Bill gave me a sympathetic look. “You know they’re just concerned, babe. You would be, too, if something like this happened to them.”
“I know.” They just thought I was an idiot, with no judgment. I sighed, hoping they weren’t right. “I know.”
So with my domestic partner’s support, but to my folks’ great dismay, I went to see Samantha that Wednesday after work. It was the first time I’d seen her since she’d thrown me out of her room five days earlier. I took that same old train ride uptown, wearing a light jacket against the chill of the late afternoon, unable to read, just staring out the window. Outside, the yellow leaves refused to fall from the trees.
I marched up to the hospital and into Sam’s room, where she sat up in bed, an IV dripping toxic chemicals into her arm. But she was off the monitors—she’d been recovering from her mysterious infections since last week’s revelation—and she looked flush, vital, like she was almost back to full-speed Sam.
“Hey.” I came around her bed and gave her a hug, like always.
She gave me the whipped-puppy-dog eyes, the dying eye already going milky. Jesus, what she’d done to herself. “Janice, thanks so much for coming.”
“It’s good to see you,” I said, smiling. “How are you feeling?”
“Well, mentally, not so great.” She smiled ruefully back at me. “But I’m getting better, physically. The doctors say they think they figured out what’s been wrong with me—they think it’s an airborne virus or something. I got a couple more tests tomorrow.”
I tried not to react with surprise. The doctors knew she’d been lying about her health, and they were still looking for the source of her infections? They should have come to me. It had taken me a little under an hour on the Internet to figure out how she could have given herself fungemia of the eyeball. But I had to go slowly, couldn’t confront her head-on. All the literature warned me to be gentle and supportive, not harsh or accusing, or I could cause her to escalate, or flee.
I made a mental note to call Dr. Rice: Um, you guys do realize that she’s been causing her own illnesses, right? “Uh-huh. But you’re getting better, right? No fevers, nothing like that?”
“Yeah. I’m still real weak, and I need to be on the meds for a few more days, but then they said they might be able to discharge me soon.”
“Oh really.” And to where were they planning to discharge her? I wondered. She didn’t have an apartment anymore, and I wasn’t about to pay for another room deposit. Maria certainly wasn’t letting Sam stay with her anytime soon—Maria was taking the week to think. When the week was up, we’d see how she was feeling. In the meantime, it was safe to assume that crashing with Maria was out of the question. “Where are you thinking you’ll go?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping maybe the social worker would help me find something.”
Right. The social worker who’d supposedly been helping her arrange for her AIDS benefits. I’d actually met the social worker, Felicia, so at least I knew she existed, though I’d never been privy to their conversations. I put Felicia on my mental list of people to call. “Huh. Because, you know, I’ve been looking into some options. I found this clinic in Illinois—here, I’ll show you.” I grabbed the wireless keyboard from her nightstand and navigated to the website of a clinic I’d found. End the pain of selfabuse, said the website. Call 1-800-DON’T-CUT.
“Huh,” echoed Sam. She had a polite but skeptical look on her face, like a dinner guest presented with fried beetles. “I mean, I guess it looks interesting. I’m just not sure I need a place like that. I was kind of thinking I’d try to get my job back, or start at that dog-walking place, maybe find a place like the one me and Valentina had….”
She looked at me like she was expecting me to support this idea—financially, even, the way I’d been doing for weeks, before Valentina gave up their room—but I wasn’t reaching for my wallet today. Nor was I buying the idea of Sam living independently. “Sam, I think it’s pretty clear that you need some kind of treatment program. I know it sucks, the idea of starting over from the bottom somewhere, but—”
“I don’t know.” Her nose was actively wrinkled now. Again, I tried not to gape at her. She had to be kidding me—she’d be lucky to get into a clinic like this one; she was lucky I was sitting next to her now, presenting her with the option. But again, I had to tread lightly.
“Well, you’ll be here for a few more days, at least, yes? That gives us a little time to plan.”
It was a strange visit, short and uneasy. There was no script for our new, post-revelation relationship, and the old one didn’t work anymore. She wasn’t going to tell me some new horror story about having to call 911 at the age of five because her mother was giving birth to her sister from the depths of a heroin blackout and her father was off on a meth rampage. I wasn’t going to tell her about Disney World.
All right, I thought. This would take time, and patience. I didn’t have a lot of either, but I’d see what I could do. I’d call Felicia the social worker, I’d call Dr. Rice; we’d get her into some kind of clinic, and they’d fix her. “All right,” I said aloud, gathering my things.
And for once she didn’t try to stall me on my way out the door. She was as relieved that I was leaving as I was. “Bye, Janice. Thanks for coming.” But her voice was high and insincere. As was the hug I gave her.
I didn’t say, “I’ll see you soon.”
Fuck her, I wrote in my notebook. Fuck Samantha Dunleavy. I don’t care if I ever see her again.
So I’d moved past the denial phase of grieving and into anger. Which was good—now all I had to hit were bargaining and depression, and then I’d be on to acceptance. Except it seemed like I might stick around and hang out in anger for a while—for the rest of my life, maybe.
Maria’s week of thinking was up; she gave me a call. “I feel better,” she said, and she sounded it. “I feel like, all right. It’s hard to deal with, but I’m ready to deal with it. I’m not giving up on her. I made a commitment, and I’m going to honor it.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “Because I’m ready to fucking quit. I can’t deal with her at all. I’m so angry, I’m ready to bust through my clothes like the Incredible Hulk. You know she’s denying she did this to herself, and she doesn’t want to go to a treatment program?”
“I know, I spoke to her earlier. But she’s going to have to go someplace, that’s for sure. I’m looking into some other options, closer by—I think it’d be too hard to get her Medicaid transferred to Illinois.”
“Well, that’s great of you. Let me know how it goes.” It was my turn to take a few days away.
I spent most of my time over the next few days researching fake illness and Munchausen’s syndrome, reading online accounts from “munchers” of their ruses—how they tore ligaments to necessitate surgery, or convinced psychiatrists they had multiple personality disorder. They were all so smart, and so self-satisfied; they just loved outwitting the doctors and making people jump for them. I remembered the smug look Sam would get when she “played a prank,” or manipulated someone into letting her have her way somehow, and I wanted to reach through the monitor and wrap my hands around these people’s necks, yelling, Just fucking stop it!
Then I looked at the joint in the ashtray next to me. If only it were that easy to just fucking stop.
I was also tearing through a book I’d ordered online, rush delivery: Dr. Marc Feldman’s Playing Sick? Untangling the Web of Munchausen’s Syndrome, Munchausen’s by Proxy, Malingering, and Factitious Disorder. Dr. Feldman was the country’s foremost authority on Munchausen’s syndrome and faking illness, and he’d devoted a chapter in his book to people like me and Maria—the “casualties,” as he called them, of people like Sam. I underlined this passage:
As a victim, your own therapy might focus on fully letting go of the other person. Although it may sound harsh, especially when you’ve been so close to a person, your own well-being may depend on your ending the relationship.
&n
bsp; I started the next week singing an entirely new tune.
My dad and Sylvia were right. I had been conned. Sam had lied to me, and I’d believed her. She’d jerked me around, and she’d enjoyed it. I’d been sick at my wedding, sick with worry on my honeymoon. What had she taken from me? Most of the past year of my life. I didn’t give a shit about the money I’d given her, the apartment deposit and the cell phone—it was the time I’d spent with her, the time I would never get back. I didn’t care if it was a disease that made her act this way; she didn’t have to infect me with it.
Every time I remembered something else she’d said, done, lied about, I was refueled with fury. I should hire a private detective, I thought. I bet she’s got hospital records all over the place. And I want to find her real parents, the meth cooker and the prostitute. Maybe there are some kind of criminal records. I wanted answers, I wanted the truth. And I wasn’t going to get them from Sam.
I got a phone message from her, still recuperating from her self-induced infections in the hospital—“Hey, Janice, just wanted to say hi and thanks for everything. Um, hope you’re doing okay. I guess I’ll talk to you soon.” I heard the “poor, frightened, alone” sorrow in her voice, and I could have crushed the phone into dust. Please, bitch, do not even try to guilt-trip me. I sent her an e-mail in reply: “Hey there, it’s been a busy week, but I’m thinking about you and hoping you’re getting a lot better.” It sounded much nicer than I meant it. I could lie just as well as she could.
I got another great big jolt of fury talking to Felicia, the hospital social worker. (Dr. Rice was no longer on Sam’s floor—she’d rotated to another unit—and none of the doctors had permission to speak to me anyway). I’d left Felicia several messages; by the time I got her on the phone, I was already raring to yell at someone. “According to Maria, her other caretaker, Sam’s almost fully recovered from her ‘mysterious recurring infections.’ Where do you plan to release her to, when she’s ready to go?”
Felicia didn’t have any good answers for me. “We’re still working on that,” she said, unconcerned. “I got your message about the place in Illinois, but I haven’t had a chance to check into it yet.”
“Okay. Well, I know they’re talking about releasing her on Monday—that gives us today and the weekend to find something.”
“Right.” Felicia didn’t care. So what if Sam was homeless and in need of therapeutic treatment? There were six people sitting in the emergency room right then who fit that profile. The hospital discharged people onto the streets all the time—it was a hospital, not a homeless shelter. Once Sam was healthy, she would not be their problem anymore.
I fumed, eyes bulging out of my head with frustration. “Felicia, she has been faking and inducing serious illness; she almost died from what she did to herself. She is an immediate danger to herself. You can’t release her under her own recognizance, or she will flee, and she will injure herself again. Can’t she at least be admitted to the psych ward while we find something?”
Felicia balked at my tone, clucking her teeth like she was annoyed. “Well, first of all, she denies making herself sick. And we don’t tend to accept people with that kind of diagnosis anyway. There isn’t really anything we can do for them.”
“That’s not true,” I insisted. A week’s worth of research, and I was an authority on the syndrome. “There’s plenty they can do for her in the psych ward. Long-term talk therapy and the right mix of antidepressants can be very effective in some cases. And you have to at least give it a shot—I mean, look at what the girl did to herself. She’s blind in one eye.”
Again, not Felicia’s problem. “Look, I’ve already gone way out of my way to help Sam, and I’m going to keep looking on her behalf. But if we can’t find anything, we still have to discharge her on Monday. She’s recovered, and we can’t keep her here.”
I wanted to scream a string of profanities at Felicia, but I knew she was right—she’d done a lot for Sam already, a lot more than most patients required—and I needed whatever help she was still willing to give. “Well, I really appreciate your efforts on her behalf,” I said, staunching the bile rising in my throat. And if she hurts herself after leaving your hospital, when you’ve been explicitly warned that she would do so, I am so, so suing you.
I hadn’t even come close to finishing the anger stage of grieving when I started bargaining, which came with a side order of depression. Except depression wasn’t a stage—it was a constant hum, a leaden feeling in my gut when I woke up in the middle of the night and the realization hit me fresh. Sam, as I’d known her, was gone. And this person was still here, this loathsome, whiny sack of neediness and deceit. Please be my friend, Janice. Don’t desert me.
I would have been happy to grieve for Sam, if only she would go away, or drop dead. Instead, I was stuck with bargaining. And not with God, either—God wasn’t changing anything about this situation to suit me, that was apparent. The only person to bargain with was Sam. She had to be talked into confessing what she’d done to herself and entering a treatment program, and it had to be now. Because she was going to be released from the hospital soon, and according to all of the research I’d read, she was going to bolt.
“She’s going to take off,” I told Bill. “I can feel it.” As codependent as I’d become with Sam—cringing with pain when she got stuck with a needle, shivering in terror as she described her father’s beatings—I could feel what she was feeling now: she was sitting in that hospital room planning to run as soon as the IV tube was out of her arm. Maybe she’d go to Oregon, or Southern California, and start over there; she’d find a homeless shelter or a church, someplace where Janices and Marias hung out. Maybe she’d break a bone on her skateboard and see who could resist her on crutches. She certainly wasn’t going to stick around New York and face up to what she’d done; she wasn’t entering any of the therapeutic programs Maria or Felicia would find. No, she was going to disappear, and I was never going to find her again.
So I steeled myself for one final journey, threw on my jacket, and headed up to the Bronx on the subway. This was really it, the last trip uptown. Sam was being discharged the next morning, and wherever she went from here, she’d never come back to this hospital again. They wouldn’t let her; Felicia had said as much. They were finished with her.
Well, I wasn’t finished yet. I came into Sam’s room. She was flushed, her arms bandaged where the IV had been inserted; an empty dinner tray sat on the table next to her pencils and drawings.
She looked up with surprise. “Hey there,” she said, nervous. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I know.” I smiled and threw myself into my usual chair, no hug. “Surprise visit, on your last night here.”
“Oh, it’s not my last night.” Her eyes widened, so sincere. “They still haven’t found a place for me, so they said they’re going to do a ‘social hold.’ It’s, like, something they can do to keep you in the hospital if you don’t have anywheres to go. So I’ll be here until, probably, Friday or something. But Maria’s been working real hard on finding me a place—I may wind up going to that place upstate, the drug treatment program, DTP.”
“Uh-huh.” I rolled my eyes to myself. First of all, drug treatment? That wasn’t what she needed. She needed psychiatric care. And DTP was one of the most emotionally abusive programs out there. It had been around since I was a kid—I’d almost been sent there myself—and had a terrible reputation; even Maria knew it was the pits. I’d never met a sober graduate of DTP. Also, I’d heard of a “social hold,” but Felicia had made it clear to me that they were not extending Sam’s stay in the hospital for any reason.
And I could see it all over Sam’s face. Maria was wasting her time, making arrangements with DTP. Sam was leaving tomorrow.
Sam continued talking, unaware of my suspicions. “And I got good news—the doctors figured out where the fungemia came from.”
“Oh really?” I asked dryly. “What did they say?”
Sam’s eyes wide
ned more at my skeptical tone. “Well, they think it was some kind of airborne contaminant that got into my lungs, and it spread from there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So…that’s good, because they were wondering how I got it, and now they know.”
“Uh-huh.”
I was looking straight into her eyes, the right one nearly dead in its socket. I switched my gaze to the good eye, and she flinched a little at my stare.
“So…”
“So,” I said, leaning forward, my heart speeding up. “‘Airborne’ doesn’t really explain how a contaminant got into your lungs. But I don’t need anyone to explain it. Because I already know that you put it there.”
She frowned and drew her head back. “What are you talking about?”
I smiled. “I’m talking about you putting a contaminant into your lungs. Probably yeast. Probably with your inhaler. Though you could have injected it—that’s probably how it wound up in your eye.” I looked at the dead eye, shook my head, switched back to the working one. She flinched again.
“What are you talking about? I didn’t do that.”
Her voice was alarmed, her face draining of color. I’d locked my gaze onto that one eye, and she couldn’t get away. I laughed, though nothing was funny. “Babe, I have done way too much research. I know everything. I know how to give yourself bacterial sepsis with E. coli. I know how your hand got infected last year. You infected it. The doctor suspected it back then, but now we know.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
This is how it went for the next half hour: I told her what I knew, ticking the list off on my fingers: “Symptom one: you feigned illness, which you admit. Symptom two: you waited too long to see a doctor when you knew you were sick, which you have also admitted. Sam, you admitted that you have Munchausen’s syndrome—”
Have You Found Her Page 33
