Have You Found Her (25 page)

“Great.” He swung the door open and held it for me. “Good thing you decided to do the grocery shopping,
wife
.”

We entered the printers, and the clerk showed us the programs Bill had designed, the picture we took on the night of our engagement on the front. “Don’t you look happy,” the woman said.

Didn’t we, though? We’d just handled a successful elopement. Bill looked at me and grinned, rakish.

“We are,” I said, my hand over his. “We really are.”

Chapter Ten

Make a Wish

         
I
was sitting with Sam on a thick log bridging the Bronx River, our feet dangling above the black water. Sam had led me here from her new place—a clean, decent-sized bedroom with wood floors and a window, a double bed and a TV, in a nondescript apartment carved into three Sheetrocked spaces, each locked from the outside with padlocks. There was a small, shared kitchen, and a shared bathroom with no toilet paper; the residents of the three spaces supplied their own. Sam showed me around the place like it was Trump Tower. She’d been particularly proud of the “balcony”—actually a fire escape, accessible from their window, which overlooked the busy street below. “This is better than the TV,” she bragged, inviting me to climb out and see for myself.

“It’s great,” I agreed. “I’m really happy for you guys.”

The log was the next stop on our tour of their new room and its environs. “This place is awesome,” Sam promised, as we descended a stone staircase by the Grand Concourse, shuffled down a steep, muddy embankment, and navigated through the muck to the banks of the river, where we clambered up the damp branch. And now here we were, sitting comfortably on the smooth, curved limb, surrounded by the dark green summer trees, the river hurrying excitedly underneath.

“This
is
awesome,” I marveled. “How did you find it?”

Sam’s mouth twisted into a suppressed smile—she’d impressed me yet again. She shrugged, like it was nothing. “Me and Valentina found it the other day. We were fencing with sticks right over there; it was so fun.”

“Ah.” I smiled, enjoying the idea.

We sat and watched the river, let our toes point, felt the slight mist from the stream tickle our legs. I had something to ask her, something Bill and I had been discussing, but I had to work my way up to it. “So. You saw the pulmonologist on Thursday?”

She gave me the shrug again, and I saw how bony her shoulder was getting, the weathered
PSALMS
22 tattoo sticking out from her sleeveless black shirt. “He says I’m doing all right. I just have to be careful about infections aggravating the asthma. As long as I take the prednisone and stuff, I should be all right for a while.”

For a while—that was the catch. I nodded, stared straight down at the water, as she was staring. Tried to see her peripherally, to look without looking.

“And what’d your…other doctor say?”

Her mouth twisted again, suppressing something that wasn’t a smile. “She says…I’m doing all right.”

Sam had been resisting this all week, since she left the halfway house; she wouldn’t talk about her AIDS. I’d hounded her about it, as gently as I could—“When are you seeing the doctors again? Do they want to retest your T cells? Do they think the antivirals are working?”—but she was evasive, gave the minimum amount of information, changed the subject—“I don’t really want to think about it too much. I just want to keep taking my meds, and focus on, like, life and stuff. I start training for that street canvassing next week. And I applied at this place that’s like a dog-walking service. They said I could probably start real soon.”

I didn’t want to push her now, but I had to know. “Any more news about the numbers?”

I sneaked a look at her, caught a little wince as it passed over her face, watched her slump forward a few degrees. “They haven’t really improved.”

“But they haven’t gotten worse,” I noted, optimistic. “Stable is okay. Maybe once the antivirals start working…”

She slumped a few degrees more. “They actually got a little bit worse,” she confessed.

I slumped too. “Huh. Well…”

The river raced underneath us; it was giving me vertigo. I wiggled backward on the log, steadied myself.

“So listen,” I said, clearing my throat, “since we’re talking about all this doctor stuff…”

I could feel her stealing a sidelong look at me, her elbows resting on her thighs, her head drooping. “Uh-huh.”

“I think it would be a good idea if you had someone to help you deal with all of this, you know?”

She frowned at her lap. “You mean, like a shrink? ’Cause I don’t wanna see a shrink, I’m seeing enough doctors, and the shrinks didn’t do shit for me when I was in the psych ward. And I mean, I got you, and Maria, and I called Jodi the other day, we’re gonna get together soon, I think—”

“Not like a shrink,” I interrupted. “Like a guardian. A legal guardian.”

I sneaked another look at her. Her arms were wrapped around her knees, and she gripped her own wrists tight. “Like…how do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m saying that you need somebody to look out for you right now. And I know, you’ve been taking care of yourself since you were twelve, and you’ve gotten this far, and you know nobody’s more impressed by that than me. I’m not saying you can’t take care of yourself, I’m just saying that you don’t have to anymore—you have me, and you also have Maria and Jodi, and I know all of us want to make sure that you’re getting all the right treatment, all the right assistance, all the right everything. You know?”

She nodded into her knees, the lower half of her face obscured. “I know.”

“So, what I’m saying is…I mean, we’ve known each other for close to a year now…” I stumbled on my words—why was this so hard? I’d just proposed to Bill last month; you’d have thought I’d be used to proposals by now. “I’m saying, why don’t I become your legal guardian?”

She was quiet. Which I couldn’t stand—she was supposed to say yes right away!—so I kept talking. “That way, if something were to ever happen to you, god forbid, I’d be there to help you deal with it. If you went back into the hospital again, or had any kind of emergency—like the room deposit—whatever you need. And, you know, even when you’re feeling well, it’s nice to have a guardian, right?”

She laughed, and her face came out of her lap, turned toward me, her eyes so clear and open. “Yeah, it is. I mean, knowing that I have you in my life, and Maria and Jodi, it makes such a big difference to me.”

“It makes a big difference to us, too.” I looked at her lovingly, wishing she were short enough and young enough to permit me to stroke her hair when she wasn’t lying in a hospital bed. “And listen, if you’d rather elect Maria to be your guardian, as long as there’s
someone
who can act on your behalf when you need them to, I totally understand.”

I totally understand,
I told myself.
Maria’s single, I have Bill at home; Sam might want someone who’s all her own.
And Maria was just as devoted to Sam as I was, if not more. Sam was certainly devoted to her—she’d once let it slip that Maria was the one she thought of like a mom, and I was like a cool older sister.
But I’m older!
I wanted to protest.
And besides, I met you first. You have to pick me. Pick me!

Sam stared straight ahead downriver, her chin on her knees. She didn’t say anything, and neither did I. It was a beautiful place to sit, hearing the soft
shush
of the water underneath us, watching the silver ropes of the stream over the rocks.

“You would really want to be my guardian?” she asked. Her voice was soft and incredulous, as sweetly disbelieving as a kid’s on Christmas morning.
Is this for me?

“Well,” I told her, bumping her with my shoulder. “What the hell, I’m stuck with you anyway. I might as well horn in on your family fortune.”

She bumped me back, openly smiling. “Right? Ha ha.”

Then she leaned back, and we sat, side by side, quiet for a moment. She was doing the math in her head; I watched her add it up. I was only a year younger than her real mom, the junkie who sold her for drugs.
Mom.
My heart got louder in my chest. I wasn’t ready to be anybody’s mom; I’d never planned to be. Bill and I had agreed long ago, we never wanted to have kids. But then, I’d never planned on meeting Sam.

She balanced her chin on her knee, affecting an underbite.
She looks good,
I thought. She was thin, but the circles under her eyes weren’t too bad, and her skin was tawny from the sun. She looked peaceful, and determined, like she was looking forward to the rest of her life.

“Can I think about it?” she asked.

“It’s a standing offer,” I said.

“Cool.”

Cool.
Okay. She needed to think about it. I was a little disappointed, but I shouldn’t have been surprised; I should have known the idea of
family,
of
legal,
of
guardian,
would be hard for her to swallow. She couldn’t hear those words without feeling the sting of the belt. And she knew why I was asking her now, when I’d never asked before; she knew I was thinking ahead to the time when she couldn’t manage alone. I didn’t want to face the fact that the day was coming; why should she?

I’d give her some time to think about it. She didn’t have to decide that very minute—in a way, she’d already decided. I was here, wasn’t I? Just like I told her I would be, all those months ago at St. Victor’s:
I’m going to be in your life from now on
.

I spread my hands on either side of me, leaned back, and felt the breeze on my face. Sam sat silently next to me, on the thick log over the deep water, looking down at the Bronx River, running away.

Late July, 2005. This is when Sam and I saw the redhead on my corner, when we were heading from my house to the bookstore at the north end of Union Square. This is when I took her to an open mike at a poetry club, but she decided she didn’t want to get up and read, so we just sat and listened. This is when I carted a bunch of Bill’s old housewares from his bachelor apartment in Queens up to Sam and Valentina’s place, and Sam used her new pots and pans to make us coconut curry shrimp. That’s when I met one of the other families sharing the apartment—a Mexican couple with two kids under the age of four. The couple didn’t look much older than Sam and Valentina.

Sam and I saw each other every three days or so, and I heard from her daily. She’d started a few shifts a week as a street canvasser, stopping people on the sidewalk to raise donations for impoverished kids. “’Scuse me, sir? Do you have a minute to help starving children?” Ironic; in a way—she was still panhandling for food.

She didn’t mention my offer to become her legal guardian, and neither did I. But something had been agreed upon between us, it seemed. She was dutiful about checking in with me, and she was way more forthcoming with the information from her doctors; she even offered me the name of her pulmonologist, the one who’d sounded the alarm in the first place. “But I’m switching doctors next week, to someone at the hospital nearby,” she said. “It’s a pain, going all the way to Brooklyn all the time.”

She still called with emergencies—she sprained her good wrist while skateboarding; thank god it didn’t need surgery. She was feeling hopeless and depressed—why did she decide to get sober at the exact moment when drugs would have come in so handy? She and Valentina drank a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream down by the banks of the river; it made her puke her guts out. I gave her a pass on it—
one
pass, because she was honest about it, and she said she hated the experience. “But if you do it again,” I warned, “you’re blowing the Disney World deal.”

All in all, though, I had to admit that Sam and Valentina had managed to surpass everyone’s expectations—they’d found a place to live, and they were maintaining it. Valentina worked as a messenger during the day, then in the evenings she put on her blouse and pumps and brushed out her hair and went to business school. Sam, too, was working; aside from the Baileys, she was seven months sober. Almost three weeks into their experiment in independent living, it was looking like a success.

And then, of course, another phone call came. Monday, August 1, noon. I was at my desk when my cell phone buzzed with a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”

“Hi, Janice, it’s Maria.” Her tone was friendly, but I could tell this wasn’t a social call. “Just wanted to let you know, Samantha’s been admitted to Mid-Bronx Hospital. They think she has meningitis, but they’re not sure if it’s bacterial or viral yet. I saw her for dinner yesterday, and she wasn’t feeling so hot; I tried to get her to go to the emergency room last night, but she wanted to give it until the morning to see if she felt better. But apparently she fainted on the way to work, and she managed to get to the nearest hospital, and they admitted her right away.”

“Oh, wow.” I was momentarily stunned, woozy. If it was bacterial meningitis, I knew, she could be dead within days. Bacterial meningitis can kill a healthy person who contracts it; without an immune system, she had no chance. Viral meningitis is less deadly, but for someone with AIDS, it’s still very bad news. “Do you know when they’ll know more?”

Maria was trying to sound calm and rational, despite the facts; I recognized this from my own attempts at the same. “Tomorrow, I think. In the meantime, you can see her, but you’ll have to wear a mask and gloves and everything. It may not be the best idea to visit. And I don’t know if she can handle calls right now—I just spoke to her, and she said her head is killing her.”