Find Me (6 page)

The news spreads throughout the Groups. Patients start rushing down from their different floors. They amass in front of the TV, our oracle, and gaze at the screen in wonder. They rub the top of the box, the sleeves of their scrubs swaying, as though to encourage it to keep giving us the kind of information we crave. The lights stay on, which means Dr. Bek and the nurses have become aware of our discovery. The only skeptic is a man from our Floor Group, Curtis, who used to be a cop in Cleveland. His roommate is dead. We stand on the edges of the Common Room.

“Hope is a seductive thing,” he says. “Hope can make people lose all sense.”

I don't like Curtis. He never does his fair share when we're cleaning the Common Room. He'll stand by the window with a spray bottle and a rag and never actually touch the glass. Still, I have to admit that I don't disagree.

*   *   *

Our wonder doesn't last long. When Dr. Bek enters the Common Room, all ten of the nurses trailing behind him, the patients go silent. We stand with our Floor Groups. Mine is huddled by the door. From this angle, the bars on the windows remind me of skeleton ribs. Group three takes over the couch, like they always do. Dr. Bek stands in front of the TV, the nurses fanning out around him. The sound of their collective breathing scratches at the air.

I know the questions we are all burning to ask. Is the world really getting safer? Have our contracts changed? How much longer do we have to wait until we are free?

Dr. Bek takes the remote from Olds and mutes the volume. On TV, a different reporter, a woman, is wandering down a street. The sky is dark, but a news truck has turned the street electric. All the houses are heavy with snow. In her white hazmat, standing in a front yard, the reporter looks like she's in camouflage. The camera moves across doors and windows, waiting for someone to emerge, for some sign of life.

“You are the danger now,” Dr. Bek tells us.

He keeps talking. I watch the floor. After Raul finished his haircuts, our group swept and vacuumed, but I keep finding strands, some light, some dark, stuck inside the carpet.

First, he explains, there's no way to know how safe it really is out there, at the start of this alleged recovery. Twenty days must pass before it can be called a recovery at all. Second, if the sickness has vanished, it's more important than ever to make sure we are not infected, to let the incubation period run its course. To hold tight to our memories. He says now is the time for skepticism and questioning.

“Every day in the Hospital progress is made.” Dr. Bek presses a button and the reporter vanishes. “But still there is so much to be done.”

I can feel the Floor Groups looking at each other. We have all swung from excited to confused. Outside I hear a winter wind moving over the Hospital. I imagine it prying open the bars and the windows and trying to get at what's inside.

Dr. Bek can sense our hesitation. He has more to say. Do we know the story of the flight attendant who carried the AIDS virus from Africa to the West? The index case. How much time do we spend considering the reactions of our actions, the way one disaster can give way to another, like mud sliding down a mountain in springtime? He pauses and makes a diving motion with his gloved hands.

“What a calamity it would be for you to go
out there
now.” He points the remote at the window. “You could reinfect the entire population. You could ruin our chances of finding a cure. Do we want America to be just as helpless if the sickness returns? No. We want her to be able to help herself next time. Isn't that what we want?”

None of the patients say anything. “Well, isn't it?” Dr. Bek presses.

“Yes,” some of us mutter in reply.

“I thought so.” He nods at the white wall of nurses behind him, as though he's just given them a lesson in how to handle us. Behind the shield his teeth are like tiny polished stones.

Dr. Bek reminds us that Lights Out was over an hour ago and it's time for us to be on our way.

*   *   *

When darkness comes, I lie awake and picture patients flooding out of the Hospital, into the snowy land, and drifting back to wherever they came from. I'm left standing outside, looking east and west, unsure of where to go.

I try to see something different: Louis and I walking out of the Hospital and across the frozen plains. Catching a bus and watching the white landscape roll by. His hand on my cheek. Our fingertips on the cold windowpanes. It's all going beautifully until I hear Paige's feathery voice and realize she's on the bus too, sitting right behind Louis, her hands on his shoulders.

I get out of bed and go to the Common Room. The space is dark and quiet. I sit down on the couch and turn on the TV. Another news truck moves through a suburb and catches people cracking open doors and peering outside. This is in California, where the sickness started. The sky is a violet haze. When a truck passes a blue gingerbread house with a white fence, I see a family standing in the yard. They're wearing gas masks. They even have one small enough for their little girl. The truck casts a net of light over the mother as she kneels and rubs the dirt. The father holds the child. The girl waves her tiny finger around like a wand. The mother and father look up and raise their fingers too. The girl lifts her hand higher. They are all pointing at something in the sky.

*   *   *

I'm on a highway in Boston, passing through the Sumner Tunnel. I'm riding in the passenger seat. The driver is a heavy shadow. Is he wearing some kind of mask? The tunnel has turned the radio music to static. I am feeling very curious about the glove compartment. The car speeds past the tile walls and the tracks of white light on the ceiling. There are doors in the tile. Where do they lead? There is no traffic.

“Wake up, Joy,” I hear Louis say. I feel myself blinking. I'm sitting up in bed. I don't know how long I've been back in my room.

“You're talking in your dreams again.” I listen to him roll over, his voice thick with sleep.

He's wrong, or maybe half-wrong: I wasn't awake, but I wasn't dreaming either.

 

6.

0–6. Group home, Roxbury.

7–9. Foster with the Carroll family, Allston.

10–12. Group home for children, hundred-acre farm, Walpole.

13–14. Foster with Ms. Neuman, Charlestown.

15–17. Group home for teenage girls, Mission Hill.

18. Over and out.

*   *   *

If someone (my mother?) asked me to account for how I've spent my life, the Years is one place I could start.

*   *   *

Massachusetts Safe Haven Law, definition: “Voluntary abandonment of a newborn infant to an appropriate person at a hospital, police department, or manned fire station shall not by itself constitute either a finding of abuse or neglect or a violation of any criminal statute.”

For years, I did not think it was right that what my mother did to me could not be called a crime.

*   *   *

At the Stop & Shop, some people bought very strange things in the middle of the night. Chicken in a can, glow-in-the-dark condoms, fish guts wrapped in brown paper, baskets filled with little round tins of Ant-B-Gon, baskets filled with chewing gum, baskets filled with enough birthday candles to light the world's largest cake, one whole coconut.

Once a man came in and said he was lost and asked me to draw him a map that would lead him to where he wanted to go. I drew one on a folded-up shopping bag and hoped my landmarks were clear. Once someone wanted to buy five shopping carts and the manager said, “No way.” The person gave up and left and the manager told me, “My price was a hundred dollars. I would have let them go for that.” More than once people brought us sagging bags of loose change, wanting cash in return. More than once I found a woman weeping in the Frozens section.

For a while a bagger with tattoos on his knuckles worked nights with me. He used to be in jail. When there was nothing else to do he would count and recount the numbers of each item on the shelves—thirty-five bags of hot dog buns, seven cartons of egg substitute, fourteen jars of grape jelly—and sometimes I would follow behind him and ask what he was doing, which I knew he found annoying, and he would say, “There is no enemy like time.”

After he left I worked with another guy who was always trying to play a joke where he snuck up behind me and put a plastic bag over my head, no matter how many times I told him that I did not find this funny at all.

If there were no shoppers, I would slip into the bathroom and sip a little more Robitussin and when I came out, the light was soft and running down the walls like rainwater.

Things I saw in the homes that made me frightened of real drugs: a boy who collapsed in a field, blue from the neck up; a girl who frothed at the mouth like a wild dog; a girl who got stabbed in the shoulder during a buy; countless zombie shuffles. Still, I envied the empty-headed place they went to, where nothing mattered and nothing hurt. Cough syrup, those hits of dextromethorphan, seemed like a not unreasonable way to manage my life.

I had a case manager, but I kept skipping our appointments. At these appointments, we were supposed to be getting me signed up for emotional wellness classes and college prep at Bridgewater State, even though I did not want to do any of those things.

“How can we be expected to help those who will not help themselves?” I can hear my case manager saying. I was never able to explain that the help I needed was a different kind.

The Stop & Shop was never robbed while I was working there, but it happened one night, at three in the morning, when the cashier who was always trying to put plastic bags over my head was on shift. The robbers wore stockings over their faces and packed the money into black JanSport backpacks, the kind high school students carry. They were very professional. They were out in under five minutes and it wasn't until after they had disappeared into the night and the police had been called that the manager found this cashier collapsed in Paper & Plastics, a roll of paper towels clasped to his chest.

After that, people knew the Stop & Shop as the place where a cashier was killed in Paper & Plastics. A heart attack was the official cause of death, but we all knew fear was what got him.

*   *   *

On the way home from the Stop & Shop, the bus passed a construction site where a metal skeleton was rising slowly from the ground. A doctor's office with a billboard ad for the flu shot:
GET THE FLU BEFORE IT GETS YOU!
Laundry World, a Laundromat with pool tables, and Beauty Island, which sold hair extensions called the Cinderella and body lotion with glitter inside. In East Somerville, we passed the evangelical church and a check cashing service and a discount store for maternity clothes.

At my stop, I would see the same man holding a newspaper over his head, even when it wasn't raining. At my address, I would see the same woman smoking on the fire escape in a Celtics T-shirt and sweatpants, even after the cold began to settle in. I felt both soothed and suffocated by these routines.

In winter, in Harvard Square, nets shaped like gold stars hung between buildings.

Once I got on the wrong bus. I was not awake and not asleep and when I looked out the window, I was in Kendall Square. The bus stopped. I got out. The sky was a bruise. I was unsure of the time. I stood outside the Microsoft building and watched a boy on a skateboard cut through a barren park. For a second, I had crazy ideas about going inside and demanding a job that had to do with computers, but instead I decided to cross the Longfellow Bridge. I thought I would stand on the bridge and look out at the river and the downtown lights and the Citgo sign beaming out from Kenmore. I would walk down Charles Street and look in the shop windows and up the steep cobblestone hills, observing all the lives that could never be mine.

But when I reached the bridge, it was closed for construction. I followed detour signs through a tunnel, a long concrete tube stained with graffiti. I was alone and the tunnel was dark. The longer I walked, the longer the tunnel seemed.

Sometimes the same thing happens when I walk the Hospital halls: the white path seems to stretch on, the stairwell door moves farther away. The echo of my breath grows louder. We believe what we see, whether it's real or not.

In my basement apartment, where it was dark regardless of the time, I would take more Robitussin and get into bed in my Stop & Shop uniform and hope for sleep. On the nights where the cough syrup failed to turn my brain to sludge, I would stare up at the ceiling and remember.

My second foster, Ms. Neuman, lived in a yellow house on Ferrin Street, between the water and Bunker Hill park, where an obelisk, a monument to battle, rose above the trees. The day I came, she was waiting on the curb, in a pink sweatsuit and flip-flops, her toenails painted gold.

“Joy, Joy, Joy,” she sang as she walked me up the driveway, her hand on the center of my backpack. White Christmas lights blinked in the windowsills, even though it was August. She smelled of cigarettes and rosy perfume. “Will you fill our house with it?”

In the living room, a boy in a werewolf mask was sitting on the orange shag carpet. The black rubber face was bearded with fur. The eyes were red and hungry. The mouth was open in a roar, the teeth long and yellow.

“Say hello to Marcus,” Ms. Neuman said, as though we were already supposed to know each other. She pulled a pack of Virginia Slims from the waist of her sweatpants, lit a cigarette, and drifted into the kitchen.

“How long?” I asked the boy from the edge of the living room, still wearing my backpack.

“Six months.” The wolf ears on the mask were small and pointed, like they once belonged to a gentler kind of animal.

“And she hasn't killed you yet?”

“Does secondhand smoke count?”

Secondhand smoke did not count.

The boy told me he could read my past and my future. I sat facing him, my backpack heavy on my shoulders. The carpet was soft. The fangs on his mask were as long as fingers.