The Girl's Guide to Homelessness (27 page)

T
wo nights after my snowbound adventure, I lounged recumbent on the floor of the living room, chatting and watching
Hell's Kitchen
with a couple of other guests, Christine and Keith. We had all had a glass or two of wine; the tone of the room was cheerful, lighthearted, the teasing lilts of Yorkshire and Highland accents twining about me and buoying me up. My cheeks blushed warmly like two impish coals, and I wondered if this was what having a family, or at least a group of close friends, was like. I was optimistic, happy even. Everything would turn out fine. Matt had been delayed for some reason, but everything would be fine; he would show up soon, we would talk and work everything out. If the men in his crew thought so, that was good enough for me. They understood the male mind better than I did.

Without warning, the room was suddenly pinwheeling and my brain felt as though it had flipped lazily to one side. Moments before, it had felt as though I were pleasantly toasting marshmallows across an open campfire on a metal skewer; now it was as though the skewer had been
heated to a lusty, insidious orange in the flames, and I was poked through the back with it, flesh cauterizing as it slid through my spine and womb like butter, emerging through my pelvis.

In shock, I staggered to my feet and excused myself. Every movement was agony and sent shocks radiating up my body into my skull, but I had to conquer the stairs. Making it safely to my room, I collapsed to my knees before the all-knowing porcelain goddess and, as proof of my veneration, spewed a suitably regal amount of burning vomit into it. I hauled myself to my feet, but the nausea struck again and I retched into the white pedestal sink this time. My pajama bottoms began to seep vile liquid, and I pulled them off, crawling clumsily into the shower and huddling in the corner. I grasped at my hip bones as the blazing poker of agony stabbed me over and over. I recognized the feeling of a dilated cervix from having my IUD put in, but now it was coming in stabbing, shuddering waves. I knew instinctively that these must be contractions, and that they shouldn't be happening, and that I was miscarrying.

 

I held my dead fetus, mere inches long, in my bloody palm. It was a tiny, weightless boy, at the end of my twisted, detached cord like some oddly deflated balloon. He looked like a baby but, at the same time, not a baby. He was the color of deep burgundy jelly; wizened like a tiny, defeated old man from a fairy tale, but with perfect translucent eyelids and fingers and veins in floppy, sylph-like limbs. I stroked the bottom of his little foot, soft and cushiony like an animal's pad.

In a dreamlike state of shock, I gently laid my baby in the shower and set about tidying up. I rinsed my leaking
body as best I could, pulled on a new pair of black sweat-pants and stuffed them with great pillowing wads of toilet paper, stripped off my stained green fleece sweatshirt and used it to mop up the horrific mess. I set about bailing my vomit from the sink with a plastic cup, wrapped my desecrated sweatshirt into a ball and stuffed it into the trash can. I had no idea what to do next, so I climbed into bed.

He needed a name. This thought came to me as clearly and inexplicably as anything. I was ragged and feeble, but I couldn't just leave him without a name. I wanted to think hard, to give the question proper weight, but I couldn't. My mind was clouding over and I was sinking fast. Only then did the tears begin to flow; I wrapped my arms around myself, heaving and quavering violently as though I were breathing chandelier shards of glass.
Hurry, hurry
… Matt had wanted his son named after his grandfather, hadn't he?
Or was it his great-grandfather? Uncle?
I knew there was a family name that was incredibly important to him, but in my stupor it was elusive, beyond my grasp. It started with a
J
though, I knew that much. It was John, wasn't it? James? John or James…just before sleep roared up and engulfed me whole, I decided, just to be safe, on John Tristan James Barnes.

 

The following morning, when Christine knocked on the door of my room, I said I didn't feel well and passed on breakfast. I remained in bed all day, occasionally refreshing my makeshift sanitary pads, staring numbly like a zombie. I finally emerged for dinner, where I smiled as best I could, but believed myself broken and transparent, sure the shameful scent of death clung to me, as obvious and clear as a foghorn.

I left the hotel on the pretense of going for a walk the next afternoon, my child in my sweatshirt pocket, wrapped in a frivolous, sheer blue scarf from my suitcase. I felt I should give him a proper burial of some sort, but the entire town was thigh deep in ice and snow. I waded onwards, coming to a rest on the outskirts of town a half mile away, under an arching, skeletal tree at the banks of the River Deveron. I had no idea what a water burial entailed. Should I say something? There was nobody to hear, and I no longer believed in God or an afterlife, so I wasn't sure who to appeal to in any event, or why. The crisp air bit into my face like an apple. I settled for a few nonsensical sobs of love and regret, clutched the blue scarf to me and then gently placed it on the river. It bobbed once before the current ripped it from my grasp, sweeping him swiftly away, tumbling, then lost from sight forever.

 

I'm a social drinker. I only like fruity, nonalcoholic-tasting drinks, and I usually only have one at a time. I can count on one hand the number of times in my life that I've been even tipsy, much less drunk (two, by the way). But that night, the Bests broke out the whiskey, and I downed over half the bottle. They exchanged playful “She's going to be
hella
sick tomorrow” glances, and cheered me on, offering me shot after shot, finally bestowing me with the empty bottle as a souvenir. It tasted disgusting and it burned, but I kept drinking until I felt like I was moving through a bubble of water. Then I crawled upstairs and puked my guts out, and spent all of the following day with my first hangover. Perhaps not so strangely, it was preferable to having any room in my pounding head to think about anything else.

 

I contacted Vicki Day in London. If anybody would know what I should do next, she would.

After I explained my situation to her, she insisted that I come stay with her in London until Matt turned up. She would keep me busy. She asked to speak to Christine, and I put her on the phone. They spoke for a while and she assured Christine that she personally would make sure that I sent them all the money for my stay, as soon as I could. The two of them seemed to hit it off, and both of them trusted me. After Matt had demonstrated his heretofore hidden mistrust of me, his own fiancée, it was sweet to know that even people who were nearly complete strangers could trust me.

I chose to remain in Huntly until January 13, the date I had originally been scheduled to return to the United States. I still held out hope that Matt would turn up, or at least contact me somehow and let me know what was wrong. I continued emailing him every few nights, as he'd asked me to, letting him know everything that was going on, so that if he suddenly gained internet access, he wouldn't be at a loss.

I'm sorry about the police. I didn't call them, I swear. They just found me out there, waiting for you. Why, why, WHY would you ask me to go there and sleep in the snow, and then never come for me? I understand if something bad happened and you had to leave suddenly. I understand. Just please let me know you're OK. Let me know you're not hurt. Unless you're hurt or in the hospital, there must be
some
way for you to contact me, or use a pay phone to call the Dunedin.

But there was only silence.

 

Meanwhile, Michael Malloy, a hard-core follower of Homeless Tales (though not a writer), offered to pay the
$20 monthly fee to restore the site. Michael had stumbled across the site several months earlier. He'd been having a bad day and had left an angry comment on an article by a writer with a somewhat controversial opinion. Quick to defend Matt and his writers, I lashed out at him. It was OK to disagree, but geez, at least be polite about it! We didn't always agree with one another on this site, but we were courteous to one another, and we didn't sling insults as he'd done. Personal attacks weren't welcome on this site. Jerk. Jerky jerk jerk troll. So there.

We'd expected him never to come back, but he did. And he'd even apologized. It was the strangest thing. He kept coming back daily from then on; commenting and offering proactive and constructive solutions on articles. He was never again nasty to any of us. He became one of Matt's and my fast friends, and though he didn't submit articles of his own, he became just as much a part of the Homeless Tales crew as the rest of the writers.

Michael was one of the few crew members I'd given the whole story of Matt's disappearance to. And now, for the sake of the rest of the writers, he was willing to lend the $20 to get the site back up.

“Poor Cynthia's going crazy,” Michael wrote. Cynthia was Matt's first writer, a deeply spiritual woman, a nondenominational reverend in San Luis Obispo who had recently been housed after two bouts of homelessness and years on California housing lists. Cynthia was the eternal peacemaker of the group, and had one of the kindest hearts I'd ever seen. She worried incessantly for others, and never for herself. I'd also let her know about the situation, and I could almost
see
her wringing her hands, panicking at the thought of me freezing in the Scottish winter.

Homeless Tales was the center of most of these people's lives. It was their support network, their social club, their outlet. I could conjure up all sorts of imaginary reasons for Matt abandoning
me,
if I tried hard enough, but I couldn't understand him forsaking his innocent crew. These people, many of them with no family or close friends, deeply loved and respected him. Why would he just vanish and ignore all their emails, too? None of it made sense.

I gave Michael the login info, but he was unable to access the Media Temple site. The password had changed. I contacted the
other
Michael, Michael Abehsera, who hosted the site, to find out what the problem was. It took him nearly a week to respond.

Why hadn't I contacted him sooner, he demanded. He berated me as though it were somehow all
my
fault that he hadn't paid the bill, as though it were my site and my responsibility, instead of Matt's. Hey, I was just the messenger. And I'd been dealing with my own crap. Like hypothermia and bleeding out my insides.

After he'd chewed me out enough, he confessed that a former business associate, with whom he'd just parted ways abruptly, had hacked into his Media Temple account and changed all the login info. He'd have to call Media Temple directly and deal with it.

It was several days before he bothered. Meanwhile, the crew was getting more and more angst-ridden. All I could tell them was what I knew…and that was basically nothing. Finally, Michael Abehsera got back to me. He'd taken too long, although he was careful to tell me that
I'd
taken too long to notify him. It was
my
fault. Media Temple had deleted the website. It was gone forever. Michael Malloy could call and pay the $20, but then
we'd have to pay an extra $120 on top of that for Media Temple to retrieve the files.

“Wait…retrieve the files that are gone forever?” I asked skeptically.

“That's what they said. They're gone forever, but they can get them back.”

Trouble was, I didn't
have
$120. Jon, in Ireland, was in touch with me and knew about the Matt crisis—after all, Matt considered him his best friend—and he told me that he could scrape up the money somehow, so that the writers wouldn't lose all their hard work. By this time, though, Michael Abehsera was having second thoughts.

“My loyalty is to Matt. If he's gone somewhere without telling you where he is, then I can't give you those files. It's his website.”

“I don't
want
the files. You don't have to send them to me. Just send them back to their writers. It's
their
intellectual property.” But he wouldn't budge. Matt would have to give him the OK, and Matt was nowhere to be found.

 

On January 13, I took the train from Huntly to London. Vicki Day met me at Kensington Station, thick blonde hair blowing in the chilly air, and spirited me away to her flat.

Vicki is like a Fellini muse crossed with the no-nonsense business sense of Anna Wintour. Minus the meanness. She became something of a surrogate mother to me. Her daughter, Alice, was magnanimous enough to give up her room to me for a month and a half, and even their Chihuahua, Biggie, deeply suspicious and snarly at first, took a liking to me after a couple of days.

I went through random bouts of depression—my moods swung high and low. Half the time, I needed to be near somebody, to feel human contact, and I padded around
from room to room, following Vicki like a stray dog. She never once complained or showed any irritation with me, and neither did Alice, though I imagine there must have been moments when I got on their nerves. In turn, they gamely dragged me all over London during my clingy phases, showing me parks and museums and Buckingham Palace—anything to keep my spirits up.

Then I would feel the deep, dark urge to be alone for days, and I would retreat to Alice's room, shut the door and sleep for vast periods, locking myself away from the world. I watched endless viral YouTube videos until a classic
Sesame Street
video of a curly-haired toddler mischievously singing the alphabet with Kermit triggered gales of tears for hours on end. I couldn't tell what would set me off anymore, what would make me think of babies or of cherished memories I'd shared with Matt, so I tried to stick to things that would make me laugh, like old episodes of
The Chaser's War on Everything
and
Futurama.