Have You Found Her (11 page)

I ran up to the shelter after work, slid the unsealed card under the closed door of Jodi’s office, then turned right around and left before I could run into any of the other girls. I didn’t have the wherewithal to hang out and mentor anybody today.

I got the message the next afternoon: “Hey, Janice, it’s Jodi. Sam’s back here at the shelter, she got your card, it made her very happy. She says she’s gonna really try to stay sober this time, and make it to rehab as soon as she can, so we’re working on that. So everything’s good, and we’ll see you on Wednesday.”

Great
. I could picture Sam sitting in Jodi’s office, her wide brown eyes scanning the card I’d sent, her lopsided half-smile as she tucked it carefully into the pocket of her cargo pants. No doubt Jodi would put her on restriction until she got to rehab; she’d spend the next few days in the lounge, writing to herself in her thin, scratchy hand, tearing through the slim collection of battered paperbacks scattered on the bookshelves. I’d come into the lounge on Wednesday before dinner, and her face would brighten like a bulb; I’d ignore the rules and give her a hug.

If I could last the five days until Wednesday. “I don’t know,” I told Bill that night over dinner. “Maybe I’ll drop by there tomorrow while you’re at work, bring some more donations. I got some more books to give away, and there’s some stuff in the closet I’m not wearing….”

“Uh-huh,” said Bill, his eyebrows only slightly raised. He’d been watching me fret and fume all week, since Sam’s surprise discharge from the hospital; he knew this trip was about more than donations. I could see the concern on his face, the tension in the corners of his eyes—
Don’t get burned out,
he wanted to say;
don’t overdo it, okay?
—but he refrained from saying anything besides “I’ll check my closet; I think I have some pants that shrunk in the wash.”

So I walked into the lounge that Saturday with my prop bag full of donations and my eager heart pumping hard against my chest. A roughneck named Melissa (“Call me Mel”) hollered at me.

“Bead Lady! What’s poppin’?” She stuck out her fist for me to pound, and I hit it lightly with mine. “What you got in the bag, beads?”

Mel would have been my new favorite these days, if I’d had time for new favorites. Funny, manic, and thoroughly sincere, she’d run away from her parents in North Carolina at the age of fifteen to go live with her girlfriend, who was moving to Florida. The girlfriend’s parents quickly threw her out, so she lived on the beach for a while. Since then, she’d bounced around to various people’s houses, institutions, beaches, and parks, through various states, with various girlfriends; now, at eighteen, she was trying to get a job and a place to live.

I put the bag on the table. “Not beads today, just some clothes and books and whatnot.” The other girls in the lounge immediately clustered around, chattering—
Ooh, clothes.
“How’s things been with you?”

Mel lifted one scrawny shoulder. “A’ight. Boring. I got an interview at Key Food tomorrow.”

I smiled absently. “That’s excellent. I hope it works out. Hey, do you know that girl Sam, tall white girl, she was in the hospital….”

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded. “She’s not around. Actually, I think she mighta left this morning—her roommate was giving away her shampoo and stuff.”

“Oh. Huh.”

My stomach flipped over.
No way.
She couldn’t have left the shelter, not since her return; she just couldn’t have.

“Be right back,” I said.

I headed toward the counselors’ office as the girls started claiming their seats at the table in the lounge. Knocked, entered, noted the counselors on the phones, engaged in conferences. No Ashley. I looked at the whiteboard. No Samantha Dunleavy.

Oh, no. No, no, no.

I stumbled back into the lounge. A six-foot-two stunner named Ynnhoj (pronounced “ee-nazh” also the name Johnny spelled backward), with broad shoulders and a prominent Adam’s apple, was holding up a pair of Bill’s old pinstripe pants—“Oh, I could make a
fierce
pair of shorts out of these.”

Mel shuffled up to me, wearing her eager smile. “Bead Lady, you hangin’ out?”

Any other day I’d say, “Yeah, I’m hangin’ out, where’s the party at?” and I’d sit right down with Mel and Ynnhoj to shoot the shit, to dissect the days-old newspaper someone had left behind, the faces on the front page already vandalized beyond recognition. “No, I gotta go see a friend. I’ll be back Wednesday with the beads, though.”

She scowled and waved one arm at me—
Forget you, then
. “I’ma have a job by Wednesday!”

I smiled at her as best I could. “I’ll miss you, then.”

“A’ight,” she said, arm dropping to her side, disappointed.

I started crying on the subway home. And there’s nothing like crying on the subway, shielding your eyes with your hand and folding into yourself, trying to stifle the sobs so they look like coughs—you’re never supposed to show weakness on the subway. I pulled it together well enough, but by the time I’d emerged at Union Square, I was in the onset of a full-blown panic attack, reduced to muttering to myself as I race-walked, spastic,
It’s okay, it’s all right, everything’s okay, I’m okay.
Looking over at the redhead’s corner by the Gap Body store, empty for the winter. Where could she be? Where did they all go when they disappeared—winter homes? Other cities? Detox wards? Early graves?

I got home and e-mailed Bill at work.
Sam’s gone. I don’t know where. This fucking SUCKS.
Then I called Jodi—no answer, of course, since it was the weekend. I left her a message. “Hey, it’s Janice. I saw that Sam’s not there at the shelter anymore; can you tell me what happened? Thanks.”

I drummed my fingers on the desk. Nadine might be in her office, but I couldn’t call her; she’d told me to back off from Sam. Nadine probably didn’t know where Sam was anyway—she’d been discharged. Sam’s name wasn’t on her whiteboard; Sam was not her problem anymore.

Think.
I could call the shelter and pretend to be someone else looking for her. A police officer! At least they’d tell me the last time they saw her. But probably better not to impersonate the police. I could call all the hospitals and morgues—isn’t that what people did when their loved ones were missing? Or maybe I could call the cops.
Hi there, I’m missing a homeless girl—well, she was last seen at a hospital, then a detox, then a shelter. She’s about six feet tall, and she has a tattoo that says
PSALMS
22 on her left arm. Her right hand has a three-inch scar, one of her Achilles tendons was slashed, and her kidneys are about to fall out. Can you help me?

Nobody could help me that night—not Bill, not my friends, not the joint and a half I smoked, hoping to quell the terrible panic. I’d lost her; Sam was gone. Bill tried his best to talk sense to me—“Jodi will call you back on Monday,” he said. “You’ll find out something. She probably got sent to rehab, and they forgot to let you know. If she’s back in the hospital, you’ll find her, and she’ll be okay. Get some sleep. Jodi will call you back.”

Eventually, and against my will, I got some sleep.
She’ll be okay,
I repeated to myself.
Jodi will call me back
.

I got up on Monday, ran a few miles, and got to work, checking my cell phone every ten minutes. Ten o’clock…ten-thirty, and still no call. Maybe Jodi was coming in to work late today. Maybe she wasn’t coming in at all. Eleven
A.M.
, I called again. No answer. I didn’t leave a message. She’d get the first one. I called again at noon, at one—still no answer. At two, I left another message. “Hi there, Janice again, I’m sure you’re busy and I hate to bother you….” Nothing. Three-thirty, my cell phone rang, and I jumped out of my skin like a skeleton to get it, but it was just Bill: “Heard anything? Well, hang in there.”

By 6
P.M.
, I was crying, smoking, and trying to hug the cats, who wanted none of it. I decided to try the counselors’ office; maybe Ashley would be there. Maybe she’d take pity on me and break confidentiality and tell me where Sam had gone. A counselor named Tamara answered the phone.

“Hey, Tamara, it’s Janice! Bead Lady! How are you?”

“Good,” she said, businesslike. I could hear a knot of girls arguing in front of her desk. “What’s up?”

“Well…” I faltered. I didn’t want to ask for Ashley—
Hi there, Tamara, could I talk to the
white
counselor, please?
And I couldn’t just ask Tamara about Sam; she wasn’t allowed to give out information about residents, even discharged ones. I’d have to try the back way, the way the girls always went when they wanted someone to tell them something.
Yo, I heard about what happened with that girl, yo….

“Well, I heard about what happened with Samantha Dunleavy—”

“Again,” said Tamara into the phone. Then, phone askew—“Ladies, I will discharge all of you if you do not stop.”

Again.
What did that mean? Hospital or detox? I chuckled, like,
That rascally Samantha! Doing “it” again!
“Is she back at St. Victor’s?”

There was no chuckle in Tamara’s voice. “I can’t say.
Ladies!
”

“Oh, sure. Well, thanks anyway.”

“All right,” she said, and hung up.

I sat back in my chair.
Again
—that was my clue. Sam had never run away from the shelter, or been discharged—
again
meant either a hospital or a detox. If she was in an institution, I could find her. I jumped online, started searching for all the hospitals in the city, already dialing St. Victor’s with one hand.

I didn’t have to dial anyone else. The woman at Patient Information said she was there: Samantha Dunleavy, on the Weiss Pavilion, third floor. She’d been admitted Saturday morning.

“Oh!” I gasped with relief, a vision of Sam’s grinning face swimming into view.
Hooray, she’s in the hospital!
I sprang from my chair, ready to grab my keys and go see her right away. “Great. Thank you so much.”

“Looks like you just missed visiting hours,” said the woman. “Tomorrow’s six to eight.”

I looked at the time—6:30
P.M.
I’d seen Sam at six-thirty before—it was prime visiting time. “I’m sorry, I thought visiting hours were two to ten.”

“Not the psych ward. Today was five to six-thirty, tomorrow’s six to eight.”

The psych ward. Well, this was a new one. I sat down again, heavy. “Oh! Of course. Thanks, thanks so much.”

I called Bill, my hands shaking with leftover adrenaline.

“Found her. She’s at the St. Victor’s psych ward. I can see her tomorrow between six and eight.”

He let out a deep, grateful breath. “Hey, that’s great, babe. That you found her, I mean. And that she’s someplace safe.”

“Yeah.” I was solemn again. I mean, the psych ward? Something bad must have happened.
What if she’d tried to kill herself? Or somebody else?
My head dropped into my free hand. “Perturbing, though. What do you think you have to do to get into the psych ward?”

“I don’t know,” said Bill. “Practice?”

Chapter Five

Psych

         
I
t had been almost two weeks since I left Sam’s bedside, saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Now, walking along the same old course to the hospital, I felt like I’d aged a year. Surely there were new crow’s feet in the corners of my puffy eyes, still swollen from the previous night’s posttrauma meltdown. “Look, you found her, and she’s all right,” Bill had said, trying to soothe me, but I was having none of it. She wasn’t
all right,
I snapped; she was in a psych ward. She’d gone from the hospital to a detox to the nuthouse in under two weeks—how did that make her
all right
?

St. Victor’s psych ward had its own entrance, with its own awning and its own locked elevators. I waited with a group of other visitors for the clock to strike six before the guard would let us sign the register and receive our passes. One gentleman was particularly agitated by the short wait; he paced a two-foot square of the lobby, muttering and fuming. I was only slightly less impatient.

The attendant took us upstairs in the elevator, and the door to the ward was opened. And there was Sam, standing a few yards down the hallway, wearing a pair of hospital slippers under her cargo pants and an expression of surprise, almost alarm, on her face upon seeing me.

I burst into a huge grin, putting out my jazz hands as I came down the hall,
Ta da!
“I
told
you you weren’t getting rid of me.”

“Oh my god.” She covered her face with her hand and doubled over with embarrassment, but underneath the hand, I could tell, she was smiling. “I told Jodi not to tell you where I went.”

So Jodi had known. As frustrated and freaked out as I’d been, trying to get ahold of her all day the day before, I had to admire Jodi for keeping Sam’s confidence. “She didn’t tell me. I found you anyway. You want me to go?”

“I just…” She twisted around some more, still trying to hide the upturned corners of her mouth, then gave up and let out a sheepish grin. “I didn’t want anybody to know I was in here! I didn’t know what you’d think.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I assured her, pshawing. “It’s not like you’re the first person I’ve ever visited in the psych ward. I mean, you’re special, but you’re not
that
unique.”

She laughed ironically,
hah,
and I followed her down the hall toward the patients’ lounge, studying her peripherally. She looked okay—her color was better than the days when she was at death’s door, and her wrist bore a long, wide scar like an earthworm, but there was no dressing on it, it was fully closed. She was still too thin, but she probably always had been. Then she looked over at me, and I saw the exhaustion in her eyes, and the hard line between them, the one that came out when she was suffering. It looked like someone had hit her in the forehead with a chisel.

We found two seats together in the lounge, where a woman in a flowered housedress was mumbling to herself in Italian, and a young Korean girl stared intently at her reflection in the window. The girl wore thick green eyeshadow up to her brows and no other makeup. The agitated man from downstairs was yelling at a mousy brunette about how hard they made it to visit; she was cowering next to him on a battered sofa. I sort of hoped someone would come over and throw a straitjacket on him.

Sam watched me look around, taking it all in. She gave me a half-shrug. “Well,” she said to me, like we were adulterers at a motel. “Here we are.”

There we were. I smiled at her. “It’s good to see you. I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.” She tried to smile back, but her head drooped forward, and a tear threatened to bust out of the corner of her eye. She rested her elbows on her knees and let her head hang. “It’s…been a hard time.”

“I bet it has. You want to tell me about it?”

A tear splashed onto her thigh, then another. I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, the blade poking through her orange sweatshirt. I felt her heave a few times, felt how hard she was trying to repress it. She straightened up, and I removed my hand.

“I don’t even know how I wound up here,” she said, miserable. “I mean, I know, but…” Her voice trailed off, another renegade tear sliding down her cheek and onto her thigh.

I smiled again, supportive. “Well, I wasn’t going to ask, but I am curious.”

I got a wan chuckle and a sideways peek.
Look at me all you want,
I thought,
I’m right here.

Her mouth twisted again; she was deciding something. She sighed. “Okay, well, last time I saw you, I was still in the hospital, right?”

“Right. New Year’s Eve.” We’d talked about books, about gun control, about free will versus determinism. She’d told me about hiking in the Rockies with her late dog last summer, her last attempt to get clean. We’d watched a rerun of
Law & Order
. “Then the next day, they discharged you, and you went back to the shelter.”

She hunched her shoulders and cringe-smiled. “Except, I kinda made a stop along the way.”

She looked up at me from her hunch—
Please don’t be mad
—and I shrugged at her—
What are you gonna do
. I’d already forgiven her for it, not that it was mine to forgive. “And that’s how you wound up in detox.”

She rolled her eyes heavenward. “
That
sucked.”

“I bet.”

“But I guess I had to go, because otherwise I just woulda been…right back where I started.”

She gestured at the floor with her arm. Right back to a square of sidewalk, a cup, and a needle. “You’re probably right,” I agreed.

She nodded. “That’s what I said to Jodi; I said I don’t want to go back to it. And part of the reason is, like, for the first time, I would be
losing
something if I went back. I mean, in the past, my life was always that bad, so who cared if it stayed that bad? But now I feel like maybe there could be something better.” She was staring hard at a patch of linoleum, her eyes narrowed. “I mean, I got high, and it took the sick feeling away, but then I knew I was just going to get sick again in a few hours, and I didn’t know what to do.”

So she went to Jodi’s office, and she waited on the busted green chair outside until Jodi was off the phone, and she went in and told Jodi what was up. And she let Jodi convince her that she should check herself in to detox and start again, fresh.

“I’m really proud that you did that,” I said.

“I don’t know why.” She ducked her head again. “I mean, when I got out of there, and I got your card, I couldn’t even believe it. Like, why would you want to be my friend, after I’d fucked up like that?”

I wanted to reach up and pet her hair, but she was about ten inches taller than me; even with her slouching, it felt like a stretch. I must have grown used to seeing her lying down in the hospital bed; I’d forgotten how much bigger than me she was. “I’m proud of you because you made a mistake but then you did the right thing to try to fix it.”

She nodded at her lap, just once. Then she raised her head and looked at me with those giant eyes of hers.

“I’m glad you found me,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”

My turn to stifle a tear. “So am I.”

It was too hard to stare at each other. We had to break it somehow, laugh about something. A short, balding guy in a gown was humming the theme song to
Jeopardy!

“I get that song stuck in my head all the time,” I confessed. “I should probably get locked up, too.”

Her grin switched on. “Oh, man! Guzman. That guy’s hilarious.” And she was off on a string of anecdotes about her ward mates: who was all right and who was creepy, and who was never getting released. And the staff—she especially liked this one orderly, Milton, who’d been very cool with her. He’d given her a forbidden cigarette, which she’d smoked in the shower.

“See, the air vent is right there in the shower, so I shut the bathroom door and turned on the cold water, because I knew the cold air would force the warm air in the room upward and out through the vent, so I could smoke without anyone smelling it.”

Rrrrright
. She knew the cold air would force the hot air upward. That was, like, elementary physics. Or…science, of some sort. I probably should have known that, shouldn’t I. “Ah-hah,” I said. “Pretty sneaky, sis.”

Then she was on to a story about climbing onto the roof from the deck where they got recreation time every day—“So everyone’s, like, ‘Where’s Samantha?’ And my feet are dangling right over their heads! It was so funny—”

I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I had to ask. “Okay, so, you got through detox, and they sent you back to the shelter. So how’d you wind up in here?”

Okay. She reared back a little and rolled her eyes again, mortified this time. “Well…it’s complicated.” She sighed, deciding how to tell it, different expressions shifting across her face. She tilted her head, started to say something, shook her head no, then made up her mind.

“Well, really, it’s all Ashley’s fault. She’s the one who said I had to come here. And now they don’t want to let me out!”

Ah, of course, it was Ashley’s fault. There was scarcely anything bad that happened at the shelter—nay, in the world at large—that the girls could not trace back to Ashley’s fault. “Okay, but
why
did Ashley say you had to come here?”

Sam threw out one arm. “I don’t know, because she hates me? Because she’s a stupid bitch, who doesn’t know how to do her job? I don’t know,
she’s
the crazy one, she should be here, not me! Alls I said is, I was having a hard time and I was depressed. Which is normal, if you consider my circumstances!”

I nodded in sympathy. “But did you say you were going to hurt yourself?”

She pressed her lips into a hard, flat line.
Yes.
“No! Alls I said was, I think about it sometimes. But who doesn’t? You told me you thought about it in the past, right, and you didn’t kill yourself, did you? Just because you think about robbing a bank doesn’t mean you’re going to do it.”

Yeah. I used to believe that, too. It’s funny, though—the more you think about robbing that bank, the better the idea seems. But Sam was on a tear now, head high, voice loud, gesticulating all over the place.

“And Ashley totally lied to me, too. She told me I’d just be in here for the weekend. Because ordinarily, if I was feeling real bad, I’d just go talk to Jodi, you know? Except it was the weekend, and Jodi was gone until Monday morning—”

“So you went to talk to Ashley—”

“And she made me come here. But they lied! They said if I committed myself, I could get out in a few days! And now they don’t want to let me out, even though I
told
them, I’m not going to hurt myself! And besides, if I really wanted to hurt myself, I could do it in here as well as anywhere else, they can’t stop me if I really want to do something. I could stab myself right here in the throat with this pen—”

“Please don’t,” I offered.

“I’m not gonna! That’s what’s so frustrating. I mean, sometimes I want to, but I already said I won’t!”

She hung her head and scowled. I didn’t say anything.

“They’re not helping me here, anyway. They’re just giving me meds, and they can’t even figure out which ones I should take. It sucks.”

“I bet.” Pause. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

The girl with the green eye shadow was staring at us, I realized. I turned my head and smiled at her. She stared back at me, then rose and shuffled over to our chairs. Sam muttered something under her breath:
Great, here we go.

“You sisters?” asked the girl. Her voice was slurred and faint. “This your sister?”

“No,” said Sam, trying to be patient. “Friend.”

“Like a sister,” I added, still smiling. “Hey, I like your eye shadow.”

The girl turned toward me suddenly, as though I’d just reminded her of something, but when her eyes locked on my face, it was clear that she’d forgotten it. Sam groaned to herself, then cleared her throat and said politely, “Hey, Dawn, me and my friend are talking right now, and I don’t mean to be rude, but—”

Dawn stared at Sam like she was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “Sister?” she repeated.

“Like a sister,” I said again.

Sam shook her head in despair. “Everybody here is crazy,” she said.

Dawn wandered away, which was good news, because Sam and I had a lot to cover before the end of visiting hours. I wanted to find out what her diagnosis was (a mix of borderline personality disorder and posttraumatic stress leading to suicidal ideation, she said), what meds they were giving her (a mix of antidepressants and antipsychotics), and when the doctor said she’d be getting out. She sighed in frustration at the last question.

“I get out when I don’t feel like hurting myself anymore, which could be forever, as far as I know.”

“It won’t be forever,” I told her. “I promise.” I reached out for the pointy shoulder blade again, and this time my hand felt right there. “I swear.”

She nodded at her lap. A few more tears dripped onto her thigh.

“Okay,” she allowed. “I’m trusting you. But if things don’t get better, I’m gonna be
real
mad at you.”