Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  “Will this place help you find a halfway house?”

  “Well, Maria’s working on it, and so’s Jodi—I’ve spoken to her a few times. I’ll probably have to go back to the shelter for a little while, probably a week or two, and then they should be able to get me into another program.” She frowned. “It sucks, though. This is the first time I been sober this long since…since I can remember, barely. Since I was a kid. When I leave, I’ll have thirty days sober. I don’t want to mess that up.”

  “We’ll all be there to help you,” I promised.

  She wanted to show me her drawings, so she ran to her room while I waited, trying to eavesdrop on the conversations around me: “So I had to get rid of the credit cards.” “You’re telling me they only give you decaf here?”

  Sam sat down again and unrolled the sheaf of smudged pages: a desert sunset, reds and pinks and purples and blues, hand-blended and thumbprinted, with a black cactus in the foreground. A self-portrait of Sam on a skateboard, jumping off the loading dock at the shelter. The head of a wolflike dog, snarling, on the same page as a handgun. A self-portrait of Sam sitting against a tombstone, her arms folded over her head, with a thought bubble: a razor dripping blood.

  She watched me linger over this last one and cringed, apologetic. “It’s still real hard sometimes.”

  She moved her drawings aside, and we gossiped about the shelter. I told her the latest stories about the new crop of girls, all of her old contemporaries long gone by now, and she had gossip for me: Jodi was leaving the shelter for another agency. “But you can’t say anything,” she warned me. “She’s not leaving until the end of the month.”

  “Wow. Did she say why she’s leaving?”

  “Nope, she said she couldn’t talk about it. But Nadine’s quitting, too; she already announced it.”

  “Really?” How did Sam, in Larchmont, hear about things that I didn’t hear about from ten feet away? Something big must have been happening at the shelter, if they were losing their senior staff like that. “That sucks. That’s really bad news.”

  Sam shrugged. “Not for me. Because Jodi told me she was gonna stay in touch like always, and she could give me her cell phone number now, since I’m not gonna be her client anymore. And Nadine was a bitch! She wouldn’t let you come visit me at the psych ward!”

  I thought about Nadine, working vigilantly as Sam went to the hospital, to detox, to the psych ward—even when Sam wasn’t technically a resident, Nadine was on her case. I thought about her standing at her desk behind her stack of folders, phone on one shoulder; how she had to walk quickly wherever she went, or the girls stacked up behind her like a conga line. Her hand on my arm, You surprised me. “I’m going to miss Nadine.”

  Two hours passed like minutes, with only a few of those awkward pauses—the rest of the time it was all jabber jabber jabber. Books this, and TV that, and the activities the residents kept busy with all day. Everything was good.

  “Eleven months and ten days until Disney World,” she reminded me.

  “Keep it up,” I replied, smiling. “I can’t wait.”

  Soon enough, it was time to go. “I guess I’ll see you in ten days or so,” she said, as we reluctantly made our way toward the door. “That Wednesday, at the shelter.”

  “Yeah, that’ll be great.”

  “And we can hang out a bunch before I go wherever they’re sending me, ’cause I won’t be on full restriction anymore. I’ll be able to do whatever I want, as long as I’m back by curfew. We could even go to a museum or something. The Museum of Modern Art is free on Fridays.”

  I blanched inside at the idea of Sam loose in the city, her long days free until she could get to another program. Dangerous, for both of us. I would have to enforce some kind of moderation on myself, or I’d be back to spending every day after work with her, and she’d never make it to the halfway house. “Great,” I said. “We’ll definitely hang out.”

  We stopped in the hallway by the door, watching couples hug good-bye—“Come home soon, Papi.” “Okay, tell Elena I miss her”—until we were the last ones there. Sam turned to me, the old visiting hours are over anxiety flashing across her face for a second.

  “Thanks for coming, Janice. You’re the greatest friend, seriously. You’ve done so much for me.”

  I cleared my throat, looked at my sneakers, tears in my eyes. “And you’ve done so much for me.”

  We hugged, then broke away, then reached out and hugged again, laughing. “Okay.”

  I pushed open the door, then turned around.

  “I…” I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t quite say it. “I’ve got a lot of love for you, kid.”

  She smiled and nodded, like she knew what I meant. Then she waved, and I walked out the door.

  And so the countdown began: ten, nine, eight, seven days until she’d be home. I stuck to my routine: running in the morning, work all day, dinners with Bill. I went to the shelter on Wednesday and heard that Mel had been discharged for fighting.

  Alas, poor Mel—I knew her, Horatio.

  Jodi was missing, too, taking her unused vacation days before leaving the shelter for good. Sam said that Jodi had found her a decent halfway house, but there’d be a few weeks’ wait until they had an open bed. And I didn’t see Nadine, though I knocked on her office door. No answer; she wasn’t there. It was one of the few times I’d been there, day or night, that Nadine wasn’t around.

  So I strung beads with the new crew, Fatima and Jenny and Marisol, and a white girl from Texas named Karen who would not shut the hell up the entire time—“So I told him, I got too many men tryin’a spend time with me, I am not waiting around for your sorry ass, I don’t care what you got in your pocket, ’cause I don’t need your dick and I can get my own yayo….” The other girls shot one another looks, especially when Karen started a new bracelet in yellow and black, the colors of the Latin Queens. “’Cause I used to be down with the Latin Queens back home, we always used to get high and party—”

  “Ain’t no ‘used to’ in the Latin Queens,” corrected Marisol, whose own black-and-yellow bracelet read MARI WANNA SMOKE. She put down the earrings she was working on and gave Karen a direct look. “Once you down, you either down, or you dead.”

  Karen pursed her lips, dropped her eyes, shrugged it off. “Well, back in Texas, the way they do things there…”

  Marisol raised an eyebrow at Fatima. Fatima rolled her eyes. I hoped Karen would be smart enough to drop the subject, maybe add some other colors to her bumblebee bracelet, before somebody decided it was time to school her in remedial gang studies.

  Fortunately, Karen dropped it, and the night passed without incident. “How’d it go?” asked Bill, kissing me hello as I came in the door.

  “Fine, I guess.” I let my bag slide off my arm with a thud. “Nothing interesting. Mel’s gone, the boxer, discharged for fighting. I guess that was apropos.”

  “Sorry to hear it. We liked Mel.”

  “Yeah.” But not enough, apparently, to go chasing after her, the way I chased Samantha. I wondered, who was looking after Mel? If she wound up in a psych ward or a detox, if she needed hand surgery and the wound got infected, there wasn’t anybody there for her. Or for any of them. Okay, Marisol might have her Latin Queens, at least, two or three other scowling girls with giant white T-shirts and skinny, overdrawn eyebrows, to sit around in the emergency room with her. But Fatima, Jenny, Karen the white girl—they’d be on their own.

  I was feeling depressed about volunteering again, feeling like it was all futile, like whatever few drops of caring I managed to add to the bucket all ran out the hole in the bottom. I’d devoted myself to Sam nearly full-time, and she was still barely afloat, buoyed only by the good graces of Jodi and Maria and the rehab program. Support like that, and her head was just above water. What chance did the rest of these girls have, with no support at all?

  I’d just hit my first anniversary of volunteering. Maybe it was time to stop. I’d already impressed Nadine
with how long I’d stayed; I’d impressed myself. Hell, even Nadine was leaving. I could hardly be blamed for doing the same. It was just too much sadness, too much frustration. Too much of the same thing—falling in love with a girl, then losing her, again and again.

  But I wasn’t going to stop volunteering now that Sam was coming back. I called her at rehab three days before her departure date—it had been a few days since we’d spoken. “She’s not here right now,” one of her fellow patients informed me, and I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. Where the fuck is she, then? Don’t tell me she took off.…

  I heard the story the next night, after a frantic twenty minutes of dialing and redialing. She’d been unable to come to the phone last night because she’d been struggling with the security guards. “They wouldn’t let me leave! And I was like, ‘You can’t keep me here, it’s voluntary, I know my rights, you can’t detain me against my will!’”

  Samantha Dunleavy, judicial expert. I felt like smacking myself in the forehead. But at least she was all right, I told myself; at least she didn’t manage to run away—this time, anyway. “Why were you trying to get out? I thought you didn’t want to leave.”

  I could picture her chin jutting out; her proud, defiant face, the same face she made after she broke that mirror, the smile that was almost a sneer. “I didn’t. But I gotta leave anyway, so I wanted to do it on my terms.”

  Right. I softened. How hard must it have been to accept safety and comfort from other people for the first time in your life, and then to feel like you were losing it. I remembered how one of the doctors at the shelter told Jodi she thought maybe Sam had let her hand get infected after her wrist surgery so she could stay at the shelter for a while before she had to move on. It didn’t seem too far-fetched, and who could begrudge her?

  “It must suck,” I empathized, “to have to leave Larchmont. Especially to leave Maria.”

  Sam’s voice lightened at the sound of Maria’s name. “Yeah. Maria’s the one who got me to stay last night. She made me come into her office to talk”—here she dropped her voice and cupped her hand over the phone—“and she told me she would stay in touch with me after I leave here, but only if I stayed the full thirty days.” Her voice went back to light and chirpy. “So I thought about it, and I said okay.”

  Ah, Maria. I sighed, both relieved and resigned. “That’s so great. That’s so great of Maria, and that’s so great of you. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me, that you stayed.”

  “Me too,” she agreed. “And, Janice, I can’t wait to see you again, and Jodi, too. You guys have been so supportive of me—I knew I’d be letting you down, too, if I didn’t stay, so…that also helped me to do the right thing.”

  Well, I was just glad to be one half of the backup reason. “You did it, kid. And I can’t wait to see you on Wednesday, too. You can make a key chain for Maria!”

  Chapter Seven

  Spring

  Now it was March, and like the crocuses pushing through the dirt in the sidewalk flower beds, the redhead on my corner was back. I observed her that Wednesday night, on my way to the subway uptown, sitting on the sidewalk under some scaffolding with a guy her age, furiously counting her change and scratching her face. I’d seen the guy before; I recognized the long hair and the scabs; he, too, was a neighborhood regular. I’d usually see him sitting on his backpack a few blocks away reading a book. He rarely bothered to panhandle—the guys don’t make nearly as much money as the girls do. But they’re still useful, as part of a team; they can provide protection, security, companionship. They can go cop the drugs.

  I walked past the two of them to the train, my heart ramping up like it did on my morning run. It was Samantha Day, at long last; she was back at the shelter. I’d gotten the message from Jodi that morning: “The eagle has landed.” Jodi would be leaving the shelter at the end of the week; Sam would be staying almost through the end of the month. Then she was due to depart for a yearlong halfway-house program in Brooklyn on March 28—three days before her twentieth birthday on April 1.

  Nadine was already gone. As was always the case, I didn’t get to say good-bye.

  At least Ashley the counselor was still there—I spotted her right away as I entered the cafeteria, swiveling my head and looking for Sam, who seemed to be absent. “How’s it going?” I asked.

  She gave me the usual answer.

  “Crazy,” she said, cheerful as ever. “There’s a ton of new intakes, and they still haven’t found a replacement for Nadine. But our friend Samantha’s back from rehab, did you hear?”

  “I did.” I smiled. “Is she around?”

  “Somewhere. I think she had some re-intake stuff to take care of. She should be down here any minute.”

  But I had to wait until I was upstairs and unpacked before Sam appeared, casually loping into the lounge with a grin on her face. “Hey, beads, cool.”

  “Hey there!” She looked fantastic, and not just because I was so happy to see her—she really looked great. Happy, healthy, confident—just as good as she’d looked at rehab, if not better. I burst into a grin of my own. I wanted to spring up out of my seat and embrace her, but that would have been impolitic. Instead, she leaned down, and I gave her half a hug from my chair. “How the hell are you?”

  She pulled up an empty chair and scooted it in between me and Fatima, ignoring Fatima’s dirty look. “I’m good! I’m actually kind of glad to be back here. I got to see Jodi, and she told me all about this halfway house I’m going to at the end of the month, so I’m psyched about that. Plus I decided to go for my GED, and I signed up for a free class I can take, so that’s good.”

  The rest of the girls eyed us sideways as we spent the next fifteen minutes chattering away—“And I already spoke to Maria to tell her I got back okay, and I think she’s gonna come down here on her day off and maybe we’ll go to the movies or something….” Occasionally someone would pass me an earring to hook—“Miss!”—and grab my attention for a second or two, then it was right back to the Sam and Janice show. “Great, that sounds great. You’re going to blow right through the GED. You could probably take it tomorrow and kick its ass.”

  Bead Lady was definitely playing favorites. “Look at you two,” said Fatima finally. “Like lovebirds.”

  Sam drew back, spread her hands on the table, and looked at them, the pink weal on the right one. I tried to shoot her a warning look—No punching, Sam.

  “Lovebirds?” I laughed. “This is my little sister! We go way back, me and her. Friends for a long time.”

  “Oh.” Fatima still looked suspicious. “You sure is good friends.”

  Sam pushed her chair back slowly, flashed me a little smile. “Well, I gotta unpack the rest of my shit and everything.”

  “Okay,” I chirped, trying to hide my disappointment. I’d known that seeing her at the shelter wasn’t going to be like our old, private visits, but I’d hoped for a grander reunion than this.

  She rose and turned toward me, adding quietly, “Then later, I’m gonna go get some Dunkin’ Donuts down the block.”

  I met her eyes and smiled. Gotcha. I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m done cleaning up. It would leave us only a half hour before she had to come back for curfew, but it was better than nothing. “Sounds good.”

  She gave me that pressed-lip smile and walked away.

  Fatima scooted her chair closer to mine again. “I’ma get my GED, too,” she announced. “Soon as I get my Section 8.”

  An hour and a half later, I walked into Dunkin’ Donuts to see Sam grinning from a back table. She jumped up when she saw me, and we hugged tightly, my head tucked under her chin like I was the kid. “I don’t know why,” she said, still grinning as she released me. “I just had a real craving for donuts.”

  I laughed, stealing a look out the window facing the street. Nadine was gone, but her boss, Kathy, was still around, and after the big psych ward kerfuffle, I didn’t really want anybody seeing me and Sam together off campus. “Fu
nny, I felt like a donut, too.”

  She indicated the counter with her arm. “Well, since we bumped into each other, shall we eat donuts together?”

  “On me,” I insisted, following her to the counter. “You want coffee or something, too?”

  Once seated with our donuts, she got me with those big brown eyes, her gaze steadier than I’d ever seen it. She sat up straight in the chair, head high, smile wide—she hardly looked like the girl from the psych ward anymore, the one with the pallor and the scowl and that battle-scarred look. Now she looked like a regular teenager, a college kid knocking off after a part-time shift at the video store, on her way back to the dorms to study for midterms. Like my brother, or one of his friends.

  “You look terrific,” I told her sincerely. “You look…peaceful.”

  She accepted the compliment with a nod. “Thanks. I feel real good. I mean, I don’t want to get cocky, because that’s when I’m most likely to mess up. But for the first time, I really feel good about myself and my life and my prospects. I mean, if you told me in October, when I was laying on that sidewalk, that by March I’da made it through rehab, I’da been clean for over a month, that I’d have people like you and Jodi and Maria in my life…” She shook her head.

  “It’s pretty incredible,” I agreed. I tried to imagine the redhead, four months from now, sitting clear-eyed and upright at a donut shop, telling me how grateful she was that her life had changed. “And you know, it only gets better from here.”

  She bobbed her head, chewed and swallowed. “That’s what I’m hoping. I mean, I know I gotta be careful while I’m here, because this is, like, the hardest part, probably. Once I’m at the halfway house, then I’ll be more secure. But still, right now I’m kind of psyched to have some freedom, you know? And to get to spend time with you, and Maria. ’Cause once I go to the halfway house, I’m not gonna be allowed to have any contact for the first few months or so, and I’m gonna have to earn privileges to go outside and stuff.”