Have You Found Her (18 page)

“I know.”

I handed out the various materials requested—“Bead Lady, let me get a string this long? Miss, you got sparkly ones this color?”—and Sam straightened up and turned.

“I think I’m gonna go write in my notebook,” she said, giving me the eyebrow.
See you next Monday, right?
Monday would be her last night before the halfway house, and we were planning a good-bye-for-now dinner.

I nodded in reply, and she walked out of the lounge. Then I turned to Mel, making her umpteenth rainbow bracelet in the seat to my left.

“So, Mel, what’s new with you?”

The next evening I was at home, waiting for Bill to get in, when my cell phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me.” Sam. Outside at a pay phone, panting like she’d been sprinting. “I’m…something bad happened.”

I was already on my feet. “What happened? Are you okay? Where are you?”

“Union Square. I’m mostly okay, I just…can I come over? I really need to see you right now, if—”

“I’ll meet you,” I said, jamming my feet into sneakers. “In front of the bookstore. Five minutes. Don’t go anywhere!”

I was flying out the door, down the staircase, pulling my coat on as I hurried to the bookstore. There she was, looking like she’d been smacked in the face with a brick. An actual brick. Her cheek and lip were badly bruised, just starting to turn blue; her left eye swelled with the makings of a shiner.

“Hey.” She hobbled toward me, pressing her hand to one side of her rib cage.

“Holy shit,” I said, panic and rage rising in my chest. “Holy shit. What the hell just happened?”

“Where can we go?” she pleaded. “Can we—”

“Did you get into a fight? Do you need to go to the emergency room? What happened?”

She shook her head, stiff, her freaked-out eyes the size of pinwheels. “I got beat up. But I’m all right. No hospitals, I don’t want to mess up my bed at the halfway house. I just gotta…sit down somewhere….”

“The diner down the block,” I instructed, and we set off. “Tell me what happened.”

It was the kid, she said. She went back to GED school that afternoon, and there he was, in front of the McDonald’s. They talked some more, and he said he’d been thinking about it; he was ready to come with her to the shelter. “He said he just had to go get his bag, and so I go with him around the corner, figuring he’s got it stashed in some hiding place.”

We entered the diner, and the host looked askance at us—me, the slumming yuppie, with this giant black-eyed, beat-up street kid in tow. We slid into a booth and accepted menus; I ordered something to make the waiter go away. “So then what?”

Her voice quavered as she continued. “So he goes into this brownstone, and into this apartment, and there’s this guy there, like, in his forties, with some Russian accent, and he’s like, ‘Where the fuck have you been? Where’s the money? Where the fuck do you think you’re going? I told you what was gonna happen if you tried to leave!’ And he starts smacking the shit out of the kid.”

“Oh my god.” I clenched my fists under the table—I’d call the police as soon as she told me the rest.

“Yeah, but the kid manages to break away and run past me, and he’s out the door. And then the guy’s coming after
me,
like,
Who the fuck are you? I should kill you!
And he grabs my throat, starts punching me, and I’m fighting him—he hit me a couple of times, thank god he didn’t have a weapon or anything—but I was scared, he was choking me—Janice, I was so scared. I used to fight all the time, but I haven’t been in a fight in months, and I was fighting him, but he was kicking me—”

“Oh my god.”

She dropped her volume and leaned in, urgent. “So I stabbed him. I had this pen in my pocket, and I just pulled it out and put it right in his neck, right here.” She pointed to the soft hollow at the base of her throat, bruised with thumbprints from this guy choking her, like,
half an hour ago
. “And he fell, and then I ran out the door.” Her face was sheet white, her eyes practically shaking in their sockets, her voice high and tiny. “Janice, what if I killed him?”

I couldn’t even consider this; it wasn’t a possibility. “We’re calling nine-one-one,” I decided. “Are you sure you’re all right? You don’t need a hospital?”

She shook her head, emphatic. “No, I’m all right. I don’t think my ribs are broke, I’m just…I’m scared to call the cops, I’m afraid what I did to this guy….”

“I’ll call. It’ll be anonymous. There’s a pay phone outside. I’ll say I heard a fight. Where was it?” She didn’t answer. “You’ve gotta tell me, there’s a kid out there, Sam—”

“And I tried to help him, and this is what I got!” She pointed to her battered face, streaked with grime, contorted with pain and fear. She was nearly hyperventilating; one of us had to calm down. I slowed my own breathing, tried to get a grip on reality.

“I know. I know. I’m so sorry this happened, Sam, I know everything was going so well.” Everything was going so fucking well, damn it! Less than a week until she went to the halfway house! And she had to go stab a pimp in the neck with a pen? Jesus! “And it’s going to be okay. I promise. It’s going to be okay. The police will handle this, neither of us will be involved, and everything will be okay, all right?”

Reluctantly, she gave me the name of the block, right near the Atlantic Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, and I put a twenty on the table so the waiter wouldn’t think I’d skipped out. “I’ll be right back.”

Standing at the pay phone, shivering without my coat, I lifted the receiver off the hook, then put it down again. Suddenly I could picture myself three weeks from then, sitting in an interrogation room in a police station, listening to a tape of my own voice making this 911 call, then pleading with them—“Officers, her name is Samantha Dunleavy, and you can find her at this halfway house. But you can’t arrest her; please, she told me it was self-defense!”

Instead of calling 911, I called Information and got the nonemergency number for the correct precinct. “Hi. I was just calling because I saw a homeless boy in front of the McDonald’s, twelve or thirteen years old, I’ve seen him there a few times, and about half an hour ago, I saw him go into a building just off Atlantic and Boerum, and it sounded like there was a fight. I wasn’t sure if it was an emergency, but I was hoping someone could maybe check to see if the boy’s all right.”

The operator asked me to describe the boy and double-checked the information. “Do you want to give your name?” she asked.

“Well, I just wanted to report it, I don’t know if—”

“All right.” I could tell that my call would not be ranked high on the priority list. Fine with me; at least I’d made it. I had to do something about the situation, but if the cops wanted to do nothing, that was their prerogative. “Thank you for your call, ma’am.”

My civic duty fulfilled, I gulped a few deep breaths of cold air, trying to restore some kind of homeostasis, and went back inside. Sam was staring at her water glass like she was in a posttraumatic trance. God, this was bad news; this was a huge setback. Which is what you got, with recovering addicts.

I slid back into my seat. “It’s all right,” I reassured her with a confident smile. “I called the nonemergency number, and I doubt they’re even checking on it, but I told them to look out for the boy, so hopefully…”

My voice trailed off as I looked at her mournful face, the tears welling in her giant eyes. How often this must have happened in her past; how often she’d worn that choker of bruises, been kicked in the ribs. And this was supposed to be her future, where shit like this didn’t happen anymore; I’d promised her that this part of her life would be better.

“So what do we do now?” I asked. “Besides calm down, and thank god that you’re all right.”

She stared at the water glass like she could make it catch fire with her mind. “I know what I
want
to do,” she answered. “Get high.”

Yeah, she and I both. I was supposed to be sitting on my couch with a joint in my hand right about now, listening to Bill tell me about his day, not sitting here dealing with the aftermath of a pimp fight. “Well, you’re not going to do that. You’ve got to get back to the shelter in time for curfew, and you’ve got to hang in there for the next few days until you can get to the halfway house. Okay? You’re not going to blow everything for a fight you had with some scumbag.”

“I know, I know.” She shook her head again, transfixed by her glass. Then she tore herself away and looked up at me. “But how am I supposed to deal with this? I mean, I’m real freaked out, Janice, I don’t know—”

Again I was surprised by the voice that came out of me: firm, calm, and decisive. “Sam, you’re going to be all right. This is a terrible thing that happened, but it’s over, and you’re all right, and everything is going to be okay. You got into a fight. It happens all the time at the shelter. It was a serious fight, but you’re okay now, and you’ve just got to move on from here and make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.”

“But it wasn’t my fault!” she protested, eyes pleading. “I was trying to help someone!”

I exhaled slowly. “Sam, I know. And I know I encouraged you here, but maybe it’s too early for you to be trying to help anybody but yourself. Okay? Now you’ve got to chalk this up to a bad fight that could have happened to anybody, and you’ve just got to concentrate on what’s ahead.”

It took another ten or fifteen minutes of me reasoning with her, trying to keep my voice calm and my breathing slow, like whispering to a drunk. “Sam, you’re okay. I know you’re freaked out. But there’s nothing you can do now. Everything’s taken care of. Everything is going to be fine. This isn’t even the worst thing you’ve been through in your life, and you made it through before, so you’re going to make it through now. No, Sam, you didn’t kill the guy. Because you didn’t, that’s how I know. Sam, you’ve got to calm down.”

She was just starting to show signs of cooperating when my cell phone buzzed.
Home,
said the display. “Hang on,” I said to Sam, then, into the phone, “Hey, babe, I’ll be home in a few. Minor Sam emergency, but everything’s okay…. No, she’s all right, she says hi. I’ll be home soon…. Okay, love you, too. See you.”

She looked at me with those pleading eyes. “Please don’t go yet,” she asked, voice rising again. “I’m really…”

“I know.” I was really
dot dot dot
, too. I sagged against the back of the booth. I couldn’t take much more of this; I had to get home and turn on the TV and pretend for an hour or two that this wasn’t happening—that Sam hadn’t just been beaten up by a pimp, that people didn’t prostitute children, that everything was basically okay in the world. “We’ll sit for a few minutes, and then I’ll put you on the train.”

She started hyperventilating again. “But I’m not ready to go back there! What are they gonna say when they see me looking like this? What happens if they wanna kick me out?”

My parental, authoritative voice was starting to fray around the edges, frustration creeping in. “You got into a fight, Sam. It happens all the time. As long as you didn’t fight anybody there, they can’t kick you out. And listen, you remember the psych ward, when you broke the mirror? You can’t do anything like that right now. You’ve got to hold it together. You understand? This sucks, but I will be here for you over the next few days, and you know you can always call Maria and Jodi, too. So that’s the plan, all right? You go back to the shelter, you tell them someone tried to steal your skateboard, and you know it was wrong but you got into a fight and you’re not going to get into any more fights, ever. And if you need anything at all, you call one of us.”

Eventually, I convinced her to listen to me, and I walked her, limping and mewling, to the subway. “You sure you don’t need a hospital?” I asked, and she shook her head again. “Okay. But call me, and tell me you got back to the shelter all right, okay?”

“Okay.” She nodded, her battered face bobbling on top of her bruise-circled neck. “I’m sorry, Janice, I didn’t mean to cause all this trouble. I wish—”

I cut her off. “I know you didn’t. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” I gave her an almost convincing smile. “Get back safe, and I’ll talk to you in a few, all right?”

Stumbling down the block toward home, I felt light-headed with relief, almost exhilarated, like after a good cry. Another crisis averted, for now; another train saved from plunging off the tracks by Super Janice. The cops would clean up whatever collateral damage had been done. I could put away my cape and pretend to be a normal citizen again.

“What happened?” asked Bill when I got home. He gathered me in his arms for a gratefully accepted hug.

“She’s okay,” I assured him. “She got into a street fight, and she got banged up, but no broken bones. She was just feeling freaked out by it, like she wanted to get high, so she called me. Her sponsor.” I tried laughing. “Anyway, she’s on her way back uptown to the shelter, and I think we’re missing
Survivor
. What do you want for dinner?”

“Jeez, hon, I hope she’s all right.” Bill frowned and asked more questions, but I brushed it off and he let it go. We made a chef’s salad for dinner and flicked on the TV. And just as I was starting to enjoy the spectacle of a bunch of well-fed Americans ripping one another’s hair out for a hot dog, the phone rang. Sam.

“I’m here,” she said, the comforting din of the shelter in the background. “I’m okay. Thanks, Janice.”

The shelter put Sam on full house restriction for the next few days, much to my relief, until she could get to the halfway house. She railed against the injustice—“Someone tries to take my skateboard, and I get put on restriction?”—but at least none of the plans had been compromised, and she was still set to transfer to Brooklyn at the end of the month. And while she could call me every day, sometimes more than once, she was stuck indoors again, so I knew she’d be safe from bodily harm—imposing or receiving it.

“But we’re still gonna have a good-bye dinner on my last night,” she insisted over the phone. “I gotta leave for a doctor’s appointment that afternoon, and then I’m not going back until curfew. What are they gonna do to me, punish me? I’m leaving in the morning!”