Have You Found Her

by Janice Erlbaum

  There he was. And for forty dollars, I could read his file. I typed in my credit card number and six pages of results unspooled onto the screen.

  Edward Liam Dunleavy, age forty-seven, lived in Glendale, Colorado; the website gave his address. He was married to Ruby Dunleavy, also forty-seven—not thirty-seven, as Sam had often told me—You’re only one year younger than my mother. Ed and Ruby owned their home, which was worth over a quarter of a million dollars—no bankruptcies, tax liens, or judgments. No criminal history for either of them—just one unspecified civil charge against Dad from April 2004. The report didn’t say anything about their kids. I hit the “print” button, and the pages started spitting from the printer next to me.

  My pulse pounded until I could practically taste it in my mouth as I opened another browser window: Google Maps. I typed in the Glendale address, and there it was—a satellite picture of a suburban subdivision, the aerial view of a bunch of look-alike houses on a winding, nondescript street. I zoomed in once, twice, three times, until I was as close up as I could get, looking at the roof of the Dunleavy house like I was Santa Claus sussing out the chimney. It was a nice-sized house. It didn’t look like a meth cookery. And that was a swimming pool in the backyard. An in-ground swimming pool.

  Goddamn.

  I leaned back in my chair, smiling furiously at the screen. Of course. Here was the certainty I’d been looking for. Sam had grown up in a middle-class home with a pool and a piano, hardbound books on the shelves; she’d been driven to school in the SUV in the driveway. The ghettoes, the drug runs, the gangs, and the guns—they were all lies, just like the AIDS.

  The search results listed a telephone number for the Dunleavys. I stared at it, willing myself to pick up the phone and call, unable to imagine what I’d say. “Hi there. I’m calling about your daughter, Samantha. I met her at a homeless shelter in New York; she said you used to sell her for drugs. Any comment?” I didn’t know if I wanted to reach out to the residents of this house, now blown up to nearly full screen on my monitor—sure, they might have had money and a home, but they might still be sadistic, abusive creeps. It must have taken some kind of fucked-up parents to produce their daughter.

  It wasn’t enough information. It was the wrong information. I wanted to get information about Sam, what schools she went to, what hospitals she’d been in, but I couldn’t—according to the record-search sites, that was kept private by law. Here were Sam’s parents, but who was she?

  She was someone who walked, talked, and acted like a hard-core street kid—the scars, the homemade tattoo, the same weathered clothes every day. The hunch, the quickness on the trigger, the instant rapport she had with other street people. She’d demonstrated her excellence at petty theft, breaking and entering, talking her way into and out of things; she had track marks and busted veins. The streetwisest of the street kids at the shelter gave her respect; they knew she was one of their own. I remembered her old roommate, St. Croix, telling me, “You know Samantha, she wouldn’t sleep in a bed for the first few weeks. She slept curled up in all her clothes on the floor.”

  Can you really fake how you sleep?

  Bill got home from work, and I dragged him straight to the computer. “Look,” I said, showing him the aerial view of their house. “Her parents’ house. With an in-ground pool.”

  Bill leaned over and peered at the screen. “Not exactly a drug slum.” He straightened up and looked at my eager, angry face. “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “Hah,” I huffed. I wasn’t sorry; I was vindicated. I’d solved even more of the mystery—Nancy Drew and the Case of the Homeless Girl Who Wasn’t. I knew she was full of shit, I knew it. This was why she hadn’t replied to my letter; this is why Luwanda the counselor wasn’t calling me back. Sam had to distance herself from me, before I caught on to who she really was, which she knew I would. “I’m just glad I found out. Knowledge is power, right?”

  If only I knew what to do with all this power I had. I waited a few days for the shock and anger to subside, paging through Dr. Feldman’s book, thumbprints and dog-ears on every other page. I’d hoped that finding Sam’s parents would answer some questions for me; instead the questions multiplied. Maybe Sam was psychotic; maybe she was really beyond help—anybody who lied as thoroughly and consistently as she did had to be living outside reality. I was starting to think that faking illness was only part of her problem, just another symptom of some super-mega, never-before-seen, off-the-charts kind of craziness. Obviously, she lived inside a three-dimensional fiction that was as real to her as any schizophrenic’s delusion—there’s no way she could have sustained the ruse otherwise.

  I fell into another funk. There really wasn’t going to be a happy ending here. Sam wasn’t going to leave DTP any better than she was when she arrived. She was up there right now, giving her counselors the same bullshit stories she’d fed me and Jodi and Maria. She wasn’t telling them about the subdivision in Glendale; she was feeding them jazz bars in Oklahoma City, street rapes in Boston, shivering in a doorway in Cheyenne, Wyoming, thinking, I want to get sober and change my life. And who even knew what she was telling them about me? I’d probably molested her, or tried to. She had to discredit me somehow. She knew me well enough to know that I was onto her by now, and she couldn’t risk my contacting DTP.

  I called DTP yet again and asked for Luwanda. “She’s in a staff meeting,” said the receptionist. “I’ll have her get back to you.”

  I rolled my eyes with disgust. No matter what time of day I called, the counselors were “in a staff meeting.” Even Sam knew how to switch up her lies, throw a little variety in there for verisimilitude’s sake. “Please do,” I said, testily reciting my name and number for the third time. “I have some important information for her about Sam’s health.”

  But Luwanda did not call me back. Luwanda was too busy “in a staff meeting.” She was too busy sitting in session with Sam, listening to her tell stories about forced prostitution, comforting her through imaginary flashbacks. Luwanda was wasting her time, at the expense of other patients—at her own expense, no doubt. It looked like I was going to have to hire a blimp if I wanted to get her my “important information.”

  Maria, meanwhile, had better luck. She called to fill me in.

  “Hi, Janice, just wanted to let you know that I heard back from Luwanda. Sam gave her permission to give me a quick update, and she says she’s doing fine. She had some adjustment problems to start, but she’s been doing well for the past few weeks. No health issues, as far as she mentioned. I tried to press her for more information, but she wasn’t all that forthcoming, and I didn’t want to say anything that might jeopardize Sam’s spot there.”

  “Oh.” I smiled tightly. So Sam was still playing favorites—Maria got a call from her counselor, but I didn’t—and it still somehow managed to irk me. “So, she’s basically not letting her counselors talk to us, like she promised.”

  “Correct,” said Maria. “It’s a little frustrating. And I’ve kept writing to her every week, but I haven’t received any letters from her. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but…”

  My smile got even tighter. “Well, I think I might have a clue.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I paused for a second, gathered my nerve. Maria hadn’t asked to have her faith in Sam shattered again; that was me. “I looked up her family online. And I found them. And they’re not who she said they were.”

  “Okay.” Maria’s voice dropped an octave. “Who are they?”

  “They live in a quarter-million-dollar house, that they own, with an in-ground pool, in Glendale, Colorado. They’re both forty-seven—so Sam’s mom aged ten years overnight. No criminal records. They look like upstanding citizens. No information about their kids.”

  “Wow.” There was a pause, and then her voice came back, harder and more peeved. “I wish I were more surprised.”

  “Me too.”

  “Have you contacted them?”

  “Not ye
t.”

  “Do you plan to?” Her words were clipped, terse.

  “I don’t know.” I knew Maria was angry about the revelation—it was another bitter pill to swallow, after all the ones we’d already choked down—but it sounded more like she was mad at me. “Look, I know we were going to wait for Sam to tell us—”

  “Well, like I said, I wish I was more surprised.” Maria exhaled wearily and tried to turn her tone back to upbeat. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I’d heard from Luwanda. Oh, and she mentioned family day, it’s the third weekend of February. So, you know, maybe Sam’s not cutting us off just yet.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “I guess the call’s a good sign.” Or, I thought, a defensive maneuver, to head us off before we got too close.

  I promised to call Maria before doing anything else that would preclude Sam’s own spontaneous confession about her past; then I hung up, feeling alienated and shitty. Even in absentia, Sam was still managing to play me and Maria against each other, to keep us in competition instead of cooperation. Even in absentia, she was still running the show. I pictured her up in DTP, humming to herself as she went about her chores, those enormous eyes of hers narrowed with satisfaction.

  I hadn’t cracked her after all.

  Two weeks passed, and the Dunleavys’ phone number sat on the pad next to my laptop, mocking me in my own handwriting as I tried to ignore it. I didn’t need to call them, I told myself, because I’d already learned everything they would possibly tell me. They weren’t going to talk to a total stranger about their estranged daughter; it was a fool’s errand. Besides, if they were anything like the kid they’d produced, I didn’t want anything to do with them. They were probably psychos themselves. I was afraid that calling them might only expose me to further misery.

  Which was backward—they were the ones who should have been afraid, if they’d neglected their parental duties to the point where their baby girl was running around the country shooting heroin and faking AIDS. I’d been one of the primary adults in her life for the past year; I was entitled to contact these people and request information about the girl I’d nearly adopted. My back got straighter, my resolve more firm, the more I thought about it—maybe I could do this after all. I remembered my first days of volunteering: how afraid of Nadine I’d been, how tentative I was around anyone who smacked of authority. And look at me now: yelling at hospital social workers, getting Sam to admit her medical deceptions, facing the information none of us really wanted to hear. This was how parenting Sam had changed me.

  I rehearsed potential phone openers with Bill, finessing them through a few iterations—“Hi, Mrs. Dunleavy, my name’s Janice, and I met your daughter Samantha last October at a homeless shelter—while I was doing arts therapy at a homeless shelter. Mrs. Dunleavy, when was the last time you heard from Samantha?”

  Bill nodded, gave me notes. “Don’t give away too much. Hang back a little and see what she says.”

  Right. I went through it over and over, out loud and in my head. If I got a machine, I’d hang up and call back. If I got the father, same. And if I blew this, I’d be back at a dead end; the only avenue of information about Sam would be permanently closed.

  The next day, I psyched myself up for the phone call, pacing around the living room and swinging my arms. Then I picked up the phone, punched *66 into the keypad to block the Dunleavys from seeing my phone number, and dialed the number on my pad.

  Ring. Ring.

  A young woman answered, her voice upbeat and carefree. Eileen, Sam’s sister. Not in a group home, not in a coma. On the phone with me. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” I said, in the smooth tones of a newscaster. “Is Ruby Dunleavy there, please?”

  “Sure, one minute, please.” So chipper, so polite. Barely a hint of Sam’s strange ’hood-inflected accent, but I could hear the similarities in the clear, high tone—she sounded like Sam at her sweetest. “Mom!”

  It was too easy. Too fast. All of a sudden, Sam’s mother was on the phone, the famed junkie hooker who whored her kids out on Christmas Eve. She was a middle-aged housewife from Colorado. “Hello?” she said.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dunleavy.” I could barely recognize my own voice, my mind was so blown, but it sounded good to me, it sounded assured. “My name is Janice, and I’m calling from New York City about your daughter Samantha.”

  She sipped in a small breath. “Oh my.” Her voice trembled, wary. “All right.”

  I started into the pitch I’d prepared. “I met Samantha a little over a year ago, when I was doing arts therapy at a homeless shelter here in New York, and she and I became friends. It’s been a hard year for her—she had some problems with her health—but I just wanted to call and let you know that she’s all right.”

  “Oh my,” her mother said again, and gasped. “Oh, this is…so she’s all right.”

  “She is.” I closed my eyes. I could hear her mother practically sob with relief, and I wanted to cry with her. She’d been worried about her daughter for who knew how long now, suffering so much grief and anguish, while Sam and I were browsing bookstores and swinging on swings. I should have suspected her parents might be decent people who’d been worried about her; I should have found them and called them weeks ago, months ago, for everybody’s sake. “It’s been a tough year, but she’s been getting better and better. And she’s had lots of people looking out for her. She’s a very special girl, and I care for her very much.”

  “Oh, oh my.” I heard Eileen in the background: “It’s about Sam? She’s all right?” Mrs. Dunleavy tried to compose herself, but her voice continued to shake. “You say you’re calling from New York?”

  “That’s right. I met Samantha at a homeless shelter here last November, and—”

  “That’s when we last heard from her,” she interrupted. “October, 2004. She wouldn’t tell us where she was. She was still using drugs. We begged her to come home, try and work things out with us, but she wouldn’t. We haven’t heard from her since then. And now…now you’re saying she’s all right.”

  “That’s right. She’s been in a drug treatment program for the past three months, and she’s doing very well.”

  “Oh, this is an answered prayer. Oh, thank the Lord. I just…I don’t know…”

  This was overwhelming her, I could feel it. I was dizzy and overwhelmed, too, though I was doing my best to sound like this was something I did all the time, calling strangers out of the blue to tell them their missing children were alive. “I’m sorry if this comes as a shock, Mrs. Dunleavy. I know it must be a lot for you to deal with at once.” I said it as much to myself as to her.

  “It is, but I’m very glad you called.”

  “I care very much for Samantha,” I told her, “and I’d love to help you work things out with her, if that’s possible.”

  Her voice fluttered. “That’s…all we’ve wanted.”

  I dropped my voice, tried to make it soothing and kind. She was talking to me, this was working—I could push, but I’d have to push gently. “Mrs. Dunleavy, can you tell me what happened with Samantha?”

  She let out a long breath, like she was hoping I could answer that question for her. “I just don’t know,” she said, honestly perplexed. “I mean, we’ve always lived a very normal middle-class life. We had the three children, Sam and her brother and her sister; we went to church, and everything was fine. Then when Samantha was eleven, we moved to Thailand for two years for my husband’s job, and when we came back, she had some trouble readjusting at school. But then she started to do quite well again. She won the physics award at her high school.”

  I flashed back to the day Sam showed me her GED, how proud she was. The girl who’d supposedly dropped out of the seventh grade, winner of the physics award.

  “And then something happened around her junior year of high school. She developed a drug habit, and we weren’t fully aware of it at first. We just knew she was acting strangely, lying about things, very defiant. Then when she was seventee
n, she came to me and told me she had been raped the year before, but when we tried to find out more about it, we found out it wasn’t true.”

  What do you mean, you found out it wasn’t true? I wanted to interrupt with a million questions, but I didn’t want to disrupt her flow—I wanted her to tell me everything she could, then I’d ask more. I could hardly believe she was being so forthcoming, reporting all this like she’d reported it before, but I was all gentle reassurance and singsong niceness, coaxing it out of her, pacing around the room with one hand clamped under the other armpit, shaking my head with disbelief.

  “And then she was causing so much distress and disruption in the house, we told her she had to stop using drugs, or she couldn’t live at home anymore. So she went to live with some family friends who ran a youth ministry while she finished high school and enrolled in college. But she was still using drugs, it was getting worse and worse, and at some point, right around her eighteenth birthday, she ran away again. And we didn’t know where she was for a while….”

  Her voice trailed off; I could hear her quick breathing in the background. “That must have been terrible for you,” I said, sympathetic.

  She continued. “It was. And then we got a call from another family in a nearby town; the mother said they found us in the phone book. They’d met Samantha at their church, and she told them she was very sick and needed a kidney transplant, and they took her in. She lived with them for two months, right up to the day she was supposed to go into the hospital for the transplant, and then she disappeared.”

  So she’d done it before, suckered people into thinking she was dying and then ditched them. Part of me was vindicated—I’d guessed that she’d pulled this trick before—another part of me was just horrified. Well, I’d wanted to know who she was, and now I was learning. I couldn’t wait to get this family’s phone number from Sam’s mom, call them and compare stories. “My goodness,” I murmured.