Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  “You’re supposed to be resting.” I smiled, sliding my book back into my bag. “That’s why you’re here, remember?”

  On my way to the hospital one evening, I decided to stop at the donut shop—what the hell. Sam’s appetite had started to return; she could use a couple of powdered jelly donuts, and so could I. Pre-dinner donuts weren’t officially sanctioned on my self-imposed diet, but she was my excuse. I had to eat donuts with Sam. She couldn’t be expected to go through that alone.

  As I rode the elevator to her floor I could hear my stomach growling, like it was going to snatch the bag right from my hand and stuff the whole thing inside itself, without help from the rest of my body. I strode quickly to her room and stopped short. Empty.

  This time I didn’t panic. Much. She must have been discharged; I’d just speak to a nurse and get that confirmed. Yes, said the woman at the nurses’ station; she’d been sent back to the halfway house that afternoon. I checked my stupid, lazy, cell phone, and there it was, an hours-old message from Sam saying she was on her way back to purgatory.

  So, good. Sam was recuperated and out of the woods; she was back behind the walls of the halfway house. And I had time to run to the grocery store before Bill got home. We’d have a healthy, home-cooked meal for a change—a stir-fry, maybe, with tofu and vegetables. Then after dinner we could sit on the couch and talk about anything but Samantha.

  I ate all three donuts on the subway home. Thank you, Sam.

  April 25, 2005

  Janice,

  Thanks for visiting me so much when I was in the hospital. I thought maybe this place would count those two weeks towards my orientation and I’d be closer to level one, but no such luck. So I still can’t call or get visits, but at least I can write. I even got my hands on an old typewriter so my hand won’t hurt so bad when I write. Enclosed are some of my latest ideas for stories, please pick the one you like best and circle it. Also enclosed is some random stuff I wrote, so let me know what you think about that, too. It was miserable being so sick but your visits made me feel better, and the docs are keeping an eye on me as an outpatient, so next time we hang out it won’t be in a hospital (I hope). Can’t wait to visit when I get to level 1. You’re a great friend, Janice.

  Peace,

  Sam

  Now that she was back at the halfway house, Sam was writing again. I got two letters in one week, each with various story premises, poems, and autobiographical jottings enclosed. The next week a small package arrived, with her telltale spiky handwriting; it was a wooden frame with the word FRIENDS on it. She had illustrated a quote from the Tao Te Ching—“While we value things for their tangibles, it is the intangibles that make them useful.” I put it on the bookshelf, next to the picture of me and my brother.

  I came home one evening after catching a drink with a girlfriend to find Bill already home, changed out of his work clothes and watching the news as he fired up the stove for dinner. He gave me a big hello kiss and a message. “Hey, babe. Sam called about a half hour ago.”

  “She did?” I raised my eyebrows—she wasn’t supposed to have phone privileges yet. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket: no messages. “Are you sure it was her?”

  “Yep.” He nodded, pleased. “Knew it was her as soon as she asked for you. I said, ‘She’s not home right now, but is this Sam?’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, is this Bill?’” He did a goofy, spot-on imitation of her voice, and I smiled. “And we talked for a minute—she thanked me for the CD I made her, and I told her I was looking forward to meeting her, and she just said she’d try you some other time. And that was it.” He nodded again, like he understood something now. “It was funny, hearing her voice. She was so polite.”

  I wanted to revel with him, but I was perturbed by the unscheduled call, and to the home phone, no less. “You’re sure that was it? Everything was okay? Was her voice normal? Did she sound like she was in the hospital?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he reassured me. “Her voice was fine; she sounded fine. Actually, it sounded like she was outside somewhere.”

  “But she wasn’t panicky or anything.”

  “Not at all. I told her she could call your cell phone if it was important, but she said it wasn’t.”

  I chewed my bottom lip, frustrated. “Well, I guess there’s no way to know what she wanted, unless she calls back. Anyway, thanks for fielding that one.”

  “No problem. I was happy to get to talk to her, finally. I can’t wait to meet her at this point.” He looked bemused, like he was recalling the high points of their conversation. “Where’s that accent from?”

  “All over,” I said. “Hell and back.”

  There were no more phone calls from Samantha that night, though I got one from Jodi the next day: “Sam got permission to go to the doctor for a follow-up yesterday, and she skipped her halfway house for a few hours. She called me from a pay phone and told me she was leaving there, and she wanted to come over to my place—it took me twenty minutes over the phone to convince her to go back.”

  “Oh my god.” So that was the call Bill intercepted. What if I’d been home to receive it—Janice, I skipped my halfway house—can I come over? I would have tried to talk her into going back, too, but I didn’t know if she would have listened to me. I could feel the wind from another near miss with disaster. “So she went back? That’s amazing, Jodi. Thank god for you.”

  “Well, it wasn’t easy. I understand her frustration with the program—there’s no psychological support, and it’s not the best place for her. I still wish she’d been able to go upstate, where she’d be getting some real therapy. But this is what she’s got for now, and she’s got to follow through with it and get whatever she can out of it. And we’ll still be able to visit her on family day—at least she didn’t lose that—so put it on your calendar—two Saturdays from now.”

  “Okay. Great. Thanks for letting me know.”

  Jodi heard my dispirited tone and tried to reassure me. “Don’t worry, she’s all right again. Everything’s okay, for now. We’ll all muddle through this somehow.”

  I hung up, put my hand to my forehead, started rubbing my temples. Bill hovered behind me. “What’s the latest?” he asked.

  “She tried to take off from her halfway house. That’s when she called here. But she didn’t get me, so Jodi talked her back in.”

  “Huh,” he said, reflecting. So he’d been talking to a fugitive; we’d narrowly avoided harboring her. “The fun never stops, does it.”

  “The joys of parenting,” I muttered.

  Well, at least I could relax a little now; I knew I wouldn’t be hearing from Sam again any time soon. She’d be stuck on orientation level for a while, following her great escape attempt—no contact other than letters for another thirty days, and the staff would be keeping a much closer eye on her from now on. Her health was being monitored; there’d be no more surprise hospitalizations, we hoped. I tried to calm down, trust that she was being looked after, and enjoy the quiet.

  Refreshing, really, when I could live my own life, uninterrupted by emergency phone calls or hospital visits. I went to the shelter on Wednesdays, came home and told Bill about the girls I’d met—a four-foot, baby-faced charmer with a thick lisp whom everyone called Mini-Me; a natural comedian called Philly (“Like the blunt,” she clarified, “not the city”), who had me crying laughing with her stories about her neighborhood bodega. I worked uninterrupted all day, wrote voraciously in my notebook, started planning ahead to Bill’s thirtieth birthday, six weeks away. Maybe we’d go to the beach for the weekend, or out to a fancy dinner with my dad and stepmom. It had to be something really special, after all the support he’d given me this year.

  I was at my desk working when I thought of it: I’d ask Bill to marry me. I sat up straight in my chair, the screen swimming before my eyes—of course, it was perfect. I’d propose to Bill. If anybody had asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I’d have said, “A ring.” I had little doubt that Bill felt the same way. We’d talk
ed about getting married a few times; after attending a friend’s wedding last year, we’d noted all the things we would have done differently (i.e., better), should we ever theoretically decide to have a wedding of our own. But neither of us had mentioned it in a while, probably because we were still so high from moving in together just seven months earlier.

  I should do it, I thought, my excitement growing as I pretended to debate the idea in my head, though by this point there was no debate: I was going to propose to Bill. I was already thinking ahead to how I’d use his old class ring to find the right size, how I’d wait until the perfect moment on his birthday, how thrilled he would be, how he’d look into my eyes and say yes, or so I fervently hoped. Thinking ahead to the wedding, to the marriage—how lucky and secure and invincible I’d feel, knowing that Bill was my partner for life. He’d probably have to take some shit for it at his job—“She proposed to you, Scurry?”—but Bill was man enough to take it, to enjoy it, even. He’d accepted my last proposal, to move in with me; I could only hope he’d accept this one, too.

  The more I thought about it over the next few days, the more I became sure that this was my most brilliant idea ever. My only problem was keeping such a brilliant idea to myself and not sharing it with Bill, or my folks, or other mutual friends, who might let it slip to him. He came home from work at night, kissing me and unbuttoning his cuffs, and I thought, Marry me. He reached out from his side of the sofa while we were watching TV, put his hand in my hair, and kissed the side of my face. I opened my eyes in the morning and he was there, stretching to hit the alarm, scratching the lazy cats under the chin as they awoke with us. “Good morning, Shmoo.”

  Six weeks started to seem like a long time to wait to propose. After years of resisting growing up and settling down, I felt now like it was the smartest possible thing to do, and I wanted to do it right away. I’d already grown up so much this year—I’d gotten over my fear of commitment and asked Bill to move in with me; I’d taken on caring for Sam. Now I wanted to start my family, already.

  The next Saturday, visiting day, was sunny and humid, and I stopped at the bodega down the block from Sam’s halfway house to buy some extra bottles of soda to bring with me. A few pit bulls and their owners growled as I passed; the flags of several Caribbean countries were displayed in windows. We were in el barrio, where the girls at the shelter lived before the shelter. My first apartment, when I was eighteen, was in a neighborhood like this.

  I rang the bell at the halfway house, and a young man with a pitted face and a too-big white button-down shirt greeted me and escorted me to the backyard, where I spotted Sam sitting with Jodi at a table. There was a kid next to them—Jodi’s ten-year-old son, Evan, whom I’d heard about but never met. Sam looked hilarious; they’d obviously insisted that she try to tame her mop of hair somehow, and they’d gotten her to tuck her shirt into some donated dress pants. She looked like Alfalfa, from The Little Rascals. But her face was rosy, and she was smiling—bashfully, almost. “Hey, Janice.” We hugged. “Good to see you.”

  It was good to see her, too—always better when she wasn’t in a hospital, when it had been weeks between visits instead of hours. When the feelings of fondness won out over the feelings of obligation, as they did now, as I looked at her forelock of hair struggle against whatever gel she’d applied to it. Six months now, we’d been friends, though we’d been separated for the past few weeks; as with Bill, I couldn’t imagine life without her anymore. “Good to see you, too.”

  I said hi to Jodi and was introduced to Evan. “Nice to meet you.” Took a look around me. “So, this is it, huh?”

  “Yep.” Sam raised her eyebrows. “You see what I’m talking about?”

  I did. This place was as bad as the psych ward, if not worse. The other residents milling around the penned-in backyard looked busted as hell; several would have appeared most at home behind a shopping cart full of cans. Tattooed necks, pitted skin, bent backs, scarred and swollen lips—this was a tough bunch. Most of them were court-mandated; they didn’t want to be here; and would be back to using as soon as they were let out the door. “Wow,” I said, contemplating Sam spending another ten months at this place.

  Maria couldn’t make it, said Sam. She had to work up in Larchmont. So it was just Sam, Jodi, and I catching up on things, while Jodi’s son played a handheld video game. Sam ran down her list of grievances with the program; Jodi and I agreed but encouraged her to stay. “In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for a new place,” promised Jodi, still counseling, even while off duty.

  Sam told us how she’d been spending her time—reading, studying for the SAT. Scrubbing things with toothbrushes, when she did something like cursed or showed insolence. “It’s real therapeutic,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  I told them how different the shelter was these days, with no one overseeing the girls’ floor and nobody replacing Jodi. “They need people like you and Nadine,” I told her. “We all do.”

  At one point Sam went to the bathroom, leaving me alone with Jodi and Evan. “This place may not be great,” I said, “but thank god you talked her into coming back here. I don’t know what I would have done, if it was me.”

  “You would have done the right thing,” Jodi assured me. “It wasn’t easy, though. Part of me wants her out of this place, too. The only time she can talk to us is when she’s in the hospital? That’s no good. And they’re not doing a thing for her. But like I said, I can look around while she’s here, maybe we can find her something better. For now, this is what she’s got to deal with.”

  Sam rejoined us. “Talking about me?”

  “Who else?” asked Jodi.

  We chatted some more, and I told them my upcoming good news. “So, I’m going to propose to my boyfriend, Bill.”

  Sam’s eyes flew open. “No way! That’s so great! Congratulations!” Jodi echoed her. I flushed with excitement, saying it out loud like that—carrying around the good news and not being able to share it had been killing me. “Bill’s so awesome,” Sam told Jodi. “He made me this CD, and he put in these real funny liner notes. I spoke to him the day I called you.”

  “Yeah, that day.” Jodi looked pointedly at Sam. “We’re not going to have any repeats of that.”

  “I know,” Sam groused, rolling her eyes. “Trust me, I know.”

  Watching her face now, I could tell that she did know. She knew this horrible place was her only chance at staying sober; that’s why she chose to come back. She knew better than anybody how few alternatives she had, and in case she forgot, Jodi reminded her—she wasn’t crashing with one of us, not even for a night, not ever. Sam had thought of everything she could to get out of here; she’d told me she’d even fantasized about getting high, just so she could get sent back to Larchmont, until Maria told her she wouldn’t be taken back like that. But now something about her had shifted—she sat up straighter and more still, and she looked farther into the distance. Like she’d accepted her time here as something else she’d survive, another sacrifice she’d make to save her own life.

  “I should give you the grand tour,” she said abruptly. “And I want you to meet my roommate, Valentina, the one I told you about. She’s a tranny; her birth name’s Jesus. Me and her get along real well.”

  “Cool.” Jodi and Evan and I got up and followed her into the building, a standard-issue five-story Brooklyn limestone. Like the shelter, it was covered throughout the common areas with construction-paper signs bearing inscrutable motivational slogans (Life become your dream) and memos about the possession of cigarette lighters (forbidden, in case anyone thought they could keep one hidden). The TV room was a near replica of the shelter’s—the couch with the frayed arms; the sour, permanent smell of potato chips and feet. We peeked into the office—same whiteboard, same desks covered in manila folders. Upstairs, the residents’ rooms were closed. Sam stopped and knocked on her door.

  “Valentina.” Knock, knock. “Valentina.”

  “Mmmmph,” came the muffled reply
.

  Sam cracked the door, looked in. “Hey, my friends are here. Can I show them our room?”

  We craned our necks to look around her, and I saw Valentina, lying curled up on the bed with her back to us. I caught a glimpse of the drawings on the wall—Sam’s work. I wanted to go look at it. “Sleeping,” grumbled Valentina.

  “Sorry.” Sam closed the door behind us, dropped her voice. “She’s real sensitive today, ’cause she doesn’t have any visitors.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said, casting a look back at the door. “I’m so sorry to hear it.”

  “Yeah, the only family she has is, like, a bunch of tranny hookers. Her real family in Puerto Rico disowned her when she came out as a kid, and she had to trick her way to Miami to be with her trans mom.” Sam grinned. “Me and her have a bunch of fun together. The other day we were daring each other to pull the fire alarm at the top of the stairs, and we kept pushing each other away from it, so we invented a new game, King of the Stairs. It’s like King of the Hill, but with stairs.”

  We pressed on with our tour, Jodi chastising Sam for courting grievous bodily injury, me looking back at the door one more time. Sam had me and Jodi and Maria looking after her, but nobody had shown up for Valentina today. Poor girl. I wanted to go back, sit down on the bed next to her, and rub her back in circles. Instead I followed after Sam, who pointed out the fire alarm in question. “I said I’d give her five bucks if she pulled it. That would be so funny.”

  When we got back downstairs, the entirely unsociable staff was starting to indicate that it was almost time for us to move along. “So, when do we get to talk to you again?” I asked Sam.

  She jammed her hands into her pockets, anxiety in her voice. We were leaving, and she’d be here for the next eternity, playing Scrabble with missing pieces with a bunch of bench-dwelling transients. “When I get off orientation. Hopefully by the middle of June. And I’ll write more letters in the meantime. I been writing all the time, since there’s nothing else to do.”