Valentina to cover the next two weeks of her rent. I figured the “don’t give them money” thing didn’t apply as much anymore, not when we were trying to keep Sam living indoors. “Yeah, I did. Thanks so much, Janice. I swear, I really am going to pay you back for all this.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it. I’m glad I can help.”

She nodded and settled her head back against the pillow, eyes heavy. She still got worn out so easily; twenty minutes of animated conversation could sap her strength.

“Do you want me to read to you?” I suggested. We were reading
McGrowl
together, only a few pages every day, as she tended to fall asleep. Then I’d stop reading aloud, and she’d wake up enough to chastise me in a murmur, “You’re not reading.”

“No, I don’t want to fall asleep. I want to wait until you have to go.” She repositioned her pillow, leaned back again. “It’s so boring here. I’m so sick of being in the hospital. All I do is look forward to seeing you and Maria.”

“We look forward to seeing you, too,” I assured her. “Although we’re kind of sick of the setting.”

She gave me a little smirk, like,
Tell me about it.
“And when I’m out of here, we have to go to Coney Island with Bill, like you said.”

“Absolutely. He’s looking forward to it. It’ll be advance training for Disney World.”

Sam looked pleased, her calendar in place. “How’s the wedding coming along?”

“Great. I think it’s going to be really great. A lot of our really good friends will be there. I can’t wait for you to meet everybody.” They’d certainly heard enough about her. The legendary Samantha was going to be one of the main attractions among my friends and family—her, and my legendary mom, if she would ever RSVP.

“Yeah. Valentina’s real excited about coming with me. She’s getting a new dress and shoes and everything. I said I might even let her put makeup on me, just to see how it looks.” She couldn’t contain a laugh at the idea. “Can you even imagine me in makeup?”

“That would be something,” I said, laughing along. Thinking,
It’ll be something if she makes it to the wedding at all, much less in makeup.

But again, she looked all right now, if not fully robust—too skinny, but red-cheeked and high-spirited, talking about all the writing she was going to do now that she could sit up and hold a pen again. “I still really like the idea we came up with together,” she assured me, “but I think I might want to write my own book first, about my life, and everything I been through.”

I remembered the excerpts she’d sent me from the halfway house, the pieces she’d shown me since then.
Baby Dunleavy was born seven weeks premature. Her mother told the nurses to give her an American name…

Write fast,
I thought. “I can’t wait until you do.”

Sam closed her eyes and leaned back against the pillow again, a slight smile on her face. “Then I’ll be totally famous.”

I laughed. “Just remember who your friends were.”

Her hand snaked out toward mine, her grasp bony but firm. “Always. I’m always going to remember what you’ve done for me, Janice.”

I gripped her hand tight in reply. “And you for me.”

Her hand got heavier in mine. She was fading for the day. “Do you want to read some more
McGrowl
now?”

“Sure.” I picked up the book, tented on the nightstand next to me, and found the place where we’d left off. Sam snuggled deeper into her bedclothes, satisfied. “’Even Mrs. Wiggins had to admit that Thomas had a special way with animals…’”

Two days later, Sam went home to her apartment. She called and left me a message: “Hey, they let me go this morning. You can come up if you want, but I’m just gonna take it easy today. Give me a call if you wanna hang out this week. Thanks for everything, and I’ll talk to you soon.”

But it was Maria’s call I returned first. “She’s home!” I exulted.

“Hallelujah!” she agreed. “I just hope she stays there for a little while.”

“Seriously.” I looked over at the
FRIENDS
plaque on my bookshelf and sighed with relief. “That was a hell of a scare, there.”

“It probably won’t be our last.”

I got that familiar seasick feeling I got every time I looked too far ahead. “I know. I wish we had a better idea of what to expect. I mean, we know what to expect, but when to expect it.”

Maria’s voice stayed firm and counselor-like. “Me too. Me too. But we’ll stay on top of her this time, and you and I will stay in touch, too. She doesn’t get to go back to work until she’s feeling a lot stronger. And any time she’s not feeling well, she goes straight to the ER.”

“Agreed.”

“She’s
got
to take it easy,” Maria emphasized.

“I know.”

And yet we both knew that we couldn’t contain her, we couldn’t slow her down. We couldn’t ask her not to run around and ride her skateboard while she was still able, even if it shortened her life. We were going to take her to Coney Island, to a Yankees game, to Disney World, if we could; we’d take her everywhere she wanted to go. Maria and I would become a two-woman Make-A-Wish Foundation—wishing as hard as we could for Sam to survive.

Chapter Eleven

Good Times

         
B
ill and I sat in the private dining room of a hotel near Union Square, a surfeit of dishes in front of us, the banquet manager seated across the table. A waiter stood by proffering a towel-wrapped bottle of wine.

“Would you like to move on to the white wine?” he asked. “Or do you prefer to stay with the champagne for now?”

“The white would be great,” said Bill, already two glasses deep into the champagne.

“Just a little for me, thanks,” I said, trying not to slur my words. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and I was hammered like a bent nail.

“So you can choose three of the cold appetizers, and three of the hot ones,” explained the banquet manager, waving over two more waiters with trays. “And then we’ve got a selection of pastas and salads for you to try.”

“Uccch,” I complained to Bill. “This is all so good. I can’t stand it.”

He dug into a plate of gnocchi. “Suck it up, Champ, we’ve got three more courses to go.”

“It’s a lot of food,” the manager agreed. “It’s a shame your parents weren’t available to join us this afternoon. We made enough for four people.”

“I should have asked Sam and Valentina,” I said to Bill. They would have loved sitting around in this exquisite room, being served by jacketed waiters; what a treat it would have been. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”

“Who are Sam and Valentina?” asked the manager politely.

Bill and I caught each other’s eyes. “They’re our…hungry friends.”

They’re our homeless kids!
I wanted to say, full of boozy bravado.
They’re ex-hookers and junkies, and they broke out of their halfway house, and I got them an apartment in the Bronx! Sam’s a genius, and I’m going to adopt her! She has AIDS!

“Would you like to try the red as well?” The waiter started filling yet another glass in front of me.

“Oh.” I smiled at him warmly. “Maybe jus’ a little.”

We finally wobbled out of the hotel at about four-thirty, utterly ruined. “Good thing I swapped days with Ted,” Bill groaned, holding his stomach as we walked across the park. “I’d hate to have to go to work right now and throw up on everyone.”

“Well, I’m supposed to meet Sam in a half hour,” I reminded him. I tried using my thumbs and forefingers to open my sleepy eyes wider. “I gotta sober up.” She’d seen me stoned before—everybody in my life had seen me stoned—but stoned was my default setting; I covered for it well. Drunk, on the other hand, I wasn’t so good at hiding.

“I’m drunk,” I announced to Sam, meeting her by Valentina’s school in Chelsea. “I totally apologize. It was an accident. It should wear off soon. In the meantime, though, I’m totally drunk.”

She looked me over and laughed. “So I guess you had fun at your tasting.”

“Uccch.” I put my hand on my belly, as Bill had. “A li’l too much.”

We started walking toward the subway, Sam filling me in on the events of the past few days. “I been feeling pretty good, mostly, a little tired sometimes. But that’s probably because I haven’t been sleeping so good.” She shot me a look, like,
you know what I mean
. Nightmares again.

“That sucks. You think you could get something from the doctors to help?”

She twisted her mouth to one side. “I dunno. I don’t want to start messing with too much prescription stuff like that; it’d be real easy to relapse into everything else. Like, every time I go into the hospital, and they give me painkillers, it’s hard when I come out not to just go pick up.”

Pick up.
That’s what they said in 12-step groups. Which reminded me—“You still going to meetings?” It was absurd, me wobbling like a wino and wagging my finger at her about sobriety, but she took it seriously.

“When I can. If I’m not at the doctors, or doing something. I probably won’t go today, because I’m seeing you, but maybe tomorrow I’ll go. There’s this one at this Quaker meetinghouse, I really like that one.”

“That’s cool.” I liked the image of Sam sitting in silence like the Quakers do, in an airy meetinghouse full of natural light, watching dust motes rise through the sunbeams. “I’m glad to hear it.”

The rocking of the train on its way uptown made me drowsy—too much wine, too much food. “Close your eyes,” Sam suggested, playing the parent for a change. “I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

“Nonsense,” I said, blinking and stretching my eyes some more. “I’m wide awake. What were you saying again?”

We walked to her apartment, the hospital looming over the tops of the other buildings. She was telling me about the nightmares she’d been having, and I was starting to sober up. It was no wonder she was having trouble sleeping, with everything that had been resurfacing lately—the leering faces of unwashed men, her mother’s fingernails clawing at her,
Go make me some money
. And then there were the existential questions—What had she done to deserve this? Was this, again, punishment for her sins on the street? Is your life predetermined? Was this all her inescapable fate? Why did she even bother waking up in the morning, staying sober, taking her meds?

“Of course, I’m gonna keep doing all that, because when it comes down to it, I don’t really want to die. That’s one thing this whole thing has taught me. It’s like, I never knew how much I wanted to live until I found out I was dying.”

You’re not dying,
I wanted to protest.
Not any more than the rest of us are. Not yet, anyway. Not yet.

We reached their apartment and walked the two flights up the stairs, which winded Sam a little. “I’m all right,” she said, opening the front door and then the padlock to their room. Valentina’s messenger clothes lay strewn on the floor near a box of cereal and a pile of library books. “Sorry about the mess—I haven’t been real good about cleaning up lately.”

“It’s cool.” I pushed a pile of clothes aside and sat down on their bed. There was some kind of board game tangled in the sheets. “What’s this?”

“Oh, it’s so cool, it’s called ‘Would You Rather…?’ Some guy gave it to us outside the bookstore the other day. He was like, ‘I went to return this, but they wouldn’t take it back, and I don’t want it, do you?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah!’” She reached out and grabbed a stack of game cards with questions on them. “You wanna play?”

“Sure.”

She sat down cross-legged on the bed; I turned to face her. “There’s a whole part with rolling the dice and everything, but mostly it’s just questions.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“Okay. Let’s see.” I smiled, watching her scrunch up her face in concentration. This is what she was supposed to have been doing all those years when she was out on the streets—doing jigsaw puzzles, playing board games. “Here’s a good one. ‘Would you rather have to kill Winnie the Pooh, or Bambi?’”

“Mmm…Winnie,” I decided. “But only if I absolutely had to kill one of them. I’d put barbiturates in the honey; it’d be a peaceful, delicious death. How about you?”

“Um, probably Bambi, ’cause then I could eat him.” She grinned. “Okay. Now you pick a card and ask me one.”

“Okay.” I frowned at the card I’d selected, wondering if I was still drunker than I thought. “Okay, I swear to god, this is what it says—‘Would you rather pee out of your nose, or poop out of your ear?’”

We both started laughing; Sam fell over onto her side. “‘Poop out of your ear?’ Are they serious?”

“I know. What kind of twelve-foot bong were they smoking out of when they came up with that one?”

“It’s like, ‘I can’t hear you, I have to take a crap!’”

“Or, ‘God bless you, would you like some toilet paper?’”

“What if you’re wearing a hat ’cause it’s cold out? Then it’s like a diaper, and you’ve got poop smooshed all over your head!”

“And all your Q-tips are covered in shit!”

We laughed until tears came out of our eyes, which was at least better than poop coming out of our ears. “Okay, okay, gimme another one.”

“Okay.” She settled down and sifted through a few cards to find a good one. “Okay, would you rather hide a deep dark secret from your loved ones, or tell the truth and go to jail for twenty years?”

“Jesus, twenty years.” I contemplated it for a minute. “What’d I do, kill somebody?”

“Probably.” She shook her head sadly. “I warned you about your temper.”

“Huh.” This was harder than I thought, this game. I wanted to be a good role model for Sam, to say,
I’d tell the truth, of course; I’d never lie to the people I loved.
But of course I’d done just that, more than a few times; I’d even lied to her. And to go to jail for twenty years? “Honestly? I’d probably hide it.”

“Me too,” she confessed. “Like, I’d like to think I’d be all noble and everything, but if you think about it, you’re hurting your loved ones more by going to jail for twenty years than by not telling them the secret.”

I smiled at her pragmatic approach. “Still, can you imagine? Not being able to tell the people you’re closest to the truth? How totally alienating would that be, having to lie to everyone all the time.” I shuddered. “I bet I’d break down at some point and just let it slip.”

“But you can’t, though, or you’d go to jail.” Sam’s face was earnest. “You have to keep the secret.”

“Okay.” I laughed. “I’ll lie my head off, then. Sorry—I’m not a very good mentor, am I?”

“No, you’re good. Now ask me another one.”

We played Would You Rather…? for a while, then Sam wanted to show me some more writing she’d been working on. “Look what Maria got me. It used to be her sister’s.”

It was an old word processor, the kind I hadn’t seen since the early nineties—more of a typewriter than a computer, but it still worked. “Cool, that’s awesome.”

“Yeah, I wrote a bunch of pages so far this week. Working on my life story.” She handed me a sheaf of pages, and I started devouring them right away:

My earliest memories: a harsh animal smell, a wet diaper, a hollow in my stomach that made me scream. Shivering next to my brother, pressing myself into the warmth of his back. My father’s face floats over mine, and my whole body tightens.

This was it, the start of the autobiography I’d been nagging her to write since I’d met her. This was her golden ticket, her writing—if she could finish a book, she’d have no problem finding a buyer. I skipped ahead a few pages:

I was in the backseat of this guy’s car, jiggling my leg, wondering what kind of pervert he would turn out to be, not that it mattered. I was hungry. My cut-off jeans were swimming on me, and the gun tucked in my waistband was in danger of falling down my leg.

I put the sheaf down. “Wow, it’s great. Can I get a copy for myself?”

“Thanks.” Sam looked gratified. “You can keep that copy, if you want.”

“Great, thanks.” I slipped the pages into my bag, kept my voice casual. “Can I show it to people?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Mmm…not yet. I want to wait until it’s finished.”

“All right.” It was like being given a bag of gold doubloons and being asked not to spend them. “Whenever you’re ready.”

We hung out for a while longer. Sam asked me about volunteering, and I confessed that I hadn’t been to the shelter the past three weeks. I missed the first Wednesday she was in the hospital, and then the next week I left her bedside in time to make it there after dinner, but I felt exhausted on the subway downtown; I skipped the stop and went home. By last Wednesday, I’d decided to admit it—I was burnt out. I needed a break. “Besides,” I told her, smiling. “I’m more involved in one-on-one mentoring these days.”

“Too bad for them.” She smiled back. “But good for me. Now I don’t have to be jealous of any of your other favorites.”

When it was time to go, she wanted to walk me to the subway, and though I thought she was getting a little peaked, she insisted. “Just let me change my T-shirt.” She opened the closet door, and there was a construction-paper collage taped to the inside. “EILEEN,” it said, in ornate script letters down the side; in the center was a ragged-edged oval picture of a teenage girl that looked like it had been cut out of a larger photo. I peered at the picture—a girlier version of Sam, with long dark hair and a sweet, rueful smile. Her younger sister.

“Wow, that’s Eileen, huh?”

“Yep. I been thinking about her a lot lately.” She gazed at the collage, drifting into reverie. “Wondering…how she’s doing.”

“It must be hard, not knowing. I guess there’s no way to find out.” I remembered what Sam had said about her sister, back in January when she was at the psych ward—how Eileen had been diagnosed HIV-positive after running the streets with Sam, how she’d tried to kill herself and wound up in a coma for a few weeks. She was in a group home now, but nobody in the Dunleavy family was allowed to know exactly where she was, because of the abuse in the home. “Maybe
I
could try to track her down, find out where she is.”

Sam looked at me strangely. “She’s in a coma ward in a hospital in Colorado,” she said. “At least she was, last time I heard.”

“Really?” I frowned. “I thought you said she came out of the coma, and child welfare put her in a group home.”

She frowned back at me. “No way, I never said that.”