CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
Prologue: Red
Chapter One: How I Became the Bead Lady
Chapter Two: New Favorite Alert
Chapter Three: The Twelve Days of Christmas
Chapter Four: Gone
Chapter Five: Psych
Chapter Six: Rehabilitation
Chapter Seven: Spring
Chapter Eight: Second Verse
Chapter Nine: Elopement
Chapter Ten: Make a Wish
Chapter Eleven: Good Times
Chapter Twelve: Unlucky
Chapter Thirteen: I Did
Chapter Fourteen: Revelations
Chapter Fifteen: Aftershocks
Chapter Sixteen: Happiest Place on Earth
Chapter Seventeen: Family Day
Epilogue: Since U Been Gone
THANKS
A READER’S GUIDE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JANICE ERLBAUM
COPYRIGHT
For B, of course
Ooh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world….
I’ll always remember you like a child, girl.
—CAT STEVENS
Prologue
Red
There’s a redheaded girl panhandling on my corner, sitting on the sidewalk behind a cardboard sign. It reads: PLEASE HELP ME. TRYING TO GET A PLACE TO STAY. ANYTHING YOU CAN GIVE. I’M JUST A YOUNG GIRL. I’ve seen her out there on the street for the past few years, on and off—I won’t spot her for weeks at a time over the winter months, but as soon as the sun starts shining in March, there she’ll be, all five feet and ninety pounds of her, her back pressed against the stone façade of the Gap Body store on Fifth Avenue, her cardboard sign propped up against her bony knees, her head dropped between her legs, sobbing.
This is what she does. She sits on the sidewalk behind her sign and sobs. Until you put something in her cup, and then she barely lifts her head and mouths thank you. And you can see, for a second, how sharp and drawn her face is, how cloudy her eyes; you’ll note the sores on her cheeks where she scratches and picks. Heroin sores.
Different drugs leave different scars. I’ve learned to recognize the signs, since I started volunteering at the shelter, since I started tracking the street kids who migrate around my neighborhood like stupefied antelopes. The girls with the burnt, scabby lips are smoking coke; the meth addicts and junkies have lesions. Except the meth addicts don’t look sleepy, like the junkies do; they look rapacious, like starvation-crazed zombies, like they’re ready to run up on you and eat your brains. But the redhead’s drug is heroin—you can tell by the way she lolls and slumps between crying jags, the way she goes to wipe her runny nose and misses, forgets halfway.
The first time I noticed the redhead, I was on my way to have lunch with my father at an expensive restaurant near Union Square. It was a cold, wet April afternoon, and she was huddled behind her cardboard sign, which was soaked dark brown, the words barely legible. I was going to walk by her, the way I often did in my pre-volunteer days, strode right past kids panhandling on the sidewalk, thinking, Go back to your middle-class parents in Westchester, girlie, and lay off the dope.
But the sign—I’m just a young girl. And she was shivering, sobbing, her red hair matted into snakes by the rain. Could have been me, once, if things had gone differently.
I stopped and crouched down in front of her, covering us both with my umbrella. “Hey,” I said, reaching for her shoulder, cold and bony as a sparrow’s wing under her wet sweatshirt. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”
She lifted her head and moaned. It sounded like, Please. Her body trembled violently under my hand.
Good god, I thought, suddenly urgent. Somebody has to help this girl.
I took my hand from her shoulder, dug in my pocket, landed on a crumpled bill. “Hey.” I showed her the bill, a five, and put it in the melting paper coffee cup at her side, empty except for some pennies and a quarter inch of rain. She continued to shake and moan—Please, please. “Hey, listen, it’s going to be okay.”
What was going to be okay? Me, I was going to be okay. I was on my way to meet my father at an expensive restaurant; I had on nice pants and heels, nice clothes to prove that I was okay. But she wasn’t okay, she wasn’t going to be okay, and my five dollars wasn’t going to make it okay. Five dollars, I pled with myself, trying to make myself believe the best: she’d purchase a half hour indoors at a coffee shop, maybe a grilled-cheese sandwich. She wouldn’t put it toward her next bag of dope.
I put my hand back on her shoulder—I’d wash it when I got to the restaurant. Other people were streaming by on the sidewalk; I looked at them desperately. Was there a doctor in the house? A social worker? Somebody’s mom? Could somebody cover this, somebody equipped to deal with it? It was an emergency, and I had to get to lunch.
She rolled her head back on her neck, tilted her parched eyes my way. Fighting for words like she was drowning. “Pl-ease,” she said thickly, her chest hitching. “I’m sick. Nobody helps….”
Her purple lips were stretched into a grimace; she trembled like she might break. Good god, I thought again, despite the evidence to the contrary. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. People want to help, they really do. I want to help. Take this.” I took the money from the cup, pressed it into her hand; she grasped it and nodded, still shaking. “Take it, go to a coffee shop, get out of the rain, get something to eat. Okay?”
She slumped forward, her face obscured, the runoff from my umbrella trickling down the back of her neck. A coffee shop wasn’t going to help her. One sandwich wasn’t going to save her life. Her sharp little shoulder was clammy under my sweating hand. I was going to be late; I hate being late. I cringed at the thought.
“Look, I have to go, but I’m going to come back, okay? I’ll be back in an hour. Will you be here? You get something to eat, and I’ll come back, and…we’ll see what we can do, okay?” She nodded into her knees, heaved and jerked. “I’ll come back,” I repeated stupidly, removing my hand from her shoulder, standing up, backing away. “You take care. I’ll see you soon.”
I tore myself away, half guilty, half relieved, and stumbled down the block in my unfamiliar heels. Washed my hands, kissed my father hello, and ate my expensive lunch.
An hour later, I walked by her spot. She was gone.
I’ve seen her I don’t know how many times since then. Fifty? Sobbing behind her sign in front of J. Crew, in front of Esprit, in front of Armani Exchange. Some days I’ll pass right by her; other days I’ll stop, offer to get her a sandwich or something to drink. She’ll lift her weary head and murmur, “Please, not hungry, spare some change.” I’ll bring her some food anyway. Some cookies, a Snapple, anything sweet—junkies crave sugar, that’s the lore. I’ll crouch beside her, put the offering at her feet; she’ll whimper a thank-you, then drop her head again. She does not appear to recognize me from one iced tea to the next.
Samantha knew the redhead. Of course she did—Sam knew all the street kids around Union Square—the blond guy with dreads and a guitar (STRANDED, TRYING TO GET $ FOR A BUS TICKET HOME), the brown-haired, slack-faced girl with the scabby lips (JUST HAD BRAIN SURGERY, PLEASE HELP). “That guy,” she’d say, pointing out a kid who looked like he’d been rolled from hood to sneaker in a fine gray dust, “that guy huffs so much paint and glue, I don’t even want to light a cigarette near him.”
Sam and I were walking from my apartment to the park one afternoon last summer when I spotted the redhead. I stopped short and nudged Sam, pointing with my chin. “There she is, the girl I was telling you about.”
Across the street, in front of the Banana Republic, head between her arms, curled like
a porcupine behind her weather-beaten sign. Sam slowed and narrowed her eyes, squinting at the markered words.
“Oh, her. I’ve seen her at StreetWorks a few times. She’s a junkie. I mean, obviously.” Sam squinted some more, shading her eyes from the sun. “Hah! ‘Just a young girl.’ She’s like twenty-five years old!”
Sam turned to continue walking, but I was still standing, watching a woman deposit some coins into the redhead’s cup as she hurried past. The tiny head bobbed up for a second, then dropped back down. Twenty-five, I thought—she’d probably been on the street for years now. It must have been the fear on her face that made her look so young.
“Yeah? What’s her story? Have you ever talked to her?”
“I don’t know, I’ve just seen her there a few times, getting the free lunch. I think Valentina knows her.” Sam wrinkled her nose, bored, ready to move on, to pick up our conversation about cults and EST and Chinese brainwashing techniques. “She’s not that interesting.”
There was that hint of chiding in Sam’s voice, the same hint I sometimes got when I inquired after her roommate, Valentina, or when I talked about the girls I’d met volunteering at the shelter that week, the way Sam and I had met. That chiding, like, What, I’m not enough for you? You want to start seeing other homeless girls?
I turned away from the redhead and smiled to myself, resuming our pace. Nobody’s as interesting as you, kid.
It’s almost summer again. Sam’s been gone for over six months now. I draft her letters sometimes, the kind you can’t send. I never get past the first few lines anyway. But the redhead is still here on my corner. It’s warm these days, but she’s still shivering, teeth chattering in the white sun on the patch of sidewalk in front of the Gap Body store. Sometimes she’s crying, other times she appears to be asleep. She doesn’t look like she’s going to last much longer, but I’ve been thinking that for years now. Maybe she’ll surprise me, and live.
I shade my eyes as Sam did, watch from across the street as people drop coins into the redhead’s cup, wishes in a fountain. I wish I could save you. And her puppet head jerks and nods, like she fell asleep while praying.
Chapter One
How I Became the Bead Lady
It’s a Wednesday evening in late May, and I’m at the shelter for my weekly workshop, which is officially listed on the calendar as “Jewelry Making with Janice.” This has been my shtick for the past two and a half years—every Wednesday evening, I come uptown to the shelter, and I sit around for a few hours with the girls of the Older Females Unit making beaded bracelets and necklaces and earrings. I am known, colloquially, as “Bead Lady,” as in, “Bead Lady, you got more alphabet beads this week? ’Cause last week you was runnin’ outa vowels.”
All of the volunteers here have a shtick. Some teach ballet, some lead prayer circles; theater groups come in to do presentations about conflict resolution. Out-of-town church choirs give concerts. The Junior League, a group of young professional women committed to volunteerism, sends representatives once a week to lead workshops about things like prenatal health and budgeting. One guy comes in and supervises pickup basketball games in the gym. There’s a guy named Carl who’s been volunteering on the Older Females Unit for the past fifteen years—a white guy, mousy, quiet, and kind. I have no idea what his shtick is, but the girls seem to like him.
They don’t like everybody. I guess when I started, I thought the girls would be so grateful for any kind of sympathy or attention that they’d fall all over the volunteers, but I’ve seen them turn their backs on a lot of people, watched them size up a bunch of white women in high-heeled shoes, out to do their annual Good Deed for the Poor Little Black Girls, and seen them “put it on frost,” as they say, ice up like snowmen. Because the girls at the shelter do not want your charity. They did not ask you to come stare at them with your pity, like they’re some fucked-up zebras at the zoo. They know you have some reason of your own for coming, whether it’s to burn off your bourgeois guilt, spread the word of Jesus, or pad your résumé—you’ve got your shtick, and then you’ve got your angle. What are you doing here, the girls want to know. Slumming?
They’ll still ask me that, directly or indirectly, the new ones who haven’t met me before—and there are always new ones, every week. Every Wednesday evening, I’m missing a few girls from the weeks before (“Where’s Angela? Where’s Zuzu? Where’s Grenada?”), and there’s a fresh crop of intakes, girls who watch me warily as I dump my bead supplies on the table in the lounge.
“What’s this?” they ask, skeptical.
“We’re going to make jewelry. You want to make some?”
Invariably: “Is it free?”
“Yeah, it’s free. You can make earrings, or a necklace, or a bracelet.”
“What about all three?”
That’s when I know I’ve got them. “You can make all three,” I tell them, smiling. “If you’ve got the patience, I’ve got the time.”
“All right then.” And the chairs scrape back, and I’ll have a table full of girls sitting with me, just like that, asking for a string “big enough for my man’s wrist” or “small enough for my baby.”
And soon enough, if it’s an all-or mostly new crowd, between talking about popular music and cell phone plans and whether or not you can tell the sex of a baby-to-be by the changing breadth and flatness of the mother’s nose, the subject will eventually come up: “Miss, Bead Lady, why you come here like this?”
As it has tonight. Tonight’s asker is a butch girl of about nineteen, wearing an oversized hockey jersey in black and red, extra-large baggy jeans belted around the upper thighs, do-rag over her braids, and cork-sized fake diamond studs in each ear. She is making a black-and-red bracelet, Blood colors. I always try to dissuade the girls from making gang beads, to no avail. The bracelet has alphabet beads that spell RIP POOKIE.
I concentrate on daubing a finished knot with glue. The glue won’t keep the cheap elastic from snapping, ultimately, but it will forestall its demise. “Well,” I say, without looking up. “I used to live here when I was a kid.”
“For real?” asks the butch girl, eyebrows high. “You lived here?”
“Huh,” murmurs someone else. Another girl at the end of the table elbows her neighbor, Are you listening to this?
I keep my eyes on the knot, blow on the glue. “Yep. When I was fifteen, I got sick of living with my mother’s husband, so I left home, and I came here. I was in the minors’ wing for about two months, then they helped me get into a group home, and I lived there for about a year.”
“I hate my mother’s husband, too,” offers the girl to my left, the one with the tattoo of a bleeding rose on her left boob. She hands me an earring in need of a hook.
“Fuck all of them,” agrees the butch in the hockey jersey, and turns her attention back to me. “So, wait—so things was messed up at home, and you came here, and then they hooked you up, and then things got better? Things is good with you now?”
I bend the hook with my pliers, smiling to myself. Succinctly, yes. “Things are very good with me now. And I’m really grateful to this place for helping me get to a place where I can say that.”
She leans back, nods. “So that’s how come you came back.”
I return the hooked earring to the girl with the bloody-rose tattoo, and she holds it up to her ear, flips her head back and forth like America’s Next Top Model, emits a little squeal of pleasure. “Pretty much,” I say.
“That’s crazy,” decrees a girl at the end of the table, pale and haughty, with traces of a Spanish accent. “No offense, miss, but when I get outa here, I am never coming back. Never.”
“That’s understandable,” I tell her. “I didn’t come back for almost twenty years.”
“So what made you decide to come back, then?” asks the butch girl.
Well, okay. This is a question I’ve asked myself over and over, ever since I walked through that door again—What made me decide to come back here, goddamn it? I’d succ
essfully managed to avoid this place for nineteen years, though I never left New York, never lived farther than a subway ride away. After purposely staying away for so long, why did I decide to return to the scene of the crime? Why couldn’t I just leave well enough alone?
Two and a half years later, I still don’t know the answer. Survivor’s guilt, I could say, or, because I want to help make a difference. But really, it was something more selfish than that, something I still can’t name.
I cut another bracelet length of elastic string, triple-knotting the end.
“Well, you know how it is,” I tell her, smiling. “I missed the company.”
I’m interested in volunteering here because I’m a former resident of the shelter, and I want to give something back to the place that helped save my life.
That’s what I wrote on my application almost two and a half years ago, back in the winter of 2004, when I was all fresh and dewy-eyed. It had been nineteen years since I’d been inside the building, since the day I’d left the shelter for the group home, my donated bag full of donated clothes, a skull and crossbones drawn in eyeliner on my temple, ready to impress my new roommates with my hard-core stories about stabbings and lesbians and twelve-year-old hoes. See you, wouldn’t want to be you. Anymore.
Then there I was again, age thirty-four, in my pinstriped pants and my good-enough shoes, sitting around the conference table in the volunteer department with my paperwork in front of me, sneaking looks at the other prospective candidates: a young white girl with her hair in braids, looking to earn college credit; a woman in her forties, also going for college credit; and a bald, muscular guy with a big tense grin. When the volunteer coordinator asked him why he was interested in volunteering, he grinned so hard he almost broke a sweat.
“I love kids!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been a foster parent, and I’m really…I love kids. Wanna help ’em out.” Grin, grin.
Creep, I decided, for no good reason. Child molester. It was something about the muscles; I could picture him shirtless, screaming at his foster kids while he made them do push-ups. He grinned at me, and I smiled back weakly.
Have You Found Her Page 1