Have You Found Her (28 page)

Really?
Because I remembered the conversation so well; I even wrote it down in my notebook. “Huh,” I said, casual. “I must have gotten it mixed up.” I shrugged, like,
You know us potheads; we can never remember anything
.

“Yeah,” she said, still frowning. “’Cause last I heard, before I went to the shelter, I called a friend of hers who stayed in touch with her, and she said Eileen was still in a coma. She said they thought she was gonna be a vegetable all her life. Anyway, you ready to go?”

“Yep.” I smiled. “Ready when you are.”

We walked to the train together, the streetlights waking like stars in the darkening sky, and talked about the wedding. “Did your mom say whether she’s coming?” Sam wanted to know.

“Haven’t heard yet. But I’m going to send her a card for her birthday next week; I’ll remind her then. I don’t think she wants to come, to tell you the truth. I think it’s too hard for her to deal with.” I sighed. “But you’ll get to meet my old friend Adam; he’s your age; I told you about him before, right? He’s one of the only people I know who’s even remotely as smart as you are. I’ve known him since he was thirteen. We met back at this dot-com I used to work for. He’s brilliant—he used to be a hacker when he was a kid. He hacked the MTV veejay contest back in ’ninety-six. It was in all the papers.”

She narrowed her eyes and dug her hands deeper into her pockets, a look of discomfort on her face. I must have upset her, going on about Adam too much. “That’s cool,” she said.

We reached the subway, and Sam stopped before hugging me good-bye, turned her head to the side, and gave a few deep, raspy coughs. I frowned again.

“Sounds lousy,” I noted. The coughing had made her go pale for a second. I’d done it again—I’d worn her out, when I was supposed to be looking after her. I shouldn’t have let her walk me to the train. “You sure you’re all right?”

She shook her head. “Naw, I’m good. I’m just tired from work and everything. I’ll go home and lie down for a while.”

“Okay. Definitely rest up, though, and if you’re not feeling a hundred percent well, don’t go anywhere tomorrow. You’ve got to take it easy, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks, Janice. I’ll call you this week.”

“From your house,” I instructed. “Not the hospital.”

“Right.” She laughed. Then she coughed again, that ripping, wet cough. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

I hugged her gently, then climbed the stairs to the subway, watching from the elevated platform as she walked away down the littered sidewalk, her hands in her pockets and her head down, shrinking with every step.

August 21, 2005

Dear Mom,

Happy birthday! I hope it was a wonderful year for you and Jerry, and I hope the year to come will be happy and healthy as well. I got your message about the engagement—thank you so much for the congratulations—and I hope you got our invitation to the wedding. I know it’s a busy time of year for you and Jerry, since you’re opening the new store, so I will certainly understand if you’re not able to make it—I do hope you can come, but if not, the four of us can always plan to have lunch when things are a little quieter. In the meantime, I’m thinking of you with love, and hoping you’re very well.

Janice

I dropped my mother’s birthday card into the mailbox on the way to the subway, then rode the train uptown to pick up my altered dress. It was really happening, this wedding thing; I was actually getting married to Bill. Two years ago, if anyone had said the word
marriage,
in relation to me, I would have clutched my neck and made strangling noises. Now here I was, standing in front of a three-way mirror in a Fifth Avenue boutique, wearing a white dress and gold high heels and clutching a prop bouquet.

“You look
gorgeous,
” gushed the salesgirl, as she was contractually obliged to do. “Oh my god, it’s going to be
such
a special day.”

I smiled nervously at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t getting cold feet, but I was definitely getting sweaty palms. I knew I was making the right decision; there hadn’t been a moment since the engagement that I didn’t look over at Bill and think,
I am so lucky, and I am so smart. Marrying Bill is the best idea I ever had.
At the same time, I was getting a little frantic about the big day—it was coming so soon, and there was still so much to arrange. More than anything, I wanted our friends and family to have a good time, to share our great happiness; I wanted this to be a celebration for everyone. And if my mom wasn’t going to have a good time, I wanted to let her off the hook.

“Great,” I said, admiring myself for one last second. I barely recognized this woman in the mirror, wearing this elegant dress, her chin high, her gaze strong. I looked so grown-up. I didn’t even look like I was faking it. I
wasn’t
faking it. I was thirty-five years old, damn it; I had a partner and a career and friends and three cats, and an unofficially adopted daughter. “Great.”

I slipped out of the dress and back into my sneakers, accepted the garment bag carefully in both arms, and allowed the doorman to hail me a cab home so I wouldn’t get trampled on the subway with my pretty dress. I was halfway to my place when my phone rang:
Sam
.

My heart, as always, sped up.
What now?
“Hey there,” I answered.

“Hey!” She sounded fine, happy even. I relaxed. “How are you?”

“I’m good, how are you?”

“I’m good. But I don’t think I can make it to Coney with you and Bill this weekend, because Maria’s staying over. We’re gonna go to a Yankees game on Saturday, and then we’re going to church on Sunday.”

“Oh, cool!”
Wow,
I thought. A sleepover, and
church
. Maria was really winning the battle for Sam’s soul. Suddenly the dress bag felt heavy on my lap. “That sounds great. Maybe we can go to Coney next weekend instead, okay? And ask Valentina if she wants to come, too.”

“That’d be great, thanks, Janice.”

Bye.

I hung up, strangely unfulfilled. Here I’d been prepared for some fresh catastrophe, ready with my running shoes to go flying up to the Bronx, or Larchmont, or deepest Brooklyn, or wherever she needed me to go, and it turned out she didn’t need me after all.

So instead of going to Coney Island that Saturday, Bill and I went to my dad and stepmother’s house in New Jersey to finalize the wedding plans. My stepmother, Sylvia, the lithe and lovely woman my dad was lucky enough to marry when I was twelve, poured us some champagne, and we sat in the den with our flutes, poring over the folder Bill and I had been keeping, their shih tzu sneezing on our feet.

“I like the smaller tables,” suggested Sylvia, looking critically at the ballroom diagrams with her keen aesthetic eye. “They make for more mingling.”

I agreed. “And here’s the invite list, so you can see how many guests we’re expecting.”

Sylvia scanned the page I handed her. “Honey, is your mom coming?”

“Still no word,” Bill reported. “We’re thinking no.”

My father and Sylvia exchanged a look but tactfully declined to comment. “How about your brother?” asked my dad. “We haven’t seen him since he was a kid.”

“Oh, yeah, Jake’s totally coming. I can’t wait for you to see him, he’s like six foot three now. I guess he looks more like his dad than like our mom. And he’s got the most beautiful girlfriend.”

“Wonderful. I can’t wait to meet her.” My father smiled, extremely pleased. “And I’ll tell you who I really can’t wait to meet—Samantha.”

“Oh, yes,” said Sylvia. “We’ve heard so much about her.”

Time for Bill and I to exchange a look. I’d only recently broken the news about Sam’s diagnosis to them—
Hey, you know that homeless junkie I’ve been spending way too much time with? She’s also got AIDS!
—and they were being very cool about it, exhibiting true
sangfroid
. Still, I knew they were worried about me, for any number of good reasons. To wit: I’d already picked up an ear-and-throat virus from hanging out at the hospital so much.

“I can’t wait for you to meet her, too. Maybe you can talk speculative physics with her, Dad; god knows I can’t.”

My dad looked impressed. Sylvia shook her head. “She just sounds so extraordinary.”

“She is. She was telling me the other day—”

Bill cleared his throat. We didn’t have time for another ten-minute sermon on the miracle of Samantha; we were still discussing the logistics of our union. “So, I’m with you on the small tables,” he said, “but we want to make sure there are enough seats for everybody. What are the dimensions of the room, again?”

It
was
hard for anyone to get in a word that wasn’t about Sam. Even now that the crisis had abated, now that she was two weeks out of the hospital with no ill consequences, I was still jumpy at the sound of my phone, still spacing out when we were talking about the honeymoon, wondering how Sam’s health would be by then, and what we’d do if there was an emergency. But most of her calls that week were innocuous enough: she wasn’t working, and she was bored; she wanted to know what I wanted for my thirty-sixth birthday at the end of the month.

I wanted a piece of paper that said I was her guardian, that’s what I wanted. I wanted to be formally recognized as more than just a friend. I wanted to be able to talk to the doctors when she got sick, to say to them, “I’m her legal guardian.”

We talked about it some more when we met in Union Square one evening that week. “I only have an hour,” I’d warned her in advance. “I have to get a whole bunch of wedding stuff done; I’m really behind.”

“That’s cool. I’ll just be hanging out by the dog run. I’ll see you when you get here.”

And there she was, eyes gleaming as she watched the dogs playing, a scruffy black-and-white mutt barking joyfully at the discovery of a stick. We took a seat under a tree, and Sam started dissecting a fallen leaf along its veins.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, the only thing that freaks me out about the guardian thing is, what if the court wants to talk to my parents, or notify them or anything? I really don’t want them to know where I am. I don’t want any contact with them at all.”

Eesh
. “I understand.” I didn’t want any contact with them, either. But I wouldn’t back down from them in a court of law—hell, I’d relish the opportunity to indict them for what they’d done to their children. “I don’t think that’s an issue, since you’re over eighteen, but I’m not sure how it works. I’ve been waiting to hear from you before I called a lawyer to look into it.”

She nodded, picking at a scab on her knee, visible through the rip in her cargo pants. “I’ll think about it some more,” she promised.

“Okay. In the meantime, though, you could sign the health-care proxy.”

“Oh, yeah, I meant to do that. It slipped my mind.” She looked up from the fascinating scab. “I guess I’ve had a lot on my mind lately.”

Yeah, I guessed she had. No skateboard with her today, and her arms were getting bony again. I wondered if she had kicked last week’s rheumy cough. “How was your checkup the other day?”

Shrug. “It was okay. The numbers are low, but they’re stable. And I been feeling all right. I mean, I haven’t been working or anything….”

I started feeling for my wallet in my back pocket. “If you need anything—”

She held up her hand. “No, I’m good. Seriously, I don’t want to keep taking money from you, Janice. You’ve done so much for me already.”

I shook my head, peeved; we’d been over this a hundred times. “See, but that’s what a guardian is for. That’s what we do. We’re like parents are supposed to be; we look out for you, and we offer to help pay for stuff. You think my parents didn’t help me pay for stuff sometimes? I wouldn’t have gotten my apartment without my dad’s help; now I’m trying to help you.” I put my hands out in frustration. “Will you let me help you?”

She let her head hang, biting her lip, eyes obscured by her shaggy hair. I drew back, too late; I hadn’t realized how much I’d raised my voice while making my point.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to harangue you.”

“I know,” she said softly. “I just…I want to be able to take care of myself.”

Two tears fell from under her hair to the dirt below, and she pulled her knees into her chest. “Oh, babe.” I crawled to her side, put my arm around her back, felt the lumps of her vertebrae through her shirt. “I know.”

“Why,” she said, into her knees. “Why did this happen
now
? Just as everything was going so good. I got an apartment, a job, friends; I been sober; I got everything I worked so hard for. Don’t I deserve a chance at a good life?”

I rubbed her bony back in circles. “You do, Sam, you do. And you’re going to have one.”

She shook it off—
no
. I could spout all the wishful thinking I wanted; she had only a few months to live, and she knew it. There was no right thing to say in this situation, no helpful advice, no mentoring I could offer her to assuage the fact that she was going to die within the year, and she was powerless to stop it. I could try to be her guardian, but I couldn’t guard her from dying.

We wound up spending a few hours together, browsing the bookstores, watching the crowds. Any errands I needed to do could wait; right now, I had the chance to be with Sam. I tried to buy her some ice cream, but she wasn’t hungry. “My stomach’s been not so good today.”

“You better rest up for Saturday,” I fretted. “If you’re not feeling well, I don’t think we should go to Coney.”

“Oh, we’re
going
to Coney,” she insisted. “I never been on a roller-coaster before, and that’s one of the things I gotta do.”

Right
. On the list she must have made. Like the list she made before she went to rehab, of things she wanted to do before she left—
fly a kite, learn how to yo-yo
. Now it was things she wanted to do before she died.
Jesus
. I knew she shouldn’t exert herself, but if riding a roller-coaster meant taking a week off the end of her life, it would be worth it. “Okay,” I said, pretending to lecture her. “But I want to see a note from your doctor saying you’re okay to go.”

“I promise I won’t go if I’m not feeling good.” She held up her flat palm like she was on the witness stand. “I swear. Oh, but listen, Valentina can’t make it—Alita is in town from Miami with a bunch of the other girls; one of her clients flew them all up for this all-weekend trick on Long Island.”