Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure. And they have a family day, where you can get visitors, but I think that’s not until, like, May.”

  I tried not to look stricken. May was two months away. Well, all right. I remembered how peaceful and fulfilled and well rested I felt when Sam was at rehab; it would be like that again, just a little lonelier, without her phone calls. “I’m sure you know I’ll be there. And I’ll write to you all the time.”

  “I’ll write, too. And I’ll start working on our novel.” She grinned at me. “And only, like, ten months until Disney World.”

  “That’s right.” I smiled. Then I was hit by a troublesome thought. “Wait—by then, you’ll have enough privileges to go, right?”

  She laughed. “By then, if I don’t, I’m eloping.”

  We talked about the usual: books, science fiction, physics—this is when I started to lose the plot a little bit. “Wait, so the photon does what?” “It’s like, it disappears, and when it comes back, it’s aged faster than time could elapse.” “Oh.” We talked about her brother again, about the last time they saw each other in Chicago, a year earlier.

  “He was on leave for a few days, and I went to go visit him, and we went out to this Greek restaurant, and it was real uncomfortable. Like, he’s wearing his navy uniform, and I could tell he was ashamed of me ’cause I was still a junkie, and I was all mad at him, like, ‘Don’t think you’re better than me, you used to do this shit all the time.’ And we were gonna spend the whole weekend together, but then he said right after dinner he had to go, and I was pissed, ’cause we used to be best friends, you know? I mean, all throughout when we were kids, it was the two of us, and we’d protect my sister. We had a real close relationship. Plus I’d hitchhiked all the way from Colorado to see him. So I was like, fuck you and fuck the navy, and I don’t ever want to see you again, and he was like, that’s good because I don’t want to see you, either. And that’s been it. For over a year.” She pondered it. “But now I think I get it. ’Cause, it’s hard to be sober, and especially if you’re gonna be around a junkie. I mean, I’ve been mad at him for that for a long time, but now I think I understand why he couldn’t be around me.”

  We finished our meal, and she insisted on paying, pulling a crumpled wad of fives and ones from her pocket. “I can’t wait to get out of the halfway house,” she said. “I decided while I’m going to college to be a vet, I’m gonna take care of people’s dogs for a living. You know how much people pay for a walk?” She shook her head, mystified at the yuppie lifestyle, and I laughed.

  We hit the street, headed toward the subway she’d take uptown, and she slowed a little as we approached the station. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything,” I replied.

  “Can I…come over and meet Bill?”

  She peeked sideways at me, biting her lip. There was such vulnerability in her voice. I didn’t want to say no to her, but I couldn’t comfortably say yes, especially not without asking Bill first. I knew she’d never steal from me, or hurt the cats, but she was so unpredictable, so volatile and prone to disaster—I could easily imagine her deciding, once she was at our place, that she didn’t want to go back to the shelter for the night, that she wanted to crash on our sofa instead; the next morning she could well decide she didn’t want to go to the halfway house. Once we let her into the apartment, we might never get her out. “I’d love for you to come over and meet Bill,” I said, thinking fast. “But he’s not home yet. And I don’t think it’s a good idea tonight. It’s just…the place reeks of weed, there’s ashtrays full of roaches everywhere you sit…it’s definitely not the place for someone in recovery.”

  “Oh.” I cringed at the sadness of the syllable, hearing the arguments in her head—But I don’t care about weed, I’m not going to smoke any of it, I’m going to the halfway house tomorrow. “I understand.”

  “Seriously,” I babbled. “I do want you to come over. As soon as you get privileges to go off-site, I want you to come visit me. I just…I wasn’t thinking, or I’d have cleaned up tonight.”

  “That’s cool.” Her disappointment was palpable, even as she kept her tone light. “We’ll do it some other time.”

  “Absolutely.” I cleared my guilty throat and changed the subject. “So, what do you want for your birthday? It’s only a few days away, right?”

  “Tickets to Disney World.” She laughed. “For ten months from now.”

  We stopped at the subway station and stood chatting for a few minutes more. “All right,” I said, checking the time. “Time for you to head uptown.”

  “Okay.” She reached out for another hug, wincing a little at the pressure. “Bye, Janice.”

  Not good-bye. See you soon. I felt the tears collecting in my eyes, tried to blink them away before she could see. There was nothing to be sad about; this was a wonderful day. Sam had survived—she’d survived the hospital, she’d survived the psych ward, she’d survived rehab, and she’d survived everything since. Tomorrow she was going to a halfway house. She was halfway home.

  Chapter Eight

  Second Verse

  So Sam was gone again—boo-hoo, hooray. Again, I felt the anxious peace of her absence, the same mix of relief, and the guilt over that relief, that I felt when she went to rehab. One day I wrote in my notebook, Wish I could give her a call; the next day I wrote, Thank god she’s off my hands—what the hell was I thinking? And really, what the hell had I been thinking, getting mixed up with this kid who couldn’t go three weeks without attracting some kind of near-fatal tragedy? I replayed the events of the past four months and shuddered; I felt like I was walking down the street and just missed being hit by a car. I mean, the story had ended well, for now—she was safe from danger, and I was safe from fucking things up—but the ending could have been much different; it still could be.

  At least now that she was gone, I could breathe easily again; I could step back and review the past few months, look at them critically. Try to figure out how one visit to see this girl in the hospital had turned into a lifelong commitment to save her from the ravages of her abusive past. This always seemed to happen to me with people; I had a longstanding habit of adopting stray neurotics as friends, trying to fix them up, and then resenting them when I couldn’t. Now here I was, doing it again. I hadn’t meant to sign up for permanent duty with Sam. I’d never wanted this kind of responsibility; still, I’d made promises, and now I couldn’t renege. And I didn’t want to renege; I wanted to succeed. I wanted to help save Sam’s life. I just wanted it to be easier.

  Which it was, now that she was in someone else’s care for a while. Bill came home at night and asked, “Any news?” And I got to tell him, “No.” Really, that’s all I wanted—no news.

  And then I felt guilty again. I missed her. I worried about her. I wondered how she was doing, whether they were taking good care of her. I sent her a package for her twentieth birthday—an SAT-prep workbook, a Disney World guidebook, a stuffed monster, a custom-mixed CD from Bill—and got gloomy when she didn’t reply. I called Jodi, just to catch up; she was happy at her new job at another agency for kids, and unruffled by Sam’s absence. “She’s where she needs to be,” said Jodi. “We’ll hear from her soon enough.”

  Indeed, not two weeks had passed when the phone rang at two in the morning, startling me from a deep sleep. I was on my feet in the kitchen and answering before I even knew it. “Hello?”

  A woman’s voice, loud confusion in the background: “Hello, is this Miss Erobum? This is Bushwick Hospital, you’re the emergency contact for a Samantha Dunleavy? I wanted to let you know, she was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit; she was unable to breathe and we had to intubate her.”

  I was disoriented, confused. Was this a bad dream, or was this actually happening? The tile floor was cold under my feet—it must have been real. “Oh my god,” I heard myself say. “What happened?”

  “Her chart says she collapsed and was unresponsive, then she was brought here by ambulance about an h
our ago. But now she’s getting some air, she seems to be stable.”

  “When can I see her?” I turned to see Bill standing behind me in his boxers and bed head, deep lines of concern on his face. Sam, I mouthed. He nodded, still frowning.

  “Visiting hours for the ICU are ten A.M. to noon. We’ll let you know if anything else happens before then.”

  “Thank you.” I hung up and turned to Bill. “She couldn’t breathe, and she collapsed, and now she’s in Intensive Care, and they said she’s stable. That’s all I know.”

  “Oh, babe.” He held out his arms, and I went to hug him, still dazed from being jolted out of sleep. “Listen, she’s stable. Come back to bed, and you’ll see her in the morning.”

  “Right.” We shuffled back to the bedroom and lay down again. I did not sleep. I dozed, one eye on the clock, until the sun came up, and then I got up and did a little work on the computer. A few hours later Bill got up, looking extra tired.

  “Any news?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, glum. “But I’m going to shower and get over to the hospital as soon as visiting hours start. I’ll call you when I know something.”

  I took the subway to the hospital, where I got my pass and went up to the ICU. There she was, alone in a room with a huge window facing the ward, hooked up to what looked like a robot army of machines. Her eyes were open but heavy, and her skin was the color of parchment. There were two thin tubes up her nose. She tried to smile when she saw me, busting into the room like a fireman and rushing to her side, but it was too much effort. “Hey,” she managed to croak. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Of course.” I petted her head, and she leaned against me. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  It took a while, but she croaked out the story for me—she’d blacked out from lack of oxygen, due to advanced pneumonia. She’d cracked a rib in that fight she’d had and hadn’t known it; the rib had punctured a lung, which had become infected. “I knew it hurt,” she admitted. “But I thought it was healing.”

  “Guess not.” Goddamn it, I should have taken her to the hospital the night she had that fight; I shouldn’t have let her talk me out of it. But she’d seemed fine at our good-bye dinner, and she’d just seen a doctor that day—they must have missed it, too. “So they’re treating the pneumonia, and the rib, I hope. Did they find anything else?”

  “No.” She shook her head and swallowed miserably. “I mean, my kidneys are still all fucked up, and my lungs were already shot to begin with, but other than that…” She turned her head abruptly as a young woman with dark, curly hair swept into the room.

  “There she is,” said the woman, swooping around the side of the bed and planting a smooch on Sam’s cheek. A smooch! “How are you? What happened? They called me at two in the morning; I’m just glad I had the day off today.”

  Maria. Who else could it be? “Oh!” she exclaimed, noticing me. “You must be Janice. I’ve heard so much about you; it’s nice to finally meet you!”

  “You too.” I smiled and shook her hand. And then we both tried to say the same thing at the same time—“Lousy circumstances, though.” “But this isn’t how I was hoping it would happen!”—and laughed.

  Maria sat down in the extra chair, and Sam brought her up to date on the progression of the ailment, pausing here and there to huff on her nose tubes. I studied Maria, the new girl on duty, finally here in the flesh. She was very cute and instantly likeable, animated and charismatic and sharp, and I could see how Sam lit up around her, glowing even as she lay in yet another hospital bed suffering from six things at once. “And how did you get a broken rib?” asked Maria, arms folded and eyebrows raised.

  “I don’t know,” Sam wheezed. “Skateboarding, I think.”

  Maria looked drolly over at me, then back at Sam. “Well, I think you need to be a little bit more careful when you skateboard!”

  Sam dipped her head like a cartoon scamp—Aw, shucks, I didn’t mean it, it was an accident!—and sneaked a look at me. I wasn’t going to say anything she didn’t want me to say.

  The three of us talked about the halfway house, which Sam hated. “There’s no therapy there, not even twelve-step meetings until I’m off orientation. (Huff.) I’m in the house all day and night. It’s just babysitting for adults. (Huff.) It’s just as bad as the psych ward, except more boring. I miss rehab. I wish I was still in Larchmont.” She and Maria looked at each other fondly—Remember Larchmont? How great that was?—and I started to feel a little extraneous.

  “So listen,” I began. Since it had been determined that Sam was all right, since the doctors had averted the crisis and they were treating the symptoms, maybe I’d head out and get back to work, leave Sam and Maria alone for a while. Maria had come all the way from Larchmont on her day off, and I was only a few subway stops away. I was sure I’d have plenty of occasion to visit over the next few days. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I promised, over their objections. “And I’ll call to check in on you later.”

  Maria and I shook hands again, and she looked right into my eyes. I could see the strength, the determination, and the goodness in hers. I wondered if she could see the joint I’d already smoked that morning in mine. She smiled widely at me. “So good to meet you,” she said again.

  “And you.” I came around to the foot of Sam’s bed and grabbed her foot, our old good-bye hug. “You, on the other hand…we’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  “Yeah,” she croaked, her lopsided grin starting to spread. “But at least we didn’t have to wait until the end of May to see each other.”

  “No, we didn’t.” I waggled the foot. “Pretty devious, how we got around that, huh?”

  And so we were back to another two weeks of near-daily visits. On my way to the hospital, I wrote in my notebook, the rocking of the subway jostling the pen as I scribbled. Again. Sam’s pneumonia started to get better within a few days, and she was moved out of Intensive Care, but the healing was slow—her kidneys were strained, and they had to take it easy on the antibiotics, so she kept spiking high fevers, her organs inflamed. “And they don’t want to give me pain meds,” she reported, between noisy, labored breaths. She put one hand on her ribs, a deep frown on her face. “Which is good, I guess. I don’t want to have to quit opiates again.”

  I couldn’t believe how sick she was, again, for the second time in a few months; I wanted to ask a doctor what was going on, but the doctors made their rounds before visiting hours, and the nurses didn’t have much information for me. “She’s doing better than yesterday,” they’d say, or “The fever’s really high today.” That was it. No conclusive statements like “The tests show she’s recuperating,” or “She should be out by next week.” Half the time, Sam was sleeping when I entered her room, or groggy; she tried to take me through the specifics of what the doctors had told her, but most of what she reported amounted to “They don’t really know yet.”

  On her more cogent days, the suffering was worse. It wasn’t just the physical pain, the chills and fevers and nausea; it was the nightmares, the flashbacks. They’d been pronounced ever since she got sober, but since she’d been at the halfway house, where she had no psychological support, she’d been waking up screaming and sweating, and the hospital was not much better. I walked into her room one day and awakened her, and she sat upright so fast she almost ripped out her IV, her face a grimacing mask of terror.

  It took ten minutes to calm her down. She’d been having a dream about being back in Colorado, about her father making her watch while he beat her brother until he puked. Worse than being beaten herself, she said. I held her hand, and she squeezed it, exhausted tears streaming down the sides of her face. We stayed like that on and off for an hour and a half, then I went home and cried until I could barely breathe.

  Sometimes, between visits, I’d get calls from the hospital phone. She needed to talk things over with me, for instance, did I think God would punish her for things she did when she was on the streets? What about karma? She’d done
terrible, unforgivable things; was that why bad things kept happening to her? I assured her over and over that she’d done nothing to deserve this, that she’d just done what she had to in order to survive. “And you’ve got to keep surviving,” I said, squeezing my free hand into a fist of solidarity, the nails digging into my palm. “You’re not allowed to quit now.”

  Other calls were lighter: she was thinking about me, and she wanted to let me know how important I was to her. She’d been writing in her notebook, and she had this plot for a story. She was reading the Disney guidebook, and she thought early December might be a better time to go than January. “It gets real crowded around the holidays,” she cautioned.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied.

  I couldn’t wait for her to get better, and not only because I cared about her; I couldn’t wait for her to get out of the hospital and back to the halfway house, where they’d limit her contact with the outside world, so I could get a break from all this again. Why? I berated myself; so I can mope around and write about her in my notebook, without being distracted by the real thing? For three weeks I’d been wishing she could have contact, I’d cursed her program for shutting me out; now I was anxiously awaiting the day when they put her back on ice, in suspended animation, and I got to run around with my feel-good fantasies of her, my kites and my swings and my ice cream.

  In the meantime, I went to the hospital in the evenings after work. Ran into Maria again, chatted as a threesome with her and Sam for a few minutes until she left for an overnight shift at Larchmont. Just missed Jodi on another night, stealing some time from her own kid to visit this one. Sat and watched Law & Order on the TV Sam had finagled. Now when I came into her room and she was sleeping, I just pulled out my book and read, grateful for the reprieve. Then she woke up and got upset. “You shoulda woke me! I didn’t know you were here!”