Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  Maria nodded. “She said she learned from a guy in Oklahoma City who owned a jazz bar.”

  “That’s what she told me,” Jodi confirmed.

  So at least she was consistent, if not always truthful. I pressed on. “How about her sister in a coma? First she told me she’d recovered and moved to a group home, then later she told me she was still in a coma.”

  Maria frowned, looked from me to Jodi and back again. “I thought Eileen was still in a coma, last she heard. Are you sure she said she was in a group home?”

  I pointed to my bag, indicating the notebook within. “That’s what she told me back when she was at the psych ward. I wrote it all down, pretty much everything she said. I used to come home from the hospital and transcribe everything I could remember. Just because…I don’t know. It helped.”

  The food came, and we went through the rest of it—living in Thailand, the pimp fight, the things she’d intimated to us about guns, and how she’d used them. All the stories matched, but there was no way to know if they matched the truth. Tentatively, I broached the subject I’d been obsessing over for the past few days: “I’ve been thinking about trying to do a background check on her.”

  Maria looked skeptical. “What do you want to find?”

  Well, I wanted to find out that she hadn’t been lying to us about everything. I wanted to find two criminal parents and a comatose sister and a brother in the navy who’d only been sober for the past few years himself. I was afraid of finding a suburban home, parents who’d paid for piano lessons, two healthy siblings, and a dog. Faking and inducing illness, Dr. Feldman’s book said, often came with a corollary case of pseudologia fantastica—gratuitous, over-the-top lying. “I want to know if she is who she says she is.”

  Jodi tipped her head, considering it. “Understandable.”

  “Not the biggest vote of confidence, I realize.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maria, thoughtful. “It kind of seems like a violation of her privacy. I think we should give her the chance to tell us the truth herself. Otherwise, it’s like, it doesn’t really mean anything, you know?”

  I nodded, trying to quell my discouragement at the veto. “I’d love it if Sam were able to tell us the truth herself. I mean, if there’s anything to tell.”

  I was sure there was more to tell, but I walked away from dinner agreeing with Maria and Jodi—we’d stay out of Sam’s treatment for now, give her a few more weeks to acclimate to DTP before we started trying to call her counselors. And we had to tread carefully, when we did finally speak to her counselors—if we told them how sick she’d made herself, how sick she remained, she could get booted from the program, and nobody wanted that to happen. Maria would be the point of contact with Sam’s counselors, and if any of us got any reply from our letters (“Our” letters, I thought, guilty—I’d better get busy writing her one), we’d let the others know.

  We kissed and hugged good-bye outside, in the glow of the green and red Christmas lights newly hung on the avenue. “Talk to you soon,” we promised one another.

  I walked away comforted, cheered, full of goodwill toward Sam.

  Dec. 1, 2005

  Dear Sam,

  Hi.

  I want to ask you all kinds of questions, like how are you, and how’s it going, and what’s it like at DTP, and stuff like that, but I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to write back—I’m not even sure if you’ll be allowed to receive this letter, which is why I haven’t written before this—I didn’t want to send letters into The Void and wonder if you’d received them. But I saw Maria and Jodi the other week, and Maria said she was pretty sure you were allowed to get letters by now. So without further explanatory preamble, here it is: a letter.

  As I said, I had dinner with Maria and Jodi the other week, which was great—you picked some awesome ladies to be in your life, and I’m glad they’re in my life too. Of course we talked about how much we miss you and love you, and how extraordinary you are and how grateful we are for your presence in our lives, and how concerned we are that you are getting the right kind of care. We also discussed our curiosity about you, and how much we are looking forward to the time when you’ll be able to tell us more specific stuff about your past. Mostly, we wished that you were there having dinner with us, but we look forward to a time when all of us will be able to get together and hang out.

  Anyway, since I can’t ask you questions, though I am kind of dying to know how you are, I’ll tell you stuff about what’s going on here. Everybody’s doing well—all the cats and the humans are okay. Bill and I are really enjoying being married, not that it’s much different from living together, but it is—I don’t know, there’s just a really good feeling that comes from creating your own family (as you know), and in making those relationships “official.”

  I haven’t gone back to the shelter yet, though I still plan to. I have a lot of great shelter memories from this time last year, especially because I was getting to know you. Last Christmas Eve, when I came to visit you in St. Victor’s and then went uptown and brought Chinese food, was one of the best Christmas Eves I’d ever had—I’m glad you and I got to spend part of it together, and wish we could see each other this holiday season as well.

  You know, I miss you so much, babe. I think about you a lot. I am so grateful and happy that you’re alive, and that you’re fighting to stay that way. I worry that it’s hard and painful for you right now—I mean, of course it is, because life is hard and painful. I just hope you know that things can get a whole lot better than they are right now, and that I’m still here to try to help you make that happen. I’m always going to feel like you’re my kid, for better or for worse, that’s never going to change—I’ll share you with your other moms, but I’m not giving you up. I love you, Samantha. You’re just going to have to learn to deal with that.

  Well, until you earn phone privileges or visits, I’ll keep writing, and if you are allowed to receive books or CDs, I’ll send some interesting stuff your way. I hope you’re hanging in there, and I hope I’ll hear from you soon. Until then, be good to yourself, and remember your family here in NYC. We can’t wait to see you again soon.

  Janice

  I felt better after I wrote the letter—just the fact that I’d been able to write it made me feel like a good person, as assuredly selfless and moral as when I was visiting her in the hospital every day. I imagined her receiving it and being so grateful that I was still on her side—maybe she’d been worrying that she lost me, that I was no longer her friend. Her eyes probably filled with tears when she realized how true a friend I still was.

  I dropped the letter into the mailbox on my corner, the hinge groaning as the door snapped shut. I love you, Samantha. Then I walked away, lighter all over, at peace.

  The next Sunday, we got up at five in the morning and rolled our suitcases to the curb for our second vacation in three months.

  “Unconscionable,” I said to Bill in the taxi to the airport. “I still can’t believe we’re actually doing this.”

  “Oh, I know,” he agreed. “It’s totally obscene.”

  Which it was—educated liberals like us, going to Disney World, spending our money to fund more globo-corporate hegemony—we should have donated the cash to end genocide or breast cancer. “See, that’s why we needed Sam here. If she were here, this would all be morally defensible.”

  Bill reached over and patted my hand exaggeratedly. “Well, she’ll always be here in our hearts. Did you take your Valium?”

  I did, and I was pleasantly loopy by the time we pulled up to the check-in counter. “Hello,” I said warmly, presenting my e-ticket and passport. The woman behind the counter checked our documents and gave us our seat assignments.

  “Is Samantha Dunleavy checking in with you as well?” she asked.

  “No,” said Bill. “She’s not making it today.”

  “She wasn’t feeling well,” I added, mugging at Bill.

  “Good one,” he muttered as we walked away.
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br />   So there was an empty seat next to us, a Samantha-shaped absence on our flight to Florida. It should have been strange, taking this trip without her, when she and I had talked for months about how this day would go—You’ll meet us at our place, and we’ll get a cab to the airport, and you can sit next to the window on the plane—but it seemed natural to travel alone with Bill; it seemed right. I grabbed his hand, and he squeezed mine in return.

  We collected our bags in Orlando and boarded the Disney Magical Express bus to the Disney Contemporary Hotel. “Space Mountain,” I said, starting to bounce in my seat. Just like Sam and I had planned. “We’re dumping the bags, and we’re going straight there. Then over to the Haunted Mansion. Then Mickey’s Philhar-magic show. I’ve never seen it, but the guidebook gives it four and a half stars. Then we’re going to want something to eat….”

  From the minute Bill and I dropped off our bags at the hotel, we were in endorphin heaven: screaming on the thrill rides, gaping at the pageantry, stuffing our faces full of fried food. Maybe it was something they put in the air there—extra oxygen or laughing gas or something—or maybe it was the way everyone around us was smiling, the look of awe and wonder on the kids’ faces—but we immediately regressed to the age of seven; we were overwhelmed with exuberance and joy. The place was even better than I remembered from my last visit with my mom and Jake, and Bill was loving it, too.

  “The guidebook says they do special stuff for honeymooners,” he noted our first night at the hotel. “We should get those buttons that say we’re newlyweds.”

  “That’s kosher,” I reasoned. “We did just get married three months ago.”

  So we got the buttons, and now every single park employee was smiling extra-wide for us, and saying, “Congratulations!” and letting us ride things twice without waiting in line. It made the whole experience feel even more like a giant victory lap.

  In fact, I almost had to stop and remember to think about Sam. Bill and I would be running around, gawking and grinning, wolfing down ice cream between rides and attractions, and I’d realize, We were supposed to be here with her. But if I’d expected to miss her, I was wrong—all I could think while we were there was, I am so glad Sam’s not here. I’m so glad it’s just me and Bill. It never would have worked, I realized, the three-person arrangement; one of them would have always been the third wheel. I would have had to choose who to sit next to on every ride, and who would ride solo in the car behind, and what if she wanted to go to one part of the park and he wanted to go to another? Besides, she never would have made it through the week without pulling some kind of prank—trying to climb from balcony to balcony along the outside of the hotel, or setting off a fire alarm—and Disney doesn’t take kindly to pranks. I could imagine the whole trip gone awry, Bill and I sitting in an office in one of the famed underground tunnels beneath the park, trying to get Sam out of Mickey Prison.

  No, I didn’t miss her. I wasn’t sad she couldn’t come. I even felt weird about how unsad I was. This trip was supposed to be poignant without her, tinged with melancholy—how was I supposed to come home and tell people we were overjoyed without her? A good person wouldn’t have been overjoyed, a good person would have been missing her, thinking of what could have been. But I was too busy laughing my ass off with Bill, racing across Tomorrowland to get on Space Mountain for the fifteenth time.

  It didn’t hit me until our last night there, when we were shopping for souvenirs. Bill held up a T-shirt for his brother—“You think this’ll fit Kevin?”—as I browsed the racks, thinking guiltily, I should get something for Sam. I hadn’t mentioned Disney in my letter to her; I didn’t want to remind her of what she was missing, the trip we’d been planning all year. But she must have been watching the calendar, thinking as she’d been thinking for months, A month until Disney; three weeks until Disney; they must be there right now. I wondered if it would be crappier to get her something, to rub the vacation in her face, or to get her nothing at all.

  I fingered a Grumpy T-shirt. No, they’d never let her have that at DTP; Grumpy represented negativism. Maybe Tigger was an acceptable role model for recovery. I grabbed a pair of Tigger boxer shorts, took them to the register. I imagined sending her a Christmas package with the boxer shorts, and maybe some books or CDs; I imagined her rueful smile as she put them on. I imagined the note that was probably waiting for me back home—I’m doing well, I miss you, thanks for the letter. I was glad I’d gotten her a souvenir.

  We rode back to the airport the next morning hand in hand, five pounds fatter than when we arrived, a hundred times giddier. “That was unbelievable,” said Bill, and I agreed.

  “We’ll have to do this every year. The Annual Samantha Dunleavy Memorial Disney Trip.”

  Maybe one year she’d even get to come with us.

  We got home to the usual—sniffing cats, a stack of mail. No reply from Sam, I noticed. Oh well. She probably wasn’t allowed to write back yet, or she was drafting a letter to me right now.

  Or she’d crumpled up my letter and thrown it into the trash, unread.

  We unpacked our suitcases. I put the boxer shorts for Sam in their bag on top of my dresser. I’ll send them soon, I thought. As soon as I heard from her.

  “Bead Lady!”

  I walked into the lounge of the Older Females Unit at the shelter that Wednesday, bead bag on my arm, and Ashley the counselor gave me a big wave from the hallway.

  “Hey there!” I waved and grinned back at her. “How are you?”

  “Good! How’ve you been? We haven’t seen you in…”

  Four months. It had been four months since I’d been to the shelter, since Sam first went into the hospital in the Bronx; two months since we’d uncovered the true source of her illness. I’d gone back and forth about volunteering: one day I’d swear to Bill that I was never going back—“I’ve got to move on from that place one of these days. It’s been twenty-one years, for crying out loud”—then the next day I’d tell him how much I missed it, missed the girls, didn’t want it to become something else Sam had taken from me. Then we got back from Disney World, and I don’t know why, but suddenly there was no question—I needed the place, and it needed me.

  I called the volunteer coordinator and left a message: I was coming back. No answer, and no head of the unit to call—after ten months, they still hadn’t replaced Nadine. So I just showed up with my beads, waved to the guards at the desk—“Good to see you again!” “You too!”—and there I was.

  “I know, it’s been a while,” I said. “I was doing some one-on-one mentoring.”

  Ashley nodded understandingly. “Well, it’s great to see you. I bet the girls will be happy, too. Remember Ynnhoj, from last winter? She’s back, and she asked about you. She goes, ‘It’s Wednesday; where’s the Bead Lady?’”

  “I’m right here,” I told Ashley, smiling. “I’m back.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Family Day

  Christmas again. A Salvation Army Santa clanged his bell on the corner where the redhead sat in the summer. No visit to Sam in St. Victor’s this year, though I did go up to the shelter and reprise last year’s Christmas Eve Chinese-food feast, celebrating another year of indoor living with a girl they called L’il Bit, a girl they called Stoney, and a girl whose parents had legally named her Bacardi.

  Another merry Jewish Christmas with Bill and my folks; another happy-holiday visit with my brother, who was getting ready to graduate college and move in with his longtime girlfriend. Another bottle of champagne, to celebrate the coming of 2006. And another card to my mom—Thinking of you, happy holidays, hope you’re well. No reply.

  The Tigger boxer shorts sat on my dresser, unsent. Sam hadn’t written, so neither had I. I traded calls with Maria and Jodi, exchanging warmest holiday wishes among our ersatz adopted family; they hadn’t heard anything from Sam, either. Fishy, I thought; Sam had promised to stay in touch and have her counselors give us updates. She should have been past the mandatory no-contact phase by now;
she should have called one of us, or written.

  I waited until a few days after the New Year and called DTP, where the receptionist offered to take a message for Sam’s counselor, Luwanda—“She’s in a staff meeting right now, but I’ll have her call you back.” Then I watched three days pass, stewing with growing incredulity as I realized that Luwanda really wasn’t calling me back. On the fourth day I called again; again Luwanda was “in a staff meeting.” Again she did not return the message.

  “Maybe Luwanda’s busy,” suggested Maria when I called to report my findings. “Maybe I’ll try, too.”

  Maybe was not cutting it for me anymore. I’d lived with maybe for the past year—maybe Sam would make it to rehab, or maybe she would break a mirror; maybe we’d cancel our honeymoon; maybe she’d die. Maybe she wasn’t who she’d said she was from the first minute I met her. I was sick of maybe; I wanted some certainty.

  “I’m going to try to find Sam’s parents,” I announced to Bill, calling him at work with the breaking decision. “I know Jodi and Maria want the truth to come from Sam, but it’s not going to, and I can’t stand not knowing anymore.”

  “Great,” said Bill, unsurprised. I’d been threatening to find her parents on and off since October; I’d only become more adamant about it as I waited for Luwanda’s call. He and I were both curious; he’d just been waiting for my curiosity to outweigh my dread. “I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

  What do you want to find? Maria had asked me back at the Meeting of the Moms. I didn’t care anymore, as long as it was the truth.

  I opened the folder where I kept all of Sam’s writings, letters, and cards, pulling out the pages of the autobiography she’d been working on last summer. Edward Liam Dunleavy, she called him, the father who’d abused her since birth. Born in 1958, son of Canadian missionaries; met and married Ruby Delosantos, a teenage hooker whose family had emigrated from Bolivia. I opened my laptop and looked up “private detective,” and found a page full of sites promising background checks, all public records: criminal, assets, lawsuits. I went to the first site listed and typed in “Edward Liam Dunleavy.”