“When I can. If I’m not at the doctors, or doing something. I probably won’t go today, because I’m seeing you, but maybe tomorrow I’ll go. There’s this one at this Quaker meetinghouse, I really like that one.”
“That’s cool.” I liked the image of Sam sitting in silence like the Quakers do, in an airy meetinghouse full of natural light, watching dust motes rise through the sunbeams. “I’m glad to hear it.”
The rocking of the train on its way uptown made me drowsy—too much wine, too much food. “Close your eyes,” Sam suggested, playing the parent for a change. “I’ll wake you up when we get there.”
“Nonsense,” I said, blinking and stretching my eyes some more. “I’m wide awake. What were you saying again?”
We walked to her apartment, the hospital looming over the tops of the other buildings. She was telling me about the nightmares she’d been having, and I was starting to sober up. It was no wonder she was having trouble sleeping, with everything that had been resurfacing lately—the leering faces of unwashed men, her mother’s fingernails clawing at her, Go make me some money. And then there were the existential questions—What had she done to deserve this? Was this, again, punishment for her sins on the street? Is your life predetermined? Was this all her inescapable fate? Why did she even bother waking up in the morning, staying sober, taking her meds?
“Of course, I’m gonna keep doing all that, because when it comes down to it, I don’t really want to die. That’s one thing this whole thing has taught me. It’s like, I never knew how much I wanted to live until I found out I was dying.”
You’re not dying, I wanted to protest. Not any more than the rest of us are. Not yet, anyway. Not yet.
We reached their apartment and walked the two flights up the stairs, which winded Sam a little. “I’m all right,” she said, opening the front door and then the padlock to their room. Valentina’s messenger clothes lay strewn on the floor near a box of cereal and a pile of library books. “Sorry about the mess—I haven’t been real good about cleaning up lately.”
“It’s cool.” I pushed a pile of clothes aside and sat down on their bed. There was some kind of board game tangled in the sheets. “What’s this?”
“Oh, it’s so cool, it’s called ‘Would You Rather…?’ Some guy gave it to us outside the bookstore the other day. He was like, ‘I went to return this, but they wouldn’t take it back, and I don’t want it, do you?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah!’” She reached out and grabbed a stack of game cards with questions on them. “You wanna play?”
“Sure.”
She sat down cross-legged on the bed; I turned to face her. “There’s a whole part with rolling the dice and everything, but mostly it’s just questions.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“Okay. Let’s see.” I smiled, watching her scrunch up her face in concentration. This is what she was supposed to have been doing all those years when she was out on the streets—doing jigsaw puzzles, playing board games. “Here’s a good one. ‘Would you rather have to kill Winnie the Pooh, or Bambi?’”
“Mmm…Winnie,” I decided. “But only if I absolutely had to kill one of them. I’d put barbiturates in the honey; it’d be a peaceful, delicious death. How about you?”
“Um, probably Bambi, ’cause then I could eat him.” She grinned. “Okay. Now you pick a card and ask me one.”
“Okay.” I frowned at the card I’d selected, wondering if I was still drunker than I thought. “Okay, I swear to god, this is what it says—‘Would you rather pee out of your nose, or poop out of your ear?’”
We both started laughing; Sam fell over onto her side. “‘Poop out of your ear?’ Are they serious?”
“I know. What kind of twelve-foot bong were they smoking out of when they came up with that one?”
“It’s like, ‘I can’t hear you, I have to take a crap!’”
“Or, ‘God bless you, would you like some toilet paper?’”
“What if you’re wearing a hat ’cause it’s cold out? Then it’s like a diaper, and you’ve got poop smooshed all over your head!”
“And all your Q-tips are covered in shit!”
We laughed until tears came out of our eyes, which was at least better than poop coming out of our ears. “Okay, okay, gimme another one.”
“Okay.” She settled down and sifted through a few cards to find a good one. “Okay, would you rather hide a deep dark secret from your loved ones, or tell the truth and go to jail for twenty years?”
“Jesus, twenty years.” I contemplated it for a minute. “What’d I do, kill somebody?”
“Probably.” She shook her head sadly. “I warned you about your temper.”
“Huh.” This was harder than I thought, this game. I wanted to be a good role model for Sam, to say, I’d tell the truth, of course; I’d never lie to the people I loved. But of course I’d done just that, more than a few times; I’d even lied to her. And to go to jail for twenty years? “Honestly? I’d probably hide it.”
“Me too,” she confessed. “Like, I’d like to think I’d be all noble and everything, but if you think about it, you’re hurting your loved ones more by going to jail for twenty years than by not telling them the secret.”
I smiled at her pragmatic approach. “Still, can you imagine? Not being able to tell the people you’re closest to the truth? How totally alienating would that be, having to lie to everyone all the time.” I shuddered. “I bet I’d break down at some point and just let it slip.”
“But you can’t, though, or you’d go to jail.” Sam’s face was earnest. “You have to keep the secret.”
“Okay.” I laughed. “I’ll lie my head off, then. Sorry—I’m not a very good mentor, am I?”
“No, you’re good. Now ask me another one.”
We played Would You Rather…? for a while, then Sam wanted to show me some more writing she’d been working on. “Look what Maria got me. It used to be her sister’s.”
It was an old word processor, the kind I hadn’t seen since the early nineties—more of a typewriter than a computer, but it still worked. “Cool, that’s awesome.”
“Yeah, I wrote a bunch of pages so far this week. Working on my life story.” She handed me a sheaf of pages, and I started devouring them right away:
My earliest memories: a harsh animal smell, a wet diaper, a hollow in my stomach that made me scream. Shivering next to my brother, pressing myself into the warmth of his back. My father’s face floats over mine, and my whole body tightens.
This was it, the start of the autobiography I’d been nagging her to write since I’d met her. This was her golden ticket, her writing—if she could finish a book, she’d have no problem finding a buyer. I skipped ahead a few pages:
I was in the backseat of this guy’s car, jiggling my leg, wondering what kind of pervert he would turn out to be, not that it mattered. I was hungry. My cut-off jeans were swimming on me, and the gun tucked in my waistband was in danger of falling down my leg.
I put the sheaf down. “Wow, it’s great. Can I get a copy for myself?”
“Thanks.” Sam looked gratified. “You can keep that copy, if you want.”
“Great, thanks.” I slipped the pages into my bag, kept my voice casual. “Can I show it to people?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Mmm…not yet. I want to wait until it’s finished.”
“All right.” It was like being given a bag of gold doubloons and being asked not to spend them. “Whenever you’re ready.”
We hung out for a while longer. Sam asked me about volunteering, and I confessed that I hadn’t been to the shelter the past three weeks. I missed the first Wednesday she was in the hospital, and then the next week I left her bedside in time to make it there after dinner, but I felt exhausted on the subway downtown; I skipped the stop and went home. By last Wednesday, I’d decided to admit it—I was burnt out. I needed a break. “Besides,” I told her, smiling. “I’m more involved in one-on-one mentoring these days.”
“Too
bad for them.” She smiled back. “But good for me. Now I don’t have to be jealous of any of your other favorites.”
When it was time to go, she wanted to walk me to the subway, and though I thought she was getting a little peaked, she insisted. “Just let me change my T-shirt.” She opened the closet door, and there was a construction-paper collage taped to the inside. “EILEEN,” it said, in ornate script letters down the side; in the center was a ragged-edged oval picture of a teenage girl that looked like it had been cut out of a larger photo. I peered at the picture—a girlier version of Sam, with long dark hair and a sweet, rueful smile. Her younger sister.
“Wow, that’s Eileen, huh?”
“Yep. I been thinking about her a lot lately.” She gazed at the collage, drifting into reverie. “Wondering…how she’s doing.”
“It must be hard, not knowing. I guess there’s no way to find out.” I remembered what Sam had said about her sister, back in January when she was at the psych ward—how Eileen had been diagnosed HIV-positive after running the streets with Sam, how she’d tried to kill herself and wound up in a coma for a few weeks. She was in a group home now, but nobody in the Dunleavy family was allowed to know exactly where she was, because of the abuse in the home. “Maybe I could try to track her down, find out where she is.”
Sam looked at me strangely. “She’s in a coma ward in a hospital in Colorado,” she said. “At least she was, last time I heard.”
“Really?” I frowned. “I thought you said she came out of the coma, and child welfare put her in a group home.”
She frowned back at me. “No way, I never said that.”
Really? Because I remembered the conversation so well; I even wrote it down in my notebook. “Huh,” I said, casual. “I must have gotten it mixed up.” I shrugged, like, You know us potheads; we can never remember anything.
“Yeah,” she said, still frowning. “’Cause last I heard, before I went to the shelter, I called a friend of hers who stayed in touch with her, and she said Eileen was still in a coma. She said they thought she was gonna be a vegetable all her life. Anyway, you ready to go?”
“Yep.” I smiled. “Ready when you are.”
We walked to the train together, the streetlights waking like stars in the darkening sky, and talked about the wedding. “Did your mom say whether she’s coming?” Sam wanted to know.
“Haven’t heard yet. But I’m going to send her a card for her birthday next week; I’ll remind her then. I don’t think she wants to come, to tell you the truth. I think it’s too hard for her to deal with.” I sighed. “But you’ll get to meet my old friend Adam; he’s your age; I told you about him before, right? He’s one of the only people I know who’s even remotely as smart as you are. I’ve known him since he was thirteen. We met back at this dot-com I used to work for. He’s brilliant—he used to be a hacker when he was a kid. He hacked the MTV veejay contest back in ’ninety-six. It was in all the papers.”
She narrowed her eyes and dug her hands deeper into her pockets, a look of discomfort on her face. I must have upset her, going on about Adam too much. “That’s cool,” she said.
We reached the subway, and Sam stopped before hugging me good-bye, turned her head to the side, and gave a few deep, raspy coughs. I frowned again.
“Sounds lousy,” I noted. The coughing had made her go pale for a second. I’d done it again—I’d worn her out, when I was supposed to be looking after her. I shouldn’t have let her walk me to the train. “You sure you’re all right?”
She shook her head. “Naw, I’m good. I’m just tired from work and everything. I’ll go home and lie down for a while.”
“Okay. Definitely rest up, though, and if you’re not feeling a hundred percent well, don’t go anywhere tomorrow. You’ve got to take it easy, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks, Janice. I’ll call you this week.”
“From your house,” I instructed. “Not the hospital.”
“Right.” She laughed. Then she coughed again, that ripping, wet cough. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
I hugged her gently, then climbed the stairs to the subway, watching from the elevated platform as she walked away down the littered sidewalk, her hands in her pockets and her head down, shrinking with every step.
August 21, 2005
Dear Mom,
Happy birthday! I hope it was a wonderful year for you and Jerry, and I hope the year to come will be happy and healthy as well. I got your message about the engagement—thank you so much for the congratulations—and I hope you got our invitation to the wedding. I know it’s a busy time of year for you and Jerry, since you’re opening the new store, so I will certainly understand if you’re not able to make it—I do hope you can come, but if not, the four of us can always plan to have lunch when things are a little quieter. In the meantime, I’m thinking of you with love, and hoping you’re very well.
Janice
I dropped my mother’s birthday card into the mailbox on the way to the subway, then rode the train uptown to pick up my altered dress. It was really happening, this wedding thing; I was actually getting married to Bill. Two years ago, if anyone had said the word marriage, in relation to me, I would have clutched my neck and made strangling noises. Now here I was, standing in front of a three-way mirror in a Fifth Avenue boutique, wearing a white dress and gold high heels and clutching a prop bouquet.
“You look gorgeous,” gushed the salesgirl, as she was contractually obliged to do. “Oh my god, it’s going to be such a special day.”
I smiled nervously at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t getting cold feet, but I was definitely getting sweaty palms. I knew I was making the right decision; there hadn’t been a moment since the engagement that I didn’t look over at Bill and think, I am so lucky, and I am so smart. Marrying Bill is the best idea I ever had. At the same time, I was getting a little frantic about the big day—it was coming so soon, and there was still so much to arrange. More than anything, I wanted our friends and family to have a good time, to share our great happiness; I wanted this to be a celebration for everyone. And if my mom wasn’t going to have a good time, I wanted to let her off the hook.
“Great,” I said, admiring myself for one last second. I barely recognized this woman in the mirror, wearing this elegant dress, her chin high, her gaze strong. I looked so grown-up. I didn’t even look like I was faking it. I wasn’t faking it. I was thirty-five years old, damn it; I had a partner and a career and friends and three cats, and an unofficially adopted daughter. “Great.”
I slipped out of the dress and back into my sneakers, accepted the garment bag carefully in both arms, and allowed the doorman to hail me a cab home so I wouldn’t get trampled on the subway with my pretty dress. I was halfway to my place when my phone rang: Sam.
My heart, as always, sped up. What now? “Hey there,” I answered.
“Hey!” She sounded fine, happy even. I relaxed. “How are you?”
“I’m good, how are you?”
“I’m good. But I don’t think I can make it to Coney with you and Bill this weekend, because Maria’s staying over. We’re gonna go to a Yankees game on Saturday, and then we’re going to church on Sunday.”
“Oh, cool!” Wow, I thought. A sleepover, and church. Maria was really winning the battle for Sam’s soul. Suddenly the dress bag felt heavy on my lap. “That sounds great. Maybe we can go to Coney next weekend instead, okay? And ask Valentina if she wants to come, too.”
“That’d be great, thanks, Janice.”
Bye.
I hung up, strangely unfulfilled. Here I’d been prepared for some fresh catastrophe, ready with my running shoes to go flying up to the Bronx, or Larchmont, or deepest Brooklyn, or wherever she needed me to go, and it turned out she didn’t need me after all.
So instead of going to Coney Island that Saturday, Bill and I went to my dad and stepmother’s house in New Jersey to finalize the wedding plans. My stepmother, Sylvia, the lithe and lovely woman my dad was lucky enough to marry when I w
as twelve, poured us some champagne, and we sat in the den with our flutes, poring over the folder Bill and I had been keeping, their shih tzu sneezing on our feet.
“I like the smaller tables,” suggested Sylvia, looking critically at the ballroom diagrams with her keen aesthetic eye. “They make for more mingling.”
I agreed. “And here’s the invite list, so you can see how many guests we’re expecting.”
Sylvia scanned the page I handed her. “Honey, is your mom coming?”
“Still no word,” Bill reported. “We’re thinking no.”
My father and Sylvia exchanged a look but tactfully declined to comment. “How about your brother?” asked my dad. “We haven’t seen him since he was a kid.”
“Oh, yeah, Jake’s totally coming. I can’t wait for you to see him, he’s like six foot three now. I guess he looks more like his dad than like our mom. And he’s got the most beautiful girlfriend.”
“Wonderful. I can’t wait to meet her.” My father smiled, extremely pleased. “And I’ll tell you who I really can’t wait to meet—Samantha.”
“Oh, yes,” said Sylvia. “We’ve heard so much about her.”
Time for Bill and I to exchange a look. I’d only recently broken the news about Sam’s diagnosis to them—Hey, you know that homeless junkie I’ve been spending way too much time with? She’s also got AIDS!—and they were being very cool about it, exhibiting true sangfroid. Still, I knew they were worried about me, for any number of good reasons. To wit: I’d already picked up an ear-and-throat virus from hanging out at the hospital so much.
“I can’t wait for you to meet her, too. Maybe you can talk speculative physics with her, Dad; god knows I can’t.”
My dad looked impressed. Sylvia shook her head. “She just sounds so extraordinary.”
“She is. She was telling me the other day—”
Bill cleared his throat. We didn’t have time for another ten-minute sermon on the miracle of Samantha; we were still discussing the logistics of our union. “So, I’m with you on the small tables,” he said, “but we want to make sure there are enough seats for everybody. What are the dimensions of the room, again?”
Have You Found Her Page 24