Have You Found Her (7 page)

She gave me her suppressed smile, her top lip pressed flat against her teeth. “I’ll check my calendar,” she said. “Yep, looks like I’m free.”

I laughed. “All right. Well, I hope you’ll stay out of trouble until then—no more hospitals, okay?”

She indicated her cast. “Well, not until my surgery, anyway.”

“Okay. Well.” I cleared my throat, re-shouldered my bag. Took one last look before walking away, just in case. There she was—stooped, her head hung, but looking back at me. “Take care.”

It wasn’t like I didn’t listen to Nadine that Wednesday; I did. But I didn’t feel like I could stay away. I promised Sam that I’d be there that Saturday. So as soon as Bill left for a weekend shift at the paper, I grabbed a bunch of books and clothes earmarked for donation and headed uptown, heart fluttering like a hummingbird in my throat.

When I got off the elevator, Sam was right there, pacing the hallway in front of the counselors’ office. She looked furious, fists clenched, wearing her hardest and most menacing face. “What’s up?” I asked, immediately concerned.

She shook her head, wouldn’t talk, so I nodded respectfully and entered the lounge, where a cluster of girls—Pinky, Leticia, St. Croix, Preggo, and Ellenette—were watching the movie
Belly
for the ninety-ninth time in a row. Ellenette yelled, “Hey! Bead Lady! What you doin’ here on a weekend? You got beads?”

“No, I just came to drop off some clothes and books—figured I’d stop up and say hello.”

I put the bags down on the table, and the girls dropped everything to run over and pick through them. “What’s this? This looks like it’d fit me. Miss, you got any books by Teri Woods?”

They were distracted, so I headed back to the hallway to check on Samantha—still pacing and muttering outside the closed door of the counselors’ office. She had her street accent on, I noticed. “I’ll kill the bitch, fuckin’ bitch.”

“Who’s that, now?” I inquired gently.

She shook her head. “Fuckin’ bitch all up in my face, sayin’ ‘What you gonna do about it?’ I’ll show you what I’ma do about it. Let her come out that office.”

I nodded, agreeing with her without even knowing the story. “I’m sorry she’s in your face,” I said. “You don’t need that.”

“Fuckin’ right I don’t. I’ll lay that bitch flat.” She stalked away, the girl with the cast on her hand from punching a wall.

I wandered over to Ellenette. “What happened?”

Nutshell: A discussion about vegetarianism got heated, people sucked their teeth at each other, one girl told Samantha to “shut up, you skinny white crow.” Sam told her to fuck off; the girl laughed in her face. “What are you going to do about it?”

And Samantha, who was detoxing her ass off after seven years of homelessness and addiction, after nineteen years of intermittent abuse, rose and said, “I’m going to beat your ass, bitch,” and stepped toward her with murderous intent.

And the girl ran into the counselors’ office. “Samantha’s going to kill me! Samantha’s going to kill me!”

“Damn right I’ma kill her,” said Sam, pacing, snarling, flexing her fists.

Rina the counselor came out of the office, her back to the closed door, and started telling Sam to calm down. She didn’t want to be discharged, right?

“I don’t give a shit, I
will
get discharged, fuck that, I’ma lay that bitch flat.”

Rina warned her, “You could get discharged just for threatening her. You can’t let her get to you, Sam. That’s what she wants.”

It was a little too late for that, I noted; the mystery girl had already gotten to Sam. But I didn’t want to contradict the staff; their job was impossible, Sisyphean. I hung back and watched Rina handle it, and offered noises of support in the background. At one point I said, “Look, this was a shitty day anyway. You’re stuck in this place for a month now, going through withdrawal, people in your face—it sucks. It sucks to be here, and this made it worse. I don’t blame you for wanting to get kicked out. Let’s go smoke a cigarette and talk about it.”

It was the closest Sam got to going outside since she was on restriction, standing downstairs under the scaffolding for a smoke. She insisted that she didn’t want to go, she wanted to stand there until the “bitch comes out the fuckin’ office, so I can beat her ass.” But then Jerome, the bald counselor with the glasses, came out of the office with his arms folded, and he had a look on his face that spelled trouble for Sam.

“You can leave the floor now, or you can leave the building for good,” he stated.

“Let’s go smoke,” I urged her.

She didn’t agree, but she stalked away, and I chased after her.

She had to wait while I ran across the street and bought a pack of Marlboros—definitely favoritism, definitely against the rules. I ran back, and we stood under the scaffold as she smoked and paced and talked.

First she ranted, spit flying from the corners of her mouth, her customary hunched-over walk exaggerated into a pimp stroll. She told me how hard-core she was, banging herself in the chest—“What do I care if I get discharged, I been sleeping on the street since I was twelve! They think I give a fuck? I been stabbed, shot, stabbed some more, stuck up—look at this.” She hiked the leg of her cargo pants, and I could see a deep two-inch gouge on the back of one heel. “Achilles tendon. Someone cut it when I was a kid after I burned ’em on a drug deal.” My eyes widened in horror, and she let the pant leg drop, satisfied. “I don’t need this place, shit. I’ma smoke this cigarette, go upstairs, and beat that bitch’s ass, then grab my stuff and heave-ho.”

Then she started talking about respect. I told her, “I respect you one thousand percent. I think all the adults here respect you, a lot.” She rolled right over this. She was still working that pronounced ’hood accent, but it was a combination of about eleven different hoods—Wyoming, New York, Texarkana. If there was a ghetto, she’d been there.

Ice.
That was her nickname. She was talking about guns she’d carried, a dog she had. She mentioned her old street families, people named Turtle, Tiny, and Pyro. I asked, “What did they call you?” Ice.

She was done with her cigarette, stomping on it and scowling at it. We sat on the concrete loading dock under the scaffold, swinging our legs. It was cold, and she had no coat on, so I gave her my sweatshirt to wear. I had my down coat.

Philadelphia was her favorite city, she told me—no, Washington, D.C., because of the free museums. Her face was starting to relax; though she still wouldn’t look directly at me, I could see it peripherally. She had the notebook in her pocket; she showed me some new drawings. A faceless girl on a cloud embraced a broken mirror; her reflection bowed her head. An exquisitely detailed pair of bound hands, blood pouring from the slit wrists. I cleared my throat and wiped my runny nose. “These are really good,” I said.

We sat out there for a while; she smoked another cigarette. At one point she said, “I’m cold.” And without saying anything else, we walked back inside.

Rina was waiting for us. They conferred, and Sam agreed to “chill,” she said. “As long as that bitch stays away from me, I will stay away from her.” That was good enough for Rina. I was betting the mystery girl would stay away from now on—everyone in the lounge was already talking about how Sam jumped up “like she was gonna kill somebody!” and how the other girl cowered in the office for an hour while Sam calmed down.

It was time for me to head home—I had groceries to buy, phone calls to make. “Are you really going to be okay?” I asked Sam, searching her eyes, which were finally turned toward mine. They were soft around the corners again, wide and warm. She even smiled.

“Yeah. Hey, good thing you came up here today, huh?”

I brushed this off, though I was thinking the same thing—my timing was perfect, I’d pretty much rescued her from being discharged, and what might have happened had I not dropped by to handle the situation? She could have been bounced; she could have been halfway to nowhere by now. I straightened up, stifling a smile of pride. “Always glad to see you,” I said, and passed her the pack of cigarettes. “I’ll see you Wednesday. I
better
see you Wednesday.”

She laughed. “All right.”

I waved and headed for the staircase, wondering, as I always wondered when I left her side, whether I’d ever see her again; whether she’d make it to next Wednesday, much less rehab, or anyplace beyond. Each time I let her out of my sight, it seemed more likely that she might disappear from my life entirely, and more vital that she stay. But walking that day toward the subway home, the image of her laughing fresh in my mind, I had hope.

The next Wednesday, Sam wasn’t there.

I showed up at the shelter early again and found Ellenette and St. Croix in front of the TV with two new girls, holding hands on the couch, despite the rule against physical affection among residents. Ellenette put out the call—
Bead Lady!
—but there was no response. No Sam coming around the corner, no Sam galumphing down the stairs two at a time when Rina called for dinner. No Sam in the cafeteria.

I sat with Ellenette and St. Croix, trying not to swivel my head around like an owl, listening to them tell the story of how they went to eat at T.G.I. Friday’s, and Ellenette spent the whole meal fucking with the waitress. “Every time she turned around, we were like, ‘MNUGH!’”—here Ellenette made an inhuman grunting groan. “She did not know what the hell was going on!”

Where is Sam?
I wanted to ask. I was agitated beyond reason, digging my nails into my sweaty palms. I’d worried she wasn’t going to make it another few days here; it was exactly as I’d feared. She’d dematerialized, the way the girls always did when I decided I loved them. “Where is everybody tonight?” I asked. “Seems kind of empty.”

Of course the cafeteria was just as crowded as it had been for weeks, ever since it turned cold for the winter. Ellenette didn’t even dignify the comment with a response. “MNUGH!” she said, and St. Croix cracked up.

I wasn’t in the mood for Ellenette and St. Croix, or for the girl they called Mocha, with her bitchy gossip, or for the butch girl who ignored me, came over and started ordering the other girls to make her something, and when I said to her, “Why don’t you join us? What do you want to make?” she acted like nobody was speaking.

“Yo, make me a bracelet—blue and black, son, blue and black.”

Finally I ducked into the counselors’ office, ostensibly for the broom, though it wasn’t even close to the time when I’d normally clean up. I peered up at the list of residents on the whiteboard the counselors used to track the active residents, and there was her name, Samantha Dunleavy, listed in the row underneath her caseworker’s name, Ashley.

“Hey, Janice,” said Ashley, who happened to be sitting right there. “How’s it going?”

God bless Ashley, a tall, broad white girl from Texas—the only counselor who’d ever come over to the bead table and struck up a conversation with me. Most of the counselors still tended to give me a wide berth; they were exceedingly busy, it seemed, and it wasn’t like I went out of my way to talk to them, either. I was afraid they thought I was weird, coming back here as an ex-resident, or I was fishy, or I was trying to do their job for free, not that anybody had ever indicated any of the above. Ashley, for instance, had been nothing but friendly, sometimes to a fault—when she sat down at the bead table for a chat, the needle would go skidding right off the record, and all conversation among the girls would halt.

“It’s good,” I said. “How’s by you? Busy around here?”

“As always,” she said cheerfully, rolling her eyes.

“So…how’s that girl Sam, is she still around?” I bit my lip, but it was too late; the words had already spilled out.

Ashley raised her hand, shook it like she was showing off a bracelet. “Wrist surgery,” she said. “Should be back tomorrow.”

“Oh. Huh.” I nodded, grabbed the broom, fought the urge to break into a grin, or a song. “Well, I’ll bring this right back.”

“No problem,” said Ashley, already back to her files.

The rest of the night passed quickly. Suddenly I was able to banter with everyone—“MNUGH!” I said to Ellenette, which won me big points, in the form of whooping laughs from around the table. Sam was all right, she hadn’t split; she was exactly where she was supposed to be tonight—in the hands of the professionals. She was in a clean room, in a freshly made bed that went up and down when you pressed the button. And her pain, for a change, was the pain of healing.

Chapter Three

The Twelve Days of Christmas

         
T
wo weeks later, the Wednesday before Christmas, and the cafeteria at the shelter was decorated with freshly handmade construction-paper signs in red and green and black:
MERRY CHRISTMAS. HAPPY HOLIDAYS. HAPPY KWANZAA
. As I walked in, I saw Nadine coming my way, two girls dogging her heels like she was the Pied Piper. I raised my hand and smiled in greeting, and she stopped short, nearly causing her followers to collide with each other.

“Juh
neece
. You know your friend Samantha is back in the hospital.”

“Oh no. What happened?”

I’d seen Sam the previous Wednesday, her hand recast from the successful surgery the week before. She had been wincing occasionally, making do without much in the way of painkillers, but her spirits had been high. She’d spent most of the night by my side, talking about what she wanted to do after her stint in rehab—maybe she’d become a vet, she said, or a mechanic. When there was a lull in the bead action toward the end of the night, she’d confessed to me that she was scared to go away; scared, after seven years of complete autonomy, to commit the next year of her life to an institution where they’d dictate her every move. But, she told me, she trusted Jodi the drug counselor—for the first time in her life, she was trying to trust an adult for longer than the duration of a drug deal—and Jodi said that rehab was the way to go. So she was going to trust rehab.

I hadn’t known, at the end of the night, if they’d be moving Sam upstate to rehab that week, if it would be the last time I’d see her. I’d wanted to hug her good-bye, in case, but she’d slipped away as I was leaving.

The two girls tailing Nadine got distracted and moved on; Nadine moved closer and dropped her voice. “She got an infection, her hand, from the surgery. Bad fever, really sick. She waited a long time to say anything; you know she doesn’t like to show pain. The doctors hope they got to it in time to save the hand.”

“Oh my god.” I thought of Sam handless, trying to become a vet or a mechanic. “What hospital? Is she nearby?”

Nadine caught my eye with that all-knowing look of hers, her forehead furrowed with concern. “Well, officially I wouldn’t say anything, but you know, off the record, she’s at St. Victor’s. I’m telling you because it’s the holidays”—here she gave me a warning look, and I nodded,
Right, the holidays, special once-a-year dispensation, not a policy change
—“and I know you’ve been important to her.”

“Well, I…” I didn’t know what to say. I was important to Sam, trustworthy to Nadine. Nadine, who once almost canned me on the spot in my first six weeks for taking a camera-phone picture of one of the girls, at the girl’s request—
Juh
neece!
What are you doing! You don’t take pictures of the girls, you compromise their security.
“Thanks, Nadine.”

“Off the record,” she reminded me. Her followers were coming our way to resume their pursuit.

“Miss Nadine, we got a situation in our room, Miss Nadine!”

She gave me a droll smile, raised her voice for the girls behind her. “Upstairs, ladies.” One more emphatic look, and she forged on.

It was all I could do not to declare bead time canceled for the evening and run straight down to St. Victor’s before the end of visiting hours, whenever those might be, but I’d already been spotted—by Ellenette, of course. She waved me over to her table to give me the good news—she was getting her Section 8 housing voucher, her free pass to the projects. “I am gonna be set
up
!” she declared, holding up her palm for me to slap.

“Congratulations,” I said, trying for enthusiasm. Thinking
Welcome to welfare, Ellenette. Good luck enjoying your shitty, limited life.

It was an all-right night, I guess; who knew, who cared. All I wanted to do was go see Samantha; everything else felt like a waste of time. So Ellenette would make it to the pj’s with one more pink-and-purple bracelet; St. Croix would make the seventeenth pair of earrings that said
ST CROIX
on them—would any of it make a difference in their lives? Would it help them get jobs, or find self-esteem, or save them any suffering? I spent three hours every Wednesday at the shelter, an extra hour to run to the bead store during the week for supplies; I’d been spending four hours a week volunteering, for ten months now. I should have cured homelessness already. Instead, I had decorated it.

And then there was Sam.

“She’s in the hospital again,” I told Bill as soon as I got home that night, all hyper and distraught.

He didn’t have to ask who I meant. “Jesus. Poor kid. Kidneys again?”

He started shuffling through the take-out menus, and I started rolling myself a joint. “No—hand infection, from the surgery. They might have to amputate it; they don’t know yet. I thought maybe I’d run by the hospital tomorrow and see how she’s doing.”

“Yeah?” His eyebrows were raised as he handed me the menu from the Thai restaurant. “That’s kosher with everyone?”

“Well, Nadine’s the one who basically suggested that I go—off the record, of course. She said, you know, because it’s the holidays, and because I’ve become
important
to Sam.” I rolled my eyes at myself, mocking my own “importance,” smiling ironically to cover up the real smile that wanted to bust through. “Anyway, since Nadine mentioned it, and I have some extra time this week…”

Which I did. Work was slow over the holidays, and I’d already finished all my gift shopping—a jacket for Bill, tennis lessons for my father, an herbal eye mask for my stepmother, Sylvia. Cash for my twenty-one-year-old half-brother, Jake, my mom’s kid, still in college in Boston; a card for my mom, to whom I hadn’t spoken much in the past few years. I loved my mom, but dealing with me made her anxious, and dealing with her made me sad. I sent her cards twice yearly, for the holidays and for her birthday; maybe every other year she sent a reply.

“God,” said Bill. “The kid just can’t catch a break, can she.”

She never should have punched that wall
was what I’d been thinking. But what if she hadn’t? She’d have gone straight from intake to rehab; I never would have met her. I certainly wouldn’t have had the chance to get to know her, to become
important
to her. And the reason she’d punched the wall, she’d told me, back in our first week of conversation, was because she was about to punch this girl Dime, and that would have gotten her thrown out. So she’d
chosen
to punch the wall instead. Even with the broken wrist, she told me, she was glad she’d done it.

Secretly, so was I.

“You came,” said Sam, sitting up in her hospital bed, amazed.

The hospital, like the shelter, was decorated for the holidays; there were candy canes at the information desk downstairs, where I’d given her name, Samantha Dunleavy, and they’d told me where to find her. I had a candy cane in my fist, along with a bag of cookies; I brandished the booty in front of me as I came around her bedside toward the empty chair.

“Bearing gifts.” I put the stuff on the table next to her bed, stepped back to look at her. She looked like a dead fish that had been left in the sun, so pale she was almost pearly, dark bruises on her arms and under her eyes. The hand in question was swathed in white gauze, the arm was hooked up to a beeping IV, and there was an angry red line shooting from her wrist to her elbow. Her skinny arms stuck out from her hospital gown; for the first time, I saw the thin, pink, parallel scars she’d carved into her own shoulders, above her tattoo. I hadn’t known she was a cutter, on top of everything else; but of course, why wouldn’t she be? “How are you feeling?”

“I’m…I’m really happy you came to visit me. I didn’t think…” She shook her head a little, like she was trying to clear a hallucination, then looked at me again. I was still there. “Thanks for coming. Here, pull up this chair.”

She leaned over, her face strained. “Don’t reach,” I ordered her as I settled myself into the visitor’s chair. “You’re here to rest. You’ve got to get this damn hand fixed, already! How’s it going?”

She indicated the twin bags of antibiotics flowing into her arm, the infected vein, vivid with poison. “It hurts like hell. And they’re trying to keep me off the opiates, but they’re giving me a little bit today, ’cause the pain’s…” She trailed off.

“Pretty bad,” I said. “It looks like it. God, I’m sorry you’re going through this.”

“It’s all right. I’m just really glad you’re here. It makes it a lot better.” She breathed deeply, trying not to flinch.

“Yeah, obviously.” I frowned. “Is there anything they can do for you? Do you want me to talk to your doctors? I mean, who’s been dealing with them—Nadine?”

Unlikely, I realized, with Nadine’s caseload; Jodi’s was just as full. So who was this teenage girl’s medical advocate? Who was holding her remaining good hand throughout this, helping her make decisions? Was there anybody who could stand up to the doctors and say,
Recovering junkie or no, how about you guys up the painkillers?
Or,
What the hell is she going to do if you have to cut off a limb?

She shook her head again, with difficulty. “No, I’m dealing with them, but it’s cool, I understand what’s going on. They been good about explaining it to me. It’s this blood infection called sepsis, but hopefully the antibiotics will kill it. Right now they think it looks pretty good that it’s working.”

“That’s good,” I said, freaking out inside.
Jesus Christ, people die from sepsis
. I wondered if they’d been fully honest about that with her. She didn’t seem like someone who’d been informed of the potential consequences of her condition—coma, amputation, death. She seemed like someone who was told she had a really shitty flu and was bummed that she might miss Christmas dinner.

Well, if they weren’t telling her, then neither was I. “I’m glad they’re taking care of it,” I said.

“Me too,” she agreed. She fixed me with her wide brown eyes. “And I’m really glad you came.”

Her voice—so childlike, so blunt. So unlike the hard-ass ’hood rat who’d been stalking the counselors’ office that Saturday just two weeks ago, bragging about how easy it would be for her to get a gun and lay a bitch out. “I’m glad I came, too,” I said, smiling.

“I mean, I didn’t think anybody was going to be able to visit me. You know, the staff’s real busy, and I called Hericka’s cell”—Hericka was St. Croix’s given name—“just to see if she could bring me some of my clothes and books and stuff from our room, but she hasn’t called me back.” Sam looked genuinely hurt. “I mean, I know we’re not best friends or anything, but we been roomies for, like, a month now, and we talked a bunch of times in our room at night, about guys we been with, and shit we been through…”

Guys?
I could have sworn, up until that moment, that Sam was gay—with her baggy clothes, her loping stride, and her jutting lower jaw, she was as butch as the hardest butch dykes on the floor (AG’s, they called themselves, for “aggressives”). That’d teach me to judge by appearances. “Well, you know, it’s only two days until Christmas. She’s probably running around.”

“Yeah, I know. Everyone’s busy.” She nodded, almost to herself, and cast a glance up at the IV monitor. It was getting toward empty, I noticed, wondering if maybe someone should be doing something about that. She turned back toward me, her pale face and glassy eyes on mine. “That’s why it’s so awesome that you’re here. I asked Nadine to tell you, in case you might be able to come, but I didn’t think—I mean, I know you’re probably busy, too.”

“Here I am,” I assured her. “And if you thought hanging out with me at a homeless shelter was fun, you’ve never hung out with me in a hospital.”

She smiled, and this time there was no grimace behind it, just a smile. “Thanks,” she said again, relaxing back into her pillow. “I hope you don’t mind if I close my eyes a minute…I’m real tired.”

“Of course,” I told her. “I’m glad just to be here with you.”

“Thanks.” That syllable again, the one that hit me right in the heart.
You’re welcome, Sam; you’ll always be welcome.
Her eyes fluttered closed, and for a second, she looked like she was at peace.

“You
came,
” she said again.

Same amount of amazed as the day before. But slightly less pallor today, I noted as I walked into the room. There was a nurse by her bedside, refitting two new bags of antibiotics to the pole of Sam’s IV, resetting the monitor so it dripped on schedule.

“This is my friend Janice,” Sam told her. “The one I was telling you about.”

The nurse smiled at me as I lowered myself into the visitor’s chair, beaming. “That’s nice,” she said.

I peered at the writing on the bags, a discordant mix of syllables,
clindamycin, aztreonam.
It all sounded horribly toxic, like floor cleaner, and it was going right into her veins.
Well
, I thought,
her veins have seen worse
.

The nurse left—“I’ll be back to check on you soon,” she promised—and Sam inspected the IV, straightening a tube so it flowed more evenly.