Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

We kissed.

  And so it was done. But not the party—the party lasted for hours more—and I danced with everyone without my shoes on, my face a collage of lipstick kisses, grinning until my cheeks ached. I toasted a hundred times with my water glass, still unable to eat or drink anything more than supplemental Tylenol, though I did manage to force down a few bites of wedding cake, for ceremony’s sake. And when the aunts and uncles said good night, and the deejay and bartenders started packing up, we moved the party upstairs to the bridal suite, where it raged (quietly) for hours more. Then I looked over at Bill, and he gave a not-so-subtle yawn and stretch, and all of our remaining guests immediately realized they had pressing business elsewhere. They wished us one more round of congratulations and skedaddled.

  We sat on the edge of the hotel bed, strewn with rose petals by my girlfriends, fancy chocolates in boxes on the pillows. This was life—roses and chocolates, and Bill by my side, my hand in his. He lifted my chin, looked into my eyes, and kissed me. The newlywed Mr. and Ms. Shmoo.

  There was no question, now—we were going on our honeymoon.

  “Five days,” I told Sam, calling from the waiting room at my doctor’s office the next morning. “We’re leaving for Bermuda on Saturday, so you better be feeling better this week.”

  “I am,” she swore. “Yesterday was kind of crummy, but I’m a lot better today. When are you coming up? Did you leave the hairdo in? I want to see it. How was it? Do you feel different now? Did you save me a piece of cake, like you said?”

  I laughed at the way she jumped all over me like a puppy, even over the phone. “Yeah, I saved you some cake. And yeah, I feel different. But I had to take out the hairdo—sorry. I’ll show you the pictures, though—we took a bunch. And listen, I don’t know if I should come up there today. I’ve got some kind of virus. I’m here at the doctor’s right now. I don’t want to add to your load. But I’ll come up tomorrow, how’s that?”

  “All right,” she said, a little dejected. “I’m sorry you’re sick, that sucks.”

  “Yeah, I’m all right.” I couldn’t really complain to Sam about feeling sick, not when she’d spent the past seventeen days in the hospital again, getting spinal fluid scraped out of her back and needles stuck into her face, vomiting blood until it was almost banal, even for me—Ho hum, bloody vomit again, I’ll just stop up my nose from the inside and breathe through my mouth while I hold up this trough for her. “And I’ll see you tomorrow, I promise.”

  “Okay. But wait, one more thing…” And she went off on sixteen more things.

  But she didn’t disappoint me—she did start to get better. We’d all grown accustomed to a cycle: a few days of high fever, a new site of infection to treat, a shift or an increase in the medication, and then a few days of recovery. Then she’d crash again. But now she was managing to put together a string of mostly good days in a row. Her appetite was healthy, and the tests showed improvements in her organs.

  “Doctors say I’m doing good,” she reported when I saw her that Tuesday, and my visual assessment said the same—she was sharp, her color vivid, and her eyes clear, except for the one with the floating retina. “They say if I keep this up for a week or two, I can go from IV antibiotics to oral, and they’ll start thinking about sending me home.”

  “That’s great.” She had ten times the energy she had last week. I missed three days of visiting her in a row, and look what happened—she improved. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Yeah, except right now I got nowheres to go. Valentina’s moving out of our place this week. Maria’s driving by there tonight to pick up all my stuff, just so it doesn’t wind up on the street.” Sam scowled. “Which is so fucked up, because Valentina never woulda been able to get that place without me, and without my friends helping her. I mean, if you didn’t put down that deposit, we never woulda got that place, and is she going to pay you back now?”

  “I’m not worried about that,” I assured her. “And we can always find you a new place.” I smiled, trying to hide my confusion. They were really talking about discharging her? Last time they checked her T cells, she had twenty. She shouldn’t have been sitting up and chirping at me like a parakeet; they shouldn’t have been talking about sending her home. To a hospice, maybe, but not home. “Has Dr. F. been by today?”

  “No, she’s off for the next few days for the Jewish holidays. But that reminds me.” She reached over into the drawer of her nightstand, pulled out a sheet of paper, and presented it to me. “Here.”

  The health-care proxy. She’d finally signed it. My eyes lighted up, and my smile was genuine this time. “Oh, great! Great. I’ll go tell them to put this on file.”

  Sam looked proud of herself for doing this thing that meant so much to me. “They already have one. This is my copy. But you can take it and make a copy for you, if you want.”

  “That’s great.” I beamed. I wanted to lean over and kiss her forehead, but I didn’t want to get germs on her. “Maybe when Dr. F. gets back, and I’m back from the honeymoon, we can all sit down with Maria and get up-to-date on everything that’s been going on.”

  “All right.”

  I left the hospital early that evening, still exhausted from the virus and the wedding and the aftermath. Got home with time to spare and food in the fridge and started to make some vegetarian tacos.

  Bill came home, and we kissed hello—a married kiss. “How was your day?” he asked. “How’s the patient?”

  “Recuperating,” I said. “Amazingly. They’re even talking about sending her home, if she keeps this up.”

  “Honey, that’s great.”

  “Well, it would be great, except for the fact that Valentina moved out, and Sam’s losing the lease on their room. So, aside from the hospital, she has no home.”

  “Oy vey,” he said. “It never ends.”

  “I know.” Bill washed his hands and jumped into the dinner preparations. “She’s really pissed at Valentina, too, which I understand, but I also understand where Valentina’s coming from—I mean, you have to figure she’s seen people go down this road before. She doesn’t want to sit around and wait for Sam to die so she can get a new roommate and move on with her life. Better for her to detach now, you know? She’s got to take care of herself; she’s had it tough enough. She’s just trying to stay in school, and not go back to tricking full-time, I think.”

  “God.” Bill shook his head over the onion he was chopping. “Poor Valentina Jesus Colón.”

  Yeah, poor everybody. “Poor Maria, is who’s poor,” I said. “She’s all alone on Sam duty next week, while you and I go play in the ocean.”

  “Well, we’ll send her a postcard,” said Bill. “‘Wish you guys were here! Not!’”

  I biffed him in the shoulder. “Meanie.”

  “Sorry. I just can’t believe I’m going to have you all to myself for a week. It’s been a while.”

  Of course, the next day was a down day for Sam. Not as bad as the day when the monitors went flat—she was fully conscious, her eyes flashing with anger as she squeezed her arms across her chest—but she was feverish and cranky, she had no appetite and fierce pain in her abdomen and back.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, arriving at her room to find her glowering in the dark.

  “I feel like hell. And I’m sick of it. And I wish these fucking doctors could do something for me, but they can’t, because they’re all a bunch of idiots.”

  “What happened?” I put my bag down, dropped into the familiar bedside chair.

  “What do you mean, what happened? I got totally screwed! First I got a false negative last year, and I’m walking around thinking I’m fine—good thing I didn’t have sex with anybody, huh? And meanwhile I keep getting real sick, and it took, like, sixteen doctors to notice, oh, maybe we should test her again! And then I find this out, and it’s like they still can’t even do anything for me! I mean, look at my eye, why’d they even bother doing all that stuff to it? I can’t even barely see out of it anymore! All
they keep doing is tests, and it sucks. I’m sick of it. I just want them to switch me to oral meds, so I can get out of here.”

  Meanwhile, her temperature was over a hundred, and the lunch tray on her table was untouched. The nurse came in with a new bag of antibiotics, and Sam glared at her the whole time.

  “It’s got to be frustrating,” I said, trying to empathize. “They keep telling you conflicting things. I mean, are they really going to send you home with less than twenty T cells?”

  She turned her glare toward me. “Why not? That’s where I want to be. I don’t want to be here anymore. However long I got left, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like this. I want to be outside; I barely got outside at all this summer. And now it’s almost October.” She leaned forward, frowning hard, hand on her belly. “This just sucks so bad.”

  I conferred with Maria by phone from the elevated-subway platform, waiting for my train downtown. “What the hell are we going to do if they really do discharge her?” I asked. “Go back to the barbershop Realtor and get her some crappy room, where they can eventually find her dead? This is crazy. This is the second time in three months she’s been this sick. She can’t go ‘home.’ I gotta talk to this Dr. F.; we’ve gotta get some answers.”

  “I agree.” Maria’s voice was quick and tense; she was catching a few minutes between rehab patients before she ran out to see Sam. “I mean, I can see she’s gotten a little bit better than she was two weeks ago, but she’s still…I agree. It doesn’t make sense for them to send her home. Maybe I can get some answers while you’re away.”

  The lights flashed as the train approached the station; I heard the shriek of metal brakes against metal rails. God, I was sick of this subway ride, of the hospital, of the whole rotten routine. “I hate to leave you alone at a time like this.”

  Maria scoffed, though I could tell she hated it, too. “Oh, it’s as good a time as any. And Sam’s adamant about you going. She told me so, more than once. She said, ‘If Janice tells you she’s not going on her honeymoon, you have to get her to go.’”

  Once again, I was touched by the selflessness of our little girl. “Well, I’ll be thinking of you guys. And I’ll check in as often as I can. Listen, the train’s here. Good luck with her tonight—she’s moody. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “All right, take care.”

  I spent the ride home brooding. They couldn’t release Sam; they just couldn’t. She needed round-the-clock care, and she couldn’t get it from me. It wasn’t just the medical inadvisability of sending her home that bothered me—though of course that bothered me, enough to inspire several impassioned rants on the state of health care in our country, where they’ll drag you out of the hospital and roll you from a sheet into the gutter if your Medicaid runs out—it was the idea of Sam leaving the hospital, trying to live a normal life, getting a job walking dogs when she wasn’t too weak, applying for school. It seemed like a cruel joke. Sure, Sam, let’s sign you a lease. Hell, let’s buy you some furniture! What classes do you want to take your first semester in college? Oh, I’m sorry. You dropped dead!

  I scolded myself. Why was I so eager to forecast her death? It was like I wanted her to hurry up and die, like I was waiting like a vulture for it to happen, already. That’s what it all felt like: waiting. I’d said as much to Bill that week—“I don’t know. Part of me feels like, if it’s going to happen…” Let it happen already. Which was awful. An unforgivable way to feel. And yet I wanted to know, how much longer was I going to have to do this? How many more days would I spend on that subway, at the hospital; how many phone calls would I get—She’s bad today, this might be it? Would we cancel the trip to Disney in December because I’d be at her bedside, watching another spinal tap; would we celebrate her twenty-first birthday in April in an oxygen tent? Would she live a whole year—could I go on like this for another year?

  I couldn’t think that way. Every day with her was a gift. I would have the rest of my life to live without her. Right now, I had to be grateful for the time we had. Right now, I had to celebrate her life, to pack in the joy and fun and silliness she never had as a kid, to read her children’s books and praise her drawings, to make her feel safe and loved. I had to soak up every word she said, every inflection and every gesture, and record them all, so when she was gone, I could remember her, and she’d continue to live. Right now, I had to be there for her.

  Or, right after the honeymoon, anyway.

  That Saturday morning I popped a Valium and strapped myself into the seat next to Bill’s on an airplane bound for Bermuda. Bill held my hand as we took off, and—remember how loud I screamed on the Zipper?—I managed not to scream. But my terror of flying was still strong enough to chew through whatever soporifics I threw in its path; by the time we landed, three hours later, I was completely, mercilessly sober.

  “We’re here!” Bill cheered, relieved of the manacle of my clutching hand.

  “God, this is gorgeous.” And I thought the sky was blue in New York. That wasn’t a sky, that was a sliver—this was a sky. It surrounded you in three dimensions, the florid breeze wafting over you, through you.

  The resort was beautiful, the bungalow room enormous. We opened the sliding door to the patio, and the birds sang a welcome. Greetings, Mr. and Mrs. Scurry! said the brochure on the bedspread.

  “Oh my god,” I said to Bill, pointing at it. “I think your mom’s here.”

  Soon we were splashing in the ocean in the bright afternoon sun, the sand glowing pink on the shore. We were lying together in lounge chairs, wrapped in plush towels, awaiting the arrival of frosty drinks. We were showering, dressing for dinner, making eyes at each other across a linen tablecloth. Walking along the water’s edge, as silver and slippery as mercury in the moonlight.

  The week passed far too quickly. We rose late and ate enormous breakfasts, smuggling lox from the buffet for the posse of stray cats that prowled the resort’s grounds; then we went swimming or snorkeling or sightseeing for the rest of the day, eating enormous lunches and dinners and desserts. Evenings, we sat on the beach and watched the sunset, talking about all the things we still planned to do: climb the lighthouse, go to the caves, swim with dolphins.

  I called Sam’s hospital room, interrupting her afternoon cartoons. “I been doing real good,” she reported, her voice perky and high. “They’re saying they might move me to a recovery hospital in Westchester next week. It’s, like, a kids’ hospital again, but I don’t care, I’m used to it. And it’s more flexible than a regular hospital—you don’t have to stay in bed all day if you feel all right, they have activities and physical therapy and stuff. So they’re saying I’d be there for a few weeks, and then they’d see if I was doing good enough to go home.”

  “That’s great!” I cheered. “Where in Westchester?”

  “Well,” she said, a little hesitant, “that’s the only thing. It’ll be good for Maria, ’cause it’s close to Larchmont, but it’d be a little harder for you to come visit. I forget the name of the place; I’ll tell you when you get back.”

  “Okay.” Huh. I couldn’t help but think, if they moved her to Westchester, I’d have an excuse to visit less often—not only would she be doing better, by the doctors’ estimation, she’d also be farther away. There was no way I could make it to Westchester every evening; no one could expect me to. “Hey, I’m so glad you’re doing so well. This is great news.”

  “Yeah, I been a lot better. And me and Maria have been having a good time. Remember that night nurse I hated, the one who was a real bitch to me? Well, she was on days last week, and I started, like, fucking with the heart monitor. I made the leads real loose so it kept going flat, and she kept running in, like, ‘What’s happening? Why is your heart stopping?’ It was so funny.”

  I remembered my own experience, watching the lines on her monitor flatten. “Hilarious,” I said, sarcastic. “Listen, those guys are there to help you. Don’t fuck with them, okay?”

  I could picture her hangi
ng her head with her naughty grin. “I know, I know.” She changed the subject. “So how’s Bermuda? Are you having a good time?”

  “It’s awesome,” I reported. “It’s so beautiful, I can’t stand it. And I think we’re getting ready for another swim, so I’m going to let you go. Say hi to Maria for me, and I’ll give you a call in a day or two to check up on you, okay?”

  “Okay.” Her voice went sad for a second, then perked back up. “And hey, thanks for calling. It means a lot to me.”

  I smiled, my heart full. “I love you,” I told her.

  “Love you, too,” she said. “Bye.”

  I hung up the phone, slid open the patio door, and found Bill a few yards away, sitting on the edge of a hammock, offering purloined turkey scraps to a ragged-eared orange-and-white stray. Pss pss pss, he said, as the little cat reached out to gobble a scrap from his hand. I approached slowly, and the cat swiveled around, prepared to flee, but Bill produced another scrap. Pss pss pss. The cat stayed.

  I beamed at my beautiful partner, and he looked up at me over the cat’s Creamsicle head, grinning.

  “Everything’s great,” I told him. “What now?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Revelations

  We unlocked our apartment door that Sunday night, and all three cats ran to greet us and sniff our luggage. Bill flipped through the bills while I listened to the messages on the answering machine—our catsitter, welcoming us home; my folks, doing the same. Maria’s perky, familiar voice: “It’s me. Just wanted to see if you’re back, catch you up to speed.”

  “Back to work,” noted Bill.

  I called Maria back the next morning and caught her between clients.

  “You’re back!” she exclaimed. “Oh, thank god. It’s been a hell of a week.”

  “Really?” I asked, distressed. “I thought she was doing better.”

  I heard Maria exhale hard, or maybe she was smoking again—she’d quit for a while, but recently she’d confessed to cadging a cigarette here and there from a work buddy. “Physically, maybe, but psychologically, I think it’s started to sink in, what’s happening with her.”