Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  I was at my desk on the morning of September 2, alternately working and checking the news, which was sickening. The entire city of New Orleans was drowning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; stadiums full of people suffered without water, food, or care; people were dying in attics, on roofs, on the streets, in hospitals, and nobody was helping them. It was a codependent’s nightmare.

  My cell phone buzzed: Maria. I braced myself and answered. “Hey there.”

  “Hi there!” She sounded like she was walking somewhere in a hurry. “Guess why I’m calling.”

  Great, another tragedy. I should have called Sam; I should have been suspicious that she hadn’t called me. “She’s in the hospital again,” I said.

  “Yep. Same one as last time. She just called me. She was running a fever, so she went to the ER, and they admitted her right away. Apparently, she almost hit 104.”

  “Ay yi yi.” I put my head in my hand. “So what’s the drill? You’re on your way there now?”

  “Yep. I’ll call you when I know more.”

  I looked at the calendar over my desk, already blocking out the next week of evenings to go spend at Sam’s bedside. “Thanks, Maria. I guess I’ll talk to you soon.”

  And often, I predicted, closing the phone.

  Sure enough, I’d heard from Maria twice more by the time I got on the subway the next afternoon, armed with my cardigan and my books and best wishes from Bill. And I called Jodi on my way uptown; we hadn’t spoken in weeks. Sam had told me she’d visited Jodi’s recently, played Xbox with her son, Evan; they were thinking they might want to join us at Disney World, if Jodi could get the time off from work.

  “Just wanted to let you know,” I told Jodi’s voice mail, “Sam’s back in the hospital. Same one as last time. She had a high fever, but she’s stable now. I’ll give you a call when I know more.”

  The familiar walk to the hospital; the same brightly lit liquor stores, fast-food joints, and unisex salons; the same old drunk slumped over the mailbox on the same old corner. The guard at the hospital entrance nodded at me—no need to sign in; he recognized me from last month. Same elevators opening onto the same mural—planets, comets, stars.

  Sam, attached to the same battery of machines, her mop of hair damp with sweat. “Hey,” I said, coming around her bed to the visitor’s chair, studying her face. Pale, very pale, with bruise-colored circles under her eyes. “How’re you doing?”

  “Not so good.” She spoke with effort; I could hear phlegm in her lungs. “Dr. F. just stopped by a few minutes ago. I told her you were coming, but she had to go.”

  Dr. F. was the AIDS specialist, the one Sam had been seeing on her last visit here, the one in charge of the antivirals. She had a complicated last name, Eastern European or something, so Sam called her Dr. F. I’d missed meeting her the last time around, but I was looking forward to tracking her down as soon as I could. “What’d she say?”

  “Dunno. She said it looks like MAC, but they’re not sure yet. They gotta do some more tests.”

  “What’s MAC?”

  Sam indicated the flat-screened monitor on the wall. She’d looked it up on the hospital’s kid-safe intranet. I took the wireless keyboard off the nightstand, moved the cursor to activate the darkened screen, and the page bloomed into view. MAC, it said on the screen, in cheerful purple letters accented with cartoon flowers. “(Mycobacterium avium complex): A group of germs found in food, water, soil, or air that affects people who are living with AIDS.”

  “Is that all it says?” No prognosis? No suggested course of treatment? I determined to look it up myself when I got home, get the unflowered version for adults.

  Sam’s eyes looked cloudy, lost. “Dr. F. says it’s like an infection you get when your T cells get real low. They’re giving me these.” She indicated the bag of antibiotics with a tired nod. “Painkillers, too.”

  “Good.”

  “Well, not good…” Right. Because she didn’t want to relapse upon leaving the hospital, the way she had in the past.

  “Don’t worry about that now,” I told her. If she made it out of the hospital this time, I’d buy her as much heroin as she wanted.

  She was exhausted, her heavy lids closing, but she didn’t want to sleep while I was there. “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me about Disney again.”

  I smiled. Finally, something I was qualified to do to help. I could tell stories all day and all night; I could be Scheherazade, keep her alive just by drawing out the plot. “Well, it’s going to be great. Except you and Bill are going to have to put up with me on the plane ride down there—I hate flying. I get so scared. Remember how much I screamed on the Zipper?”

  She nodded, barely, and a faint smile crossed her face. “You were screaming so loud.”

  “That’s how loud I feel like screaming whenever I’m on a plane. The whole way down to Florida. I’d be like, ‘Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!’”

  “Except…except they’d throw you off. Out the window.”

  “Yeah, they’d make me go sit on the wing.”

  Her head drooped, and I fell silent for a minute. “Tell me more,” she murmured.

  “Well, so we’ll get to the airport in Orlando, and we’ll take the special Disney bus to the hotel, and we’ll put our bags in the rooms, and then we’ll get right on the monorail, which is like a really clean, quiet, above-ground subway, and we’ll take it to the Magic Kingdom. And we’ll go straight to Space Mountain—I’ll be screaming my head off on that one, too, but in a good way—and we’ll ride it as many times as we want. And when we’re done with that…”

  Sam’s mouth had fallen open a little bit, and her eyes were fully closed, a slight buzzing sound coming from her nose as she fell completely asleep.

  And when we’re done with that, Sam, we’ll hop onto the back of a unicorn and ride it all the way back to fairyland. I wanted to believe it so badly, the story about Janice and Sam and Bill in Disney World, running around and laughing like we did at Coney Island, just a week earlier. It was the only story I wanted to tell. But for now, all I could do was sit and watch the orange line of her heart monitor, rising and falling like an amusement park ride.

  I rode the train uptown the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. I sat by her bedside and watched her sweat, writhe, vomit bloody bile into a kidney-shaped trough. Watched her sleep, watched the heart-rate monitor, the breathing monitor, both of them so slow. When she was awake, she was in pain, she was afraid. She held my hand and rasped to me, “I don’t want to do this anymore, Janice. I’m scared.”

  I didn’t want her to have to do it anymore. “I know,” I told her. “I’m so sorry, babe. I’m right here.”

  Once again, everything else fell off my calendar—I sent e-mail after e-mail canceling, apologizing, rescheduling. Of course, said my friends, you have to be there for Sam. Fortunately, most of the wedding plans were already set; there were only a few last details to take care of over the next two weeks. The week after that, we’d be leaving on our honeymoon.

  If we’d be leaving on our honeymoon. I didn’t want to bring it up with Bill, but I was worried that when the time came, Sam might be at the very end of her life, in which case I couldn’t possibly go away. I had to be there for her. I was supposed to be her guardian. I’d promised her all those months ago: I’m going to be in your life from now on. Now was not the time to renege. I couldn’t flake out on my dying adoptive daughter, not even for an afternoon. I couldn’t tell her I was busy, or I had to meet my stepmother at the florist to pick out flowers. And when I was desperate to go home and get high and get away from the stinking chill of the recycled hospital air, and she reached out her fevered hand and said, Please stay, just a little longer, I had to stay.

  Bill watched me fidget through dinner at night, watched me smoke joint after joint on the sofa, waiting for an unwanted call from a nurse, or from Maria—Come quick, there’s an emergency. He knew what I was thinking, especially after I hinted around to him about it one night.r />
  “I don’t know if I feel great about leaving Sam right now,” I ventured.

  “Well,” he said, his top lip stiff as stone, “you don’t have to leave her right now. You have to leave her in three weeks.”

  I didn’t mention it again. It would be a terrible precedent, I knew, to start my marriage to Bill by canceling our honeymoon to stay home with Sam. I had to go on our honeymoon; I wanted to go on our honeymoon. I wanted it more than anything—I could have skipped the wedding and gone straight to Bermuda with him, right then and there. We could have thrown ourselves into the warm ocean, bobbed in the waves; wrapped ourselves together in a big beach towel, sharing one chair in a sandy cocoon. I could have pressed my cheek against his chest, heard his heartbeat, felt his toes wiggling under mine.

  I could, and I wanted to, and I would. Sam just had to get better, that was all.

  I entered Sam’s room the next evening to find her sitting up in bed, the wireless keyboard on her lap, squinting at a picture of the Coney Island Cyclone on the flat-screened monitor. She’d hacked through the child-safe intranet to get to the real thing; she’d even signed up for a freebie e-mail account, so I could send her e-mails when I wasn’t there by her side.

  “Uh-oh,” I said as I came around the bed to hug her. “What’re you rotting your brain with today?”

  She grinned—she was having a good day, a better day than she’d had all week. She’d worked her way up to ecru on the Pantone chart of sickly skin colors, and her face was lively, even if her eyes were dim. “I was just reading about Coney Island. That place was awesome.”

  I dropped into the visitor’s chair, grinning back. “Except for when the Cyclone stopped, and I was across the street, like, ‘Oh my god, they’re gonna die!’”

  Sam looked happy. “I was reading the Disney book again last night after you left. But my eye’s getting real bad, ’cause of all the bacteria floating around. They’re taking me down to the eye clinic soon, they gotta give me an injection.”

  An eyeball injection—I tried not to make a nauseated face. “Oh, wow. They can’t do that here?” Every time they moved her for a test, she came back significantly weakened. I’d taken to riding along with her to X-rays and sonograms, when I could, just so I could noodge everybody to hurry up, get her back into bed ASAP, not make her sit up in the wheelchair too long or she’d start dry heaving, or going cold. Now they were planning to put a needle in her eyeball—and they couldn’t take the elevator up here to do it?

  “Naw,” said Sam, and I stole a look at the eye in question, which was definitely lagging behind the other one when she shifted her gaze. “I wish they could do it here. I mean, I wish they didn’t have to do it at all.”

  “I bet.” If you told me that someone was going to put a needle anywhere near my eyeball, I’d be sobbing and begging to be knocked unconscious. Sam contented herself with a resigned chuckle.

  “Oh, well. Won’t be the worst thing I been through.”

  Maybe not, but it was one of the worst things I’d been through in a while—standing next to her wheelchair in the darkened room in the eye clinic while the optometrist forced her into a gruesome face mask with Clockwork Orange–style eye props. She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back, just as scared as she was. “Okay,” said the doctor, and I closed my eyes tight, felt the jerk of her hand as the needle went in—“Ah!”—felt myself swoon a little, sickened, then caught myself. Okay. It was over. I could look again.

  “It hurts,” she complained in a small voice. “It feels…swollen.”

  Nope, couldn’t look. Her left eye was bulging, just noticeably larger than her right. It gave her a demented expression. My knees wanted to buckle, but I locked them. “How long will she experience the swelling?” I asked the doctor.

  “Well, it’s going to be a little uncomfortable for a while, but we’ll drain some of the fluid out of it in a few days, and hopefully we won’t need another injection.”

  I took deep breaths, standing beside her, trying to concentrate on breathing from my diaphragm and not the image of them sucking eyeball juice out of her head with a needle. Sam looked up at me hopefully from her wheelchair. “Does it look weird?”

  “Not so bad,” I told her. “Hardly noticeable at all.”

  I left that evening, crossing paths quickly in the lobby with Maria (“How is she today?” “Well, her mood’s pretty good, considering the eyeball injection they gave her”), my stomach crawling up into my throat, heart burning with acid reflux. Got home about ten minutes before Bill was due. There was nothing to eat in the house, and the place was a mess.

  I heard the key in the lock, and Bill came in.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.” He gave me a peck and went into the bedroom to take off his work clothes.

  Bill was in a shitty mood, I could tell—working too many late nights, too many six-day weeks, so he could save up time off for the honeymoon—and I immediately felt defensive, resentful. I was the one in a shitty mood; whatever his day had been like, mine had been worse. I followed him into the bedroom.

  “We don’t really have anything for dinner,” I informed him. “How was your day?”

  “Long. How about yours?”

  “Awful. She was feeling a little bit better today, but they had to give her an injection in her eyeball. And I was there for it. I thought I was going to collapse.”

  “Sounds pretty lame.” He passed me, going for the kitchen. “So there’s nothing to make?”

  “Sorry,” I said, following. My turn to get the groceries, and I’d missed it again. “How about takeout?”

  Bill opened and shut the cabinets and fridge. His mouth was a flat line. “It’s getting expensive, all the takeout every night. And I want to fit into my suit.”

  “Sorry. I meant to go yesterday, but I was wiped out.”

  He grabbed the take-out menus from their drawer. “So, what do you want?”

  Um, I want you not to be mad at me. “I don’t know,” I said sweetly. “Whatever you want is good with me.”

  He sighed. He wanted a home-cooked meal, the way we used to make together. He wanted a conversation that wasn’t “her T cells, her fungemia, her impending death.” He wanted his partner back. “Oh, did you make the final arrangements with the florist?”

  Shit. “Yeah,” I lied. “I’m going over there, uh, Monday at lunch to approve everything. I still gotta call Sylvia, though. I’ll do that after dinner.”

  “Please.” He pushed the menu for macrobiotic food across the counter at me, not meeting my eye.

  “I will,” I said.

  “All right.”

  I could tell he wanted to retreat to his computer, to avoid me, avoid the fight that was brewing—the fight he was starting, by being so pissy and abrupt. But now I was all engaged—I mean, was he really going to step to me for not doing the grocery shopping when my adoptive daughter was dying? I was in just as shitty a mood as he was; if he wanted to take his mood out on me, I’d be delighted to reciprocate.

  I blocked his exit from the kitchen, frowning. “Is everything okay, honey?”

  Bill let his breath go, and his shoulders slumped. “I’m just…this whole thing with Sam has just been really hard for everybody. Especially right now. I just wish it wasn’t happening. That’s all.”

  “Hard for everybody.” I nodded seriously, frowning deeper. “You mean this has been hard for you?”

  “Yes,” he admitted, tense. “This has been hard for me.”

  I knew it was true. This was incredibly hard for Bill—he was watching this kid die, and he was losing a piece of me at the same time. And he couldn’t complain; how could he say anything? Like, Gee, honey, I sure wish we were just getting married like a normal couple, without the specter of death breathing down our necks. This was a no-win situation for him, as much as it was for anybody else, and it was all my fault. I’d dragged us into this thing with Sam; our lives would have been so much easier if I hadn’t. Knowing that I’d hurt Bill just made m
e angrier—strangely, at him.

  “Hard for you?” I laughed a little, bitter. “What about for me? What about for her? She’s fucking dying, Bill! Can you even imagine what that’s like? She’s lying up there with all of her organs failing, going blind in one eye, waiting to die, okay? And I’m holding her hand, trying to tell her, ‘Go toward the light, Sam, we’ll see you on the other side!’ I’m telling her, ‘Maria’s right, Sam, you should get right with Jesus!’ That’s how bad this is! I’m telling her to embrace Jesus! Because she’s dying, she is facing imminent death! And you think this is hard for you?”

  His voice came back at me as loud as mine was, his hands flexing in frustration. “I know she’s dying! Trust me, I know. There’s nothing I can do about it, either. I wish she wasn’t. We all wish she wasn’t. I’m just saying, it sucks.”

  I burst into tears. “I know! I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry, okay? I’m sorry I ever met her. I’m sorry we took her to Coney. I’m sorry she’s not up there dying by herself right now, just like the twelve million other people who are fucking dying right now that we don’t know anything about, okay? I wish it wasn’t our problem. I’m sorry.” I sobbed and heaved, covering my face with my hands.

  Bill crossed his arms and sighed deeply. “Babe, calm down. I’m not blaming you for this. I’m not blaming anyone.”

  I kept crying. Maybe he wasn’t blaming me for it, but I was—blaming myself, blaming Sam. Damn you, Sam, why did you have to find me? I was fine before you came along. Now I’m going to have to mourn you for the rest of my life. There was nobody to be angry with, and it was killing me. “It’s my fault,” I cried. “I’m ruining everything. I don’t know why I signed up for this. You didn’t ask for any of this. It’s not fair to you.”