Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  “Okay, but what about the antivirals?” I asked, wide-eyed. “I mean, shouldn’t they be helping to combat the AIDS?”

  Samantha turned her head sharply my way, clenched her jaw and bugged her eyes out at me. Don’t say “AIDS” in front of the doctor. The thin line of her mouth was menacing, and there was violence in her stare.

  I bugged my eyes back at her, shocked by the ferocity of her look. “Don’t bug your eyes at me,” I warned, my voice rising. “Have you been taking your AIDS meds, or not?”

  Sam bugged her eyes again, wider this time. She was as hard and cold as marble. I’d never seen her like this; I could barely recognize this girl, staring at me with furious intent. This couldn’t be Sam—not my kite-flying, birthday-card-sending Sam, who always looked at me with such gratitude and love. I stared right back at her, unflinching, even as my heart beat so loudly, the loudest thing in the room, louder than the beeping IV, louder than the nurse on the intercom: Dr. Rice, please call Dr. Lashki; Dr. Rice, call Dr. Lashki. Dr. Rice sat there, looking at the two of us, clipboard on her lap.

  Sam turned her head away from me. “I want you to leave,” she said coldly.

  I laughed, and choked on it, kah. “You want me to leave?” I demanded, already rising. “You want me to leave?” I fumbled for my bag, shoving the chair back. My heart couldn’t keep up with the pace it had set; the beats were stacking up, tripping. “You bet I’m leaving. Because obviously, I have been in the way here.”

  I was walking toward the door, though my feet didn’t feel anything; I didn’t feel anything but a rush of motion underneath me, like I was on a plane, on an escalator, like the world was moving for me. I stopped at the door and turned around.

  “I will be right outside in the visitors’ lounge,” I said, “waiting for someone to explain to me exactly what the fuck is going on here.”

  Then I ripped open the door and stormed through.

  The nurse gave me an alarmed look from her station as I heaved myself into the visitors’ lounge, empty except for some chewed-up Styrofoam cups and a year-old copy of Highlights Kids’ magazine. Ah, Highlights! How often I’d flipped through it during our stays here, reading about the twin brothers, Goofus and Gallant, one bad and one good—Goofus lies about his HIV status and refuses to take his meds! Whereas Gallant acknowledges his AIDS and cooperates with his support team! The room was barely big enough to pace; how could a hospital have a waiting room where you couldn’t pace? What the hell was wrong with this place? What the hell?

  Dr. Rice entered the visitors’ lounge. “Hey,” she said, her eyes wide. “So, Sam’s revoked your proxy, and she asked me to have you leave the building.”

  I nodded, dumb with disbelief. “Okay.”

  “But before you go—I can’t talk to you anymore, because she’s asked me not to.” She looked at me with extra meaning. “But you can still talk to me. So if there’s anything we should know…”

  Right. Well, you see, Doctor, I met this girl in a homeless shelter last fall, and I fell in love with her. Not like that. Real love, not romantic love—true love, family love. And she was sick, and then she got well, and she was high, and then she got sober, and then she got sick again, and she’s stayed so sick. And I’ve just been here, for the past eleven months, loving her, and waiting for her to die.

  “She’s been in and out of hospitals all year,” I began. Dr. Rice nodded and nodded as I went through the history. St. Victor’s for the hand infection. Bushwick for the pneumonia. The phone call when she told me she’d been diagnosed HIV-positive. The weeks and weeks I’d spent here in the Bronx—meningitis and MAC, eyeball injections and spinal taps. And then I stopped, remembering how the doctor at the shelter had said that Sam might have sabotaged her infected hand because she didn’t want to move on. I repeated this to Dr. Rice.

  “This couldn’t be her sabotaging her health,” I asked, “could it?”

  Dr. Rice tipped her head, considering. “Well, you know, I don’t see how she could have sabotaged herself into fungemia, so I think we can rule that out. She’s definitely been dishonest about something, though, and maybe this will give us some clues as to what’s going on. Just let her calm down, we’ll retest her, and I’ll encourage her to be in touch with you, okay?”

  “Okay. All right.” I nodded. Okay. They’d retest her, and then we’d know. As long as she hadn’t done this to herself, as long as Dr. Rice was sure about that. “Thanks, Dr. Rice, I’m really…” I fluffed my hands around in the air, unable to say what I was.

  She smiled comfortingly. “No, thank you. I’m glad you found me today. And she’s lucky to have you as a friend.”

  “Well…” I tried to chuckle. “We’ll see about that.”

  We’d see. Was she really lucky? Was I really her friend? The test would tell. I turned to leave the lounge, and the room spun a little. My axis was off. I had to go by instinct, lumber toward the elevators, the mural of the solar system that greeted you on the floor. Right. I knew these double doors. I knew this place. I knew these hands. I knew what to do inside this metal box. Push the button, L. I knew what this buzzing thing in my pocket was—it was my cell phone. It was Maria. I walked out of the elevator into the lobby and answered the call.

  “Hey,” Maria said brightly. “How’s it going today?”

  I pushed through the lobby doors out into the brightness. It was so cloudless and clear blue—why were the most devastating days always so blue? It looked like September 11 today. “Well,” I understated, “not so great.”

  Maria’s voice dropped in sympathy. “She’s had a bad day, huh? What’s the latest?”

  I had no idea how to put this. “Well, the latest is, I spoke to the doctor, and…you’re not driving right now, are you?”

  “No, I was just about to leave work.” Her voice went grave. “Why, what’s going on?”

  I pulled over on the sidewalk and leaned back against a brick building. “Maria, they say she’s HIV-negative. Her T cells are fine. They say they’ve tested her twice.”

  “What?” It came out as a glass-breaking shriek. “They said what?”

  “I know. I know. And when I asked her, in front of the doctor, if she was taking her AIDS meds, she told me to get out of the room, and she revoked my proxy. I’m on my way to the subway right now. I’m in shock. I’m in total shock.”

  “What? Wait…what?”

  It was like she was pulling dialogue directly from inside my head. “I wish I knew what was going on, Maria, but I really don’t. All I know is, the doctor said she doesn’t have AIDS, and Sam freaked out on me when I brought it up. But the doctor said it’s probably a mistake or something. They’re going to retest her, they should know something tomorrow.”

  I heard Maria taking quick, deep breaths. “I’m coming down there right now,” she decided. “I can’t…I have to hear this for myself. I don’t even understand what you’re saying. You’re telling me they have recent negative HIV tests for her?”

  “Two of them. And a T cell test last week. They were fine.”

  “Janice, that’s impossible,” she spat, furious with frustration. “What the fuck—”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying for the past forty-five minutes.”

  I heard the lighter click, the intake of breath as Maria lit a cigarette. Puff. Puff. I couldn’t wait to get home for a smoke of my own; maybe drugs would make this situation make sense. “I’m coming down there,” she repeated. “I’ll be there in half an hour. And somebody better have some answers for me.” Puff. “And…I won’t tell her we talked. I’ll act like I don’t know anything.”

  I laughed my broken laugh. “Which we don’t.”

  “Right?” She laughed, too, shrilly. “I mean, what the hell?”

  I’d started walking toward the subway again—I could tell by the breeze against my face. “Look, it’s probably a mistake. I asked the doctor a bunch of times if this could be a hoax, or anything else, and she said it’s probably a mistake. They’re going to rete
st her, so…”

  “Okay,” she said, in a warning tone. “But in the meantime, I’ll be down there soon, and I will certainly call you if I learn anything new.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll talk to you soon, then.”

  Snap.

  I put the phone back into my pocket, took my MetroCard out. I climbed the stairs to the elevated subway station and took my usual place at the front of the platform. I stood there, waiting for the train, looking out at the trees with their yellow leaves. Waiting for the other leaf to drop.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Aftershocks

  I got home, opened my notebook, and wrote: This has been one of the top ten weirdest days of my life.

  Then I wrote down everything that had happened since the morning: all the dialogue, all the action, all my impressions. A habit I’d had for years, one I’d kept up through my association with Sam—it always helped to unblow my mind, writing everything down where I could look at it, judge it. I’d been keeping the current notebook for the past three months, since she went into the hospital in July. When I paused and riffled through it, I saw Sam’s name on every page.

  My cell phone buzzed: Sam’s hospital phone. Fuck you. I didn’t answer it, didn’t want to hear her pissed-off ugly voice, the voice that went with that hateful face she’d made, telling me I was fired as her proxy. She didn’t leave a message. A minute later the phone buzzed again. Again I didn’t answer it. Again she didn’t leave a message. It buzzed a third time, then stopped halfway.

  Good.

  I turned off the phone and wrote until I caught up with myself in real time. And now I’m sitting here writing this, waiting for an update from Maria, waiting for the results of the retest. Waiting to find out if the past eleven months of my life have been a lie.

  I closed the notebook, opened my laptop, and started a Google search for “Samantha Dunleavy.” I didn’t know what I thought I was going to find—I’d looked her up online before, to no avail. I’d even looked for her parents, her sister, and her brother, and never found them, either. Now I got the same old half page of results for my search: a genealogical record of the Dunleavys in Ireland, with a Samantha who’d died in the 1840s; an eighth-grader who’d recently won a prize for Excellence in Language Arts at a middle school in Virginia. Nothing that looked like Sam, nothing that looked like her family.

  I stared at the useless results, unsure of what to look for next. I’d already looked up all the AIDS websites; I had a long list of bookmarks to which I’d frequently referred over the past few months as I’d tried to understand the course of her disease. They weren’t going to tell me anything new. There had to be another diagnosis.

  My hands hesitated, but I went ahead and typed it. Faking illness. Up came the results. The first page called it Munchausen’s syndrome—a psychological disorder whereby patients fake or induce illness in order to receive care and attention.

  I chewed at my lip as I studied the screen, consumed by a growing unease. I’d heard of Munchausen’s before; I’d even read a book about it once. As a matter of fact, Samantha had mentioned it to me just three weeks earlier, a few days before the wedding.

  We were in her hospital room, of course, and she’d been having a good day; she was propped all the way up in bed, her color high. “Valentina did this report for school about this thing called Munchausen’s syndrome,” she said, grinning. “Have you ever heard about it? Where people make themselves sick? It’s so fucked up. They call themselves ‘munchers,’ and they, like, shoot poop into their veins to get sick on purpose. Isn’t that the craziest thing?”

  And I’d jumped right in. “Oh my god, I’ve heard of that, it’s so crazy. And you know, there’s also Munchausen’s by proxy, where people’s parents make them sick so they can get attention. I once read this book about this girl whose mom almost made her get heart surgery….”

  “Yeah,” she’d said, serious for a minute. “That’s so insane to me. Can you imagine wanting to feel this sick? I’d do anything to feel better.”

  Poor Sam. Maybe she could trade places with one of those munchers, and everyone would be happy. “It’s crazy,” I’d agreed.

  Crazy. I stared at the blinking cursor, at the words on the screen. Munchausen’s sufferers, it said, are exceptionally intelligent, and often claim to be the products of abusive homes. They enjoy being taken care of; they also enjoy feeling in control of others, especially doctors, whom they take great pride in outwitting. Sufferers have an unusual grasp of medical symptoms, treatments, and terminology. They are not deterred by unusual or painful procedures and will often have numerous surgical scars.

  Sam certainly fit the profile: brilliant, abused, scarred all over her body. Able to toss around medical terms with the best of them; unafraid to get a needle stuck in her eye. I started to feel nauseated, reading the case histories—people who’d starved and bled themselves to mimic cancer, patients who’d infected open wounds with cat shit. And then this: Munchausen’s syndrome can be fatal. For most patients, there is little hope for recovery.

  I was trying to digest all of this when I heard Bill’s key in the lock. He came in and I collapsed into his arms, grateful for his palpable, three-dimensional presence.

  “This is some super-crazy X Files shit,” he said, kissing the top of my head the way I’d kissed Sam’s. “I can’t wait to find out what’s up.”

  We mixed some stiff drinks, made dinner, and discussed it. Bill was still going with the false-negative theory, whereby the hospital had somehow repeatedly mistested Sam and gotten the wrong results. Or maybe, he suggested, she’d manipulated the tests somehow, so she could hide her HIV status and stay in denial. If anybody could figure out how to screw up the tests, he said, it’d be her.

  “I don’t know,” I said, frowning. I wanted to believe the false-negative theory, but I was leaning more toward the false-Samantha theory. I couldn’t stop thinking about things she’d said and done: how she’d loosened the leads on her monitors to scare the night nurse; how she’d told me her sister was in a group home, then told me she was still in a coma. The grin on her face the day she asked me, Munchausen’s syndrome—have you heard of it?

  All I had to cling to was what Dr. Rice had said, standing there in the hallway: Sam couldn’t have induced fungemia of the eyeball; she couldn’t have done this to herself. She was, as Dr. Rice said, “legitimately sick.” But again, if anybody could figure out how to make herself that way…

  I looked at the clock: 10 P.M. Friday. Just that morning, I’d been lying on the floor in the other room, hoping she was going to hurry up and die. Now here I was, wondering if she ever really existed in the first place.

  That weekend, Columbus Day, Bill and I tried to go about our lives as if nothing had changed. We went to the grocery store, where the ghosts of Sam and Valentina lurked in the dairy aisle; we went to the movies. We ran six laps around Washington Square Park, showered together, made lunch.

  We looked at our honeymoon pictures again, downloading them from the camera to the computer—me in my swimsuit, posing like Bettie Page; Bill feeding the orange-and-white stray. The two of us with our heads together, Bill holding the camera at arm’s length to take the picture, purple sky and pink shore behind us. It was only last Sunday—we’d woken up early in our hotel room, taken one last trip down to the beach, one last swim in the ocean before we caught our plane home. One last photo, in front of the hotel, big smiles on our faces. How happy we looked, except for that one thin line between my eyes.

  There was an extra weight to the weekly Sunday-night sadness that week—Oh, weekend’s through, time to face reality again. I didn’t want to face reality. One way or the other, Sam had lied to us, or to the doctors—either way, she had lied. I put off the phone call I knew I had to make until after we’d eaten dinner, watched whatever was on TV, and I’d checked my e-mail for the fifty-fifth time. I went to roll a joint and stopped halfway—smoking didn’t even get me high these days; it just made me depressed and sleep
y. I couldn’t avoid or procrastinate anymore. I picked up the phone and called Maria.

  “Hi there.” Maria sounded furious, her sharply musical voice a caricature of its former self. “How are you?”

  “I’m…weirded out.” I laughed. “How are you?”

  “I’m not very good at all,” she said. “But I can’t talk about it until you talk to Sam. Did she call you yet?”

  “She called on Friday, but I didn’t feel like talking right then.”

  “Well, I think you should call her now.”

  “Why. Maria, what…” Her voice, so angry. A pit opened up in my stomach. This was bad news, this was the worst-case scenario. I wasn’t even sure what that was anymore. “What’s up?”

  “You need to hear it from her. Then you and I can talk. All right? Call her, and call me back. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  She hung up, and I looked over at Bill, lurking from the doorway. His face was grave.

  “She wouldn’t say,” I told him. “I have to call Sam.”

  I dialed Sam’s hospital phone, and she answered on the second ring, her voice low. “Hello?”

  “Hey there,” I said. “How are you?”

  Surprisingly, my voice came out the way it always did with her—gentle, loving, concerned—asking the same question I always asked. How are you? As in: How’d the tests go today? What’d the doctors say? Are you running a fever? Did you have anything to eat?

  “I’m all right,” she said, hesitant. “Nauseous and achy, but the fever’s down.”

  “That’s good.” I paused. Here was where she usually caught me up on the specifics—I had an MRI earlier. They took blood before. Dr. F. says I’m doing real good. Except now I knew that Dr. F. didn’t exist. “So.”