Have You Found Her (40 page)

Which was backward—
they
were the ones who should have been afraid, if they’d neglected their parental duties to the point where their baby girl was running around the country shooting heroin and faking AIDS. I’d been one of the primary adults in her life for the past year; I was entitled to contact these people and request information about the girl I’d nearly adopted. My back got straighter, my resolve more firm, the more I thought about it—maybe I could do this after all. I remembered my first days of volunteering: how afraid of Nadine I’d been, how tentative I was around anyone who smacked of authority. And look at me now: yelling at hospital social workers, getting Sam to admit her medical deceptions, facing the information none of us really wanted to hear. This was how parenting Sam had changed me.

I rehearsed potential phone openers with Bill, finessing them through a few iterations—“Hi, Mrs. Dunleavy, my name’s Janice, and I met your daughter Samantha last October at a homeless shelter—
while I was doing arts therapy
at a homeless shelter. Mrs. Dunleavy, when was the last time you heard from Samantha?”

Bill nodded, gave me notes. “Don’t give away too much. Hang back a little and see what she says.”

Right.
I went through it over and over, out loud and in my head. If I got a machine, I’d hang up and call back. If I got the father, same. And if I blew this, I’d be back at a dead end; the only avenue of information about Sam would be permanently closed.

The next day, I psyched myself up for the phone call, pacing around the living room and swinging my arms. Then I picked up the phone, punched *66 into the keypad to block the Dunleavys from seeing my phone number, and dialed the number on my pad.

Ring. Ring.

A young woman answered, her voice upbeat and carefree. Eileen, Sam’s sister. Not in a group home, not in a coma. On the phone with me. “Hello?”

“Hi,” I said, in the smooth tones of a newscaster. “Is Ruby Dunleavy there, please?”

“Sure, one minute, please.” So chipper, so polite. Barely a hint of Sam’s strange ’hood-inflected accent, but I could hear the similarities in the clear, high tone—she sounded like Sam at her sweetest. “Mom!”

It was too easy. Too fast. All of a sudden, Sam’s mother was on the phone, the famed junkie hooker who whored her kids out on Christmas Eve. She was a middle-aged housewife from Colorado. “Hello?” she said.

“Hi, Mrs. Dunleavy.” I could barely recognize my own voice, my mind was so blown, but it sounded good to me, it sounded assured. “My name is Janice, and I’m calling from New York City about your daughter Samantha.”

She sipped in a small breath. “Oh my.” Her voice trembled, wary. “All right.”

I started into the pitch I’d prepared. “I met Samantha a little over a year ago, when I was doing arts therapy at a homeless shelter here in New York, and she and I became friends. It’s been a hard year for her—she had some problems with her health—but I just wanted to call and let you know that she’s all right.”

“Oh my,” her mother said again, and gasped. “Oh, this is…so she’s all right.”

“She is.” I closed my eyes. I could hear her mother practically sob with relief, and I wanted to cry with her. She’d been worried about her daughter for who knew how long now, suffering so much grief and anguish, while Sam and I were browsing bookstores and swinging on swings. I should have suspected her parents might be decent people who’d been worried about her; I should have found them and called them weeks ago,
months
ago, for everybody’s sake. “It’s been a tough year, but she’s been getting better and better. And she’s had lots of people looking out for her. She’s a very special girl, and I care for her very much.”

“Oh, oh my.” I heard Eileen in the background: “It’s about Sam? She’s all right?” Mrs. Dunleavy tried to compose herself, but her voice continued to shake. “You say you’re calling from New York?”

“That’s right. I met Samantha at a homeless shelter here last November, and—”

“That’s when we last heard from her,” she interrupted. “October, 2004. She wouldn’t tell us where she was. She was still using drugs. We begged her to come home, try and work things out with us, but she wouldn’t. We haven’t heard from her since then. And now…now you’re saying she’s all right.”

“That’s right. She’s been in a drug treatment program for the past three months, and she’s doing very well.”

“Oh, this is an answered prayer. Oh, thank the Lord. I just…I don’t know…”

This was overwhelming her, I could feel it. I was dizzy and overwhelmed, too, though I was doing my best to sound like this was something I did all the time, calling strangers out of the blue to tell them their missing children were alive. “I’m sorry if this comes as a shock, Mrs. Dunleavy. I know it must be a lot for you to deal with at once.” I said it as much to myself as to her.

“It is, but I’m very glad you called.”

“I care very much for Samantha,” I told her, “and I’d love to help you work things out with her, if that’s possible.”

Her voice fluttered. “That’s…all we’ve wanted.”

I dropped my voice, tried to make it soothing and kind. She was talking to me, this was working—I could push, but I’d have to push gently. “Mrs. Dunleavy, can you tell me what happened with Samantha?”

She let out a long breath, like she was hoping I could answer that question for her. “I just don’t know,” she said, honestly perplexed. “I mean, we’ve always lived a very normal middle-class life. We had the three children, Sam and her brother and her sister; we went to church, and everything was fine. Then when Samantha was eleven, we moved to Thailand for two years for my husband’s job, and when we came back, she had some trouble readjusting at school. But then she started to do quite well again. She won the physics award at her high school.”

I flashed back to the day Sam showed me her GED, how proud she was. The girl who’d supposedly dropped out of the seventh grade, winner of the physics award.

“And then something happened around her junior year of high school. She developed a drug habit, and we weren’t fully aware of it at first. We just knew she was acting strangely, lying about things, very defiant. Then when she was seventeen, she came to me and told me she had been raped the year before, but when we tried to find out more about it, we found out it wasn’t true.”

What do you mean, you found out it wasn’t true?
I wanted to interrupt with a million questions, but I didn’t want to disrupt her flow—I wanted her to tell me everything she could, then I’d ask more. I could hardly believe she was being so forthcoming, reporting all this like she’d reported it before, but I was all gentle reassurance and singsong niceness, coaxing it out of her, pacing around the room with one hand clamped under the other armpit, shaking my head with disbelief.

“And then she was causing so much distress and disruption in the house, we told her she had to stop using drugs, or she couldn’t live at home anymore. So she went to live with some family friends who ran a youth ministry while she finished high school and enrolled in college. But she was still using drugs, it was getting worse and worse, and at some point, right around her eighteenth birthday, she ran away again. And we didn’t know where she was for a while….”

Her voice trailed off; I could hear her quick breathing in the background. “That must have been terrible for you,” I said, sympathetic.

She continued. “It was. And then we got a call from another family in a nearby town; the mother said they found us in the phone book. They’d met Samantha at their church, and she told them she was very sick and needed a kidney transplant, and they took her in. She lived with them for two months, right up to the day she was supposed to go into the hospital for the transplant, and then she disappeared.”

So she’d done it before, suckered people into thinking she was dying and then ditched them. Part of me was vindicated—I’d guessed that she’d pulled this trick before—another part of me was just horrified. Well, I’d wanted to know who she was, and now I was learning. I couldn’t wait to get this family’s phone number from Sam’s mom, call them and compare stories. “My goodness,” I murmured.

“So then we didn’t hear anything for months, and then, completely without warning, she filed a restraining order against my husband. That was April of 2004—we hadn’t even seen her for over a year—and the day she was supposed to show up in court to enforce it, we were there, but she wasn’t. And then that was the last we heard of her for six months or so, until that phone call last October. And then nothing.”

Until today. “And that’s when I met her.” I picked up the story where she had left off, told her how Sam and I had met at the shelter around Thanksgiving, how Sam had claimed to have been homeless since she was twelve, and using drugs for most of her life. How we became friends when she was in the hospital for her hand, and how our friendship continued after she left the shelter, through rehab, to the halfway house, and then the hospital in the Bronx. “She’s all right now,” I assured her mom. “But she had made herself very sick intentionally, and she lied about her illness.”

“Like she did with the other family,” said her mother, still quavering. “But she’s recovered—she’s better now?”

“Yes, she is. We caught on before too much damage was done, and now she’s in a long-term therapeutic rehab program, and she hasn’t suffered any health issues for a while now. So things are stable, and she’s getting help for her problems.”

“Oh, thank the Lord. This is the news we’d prayed for.”

I could hear the relief in her voice and Eileen chattering excitedly in the background—“Say to tell Sam I miss her!” However happy or unhappy I was to hear about Sam’s past, these people were overjoyed to hear about her present, and it was starting to rub off on me. Sam was okay, and I’d helped make her that way; I was a hero again, I was the angel of good news. And everything would only get better from here. This phone call would be the start of a fresh era in Sam’s life, and in mine. There was a whole new “other mom”—her
real
mom—who was going to take care of this.

“I really appreciate everything you’ve told me,” I said. “It’s been a confusing time for me as well, trying to figure out what’s real and what’s been the product of Sam’s imagination.” I chuckled a little, because now Mom and I were old friends, on the same team. “I’m actually delighted to hear Eileen sounding so well—Sam told me she was either in a coma or a group home following a suicide attempt, so hearing her voice is—”

“Well,” Ruby interrupted nervously, “Eileen did try to kill herself a few years ago, and she was briefly comatose, and then she was living in a group facility, yes. But she’s much better now.”

“Oh.”
Nice family,
I thought. I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice, but Ruby’s tone had become defensive, so I changed the subject back to Sam. “Mrs. Dunleavy, do you think Sam is psychotic?”

She let out another deep sigh—the good news was over; now the hard facts remained. “I don’t know. At first we thought it was the drugs, but now I think it’s something more.”

“But it definitely started around age seventeen.”

“Yes, that’s right.” She cleared her throat nervously. “But…but you say she’s been to drug treatment now?”

“Yes, she’s there right now. And I’d give you the phone number of the program, but it’s impossible to contact her right now anyway. Besides, I think it might be upsetting to her if she knew we spoke. She seems to be doing well at this program; she’s been there for a few months now. I’m hoping we can proceed slowly, so we don’t spook the horses, you know?”

Her mother agreed right away—too fast, almost. She’d just gasped with relief to find out that Sam was alive; I’d have thought she would have wanted to contact her right away, but she seemed almost afraid of her daughter. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to…I mean, I’m just so grateful that she’s all right, and that she’s getting some kind of help. I wouldn’t want to do anything…and I have to talk to my husband, you know, this is all very…”

She trailed off again, like she was at a loss for what to say or do next, and I realized I didn’t know, either. I hadn’t thought this far ahead; I had no idea how to reunite Sam and her mom when I was being blockaded from Sam myself.

“Well, maybe you and I can figure out a good way for you to reestablish contact with her—you can talk things over with your husband, and I can try to figure something out on my end, and we can talk again in a few days. Does that sound like a good idea?”

“Yes, I think we should. I definitely need to speak with my husband, you know, this is such a surprise….”

Ruby Dunleavy sounded like she really needed to sit down, maybe take a Valium. I hoped Eileen was standing by, ready to make her mother a nice cup of tea. “I’m sorry,” I said again, reassuring. “I know it’s out of the blue.”

“Oh no. You’re an answered prayer. We’ve just been hoping that she was…being taken care of somehow.”

“She has been,” I told her. “She’s had a lot of people who have cared very much for her.” Talking about her with all this warmth and love in my voice made me feel it again. I thought about the Sam I’d met that first night at the shelter—her wide, open smile, her look of satisfied concentration as she strung beads on a key chain for Jodi. “She’s a very special and talented young person, and I’m very dedicated to seeing her get well.”

I gave her my name and number, and Mrs. Dunleavy wrote them down. “Well, that’s just wonderful, and we thank you so much for calling.”

“I’m glad I called, too, and we’ll talk again in a few days.”

We hung up.

Well.

I put the phone down, exhilarated. I’d done it, I’d made the call, and it had worked out as well as it could have, better than I’d imagined. She’d talked to me, she was going to work with me. As shattered as I was by the truth, I was also satisfied, my curiosity sated, my ego somewhat restored. I’d been right about Sam—she was a middle-class suburban kid, as I’d suspected, but she’d also been a runaway junkie—I hadn’t been wrong to believe that. And I was right when I said she’d pulled a stunt with her health before. God, I loved being right. Sam had made me wrong there for a while, she’d made me mistaken, but now I was back to being right.