Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  “Well, I heard about what happened with Samantha Dunleavy—”

  “Again,” said Tamara into the phone. Then, phone askew—“Ladies, I will discharge all of you if you do not stop.”

  Again. What did that mean? Hospital or detox? I chuckled, like, That rascally Samantha! Doing “it” again! “Is she back at St. Victor’s?”

  There was no chuckle in Tamara’s voice. “I can’t say. Ladies!”

  “Oh, sure. Well, thanks anyway.”

  “All right,” she said, and hung up.

  I sat back in my chair. Again—that was my clue. Sam had never run away from the shelter, or been discharged—again meant either a hospital or a detox. If she was in an institution, I could find her. I jumped online, started searching for all the hospitals in the city, already dialing St. Victor’s with one hand.

  I didn’t have to dial anyone else. The woman at Patient Information said she was there: Samantha Dunleavy, on the Weiss Pavilion, third floor. She’d been admitted Saturday morning.

  “Oh!” I gasped with relief, a vision of Sam’s grinning face swimming into view. Hooray, she’s in the hospital! I sprang from my chair, ready to grab my keys and go see her right away. “Great. Thank you so much.”

  “Looks like you just missed visiting hours,” said the woman. “Tomorrow’s six to eight.”

  I looked at the time—6:30 P.M. I’d seen Sam at six-thirty before—it was prime visiting time. “I’m sorry, I thought visiting hours were two to ten.”

  “Not the psych ward. Today was five to six-thirty, tomorrow’s six to eight.”

  The psych ward. Well, this was a new one. I sat down again, heavy. “Oh! Of course. Thanks, thanks so much.”

  I called Bill, my hands shaking with leftover adrenaline.

  “Found her. She’s at the St. Victor’s psych ward. I can see her tomorrow between six and eight.”

  He let out a deep, grateful breath. “Hey, that’s great, babe. That you found her, I mean. And that she’s someplace safe.”

  “Yeah.” I was solemn again. I mean, the psych ward? Something bad must have happened. What if she’d tried to kill herself? Or somebody else? My head dropped into my free hand. “Perturbing, though. What do you think you have to do to get into the psych ward?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bill. “Practice?”

  Chapter Five

  Psych

  It had been almost two weeks since I left Sam’s bedside, saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Now, walking along the same old course to the hospital, I felt like I’d aged a year. Surely there were new crow’s feet in the corners of my puffy eyes, still swollen from the previous night’s posttrauma meltdown. “Look, you found her, and she’s all right,” Bill had said, trying to soothe me, but I was having none of it. She wasn’t all right, I snapped; she was in a psych ward. She’d gone from the hospital to a detox to the nuthouse in under two weeks—how did that make her all right?

  St. Victor’s psych ward had its own entrance, with its own awning and its own locked elevators. I waited with a group of other visitors for the clock to strike six before the guard would let us sign the register and receive our passes. One gentleman was particularly agitated by the short wait; he paced a two-foot square of the lobby, muttering and fuming. I was only slightly less impatient.

  The attendant took us upstairs in the elevator, and the door to the ward was opened. And there was Sam, standing a few yards down the hallway, wearing a pair of hospital slippers under her cargo pants and an expression of surprise, almost alarm, on her face upon seeing me.

  I burst into a huge grin, putting out my jazz hands as I came down the hall, Ta da! “I told you you weren’t getting rid of me.”

  “Oh my god.” She covered her face with her hand and doubled over with embarrassment, but underneath the hand, I could tell, she was smiling. “I told Jodi not to tell you where I went.”

  So Jodi had known. As frustrated and freaked out as I’d been, trying to get ahold of her all day the day before, I had to admire Jodi for keeping Sam’s confidence. “She didn’t tell me. I found you anyway. You want me to go?”

  “I just…” She twisted around some more, still trying to hide the upturned corners of her mouth, then gave up and let out a sheepish grin. “I didn’t want anybody to know I was in here! I didn’t know what you’d think.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I assured her, pshawing. “It’s not like you’re the first person I’ve ever visited in the psych ward. I mean, you’re special, but you’re not that unique.”

  She laughed ironically, hah, and I followed her down the hall toward the patients’ lounge, studying her peripherally. She looked okay—her color was better than the days when she was at death’s door, and her wrist bore a long, wide scar like an earthworm, but there was no dressing on it, it was fully closed. She was still too thin, but she probably always had been. Then she looked over at me, and I saw the exhaustion in her eyes, and the hard line between them, the one that came out when she was suffering. It looked like someone had hit her in the forehead with a chisel.

  We found two seats together in the lounge, where a woman in a flowered housedress was mumbling to herself in Italian, and a young Korean girl stared intently at her reflection in the window. The girl wore thick green eyeshadow up to her brows and no other makeup. The agitated man from downstairs was yelling at a mousy brunette about how hard they made it to visit; she was cowering next to him on a battered sofa. I sort of hoped someone would come over and throw a straitjacket on him.

  Sam watched me look around, taking it all in. She gave me a half-shrug. “Well,” she said to me, like we were adulterers at a motel. “Here we are.”

  There we were. I smiled at her. “It’s good to see you. I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too.” She tried to smile back, but her head drooped forward, and a tear threatened to bust out of the corner of her eye. She rested her elbows on her knees and let her head hang. “It’s…been a hard time.”

  “I bet it has. You want to tell me about it?”

  A tear splashed onto her thigh, then another. I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, the blade poking through her orange sweatshirt. I felt her heave a few times, felt how hard she was trying to repress it. She straightened up, and I removed my hand.

  “I don’t even know how I wound up here,” she said, miserable. “I mean, I know, but…” Her voice trailed off, another renegade tear sliding down her cheek and onto her thigh.

  I smiled again, supportive. “Well, I wasn’t going to ask, but I am curious.”

  I got a wan chuckle and a sideways peek. Look at me all you want, I thought, I’m right here.

  Her mouth twisted again; she was deciding something. She sighed. “Okay, well, last time I saw you, I was still in the hospital, right?”

  “Right. New Year’s Eve.” We’d talked about books, about gun control, about free will versus determinism. She’d told me about hiking in the Rockies with her late dog last summer, her last attempt to get clean. We’d watched a rerun of Law & Order. “Then the next day, they discharged you, and you went back to the shelter.”

  She hunched her shoulders and cringe-smiled. “Except, I kinda made a stop along the way.”

  She looked up at me from her hunch—Please don’t be mad—and I shrugged at her—What are you gonna do. I’d already forgiven her for it, not that it was mine to forgive. “And that’s how you wound up in detox.”

  She rolled her eyes heavenward. “That sucked.”

  “I bet.”

  “But I guess I had to go, because otherwise I just woulda been…right back where I started.”

  She gestured at the floor with her arm. Right back to a square of sidewalk, a cup, and a needle. “You’re probably right,” I agreed.

  She nodded. “That’s what I said to Jodi; I said I don’t want to go back to it. And part of the reason is, like, for the first time, I would be losing something if I went back. I mean, in the past, my life was always that bad, so who cared if
it stayed that bad? But now I feel like maybe there could be something better.” She was staring hard at a patch of linoleum, her eyes narrowed. “I mean, I got high, and it took the sick feeling away, but then I knew I was just going to get sick again in a few hours, and I didn’t know what to do.”

  So she went to Jodi’s office, and she waited on the busted green chair outside until Jodi was off the phone, and she went in and told Jodi what was up. And she let Jodi convince her that she should check herself in to detox and start again, fresh.

  “I’m really proud that you did that,” I said.

  “I don’t know why.” She ducked her head again. “I mean, when I got out of there, and I got your card, I couldn’t even believe it. Like, why would you want to be my friend, after I’d fucked up like that?”

  I wanted to reach up and pet her hair, but she was about ten inches taller than me; even with her slouching, it felt like a stretch. I must have grown used to seeing her lying down in the hospital bed; I’d forgotten how much bigger than me she was. “I’m proud of you because you made a mistake but then you did the right thing to try to fix it.”

  She nodded at her lap, just once. Then she raised her head and looked at me with those giant eyes of hers.

  “I’m glad you found me,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”

  My turn to stifle a tear. “So am I.”

  It was too hard to stare at each other. We had to break it somehow, laugh about something. A short, balding guy in a gown was humming the theme song to Jeopardy!

  “I get that song stuck in my head all the time,” I confessed. “I should probably get locked up, too.”

  Her grin switched on. “Oh, man! Guzman. That guy’s hilarious.” And she was off on a string of anecdotes about her ward mates: who was all right and who was creepy, and who was never getting released. And the staff—she especially liked this one orderly, Milton, who’d been very cool with her. He’d given her a forbidden cigarette, which she’d smoked in the shower.

  “See, the air vent is right there in the shower, so I shut the bathroom door and turned on the cold water, because I knew the cold air would force the warm air in the room upward and out through the vent, so I could smoke without anyone smelling it.”

  Rrrrright. She knew the cold air would force the hot air upward. That was, like, elementary physics. Or…science, of some sort. I probably should have known that, shouldn’t I. “Ah-hah,” I said. “Pretty sneaky, sis.”

  Then she was on to a story about climbing onto the roof from the deck where they got recreation time every day—“So everyone’s, like, ‘Where’s Samantha?’ And my feet are dangling right over their heads! It was so funny—”

  I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I had to ask. “Okay, so, you got through detox, and they sent you back to the shelter. So how’d you wind up in here?”

  Okay. She reared back a little and rolled her eyes again, mortified this time. “Well…it’s complicated.” She sighed, deciding how to tell it, different expressions shifting across her face. She tilted her head, started to say something, shook her head no, then made up her mind.

  “Well, really, it’s all Ashley’s fault. She’s the one who said I had to come here. And now they don’t want to let me out!”

  Ah, of course, it was Ashley’s fault. There was scarcely anything bad that happened at the shelter—nay, in the world at large—that the girls could not trace back to Ashley’s fault. “Okay, but why did Ashley say you had to come here?”

  Sam threw out one arm. “I don’t know, because she hates me? Because she’s a stupid bitch, who doesn’t know how to do her job? I don’t know, she’s the crazy one, she should be here, not me! Alls I said is, I was having a hard time and I was depressed. Which is normal, if you consider my circumstances!”

  I nodded in sympathy. “But did you say you were going to hurt yourself?”

  She pressed her lips into a hard, flat line. Yes. “No! Alls I said was, I think about it sometimes. But who doesn’t? You told me you thought about it in the past, right, and you didn’t kill yourself, did you? Just because you think about robbing a bank doesn’t mean you’re going to do it.”

  Yeah. I used to believe that, too. It’s funny, though—the more you think about robbing that bank, the better the idea seems. But Sam was on a tear now, head high, voice loud, gesticulating all over the place.

  “And Ashley totally lied to me, too. She told me I’d just be in here for the weekend. Because ordinarily, if I was feeling real bad, I’d just go talk to Jodi, you know? Except it was the weekend, and Jodi was gone until Monday morning—”

  “So you went to talk to Ashley—”

  “And she made me come here. But they lied! They said if I committed myself, I could get out in a few days! And now they don’t want to let me out, even though I told them, I’m not going to hurt myself! And besides, if I really wanted to hurt myself, I could do it in here as well as anywhere else, they can’t stop me if I really want to do something. I could stab myself right here in the throat with this pen—”

  “Please don’t,” I offered.

  “I’m not gonna! That’s what’s so frustrating. I mean, sometimes I want to, but I already said I won’t!”

  She hung her head and scowled. I didn’t say anything.

  “They’re not helping me here, anyway. They’re just giving me meds, and they can’t even figure out which ones I should take. It sucks.”

  “I bet.” Pause. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  The girl with the green eye shadow was staring at us, I realized. I turned my head and smiled at her. She stared back at me, then rose and shuffled over to our chairs. Sam muttered something under her breath: Great, here we go.

  “You sisters?” asked the girl. Her voice was slurred and faint. “This your sister?”

  “No,” said Sam, trying to be patient. “Friend.”

  “Like a sister,” I added, still smiling. “Hey, I like your eye shadow.”

  The girl turned toward me suddenly, as though I’d just reminded her of something, but when her eyes locked on my face, it was clear that she’d forgotten it. Sam groaned to herself, then cleared her throat and said politely, “Hey, Dawn, me and my friend are talking right now, and I don’t mean to be rude, but—”

  Dawn stared at Sam like she was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “Sister?” she repeated.

  “Like a sister,” I said again.

  Sam shook her head in despair. “Everybody here is crazy,” she said.

  Dawn wandered away, which was good news, because Sam and I had a lot to cover before the end of visiting hours. I wanted to find out what her diagnosis was (a mix of borderline personality disorder and posttraumatic stress leading to suicidal ideation, she said), what meds they were giving her (a mix of antidepressants and antipsychotics), and when the doctor said she’d be getting out. She sighed in frustration at the last question.

  “I get out when I don’t feel like hurting myself anymore, which could be forever, as far as I know.”

  “It won’t be forever,” I told her. “I promise.” I reached out for the pointy shoulder blade again, and this time my hand felt right there. “I swear.”

  She nodded at her lap. A few more tears dripped onto her thigh.

  “Okay,” she allowed. “I’m trusting you. But if things don’t get better, I’m gonna be real mad at you.”

  “Okay.” I laughed. “I’ll totally accept that.”

  It was almost time to go, and I wanted to use the ladies’ room. “I’ll be right back.” I rose and placed my bag on my seat—my way of saying, I trust that I can leave this here with you.

  “All right,” she said, moving over to the busted old upright piano that was sitting there, somewhat incongruously, hosting a collection of board games with scattered pieces on its bench and top. Her way of saying, You’ll hear that my hands are occupied, so you know I’m not going through your bag.

  She lifted the lid and cracked her knuckles, and as I closed the door to the bathroo
m across the lounge, I heard her begin to play.

  It was Beethoven—fucking Beethoven!—“Für Elise.” She played it perfectly, fluidly; the notes lingered and rushed and got louder and softer as she caressed each key, feet urging the pedals. I froze. She could not be playing this right now; she could not be playing like this. This was not believable. This called into question everything she’d told me about herself so far. How could she have been homeless since the age of twelve, neglected and abused since birth, living in squalor and poverty, and have learned to play the piano like this?

  I washed my hands, dried them, and walked out to where she was hitting the crescendo. She swayed a little as she put the finishing touches on it, leaned over with one hand to hit the last note, and put her hands in her lap.

  She looked at me. I bugged my eyes at her. Her lips pursed as she tried not to smile.

  “Dude,” I said. “You did not just play that like that.”

  She sat there with her pursed lips, enjoying my reaction as I continued to stare at her, mouth agape.

  “Where the hell did you pick that up?”

  She shrugged, no biggie. “I used to sell dope to this guy who had a jazz bar in Oklahoma City. Sometimes he’d let me crash there. He showed me how to read music.” She squinted at the sheaf of sheet music on the rack, played a few bars of Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” “Once you learn how to read the notes, you can play just about anything.”

  So she’d learned how to sight-read from a jazz and dope fiend in Oklahoma City. “Yeah, I know,” I said, wary. “I took lessons in middle school.” Three years of them, weekly, with practice in between. And I still couldn’t sight-read, or play like that.

  “It’s funny, they always got a piano at places like this. They got two at the shelter.” She was right, I realized, though I’d barely noticed them, and had never seen them played. “Maybe they’ll have one at rehab.”

  She slid from the bench back to her chair, nonchalant, but I couldn’t be quite as blasé about her virtuosity as she was. Even if she’d had informal lessons, it didn’t explain how she got so good, how she’d stayed so good without practice. The music just seemed to come naturally to her—as natural as quoting the Tao Te Ching, as natural as applying physics to the problem of how to sneak a cigarette. I already knew the kid was a prodigy, that she could read a book in a day and discuss it with you the next; I’d noted her vocabulary, I’d read her poems. I’d seen her discussing her meds with the nurses—“Is that the vancomycin? Am I through with the nafcillin?” Now, watching her sight-read “The Rose” off the rack of a psych ward piano, it was like all six sides of the Rubik’s Cube clicked into place.