Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  I turned to her, sheer wonderment all over my face. “You’re a savant, aren’t you?”

  Sam drew back and wrinkled her forehead at me. “I don’t play that good.”

  I shook my head, brushing her off. “You’re a fucking savant. You’re a supergenius. You’re like Good Will Hunting, or somebody. You have an eidetic memory, don’t you.”

  Anybody else would have had to ask what eidetic meant. “What are you talking about?” she asked, uneasy.

  I had not stopped staring at her, my mouth hanging open. She fidgeted a little under my gaze.

  “You’re kind of freaking me out,” she said.

  Well, vice versa, Einstein. “I’m sorry.” I shook my head again, trying to dispel the weird feeling I had, a combination of jealousy and possessiveness. Maybe she was smarter than me, but she was still my discovery. I eyed her covetously, and she looked nervously back at me. “I’m just…impressed.”

  “Anyway,” she said, breaking eye contact. “I think it’s almost eight o’clock.”

  The nurse who’d unlocked the ward for us came into the lounge and made the announcement—“Visiting hours are over in five minutes, please say your good-byes.” I rose slowly from the piano bench, loath to leave Sam again.

  “It was great seeing you,” I told her. “Despite the circumstances.”

  She rose and hovered next to me. The chiseled line between her eyes was back, deep as ever. “You too.”

  “And you know, the circumstances are only going to get better from here.”

  She exhaled and put on a brave face. “I know.”

  I reached out for a hug, and she reached down to receive it—a loose clasp, brief but satisfying. I slung my bag over my shoulder.

  “Hey, Janice?” I turned, and Sam bit her lip. “Can I ask…would you give me your phone number? I wouldn’t use it unless it was an emergency. Just in case I get moved again, or something. I want you to know how to find me.”

  “Oh! Uh…” Twelve thoughts at once: Yes! No. Bad idea, not kosher; then again, none of this is. Say yes, you want to, and she needs you—you’re her mentor. But not twenty-four hours a day. It’s too much; you’re going to regret it when the phone starts to ring. But at least you won’t lose her again. “Sure.”

  She reached into her cargo pants and pulled out the notebook, the one I’d given her two months ago. The tan cardboard back was soft with wear, like a teddy bear.

  “I read what you wrote all the time,” she said, and flipped to the back page. She passed me the book, and I scrawled my cell number under my name, adding a smiley face with a ponytail.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling at it.

  “You’re welcome.”

  The other visitors started to trickle out; the agitated man was taking his leave, agitatedly. I turned to follow, and Sam stopped me. “And, one other thing—do you think, tomorrow, could you maybe bring me something to read? It’s so boring in here, I just…”

  Tomorrow. Another internal argument started to brew. The holidays were over; I had work to do. I couldn’t afford to get back into the habit of visiting her every day. Then again, it hadn’t been every day—we’d just missed two weeks.

  “Sure thing,” I decided. “See you tomorrow.”

  Of course, tomorrow turned into every day. Every day after work, I ran over to the psych ward to sit with Samantha until visiting hours were over; then I’d run home, burst through my front door, and greedily suck down a joint. Bill tried gently suggesting that I take a break—“Babe, you’re running yourself ragged again; please don’t overdo it.”

  “I won’t,” I swore. It was just temporary, anyway. Soon Sam would go to rehab, and I wouldn’t have to visit every day. But today she needed me. She was in crisis; it was even more severe than usual.

  She’d called me the night before from the patients’ pay phone. She wouldn’t say what had happened at first, but then she broke down and spilled it.

  “This guy, one of the patients, he came into my room, and he started…trying stuff with me.”

  “Oh my god.” I’d clenched the phone in my hand until the veins popped. “What the fuck is going on at that place? Who the hell—did you tell the staff?”

  “No! No, Janice, please don’t say anything. They’d just make a big deal out of it, and I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to get out of here as soon as I can. Please.”

  “Okay,” I’d agreed, unwilling. But it definitely put a jog in my step as I wended my way to see her.

  The nurse let the visitors onto the floor, and there was Sam, right by the pay phone, waiting for me, her face pale. I hugged her, briefly, and pulled back to look into her eyes. They were wide, red, and haunted.

  “How are you?” I asked, though the answer was apparent—she was terrible. Why did things like this always happen to her? she asked me. She must have invited them. She must have deserved it. She collapsed into a seat next to me, let me put my arm around her. We’d just been talking the day before about the time she was raped in Boston, and the subsequent abortion she’d had; she’d asked the same thing yesterday, too. Why did this always happen to her?

  “Please let me tell the staff,” I asked. “It won’t make trouble for you, and they should know what happened so they can isolate the guy.”

  “No,” she insisted. “It’ll make it worse. Please, I got enough to deal with. Just let it go.”

  It had been a brutal few days—she’d been coming face-to-face with old nightmares, things she’d managed to blot out with heroin and meth and whatever else was handy. Now sober, she was having flashbacks, night terrors, panic attacks; even with the meds, she was a wreck. From the time I got off the elevator every day to the time the nurse escorted me away, Sam stuck to my side, begging me for some kind of answer, some kind of relief. How was she supposed to live with all this? When was this going to get better?

  Rehab, I told her. Rehab was going to help her out so much, and then, a year from now, when she graduated…“How about this,” I blurted. “When you graduate from rehab, I’ll take you to Disney World.”

  She gaped at me, astonished. “Are you kidding me?”

  Are you kidding me? I asked myself. What the hell are you promising her? Man overboard! Man overboard!

  “I’m totally serious,” I replied. “Let’s make a bargain, and shake on it. If you go to rehab and stay sober for a whole year, next winter I will take you to Disney World.”

  “For real?” Sam looked awestruck, almost frightened, as the idea dawned on her—I really was serious. Me and her, we’d go to Disney World, just like Ashley and her family; we’d ride all the rides and eat all the candy and buy matching souvenir T-shirts. “I…I always wanted to go there, when I was a kid.”

  When she was a kid, she was beaten with an electrical cord. When she was a kid, she had to steal her own food or starve. When she was a kid, her parents took them all to Thailand for a few months, so they could make money off the kids while the heat cooled in the States. She could still speak the language, though she didn’t much care to. Samantha had never been a kid, but I would fix that.

  “It’s a deal, then.” I extended my hand. “Shake.”

  Sam shook my hand, still wary, despite her widening grin. “This is, like, legally binding, right? You’re really serious?”

  “Certifiably,” I promised.

  “Oh man, I am totally going to stay totally sober from now on,” she vowed. She straightened her posture, and her face was shining with reverence. “I’m not even gonna huff the air freshener I got stashed in my room anymore.”

  I walked home that evening, high off the contact with her happiness. I’d done it; I’d given her something to look forward to, some tangible reward for staying alive and fighting. When I came in that night she’d been terminally despondent; when I left, she was grinning ear to ear. I’d worry about how to tell everyone later—Bill, my family—Oh, by the way, I’m taking my little homeless junkie to Disney World. Right now, I wanted to enjoy my success.
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br />   Bill was already home when I walked in.

  “How was she tonight?” he asked, fixing himself a few fingers of scotch as I lit my post-hospital joint.

  I kept my eyes averted and my voice noncommittal. “A little better, I think.”

  “That’s good.” He was noncommittal in return. “Have they told her when she’s getting out?”

  “Well, she told me probably by next week, but when I ran into Jodi at the shelter the other night, she said it might take longer.”

  “Huh,” said Bill, his upper lip thin and tight. His upper lip always tightens when he’s upset; it’s what makes him no good at poker.

  I said, “She won’t be there too much longer, I hope.”

  “I hope not. It’s been really tough.”

  I turned away from him, sucked on the joint. What was tough—me not being home in time to make dinner every night? Was it so hard for him, listening to the secondhand stories, the stories I barely hinted at, sparing him the worst of the details? What about the fact that I was nobly caring for one of society’s most abject castoffs? I took another whopping hit and held it, stern-faced. I was sorry if Bill was feeling neglected, but he didn’t have it tough.

  I blew out the smoke in a long, thin line over my shoulder, away from him. “It is really tough,” I said, short. “She’s had an unbelievably tough life.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t believe it.”

  I looked over at him again. He met my gaze, tight-lipped. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know. Just, every time something happens with her, it’s like, you’re running out the door.”

  I gave him a frosty smile. “That’s what you do in an emergency.”

  “She has a lot of emergencies. I mean, she calls last night, and you’re foaming at the mouth—”

  “I wasn’t foaming at the mouth,” I fumed. “I was worried. That’s what happens when you care about someone.”

  Bill looked down at his glass, swirled it. His voice got softer. “You really do care about her.”

  “Well…yeah.” It probably wasn’t meant to be an accusation—he sounded more resigned than anything. Like he’d caught me in bed with the mailman, and now he wanted to know, So, you love this mailman guy, huh. I felt stung with guilt. “I mean, not like I care about you, Shmoo.” I laughed a little. “I don’t want to have sex with her.”

  He didn’t laugh. “That’s good.”

  I frowned, turning away again. Of course, the thing with Sam wasn’t sexual. But it was almost romantic, the way I thought about her constantly, talked about her all the time. If she were a man of my age, with her same wit and intellect, I’d probably fall in love with that man the way I did with Sam. And where would that leave Bill? I felt a moment of fear for our relationship, that I could be so easily swayed by someone else. It had happened before, with other boyfriends—I’d met someone new, and I’d moved on. But Sam wasn’t a man, and I loved Bill first and foremost, and there was no question about it in my mind. I was sad that there was a question in his.

  I’m sorry, I wanted to say, but he spoke first.

  “I would just hate to find out that she’s…playing you, somehow.”

  My mood flipped again. Was he fucking kidding me? Nobody could play me; I knew the game too well. Who was at the shelter week after week; who knew these girls from the inside and out? Me. And besides me, there was Jodi, Sam’s other biggest fan—with twenty years of experience under her belt; nobody was playing Jodi. I smirked at Bill’s civilian ignorance.

  “How in the world could she be playing me? What’s she playing me for, a notebook? Some cookies? She hasn’t asked me for a single cent, and I haven’t offered her one.” Not one cent, just a week in Disney World. I barreled past the thought. “All I’m giving her is my time, and my caring. What’s she playing me for, hugs? She’s a homeless junkie, Bill, I’m just trying to do the right thing here, and I don’t understand why everybody is fighting me on this!”

  “Nobody’s fighting you!” he said, exasperated.

  “Then why are we fighting?” I yelled.

  “I don’t know!”

  He put his scotch down too hard on the table, put his head in his hand. This was making him miserable. I was making him miserable. I stubbed out the joint and moved over to sit next to him.

  “I’m sorry, babe. I know I’ve been distracted a lot, and I have been spending a lot of time with Sam. And I know I’ve said this before, but she will be going to rehab soon. She should be ready to get out of the psych ward any day, and they’re going to send her straight upstate, and then things will settle down. I promise. But I can’t just abandon her, now that I’ve made the commitment. I just want her to get to rehab, that’s all I want.”

  Bill nodded at his lap. “I know.”

  “I mean, you’re right, I’m right back where I was over the holidays; I’m totally stressed out and overtaxed—”

  He cut me short. “I know.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. It scared me when Bill pulled away like this—that was supposed to be my prerogative. I put my arms around him, and he wrapped one arm around me.

  “I love you,” I tried.

  “I love you, too,” he said. It sounded more like, I would pay you to shut up and leave me alone.

  For the first time in three years, we went to bed unhappy.

  Sam was two days away from going to rehab when she smashed the mirror in her room and was committed to the psych ward for another week.

  I arrived at the ward at the start of visiting hours, bearing a Mountain Dew and a Kit Kat bar, excited to update our Disney countdown—only 367 days to go!—when I saw her in the hallway, stripped of her street clothes and clad only in a hospital gown and slippers. She looked bleached again, her expression ghostly. There was a series of fresh cuts on her newly healed hand.

  “What happened?” I asked, swooping to her side. We sat right down in the lounge, and she began.

  Well, everything had been really hard, she said. Even with the meds, she was still completely depressed. And the ward wasn’t helping her; it was making it worse.

  “Which is why you have to get to rehab as soon as you can,” I interrupted. “This place isn’t doing you any good.”

  “I know,” she said. “I just…the stuff we’ve been talking about the past couple days…”

  What we’d been talking about: Sam blamed herself for the death of a friend, murdered in a drug deal. She blamed herself for turning a girl on to meth; within eight months, the girl was dead. She had a lot on her conscience, she told me, hinting that there were things I’d rather not know.

  It’s like child soldiers in the Congo, I’d told her. They’re children. Nobody blames them for what they were forced to do to survive.

  She’d told me more about her younger sister, Eileen, the one who’d tried to kill herself and failed, wound up comatose and then in a group home. Eileen had joined Sam on the streets for a few weeks two years ago; it hadn’t worked out, so she’d gone back to living with friends. Then she found out she was HIV-positive. Then she tried to kill herself.

  “So all of this has just been on my mind, so much, you know? And I can’t stop thinking about it. About how shitty my life has been, and how I deserve it, and how nothing is ever going to change what happened, or who I am. I mean, even if I go to rehab, I’m still going to be the same person, with the same past—what’s rehab going to do for me? It’s just going to change the outside. Inside I’m still going to be a worthless piece of shit.”

  So she looked at herself in the mirror, and she saw her reflection smirking back at her. “And it was like nothing had changed.” Sam shook her head, ground her fist into her palm. All the work she had done over the past few months, all the relationships she’d tried to build—she’d thought she’d made progress, but she still had that look on her face. Like she was damaged and proud of it, and it was never going to change.

  “So I punched the mirror. I didn’t think it would break! I mean, w
hat kind of psych ward is this? They shouldn’t have mirrors that break! That’s not my fault, and now they’re punishing me!”

  I wasn’t going to be drawn into the no-fault conversation now. “So what happened after you broke the mirror?”

  Nothing, she said. Nobody even came to investigate the sound. She sat there looking at a shard of mirror, wondering whether or not to cut her own throat, until finally one of the orderlies came in and saw the broken glass.

  “See, that proves I’m not going to kill myself. I totally had the chance, and I didn’t take it!”

  Now her chin was up, defiant; she looked almost pleased with herself. I narrowed my eyes. Sam knew exactly what she was doing. She knew what was going to happen if she punched that mirror; she was going to get to stay at St. Victor’s, where the creeps and molesters were at least the ones you knew, where the orderlies sneaked her cigarettes, where Janice was available every single day. Goddamn it, I’d been so blind, so completely counterproductive. Sam was afraid to move on to rehab, and I’d been enabling her to stay.

  “So now what?” I said, to myself as much as to Sam.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. They said I have to stay another week or so before I can go upstate, which is bullshit. I want to get out of here.” Her usual complaint, delivered with the usual doe eyes.

  They weren’t working on me today. “Then you shouldn’t have punched a mirror,” I exhaled through clenched teeth. “Didn’t you just get over an infected hand from punching a wall? And you almost died from that infection—do you want another one? Jesus, Sam, you could have been at rehab two months ago; I thought that’s what you wanted. Is that even what you want?”