Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  She was right, I realized—this was our window of opportunity. Whatever plans for moderation I’d made with myself might have to be revised, in light of the time frame. Besides, this was the most crucial juncture; this was when she was most likely to use. “Well then, we’d better enjoy this time while we can.”

  We finished our donuts and picked at the crumbs, talking about her plans for the next three and a half weeks. She couldn’t really job-hunt, since she’d be going to a facility where she wouldn’t be allowed off the premises for the next thirty to sixty days. The GED thing, though, that would be a productive use of her time, and she was going to try to make at least one 12-step meeting a day, and check in with Maria or Jodi or me by phone. “And of course on Wednesday, the Bead Lady comes—I always make sure to be there for that.”

  I mirrored her smile. “Of course. And maybe Friday we can go to MoMA. You want to meet outside at five-thirty?”

  “It’s a date,” she agreed.

  It was almost curfew time, so we bussed our table and put on our coats. “You go first,” she suggested, standing back from the door. “I’ll wait a minute, then leave.”

  Secret Agent Sam—nothing she loved more than a scheme. Not that it wasn’t a good idea. I hugged her good-bye and yelled, “Great running into you!” as I pushed through the door. I could hear her laughing as it swung shut.

  Moderation—I could manage that. We only went to MoMA twice, which was moderate, and we only went twice because the first time she’d scared the shit out of me, hadn’t shown up, left me waiting for an hour before she realized she was standing in front of the Metropolitan Museum instead. My cell phone rang, a stranger’s number—she’d borrowed someone’s phone on the street to make the emergency call. “Janice, I’m so sorry, I screwed it up, I’ll be right down!” But by the time she got there, sweating with exertion and apology, the museum was almost ready to close.

  “That’s okay,” I said, wholly relieved just to know where she was again. And I couldn’t help but notice that she’d arrived on a well-worn skateboard. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Oh!” She looked at it like she’d forgotten about it, looked up at me and grinned. “Uh, somebody gave it to me.”

  The next Friday we had more luck; she was only twenty minutes late, and we managed to see a few galleries. “My art is usually more, like, traditional,” she judged, “but I think I appreciate modern art more, you know?”

  “It leaves a lot of room for interaction,” I agreed.

  I couldn’t get over how thrilling it was, to be walking around the museum discussing art with her, my very own homeless girl, just a more fucked-up version of the homeless girl I’d been in my youth, when I’d have died from gratitude if someone had taken me to a museum. I basked in the aptness of her comments, in my apt replies, in the picture we presented—the brilliant street kid and the selfless volunteer, enriching each other through art. It was like one of the scenes in the movie I’d imagined, the one that ended with me and Sam laughing in the sunshine as she threw her mortarboard in the air. And just as I was looking around for a witness to all this altruism, there he was: Edward, a dear friend of mine and Bill’s.

  “Edward!” I leapt through the crowd like a gazelle and seized him by the arm. “How wonderful to see you. How’ve you been? You look great! This is my friend Samantha; Samantha, this is our friend Edward.”

  “Of course!” Edward’s eyebrows rose as they shook hands—here she was, the famous Sam, whom he’d heard so much about. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she replied politely.

  Edward and I chatted for a minute—“How’s your latest play?” “Coming along, thanks.” “We’ll have to have dinner with Bill sometime soon.” “Oh, absolutely!” And the whole time I’m making eyes at him, like, Isn’t she great? Isn’t she something? Look at us, Edward, we’re at the museum!

  Soon Edward went his own way, and Sam and I stayed until the museum closed, wandering through the throngs of people, talking about the other patrons as much as the artwork (“Look at the guy over there—his haircut looks like it could cut glass”). We followed the dregs of the visitors out through the front door, and I started walking her back toward the shelter.

  She said she’d been enjoying her freedom—“Not too much,” I interjected hopefully, and she laughed. No, she’d been good. Which I knew. I could see it in her eyes, in her skin, in her posture. She’d just been hanging out, studying for her GED, going to the Virgin Mega-store and listening to CDs, walking dogs around the Union Square dog run for money. Skateboarding.

  “Ten months and two weeks until Disney World,” she reminded me.

  “Oh, I know.”

  I hopped on the subway a few blocks short of the shelter. At the top of the stairs she hugged me; “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she promised. Then I got myself home, where Bill was waiting, Friday-night take-out menus in hand.

  “I know where you’ve been,” he said, kissing me hello.

  “Well, yeah,” I scoffed. “Because I told you where I was going to be.”

  He shrugged. “Well, that. And also, Edward called. He says he ran into you and Sam at MoMA. She’s ‘quite something,’ he said.”

  I laughed, hah. “That she is. You should have heard her riff on pointillism and methamphetamines.” I switched into her hey-dude voice. “‘See now, that’s the perfect thing to do when you’re tweaking, paint a hundred million little dots like that.’”

  “Seurat as a speed freak.” He smiled. “I like it.”

  We ordered dinner and arranged ourselves on the couch together, me with my customary joint in hand, fogging myself up as usual. “It’s funny,” mused Bill. “Hearing about her from Edward—I almost felt possessive of her, like I should have met her first. It’s like I know her, and I’ve never met her.” He frowned a little, pondering. “Edward says she’s really tall and really butch.”

  “Well, I told you that,” I protested. “I described her to you a bunch of times. The kind of messed-up teeth, the brown hair—”

  He nodded, right, right. “I know, but now I feel like she really exists. She’s not just a product of your fevered imagination, or a cover story for one of your many affairs.” He was kidding but with a serious look on his face. “She’s real. She’s a part of our lives. I’ve heard all about her. Now I’m curious to meet her.”

  Huh. I’d always meant for them to meet, and Sam had mentioned it, too—“I want to meet Bill sometime. He sounds like a really good guy.” I’d thought about introducing them long ago, but the psych ward didn’t seem like the right circumstances, nor did visiting day at rehab. Now that she was back at the shelter, it might be time—though the prospect was a little worrisome. Sam was still emotionally vulnerable, and I didn’t want her to feel threatened by my relationship with Bill. When we were together, she needed all of my attention; she shouldn’t have had to compete with anyone. Nor should Bill have to play second fiddle to Sam. But if she was going to continue to play such an important role in my life, if I was serious about my commitment to her, then she was going to have to meet my partner. And he would have to decide for himself whether he was committed, too.

  “Sam’s heard all about you, too. I think she’d love to meet you.”

  “Excellent.” He looked satisfied. “We’ll arrange that soon, then.”

  In the meantime, Sam and I spoke almost every day, saw each other at the bead table on Wednesdays, made after-work dates to go browsing bookstores and novelty shops. She told me about her 12-step groups and GED classes, about riding her skateboard off the handrails in Union Square, and again, it was like watching the montage I’d dreamed of: images of happy Sam, running around the city, clasping hands with her fellow recovering addicts in a sober circle, whooping with joy as she soared on her wheels.

  I blew off work one afternoon, and we went for lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Chinatown. Sam was in great spirits—she’d conned me into ditching work, and she’d seen Maria just a few
days earlier. Maria had driven down from Larchmont with a kite for Sam, and they’d flown it in Central Park. “I brought my kite with me today, in case you want to try it. It’s not so windy today, but maybe it could work.” Everything else was going really well, too: she was ready to take her GED next week; she’d get her results before her transfer to the halfway house in Brooklyn. “I’m going to be a high school graduate,” she said, savoring the words.

  Great, great, great. I could hardly stop smiling enough to stuff the food in my face.

  “And the writing’s going real well,” she told me. “I feel inspired a lot, even when things are down—like, even when I feel depressed, or whatever, I write about it, and it feels better. I had to get another notebook, ’cause I filled up the one you gave me—I been writing a lot of poems. I want to get them all together in a bunch so I can show you.”

  “I can’t wait to see them, whenever you’re ready.”

  She nodded, eyes wide. “And I was even thinking…maybe you and me could write a book together.”

  “That sounds great.” I beamed. More fodder for my montage: the idea of Sam pacing as I scribbled, of meeting at coffee shops to compare chapters, of a book with our names on it, a picture of us at Disney World on the back flap. “What should we write about?”

  “Well, I was thinking about this kid I met at the shelter, the first time I was there, last fall. I can’t remember his name, but he was from the Sudan, and he’d come over with some aid agency when he was, like, thirteen—they rescued him from the war or something—but then it wasn’t working out with his foster family, so he split.”

  “Wow.” I’d just read about a bunch of kids like that, Sudanese refugees who’d come to the United States, in one of the papers.

  “Yeah, and he was telling me this one time about how he ran away, and how he was on the streets, eating garbage and stuff, and he was like, ‘Oh my god, this is so much better than where I came from.’ ’Cause where he came from, there wasn’t even any garbage to eat. Where he came from, they made you kill your own parents and then join the army.” She stopped and shook her head. “And I was like, I thought I had it rough.”

  Um, I thought, you did.

  By the end of the meal, we’d drafted a plan for a cooperative novel, something about a Sudanese kid and the volunteer who helped teach him English, and were trying to think of a title—“How about Everyone Suffers?” she suggested, and I wrote it down in my notebook. This was one of my favorite things to do, coming up with creative projects; why weren’t all my friendships this much fun? So many of my girlfriends just wanted to talk about boys, or diets, or one another. We never planned novels, or debated Nietzsche; it was never like it was with Sam.

  After lunch, we got some green-tea ice cream and walked southwest toward Hudson River Park. Sam told me about the kid she’d seen on her way to GED class, panhandling outside a McDonald’s. The kid looked like he was twelve, wearing nothing but a ratty T-shirt and zipped jeans in all the March bluster. She’d wanted to stop, but she had nothing in her pocket. “And I keep thinking about that kid,” she said. “I can’t stop. I really wanted to do something for him, help him out or something. It’s like, he kind of reminds me of how I was at that age. Like, if I could help him, it would almost make up for what I went through, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do know.”

  It was a beautiful afternoon, bright and sunny, if not quite windy enough for the small bat-shaped kite, but Sam dug it out of her knapsack and assembled the struts, and we tried it anyway. “Okay, hold it up, now run!” The kite trailed behind us, skidded and bumped against the grass. “Wait, try it this way!” “I think you have to run faster!” Eventually we gave up, but not before we’d exhausted ourselves from sprinting and laughing.

  “What about those swings over there?” Sam pointed to the empty swings nearby.

  “Yeah!” We threw down our stuff and sat on neighboring swings, started pumping our legs until we were soaring, almost synchronous for a second, then I was flying after her, watching the sun glow red through her mop of dark hair one minute, feeling the rush of air as she swung the other way behind me. Whoosh, whoosh.

  A group of high-schoolers on a field trip, maybe ten kids and one teacher, passed by, one of the kids pointing up at the soles of our feet as we scraped them against the clouds.

  “Swings!” he yelled, and within seconds the kids had all dropped their bags and dived for the empty ones. “Woo-hoo!”

  We laughed, left the swings to the high-schoolers, and continued our walk through the park, then up through Tribeca and SoHo toward my apartment—just ambling, no destination in mind. It was getting to be late afternoon, and I had a few e-mails to send before the end of the business day.

  “I’m going to have to take off soon,” I said with regret.

  “I’ll walk you home,” she offered.

  Yeah…no. Sam had never been to our place—I’d never invited her. It felt like a bad idea, for a number of reasons. I mean, it wasn’t like she and I had played exactly by the shelter’s rules for volunteers, but this was a very big, obvious no-no, inviting one of the girls to your apartment. If anybody found out about it, and wanted to misinterpret it the way they misinterpreted things at the psych ward, I’d be in big trouble. Furthermore, yikes. I knew Sam wasn’t going to steal anything from me, but…yikes. To invite a homeless junkie into your home—an ex-homeless ex-junkie, even—just didn’t seem like a sound domestic policy. Even if nothing were to happen today, I had to think about later, down the line. I had to think about what would happen if she relapsed, if she eloped from her halfway house, about all the years to come when she was going to need things. I really wasn’t going to want her showing up on my doorstep.

  “Well, actually,” I lied, guilty, “I’ve got to stop at a friend’s house—I’m helping her with this proposal she’s working on, so…”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t see Sam’s face to tell if she’d bought it or not. “That’s cool.”

  We parted ways on the corner by the subway—she’d continue uptown, and I’d walk east to my imaginary friend’s house.

  “I had a great time,” I said truthfully. “I had so much fun today.”

  “Me too.” She stretched her arms over her head, exultant, and yawned. “Hope it goes well at your friend’s house.”

  “Thanks. Hope it goes well up at the shelter. Say hi to everybody for me.”

  “I will. See you Wednesday.”

  We hugged, as we always did when meeting and parting these days. “Be good,” I warned her. Then I waited until she’d walked away, and started for home.

  “Bead Lady!”

  It was the last Wednesday before Sam went to her halfway house, and I was walking into the cafeteria at the shelter when I heard the call and stopped short, delighted. It was the triumphant return of Mel, the boxer who’d escaped from the Jesus cult.

  “Mel!” We clasped hands, pulled in toward each other, and bumped shoulders. “Great to see you. How you been?”

  I looked over her head to see Sam, sitting with a book at another table. She gave me a quick flick of the wrist—I’m over here, when you’re done.

  “I’m a’ight,” said Mel, trying to sound positive. “I’m back here, so…”

  Right. Not exactly a sign of progress, being back at the shelter; then again, she’d probably been worse off since she left. “Well, it’s good to see you,” I said, moving away. “We’re stringing beads after dinner, if you want to join us.”

  Sam put down her book as I sat across from her. “Got something to show you,” she said, by way of greeting.

  “Oh yeah?”

  She rifled through her backpack, forehead creased with concentration, and came up with it. An official-looking piece of paper with a stamp on it, and her name in a calligraphic font—Samantha Eliza Dunleavy.

  My eyes widened as she passed it to me for inspection. “Your GED. Oh my god. That’s so awesome. Dude, that’s so awesome.” I passed it back to her,
holding it reverently.

  “It was easy,” she protested. “Next I want to take the SATs. I was thinking maybe when I get out of the halfway house I could go to the New School for college—that’s near your house, right?”

  Sam at the New School, a year and a few months sober, working toward her degree. What I wouldn’t give to see it come true. “Yep. I think that’s a great idea. And if there’s any way I could help you with the applications, or the financial-aid forms—I could write you a recommendation, whatever you need.”

  “Thanks, Janice.” She ducked to put her diploma away, and I saw the flash of a proud smile. She straightened up again and met my eyes. “You know, I was thinking about when I was in St. Victor’s the other day, and I was thinking, like, as much as it sucked, the whole hand thing, the surgery and the infection and everything, it feels like it must have happened for a reason. You know? Like being in the hospital was almost a good thing. Because that’s how we got to know each other.”

  “It was not a good thing,” I said, mock-scolding, though I’d come close to thinking the same thing a few times. “You were already stuck with me, whether you knew it or not. And we’ll have no more hospitals in the future.”

  She put up her hands in surrender. “No argument here.”

  We trudged up the stairs to Older Females, and she told me she’d seen the kid again, the McDonald’s kid, panhandling in the same ratty T-shirt as the week before. “But I talked to him this time. ’Cause I had these McDonald’s coupons from Maria, and so I went up to him, and I said, ‘You want something to eat?’”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. And I bought him, like, a whole bunch of stuff, and he was eating real fast, like he was super-hungry. And I was trying to get him to tell me, like, where he lived and stuff, but he was being real evasive, you know? So I was telling him about this place here, how I was on the streets and I came here, and how good it was and shit.”