Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  Samantha is trying to manipulate the situation, Nadine had said. And it’s working.

  “Sam, there’s nothing we can do about it today. The only thing we can do is not make the situation worse. You’ve got to calm down and accept this. I want to visit you just as much as you want me to. But I will see you as soon as I can, when you get to rehab. If you do something crazy right now, you’ll have to stay in the psych ward, and they won’t let me visit you at all. Is that what you want?”

  “No.” She was meek again, her voice frail and sorrowful. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I got you in trouble.”

  “You didn’t get me in trouble.” I’d gotten myself into it. “Just let’s both try to stay out of trouble in the future, okay? I’ll call you tomorrow, and I’ll ask for Britta, and if you need to call me, you know you can, anytime—just, be discreet about it, okay? We’ll play along for a day, and then you’re going to Larchmont, and life will change very much for the better.”

  “I know. I just wish…it would mean so much if I could see you.”

  Yeah, it would. To see her, and to give her a hug good-bye. To tell her one more time, face-to-face, before she went away, how proud I was of her, and how grateful I was to be in her life. I didn’t even know if she’d actually make it to rehab, or if she’d ditch her escort and run; I didn’t know if she’d stay once she got there. As always, every time I let her out of my sight, I risked never seeing her again.

  “I will see you as soon as I can,” I promised. “You know I will.”

  I wasn’t looking forward to going to the shelter that Wednesday. I wanted more than anything to blow it off, to say to Nadine, “You know, I come here every week at my own expense for no reason except the kindness of my heart and soul, but I don’t have to.” And “If you don’t like the way I volunteer, maybe I shouldn’t volunteer at all.” I mean, Nadine had basically called me a liar, told me I was out of line, and hung up on me. Why? Because I had shown an above-average level of commitment to a young person who needed it? I mean, rules aside, I wasn’t a detriment to Sam. I didn’t see how it hurt the other girls if I visited Sam at the psych ward. This was bullshit; they acted like I needed them more than they needed me. And to impugn my character, to insinuate that I’d been improper in any way—that was practically slander.

  Still, I had to go. I couldn’t quit volunteering over Sam; that would be proving them right. I had to take my own advice again, hold my head up and show them that I was a team player. My bead bag seemed extra heavy and odious as I dragged it down the block toward the shelter, and my feet didn’t want to take me there. The only consolation was the memory of the message from Sam that morning—“I’m here in Larchmont. It looks all right. Here’s the number, you can call between six and eight every night. If it’s busy, just keep trying. Thanks for everything, Janice. Hope I’ll see you soon.”

  If Sam could go to someplace she didn’t want to go, so could I. I marched my unwilling ass through the shelter doors, up the stairs, and straight to Nadine’s door. I wasn’t going to skulk around and avoid her; if I couldn’t clear my name, at least I wanted to know where I stood.

  She waved me right in. “Juhneece. Sit down. I want to talk to you.”

  “Okay, great.” I sat and gave her my obedient look.

  She appraised me, not unkindly, and her face relaxed. “So, what happened on Monday—it was the hospital’s mistake. The social worker called me, she said you never claimed to be the caseworker, it was Samantha. She said to tell you she was sorry for the confusion.”

  Well, hallelujah. I broke into a smile. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  So was Nadine, obviously. “But you know why she was confused—because Samantha made it sound like you were the caseworker, and she saw you there all the time….”

  “I know.” I shook my head, laughed at myself. “I guess I overdid it a little bit.”

  Nadine looked at me, pointed. Yeah, you did. “And so did Samantha. She overdid it a lot.”

  “I guess she did.”

  She shook her head, like, You don’t even know. “She had everybody here in an uproar the past two days. Nothing else got done. Jodi was calling my boss, and my boss was calling the hospital, and Samantha was calling everybody, trying to get us all confused—she was running the show. You know, she’s very smart.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said.

  “And she’s very good at getting what she wants. That’s how she survived those years she was on the streets. She knows how to read people, and how to get them to do what she wants. When I told you to be careful with her, I wasn’t just talking about her. Some of these girls will take over everything, if you let them.”

  I looked back at the last ten weeks—how quickly I’d gone from not knowing this girl at all to signing on as her full-time advocate for life. “I know.”

  Nadine smiled at me, head tipped in warning. “The rules are to protect the volunteers and staff, too.”

  I smiled back. “I’m starting to figure that out.”

  I realized, looking at Nadine now, how young her face was. I’d always thought of her as my elder, but tonight it dawned on me that she was probably my age, maybe even a year or two younger—thirty-three or thirty-four, at most. And here she ruled this floor like the prime minister, like she was Golda Meir, motherly political leader to forty or fifty severely troubled teenage girls. My prodigious respect for her grew tenfold.

  “Good.” She rose from her chair, and I did the same. She came around to my side of the desk and put her hand on my shoulder for a second. “Look, Juhneece, I know you meant well. I know that. I see how you are with the girls. You’re good for them. They look forward to seeing you every week, and it’s not just for the beads. They know you used to be a resident, and they see you as somebody that they could be one day. That’s very important for them.”

  “Oh, pfff,” I sputtered, tongue-tied with pride.

  “I notice you’ve been here for almost a year now. Not many people make it that long.” One corner of her smile twisted upward. “I didn’t know how long you were going to last, when you started. You surprised me.”

  I surprised myself sometimes. “I’m just glad everything worked out.”

  And it had. Sam was at rehab, at long last, and I was back in Nadine’s good graces. What a blessed place to be.

  I waved and shut Nadine’s door behind me, headed into the lounge to see my girls. It was time to string some beads.

  Chapter Six

  Rehabilitation

  So Samantha was ensconced at rehab, and I was in a state of jubilation. I had helped her, after all; I’d seen her through the most precarious phase of her recovery. I’d put my arm around her while she cried, witnessed her pain, tried to absolve her of her shame. I’d shown her what real love looked like. I might have actually helped to save somebody’s life—what greater purpose on earth could there be? And now I was free to stretch out in the king-sized bed of my life, and luxuriate in the lush comfort of it all. I could meet friends for drinks in the evening instead of running to the psych ward for visiting hours, or I could come home and read in the easy chair. I could see my brother, Jake, on a visit from college in Boston, and make leisurely dinners with Bill.

  “Nothing new with Sam,” I reported happily to everyone. “She’s still away at rehab.”

  I didn’t even have to miss her, because I spoke to her every night, sometime between 6 and 8 P.M., even if it meant standing outside of a restaurant with my finger in my ear, yelling, “Just keep going, babe! Twenty-six more days!” into the phone. She’d had some trouble adjusting to rehab at first—three days into her stay, she was vowing to break out of the locked ward and run away—to “elope,” in the institutional parlance. She swore that rehab wasn’t working—she wanted to use drugs more than ever. But her new counselor, Maria, convinced her to give it another twenty-four hours and then decide whether to stay or to go.

  “Maybe this isn’t working right now,” Maria told her. “But the other thing you were do
ing wasn’t working, either.”

  I was hearing a lot about Maria now, as Sam entered her second week of all-day meetings, workshops, and therapy sessions. Maria was young, only twenty-five, an ex-junkie and a practicing Catholic, now ministering to other addicts, some twice her age, while going for an advanced degree. “She sounds amazing,” I said, that familiar jealousy rising in my throat, but I swallowed it—what was good for Sam was good for Janice. “I’m so glad you and she found each other. Didn’t I tell you how great rehab would be?”

  In fact, I was overjoyed that Sam was in such good hands and off of mine. I sang in the kitchen while making dinner, buoyed by the evening’s phone call: “Today we had art therapy; I did these really cool pastels, I can’t wait to show you when you visit.” Bill and I spent uninterrupted weekends at home, walking down to Chinatown for dim sum, having dinner with other couples. I didn’t have to run out to any hospitals. Nobody was calling to say they’d nearly been molested or had punched something inanimate. I went to the shelter on Wednesdays, smiled brightly and waved at Nadine when I saw her, and she waved back.

  By the second week of rehab, I’d gone from speaking to Sam every night to speaking to her every other night. Soon she’d be allowed to have a visitor; I could come up on Sunday and spend two hours with her on the ward. It would be good to see her—our phone conversations had grown a little strained lately.

  “So, how are you today?” I’d ask.

  “Good. I got to play basketball after lunch.”

  “That sounds fun.”

  “It was.”

  (Awkward pause.)

  Well, she was standing in a hallway in rehab—she wasn’t going to spend half an hour going through her private innermost feelings, the way she used to. Sometimes she said, “I was really down today,” or “Maria and I have been talking about my mom,” but most of it was pretty prosaic—a joke she’d heard or a prank she’d pulled (“So I held my breath until I passed out, and they were like, oh my god, she has epilepsy!”). I tried to take it as a good sign—things were stable in her life right now, she could focus on the day-to-day. Play basketball, tell a joke, be a kid. She was doing the hard work with Maria.

  Still, I was starting to wonder if she was slipping away from me a little. “I think she loves Maria more than me,” I complained to Bill.

  “Impossible,” he judged. “Who is this Maria-come-lately, anyway?”

  “Well, you know, I think she sounds great, she sounds perfect—she’s young, she’s really dedicated, and she’s an ex-junkie, so they have that in common.” Damn it, I thought, why didn’t I ever do any heroin? God knows I did enough of everything else. “Anyway, the more support Sam has, the better. I mean, now she’s got Jodi, and me, and Maria—she’s in great shape.”

  I thought I might meet Maria on visiting day, but Sam told me she’d be off duty that weekend. “I hate it when she’s not around,” Sam confessed. “Me and her have grown real close, and then stuff comes up and I want to share it with her, and she’s not here.”

  You can always call me, I wanted to say, but she couldn’t. She could only receive calls, and only between six and eight, and only after I’d dialed and dialed and dialed for a half hour, waiting for someone else to get off the line. “I wish I could meet her,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, wistful. There was another one of those awkward pauses.

  “So, is there anything I can bring when I come see you? Books or magazines or anything?”

  “Nope. Just bring yourself.”

  Her perky voice, almost rushed. Probably couldn’t wait to hang up and go smoke a cigarette before evening free time was over. Kids—they outgrew you so fast.

  “Will do,” I said, letting her go. “I’ll see you then.”

  I had my notebook on my lap on the train to Larchmont, but I was nervous and the train was shaking, so I didn’t write; I just stared out the window, thinking. This was the same train I used to take to visit my mom and Jake when they were living in Westchester, back when I was in my twenties, before my mother and I dropped out of touch. She was still living nearby; if I stayed on the train for another few stops, I could go visit her instead of Sam. I hadn’t visited my mother in years.

  I got off the train at Larchmont and followed the directions to the rehab hospital I’d printed off the Internet. I’d been advised to show up a little bit before 2 P.M.—visitors had to sit through a presentation about 12-step recovery before they were allowed to see patients. I surveyed the other visitors as they arrived in the waiting room: a thirty-something man holding a squirming three-year-old girl on his lap; a couple in their sixties, who looked like they’d been through this before. Two women, Central American maybe, a mother and a daughter, holding hands. I wondered what I looked like to the others, pacing around in my down coat and hooded sweatshirt. Probably like I was going to see my boyfriend and slip him some cocaine with my tongue.

  By 2 P.M., we were a motley crowd of twenty or so visitors, escorted by a facilitator into a meeting room with a big-screen TV on a cart. We signed in at a table bearing stacks of literature about addiction, 12-step recovery, and codependence. Are you a marijuana addict? asked one leaflet. I didn’t bother to take one. I already knew the answer.

  I chose a plastic chair and turned my attention to the facilitator, a woman in her fifties with a weary, seen-it-all look on her face. She stood at the front of the room and began her spiel. “You’re here because you love somebody who’s an addict. It’s a hard thing to do, and sometimes you find you can’t do it anymore. Here are some things you should know about addiction and recovery so you can understand what your loved one is going through, and so you can help yourself through this process.”

  She turned on the TV and started to play an Al-Anon video. The salient points of the video were:

  • If you’re involved with an addict, there’s probably something a little addictive about your personality, too.

  • You might want to look into that.

  • Also, you might think you’re helping the addict to get better, but you’re probably not.

  • In fact, you’re probably enabling the addict.

  • Relationships with addicts = generally unhealthy.

  • The addict might have to leave the relationship with you in order to get healthy.

  • That might not be such a bad thing for you, either.

  Right. I looked around the room at all the other people, to whom this applied. Not me, of course—the only thing I’d enabled Sam to do was get to rehab. So could I see her, already?

  We formed a line behind the facilitator and were ushered one by one through the double doors to the ward. I took two steps inside, and there was Sam, all six feet of her, leaning against the wall with one shoulder, hands in her pockets, grinning.

  “Hey there!” I said, and went in for the hug. She hugged me back, reaching down to embrace me, then broke away.

  “Hey,” she said. She sounded out of breath, nervous maybe. “It’s great to see you.”

  “You too!” She was pinker than she’d ever been, her eyes clear and wide, ten more pounds on her than when I’d seen her last, three weeks ago. No scowl of self-hatred like the one she’d seen in the psych ward mirror. “You look like you’re doing just great.”

  “I’m getting fat.” She laughed. “I keep eating and eating. It’s, like, the closest I can get to a sedative.” She extended her arm toward the patients’ lounge. “Want to go sit?”

  I sat across from her at a table for two and draped my coat over the back of my chair. “So.”

  “So.” She smiled, fixing me with that hungry, penetrating look of hers. “Here we are.”

  There we were. Heady, to be in her company again, to feel that intense vitality she radiated. “So, how is this place?”

  She widened her eyes, serious. “It’s really good. Remember how I always said the shelter was the nicest place I’d ever lived? This place is even better. They keep us busy all day long, which is good—I mean, sometimes
I hate it, but I always know, okay, just get through this one part and then something better will happen. You know? Like, I’ll talk to Maria, or I’ll go play basketball, or I’ll write in the notebook you gave me. And I just give it another day. And it works—I been totally sober since I left the psych ward, not even air freshener or anything, completely sober. And no street drugs since detox. I mean, this is the first time I wake up in the morning and using isn’t the first thing I think about. I still want to use, but I want to not use more than I want to use, you know?”

  I beamed at her. This was exactly what I’d hoped she’d say—You were right, Janice, you promised me that things would get better if I went to rehab, and they did. “That’s great. That’s so awesome. I’m so glad to hear it. See? You worked so hard to get here, and you’ve worked so hard since you’ve been here, and it’s really paid off.”

  “Yeah, I know. I mean, when I think about how much I didn’t want to come here, and now I only have ten more days, and I don’t want to leave. I mean, I don’t want to stay here forever, but right now, this is where I need to be. And I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get out of here—I don’t want to go back to the shelter, there’s too much temptation there. I need someplace where I can’t get away with anything, like this place. Like a halfway house or something.”

  My brow furrowed before I could catch it. They weren’t really going to send her back to the shelter, were they? I’d thought the plan was to find her a nice yearlong version of this place, someplace strict and rigorous and long-term, and transfer her there directly. Someplace where we could talk on the phone, and I could come see her once every few weeks on visiting day, and somebody else would be taking care of her daily emotional needs. I couldn’t do it; I shouldn’t have even tried, and I wasn’t game to try again. The past few weeks away from her had shown me how much I’d needed a break, how ill-equipped I was to minister to someone full-time. I might have been jealous of Sam’s counselor Maria, but I didn’t envy her.