Have You Found Her (35 page)

“Okay. All right.” I nodded. Okay. They’d retest her, and then we’d know. As long as she hadn’t done this to herself, as long as Dr. Rice was sure about that. “Thanks, Dr. Rice, I’m really…” I fluffed my hands around in the air, unable to say what I was.

She smiled comfortingly. “No, thank
you
. I’m glad you found me today. And she’s lucky to have you as a friend.”

“Well…” I tried to chuckle. “We’ll see about that.”

We’d see. Was she really lucky? Was I really her friend? The test would tell. I turned to leave the lounge, and the room spun a little. My axis was off. I had to go by instinct, lumber toward the elevators, the mural of the solar system that greeted you on the floor.
Right.
I knew these double doors. I knew this place. I knew these hands. I knew what to do inside this metal box. Push the button, L. I knew what this buzzing thing in my pocket was—it was my cell phone. It was Maria. I walked out of the elevator into the lobby and answered the call.

“Hey,” Maria said brightly. “How’s it going today?”

I pushed through the lobby doors out into the brightness. It was so cloudless and clear blue—why were the most devastating days always so blue? It looked like September 11 today. “Well,” I understated, “not so great.”

Maria’s voice dropped in sympathy. “She’s had a bad day, huh? What’s the latest?”

I had no idea how to put this. “Well, the latest is, I spoke to the doctor, and…you’re not driving right now, are you?”

“No, I was just about to leave work.” Her voice went grave. “Why, what’s going on?”

I pulled over on the sidewalk and leaned back against a brick building. “Maria, they say she’s HIV-negative. Her T cells are fine. They say they’ve tested her twice.”

“
What?
” It came out as a glass-breaking shriek. “They said
what
?”

“I know. I know. And when I asked her, in front of the doctor, if she was taking her AIDS meds, she told me to get out of the room, and she revoked my proxy. I’m on my way to the subway right now. I’m in shock. I’m in total shock.”

“
What?
Wait…
what?
”

It was like she was pulling dialogue directly from inside my head. “I wish I knew what was going on, Maria, but I really don’t. All I know is, the doctor said she doesn’t have AIDS, and Sam
freaked out
on me when I brought it up. But the doctor said it’s probably a mistake or something. They’re going to retest her, they should know something tomorrow.”

I heard Maria taking quick, deep breaths. “I’m coming down there right now,” she decided. “I can’t…I have to hear this for myself. I don’t even understand what you’re saying. You’re telling me they have recent negative HIV tests for her?”

“Two of them. And a T cell test last week. They were fine.”

“Janice, that’s
impossible,
” she spat, furious with frustration. “What the
fuck
—”

“That’s what I’ve been saying for the past forty-five minutes.”

I heard the lighter click, the intake of breath as Maria lit a cigarette.
Puff. Puff.
I couldn’t wait to get home for a smoke of my own; maybe drugs would make this situation make sense. “I’m coming down there,” she repeated. “I’ll be there in half an hour. And
somebody
better have some answers for me.”
Puff.
“And…I won’t tell her we talked. I’ll act like I don’t know anything.”

I laughed my broken laugh. “Which we don’t.”

“Right?” She laughed, too, shrilly. “I mean, what the
hell
?”

I’d started walking toward the subway again—I could tell by the breeze against my face. “Look, it’s probably a mistake. I asked the doctor a bunch of times if this could be a hoax, or anything else, and she said it’s probably a mistake. They’re going to retest her, so…”

“Okay,” she said, in a warning tone. “But in the meantime, I’ll be down there soon, and I will
certainly
call you if I learn anything new.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll talk to you soon, then.”

Snap.

I put the phone back into my pocket, took my MetroCard out. I climbed the stairs to the elevated subway station and took my usual place at the front of the platform. I stood there, waiting for the train, looking out at the trees with their yellow leaves. Waiting for the other leaf to drop.

Chapter Fifteen

Aftershocks

         
I
got home, opened my notebook, and wrote:
This has been one of the top ten weirdest days of my life.

Then I wrote down everything that had happened since the morning: all the dialogue, all the action, all my impressions. A habit I’d had for years, one I’d kept up through my association with Sam—it always helped to unblow my mind, writing everything down where I could look at it, judge it. I’d been keeping the current notebook for the past three months, since she went into the hospital in July. When I paused and riffled through it, I saw Sam’s name on every page.

My cell phone buzzed: Sam’s hospital phone.
Fuck you.
I didn’t answer it, didn’t want to hear her pissed-off ugly voice, the voice that went with that hateful face she’d made, telling me I was fired as her proxy. She didn’t leave a message. A minute later the phone buzzed again. Again I didn’t answer it. Again she didn’t leave a message. It buzzed a third time, then stopped halfway.

Good.

I turned off the phone and wrote until I caught up with myself in real time.
And now I’m sitting here writing this, waiting for an update from Maria, waiting for the results of the retest. Waiting to find out if the past eleven months of my life have been a lie.

I closed the notebook, opened my laptop, and started a Google search for “Samantha Dunleavy.” I didn’t know what I thought I was going to find—I’d looked her up online before, to no avail. I’d even looked for her parents, her sister, and her brother, and never found them, either. Now I got the same old half page of results for my search: a genealogical record of the Dunleavys in Ireland, with a Samantha who’d died in the 1840s; an eighth-grader who’d recently won a prize for Excellence in Language Arts at a middle school in Virginia. Nothing that looked like Sam, nothing that looked like her family.

I stared at the useless results, unsure of what to look for next. I’d already looked up all the AIDS websites; I had a long list of bookmarks to which I’d frequently referred over the past few months as I’d tried to understand the course of her disease. They weren’t going to tell me anything new. There had to be another diagnosis.

My hands hesitated, but I went ahead and typed it.
Faking illness.
Up came the results. The first page called it
Munchausen’s syndrome—a psychological disorder whereby patients fake or induce illness in order to receive care and attention.

I chewed at my lip as I studied the screen, consumed by a growing unease. I’d heard of Munchausen’s before; I’d even read a book about it once. As a matter of fact, Samantha had mentioned it to me just three weeks earlier, a few days before the wedding.

We were in her hospital room, of course, and she’d been having a good day; she was propped all the way up in bed, her color high. “Valentina did this report for school about this thing called Munchausen’s syndrome,” she said, grinning. “Have you ever heard about it? Where people make themselves sick? It’s so fucked up. They call themselves ‘munchers,’ and they, like, shoot
poop
into their veins to get sick on purpose. Isn’t that the craziest thing?”

And I’d jumped right in. “Oh my god, I’ve heard of that, it’s so crazy. And you know, there’s also Munchausen’s by proxy, where people’s parents make them sick so they can get attention. I once read this book about this girl whose mom almost made her get heart surgery….”

“Yeah,” she’d said, serious for a minute. “That’s so insane to me. Can you imagine
wanting
to feel this sick? I’d do anything to feel better.”

Poor Sam. Maybe she could trade places with one of those munchers, and everyone would be happy. “It’s crazy,” I’d agreed.

Crazy.
I stared at the blinking cursor, at the words on the screen. Munchausen’s sufferers, it said, are exceptionally intelligent, and often claim to be the products of abusive homes. They enjoy being taken care of; they also enjoy feeling in control of others, especially doctors, whom they take great pride in outwitting. Sufferers have an unusual grasp of medical symptoms, treatments, and terminology. They are not deterred by unusual or painful procedures and will often have numerous surgical scars.

Sam certainly fit the profile: brilliant, abused, scarred all over her body. Able to toss around medical terms with the best of them; unafraid to get a needle stuck in her eye. I started to feel nauseated, reading the case histories—people who’d starved and bled themselves to mimic cancer, patients who’d infected open wounds with cat shit. And then this:
Munchausen’s syndrome can be fatal. For most patients, there is little hope for recovery.

I was trying to digest all of this when I heard Bill’s key in the lock. He came in and I collapsed into his arms, grateful for his palpable, three-dimensional presence.

“This is some super-crazy
X Files
shit,” he said, kissing the top of my head the way I’d kissed Sam’s. “I can’t wait to find out what’s up.”

We mixed some stiff drinks, made dinner, and discussed it. Bill was still going with the false-negative theory, whereby the hospital had somehow repeatedly mistested Sam and gotten the wrong results. Or maybe, he suggested, she’d manipulated the tests somehow, so she could hide her HIV status and stay in denial. If anybody could figure out how to screw up the tests, he said, it’d be her.

“I don’t know,” I said, frowning. I wanted to believe the false-negative theory, but I was leaning more toward the false-Samantha theory. I couldn’t stop thinking about things she’d said and done: how she’d loosened the leads on her monitors to scare the night nurse; how she’d told me her sister was in a group home, then told me she was still in a coma. The grin on her face the day she asked me,
Munchausen’s syndrome—have you heard of it?

All I had to cling to was what Dr. Rice had said, standing there in the hallway: Sam couldn’t have induced fungemia of the eyeball; she couldn’t have done this to herself. She was, as Dr. Rice said, “legitimately sick.” But again, if anybody could figure out how to make herself that way…

I looked at the clock: 10
P.M.
Friday. Just that morning, I’d been lying on the floor in the other room, hoping she was going to hurry up and die. Now here I was, wondering if she ever really existed in the first place.

That weekend, Columbus Day, Bill and I tried to go about our lives as if nothing had changed. We went to the grocery store, where the ghosts of Sam and Valentina lurked in the dairy aisle; we went to the movies. We ran six laps around Washington Square Park, showered together, made lunch.

We looked at our honeymoon pictures again, downloading them from the camera to the computer—me in my swimsuit, posing like Bettie Page; Bill feeding the orange-and-white stray. The two of us with our heads together, Bill holding the camera at arm’s length to take the picture, purple sky and pink shore behind us. It was only last Sunday—we’d woken up early in our hotel room, taken one last trip down to the beach, one last swim in the ocean before we caught our plane home. One last photo, in front of the hotel, big smiles on our faces. How happy we looked, except for that one thin line between my eyes.

There was an extra weight to the weekly Sunday-night sadness that week—
Oh, weekend’s through, time to face reality again
. I didn’t want to face reality. One way or the other, Sam had lied to us, or to the doctors—either way, she had lied. I put off the phone call I knew I had to make until after we’d eaten dinner, watched whatever was on TV, and I’d checked my e-mail for the fifty-fifth time. I went to roll a joint and stopped halfway—smoking didn’t even get me high these days; it just made me depressed and sleepy. I couldn’t avoid or procrastinate anymore. I picked up the phone and called Maria.

“Hi there.” Maria sounded furious, her sharply musical voice a caricature of its former self. “How are you?”

“I’m…weirded out.” I laughed. “How are you?”

“I’m not very good at all,” she said. “But I can’t talk about it until you talk to Sam. Did she call you yet?”

“She called on Friday, but I didn’t feel like talking right then.”

“Well, I think you should call her now.”

“Why. Maria, what…” Her voice, so angry. A pit opened up in my stomach. This was bad news, this was the worst-case scenario. I wasn’t even sure what that was anymore. “What’s up?”

“You need to hear it from her. Then you and I can talk. All right? Call her, and call me back. I’ll talk to you soon.”

She hung up, and I looked over at Bill, lurking from the doorway. His face was grave.

“She wouldn’t say,” I told him. “I have to call Sam.”

I dialed Sam’s hospital phone, and she answered on the second ring, her voice low. “Hello?”

“Hey there,” I said. “How are you?”

Surprisingly, my voice came out the way it always did with her—gentle, loving, concerned—asking the same question I always asked.
How are you?
As in:
How’d the tests go today? What’d the doctors say? Are you running a fever? Did you have anything to eat?

“I’m all right,” she said, hesitant. “Nauseous and achy, but the fever’s down.”

“That’s good.” I paused. Here was where she usually caught me up on the specifics—
I had an MRI earlier. They took blood before. Dr. F. says I’m doing real good.
Except now I knew that Dr. F. didn’t exist. “So.”

“So.” Her voice was thick with dread. She knew what was coming, and so did I. I braced myself and asked the question.

“So, are you HIV-positive, or not?”

She took a deep breath. “I’m…not.”

Boom.
There it was. Good news, bad news, all in one. She didn’t have AIDS; she was going to live. And she’d lied to me.

“Okay,” I said, no big deal, as though she’d just told me she’d lost her cell phone. “And you’ve always known you weren’t positive.”

“Well…” Her voice got high and dodgy. “I mean, one time last year, I got this false positive, and I thought I was positive for a week or so, but then they retested me, and…”

I clamped my lips shut. She was lying again, and I didn’t want to hear another lie. “Okay,” I repeated. “So you didn’t tell us the truth.”

“I…” Her high voice broke, and she exhaled. The next word came out low. “No.”

“Okay.” I breathed in and out, in and out. “Okay.”

One thing at a time—she wasn’t going to die. Not this week, not next week, not next month, not next year.
She’s going to make it to Disney World!
I thought, delirious. She was going to live! She’d be able to get a room and apply for school and work at a dog spa, write her book and ride her skateboard, do whatever she wanted to do. I laughed, relieved. “Well, so you don’t have AIDS. That’s good. I’m really glad about that.”

“Me too,” she said, high-voiced and uncertain. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, or hit her across the face.

“So…” I almost didn’t want to ask the next question, didn’t want to ruin the high of hearing that she wasn’t fatally ill. “Why did you say you did?”

Her breath left her in a heavy sigh, her voice pained. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I said I was positive. It just…came out, and then once I said it, I couldn’t take it back. I wanted to tell you guys so many times. I wanted to tell you right away, but I was afraid you’d hate me for it, and you wouldn’t be my friend anymore. And then, it’s like, I almost believed it, you know? Because I kept getting real sick, and I started to think maybe it was true—like maybe somehow God had punished me for lying by giving me AIDS.”

I shut my eyes. I remembered junior high, when I was a habitual liar, lying compulsively to everyone, lying half the time before I realized what was coming out of my mouth. I’d learned to become a method liar, to have a full Sensurround story behind every lie, to be able to see every detail, hear every word, until I could have passed a polygraph; that’s how much I believed myself. I understood lies you couldn’t tell from reality anymore. I understood lies that got out of control, that stacked up, necessitating more lies. I knew that regret,
Why did I say that in the first place? I wish I could take it back
. When I was in my freshman year of high school, and still a virgin, I told my best friend, Karlina, that I was pregnant by a handsome older teenager I’d seen in our neighborhood—I even pointed him out to her on the street.
He wants me to keep it,
I told her.
But I don’t know
. I had to lie for weeks on that one, months; had to describe the abortion clinic my mom took me to, and how I got stitches from the operation. Later, I discovered that you don’t get stitches from an abortion. Karlina had known all along.

“I understand,” I told her. “I do.”

Bill shook his head from the doorway, still trying to comprehend what was happening. He looked at me, almost an appeal—
She didn’t lie, did she? Tell me she didn’t lie about having AIDS
—and I shook my head in return.
Sorry, pal.

“I’m sorry,” said Sam, almost whispering. “I really am.”

“I understand,” I said again. And then realized I didn’t. I might have lied about getting pregnant, but my belly never swelled, I wasn’t morning sick. I faked it, but Sam wasn’t faking it. A team of doctors had observed her for most of the summer—meningitis, MAC disease, bacterial sepsis, fungemia—she was, as Dr. Rice had said, “legitimately sick.” “But how did you get so sick?”