Have You Found Her (39 page)

I want to ask you all kinds of questions, like how are you, and how’s it going, and what’s it like at DTP, and stuff like that, but I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to write back—I’m not even sure if you’ll be allowed to receive this letter, which is why I haven’t written before this—I didn’t want to send letters into The Void and wonder if you’d received them. But I saw Maria and Jodi the other week, and Maria said she was pretty sure you were allowed to get letters by now. So without further explanatory preamble, here it is: a letter.

As I said, I had dinner with Maria and Jodi the other week, which was great—you picked some awesome ladies to be in your life, and I’m glad they’re in my life too. Of course we talked about how much we miss you and love you, and how extraordinary you are and how grateful we are for your presence in our lives, and how concerned we are that you are getting the right kind of care. We also discussed our curiosity about you, and how much we are looking forward to the time when you’ll be able to tell us more specific stuff about your past. Mostly, we wished that you were there having dinner with us, but we look forward to a time when all of us will be able to get together and hang out.

Anyway, since I can’t ask you questions, though I am kind of dying to know how you are, I’ll tell you stuff about what’s going on here. Everybody’s doing well—all the cats and the humans are okay. Bill and I are really enjoying being married, not that it’s much different from living together, but it is—I don’t know, there’s just a really good feeling that comes from creating your own family (as you know), and in making those relationships “official.”

I haven’t gone back to the shelter yet, though I still plan to. I have a lot of great shelter memories from this time last year, especially because I was getting to know you. Last Christmas Eve, when I came to visit you in St. Victor’s and then went uptown and brought Chinese food, was one of the best Christmas Eves I’d ever had—I’m glad you and I got to spend part of it together, and wish we could see each other this holiday season as well.

You know, I miss you so much, babe. I think about you a lot. I am so grateful and happy that you’re alive, and that you’re fighting to stay that way. I worry that it’s hard and painful for you right now—I mean, of course it is, because life is hard and painful. I just hope you know that things can get a whole lot better than they are right now, and that I’m still here to try to help you make that happen. I’m always going to feel like you’re my kid, for better or for worse, that’s never going to change—I’ll share you with your other moms, but I’m not giving you up. I love you, Samantha. You’re just going to have to learn to deal with that.

Well, until you earn phone privileges or visits, I’ll keep writing, and if you are allowed to receive books or CDs, I’ll send some interesting stuff your way. I hope you’re hanging in there, and I hope I’ll hear from you soon. Until then, be good to yourself, and remember your family here in NYC. We can’t wait to see you again soon.

Janice

I felt better after I wrote the letter—just the fact that I’d been able to write it made me feel like a good person, as assuredly selfless and moral as when I was visiting her in the hospital every day. I imagined her receiving it and being so grateful that I was still on her side—maybe she’d been worrying that she lost me, that I was no longer her friend. Her eyes probably filled with tears when she realized how true a friend I still was.

I dropped the letter into the mailbox on my corner, the hinge groaning as the door snapped shut.
I love you, Samantha.
Then I walked away, lighter all over, at peace.

The next Sunday, we got up at five in the morning and rolled our suitcases to the curb for our second vacation in three months.

“Unconscionable,” I said to Bill in the taxi to the airport. “I still can’t believe we’re actually doing this.”

“Oh, I know,” he agreed. “It’s totally obscene.”

Which it was—educated liberals like us, going to Disney World, spending our money to fund more globo-corporate hegemony—we should have donated the cash to end genocide or breast cancer. “See, that’s why we needed Sam here. If she were here, this would all be morally defensible.”

Bill reached over and patted my hand exaggeratedly. “Well, she’ll always be here in our hearts. Did you take your Valium?”

I did, and I was pleasantly loopy by the time we pulled up to the check-in counter. “Hello,” I said warmly, presenting my e-ticket and passport. The woman behind the counter checked our documents and gave us our seat assignments.

“Is Samantha Dunleavy checking in with you as well?” she asked.

“No,” said Bill. “She’s not making it today.”

“She wasn’t feeling well,” I added, mugging at Bill.

“Good one,” he muttered as we walked away.

So there was an empty seat next to us, a Samantha-shaped absence on our flight to Florida. It should have been strange, taking this trip without her, when she and I had talked for months about how this day would go—
You’ll meet us at our place, and we’ll get a cab to the airport, and you can sit next to the window on the plane
—but it seemed natural to travel alone with Bill; it seemed right. I grabbed his hand, and he squeezed mine in return.

We collected our bags in Orlando and boarded the Disney Magical Express bus to the Disney Contemporary Hotel. “Space Mountain,” I said, starting to bounce in my seat. Just like Sam and I had planned. “We’re dumping the bags, and we’re going straight there. Then over to the Haunted Mansion. Then Mickey’s Philhar-magic show. I’ve never seen it, but the guidebook gives it four and a half stars. Then we’re going to want something to eat….”

From the minute Bill and I dropped off our bags at the hotel, we were in endorphin heaven: screaming on the thrill rides, gaping at the pageantry, stuffing our faces full of fried food. Maybe it was something they put in the air there—extra oxygen or laughing gas or something—or maybe it was the way everyone around us was smiling, the look of awe and wonder on the kids’ faces—but we immediately regressed to the age of seven; we were overwhelmed with exuberance and joy. The place was even better than I remembered from my last visit with my mom and Jake, and Bill was loving it, too.

“The guidebook says they do special stuff for honeymooners,” he noted our first night at the hotel. “We should get those buttons that say we’re newlyweds.”

“That’s kosher,” I reasoned. “We did just get married three months ago.”

So we got the buttons, and now every single park employee was smiling extra-wide for us, and saying, “Congratulations!” and letting us ride things twice without waiting in line. It made the whole experience feel even more like a giant victory lap.

In fact, I almost had to stop and remember to think about Sam. Bill and I would be running around, gawking and grinning, wolfing down ice cream between rides and attractions, and I’d realize,
We were supposed to be here with her
. But if I’d expected to miss her, I was wrong—all I could think while we were there was,
I am so glad Sam’s not here. I’m so glad it’s just me and Bill.
It never would have worked, I realized, the three-person arrangement; one of them would have always been the third wheel. I would have had to choose who to sit next to on every ride, and who would ride solo in the car behind, and what if she wanted to go to one part of the park and he wanted to go to another? Besides, she never would have made it through the week without pulling some kind of prank—trying to climb from balcony to balcony along the outside of the hotel, or setting off a fire alarm—and Disney doesn’t take kindly to pranks. I could imagine the whole trip gone awry, Bill and I sitting in an office in one of the famed underground tunnels beneath the park, trying to get Sam out of Mickey Prison.

No, I didn’t miss her. I wasn’t sad she couldn’t come. I even felt weird about how unsad I was. This trip was supposed to be poignant without her, tinged with melancholy—how was I supposed to come home and tell people we were overjoyed without her? A
good
person wouldn’t have been overjoyed, a good person would have been missing her, thinking of what could have been. But I was too busy laughing my ass off with Bill, racing across Tomorrowland to get on Space Mountain for the fifteenth time.

It didn’t hit me until our last night there, when we were shopping for souvenirs. Bill held up a T-shirt for his brother—“You think this’ll fit Kevin?”—as I browsed the racks, thinking guiltily,
I should get something for Sam
. I hadn’t mentioned Disney in my letter to her; I didn’t want to remind her of what she was missing, the trip we’d been planning all year. But she must have been watching the calendar, thinking as she’d been thinking for months,
A month until Disney; three weeks until Disney; they must be there right now
. I wondered if it would be crappier to get her something, to rub the vacation in her face, or to get her nothing at all.

I fingered a Grumpy T-shirt. No, they’d never let her have that at DTP; Grumpy represented negativism. Maybe Tigger was an acceptable role model for recovery. I grabbed a pair of Tigger boxer shorts, took them to the register. I imagined sending her a Christmas package with the boxer shorts, and maybe some books or CDs; I imagined her rueful smile as she put them on. I imagined the note that was probably waiting for me back home—
I’m doing well, I miss you, thanks for the letter.
I was glad I’d gotten her a souvenir.

We rode back to the airport the next morning hand in hand, five pounds fatter than when we arrived, a hundred times giddier. “That was unbelievable,” said Bill, and I agreed.

“We’ll have to do this every year. The
Annual
Samantha Dunleavy Memorial Disney Trip.”

Maybe one year she’d even get to come with us.

We got home to the usual—sniffing cats, a stack of mail. No reply from Sam, I noticed. Oh well. She probably wasn’t allowed to write back yet, or she was drafting a letter to me right now.

Or she’d crumpled up my letter and thrown it into the trash, unread.

We unpacked our suitcases. I put the boxer shorts for Sam in their bag on top of my dresser.
I’ll send them soon,
I thought. As soon as I heard from her.

“Bead Lady!”

I walked into the lounge of the Older Females Unit at the shelter that Wednesday, bead bag on my arm, and Ashley the counselor gave me a big wave from the hallway.

“Hey there!” I waved and grinned back at her. “How are you?”

“Good! How’ve you been? We haven’t seen you in…”

Four months
. It had been four months since I’d been to the shelter, since Sam first went into the hospital in the Bronx; two months since we’d uncovered the true source of her illness. I’d gone back and forth about volunteering: one day I’d swear to Bill that I was never going back—“I’ve got to move on from that place one of these days. It’s been twenty-one years, for crying out loud”—then the next day I’d tell him how much I missed it, missed the girls, didn’t want it to become something else Sam had taken from me. Then we got back from Disney World, and I don’t know why, but suddenly there was no question—I needed the place, and it needed me.

I called the volunteer coordinator and left a message: I was coming back. No answer, and no head of the unit to call—after ten months, they still hadn’t replaced Nadine. So I just showed up with my beads, waved to the guards at the desk—“Good to see you again!” “You too!”—and there I was.

“I know, it’s been a while,” I said. “I was doing some one-on-one mentoring.”

Ashley nodded understandingly. “Well, it’s great to see you. I bet the girls will be happy, too. Remember Ynnhoj, from last winter? She’s back, and she asked about you. She goes, ‘It’s Wednesday; where’s the Bead Lady?’”

“I’m right here,” I told Ashley, smiling. “I’m back.”

Chapter Seventeen

Family Day

         
C
hristmas again. A Salvation Army Santa clanged his bell on the corner where the redhead sat in the summer. No visit to Sam in St. Victor’s this year, though I did go up to the shelter and reprise last year’s Christmas Eve Chinese-food feast, celebrating another year of indoor living with a girl they called L’il Bit, a girl they called Stoney, and a girl whose parents had legally named her Bacardi.

Another merry Jewish Christmas with Bill and my folks; another happy-holiday visit with my brother, who was getting ready to graduate college and move in with his longtime girlfriend. Another bottle of champagne, to celebrate the coming of 2006. And another card to my mom—
Thinking of you, happy holidays, hope you’re well
. No reply.

The Tigger boxer shorts sat on my dresser, unsent. Sam hadn’t written, so neither had I. I traded calls with Maria and Jodi, exchanging warmest holiday wishes among our ersatz adopted family; they hadn’t heard anything from Sam, either.
Fishy,
I thought; Sam had promised to stay in touch and have her counselors give us updates. She should have been past the mandatory no-contact phase by now; she should have called one of us, or written.

I waited until a few days after the New Year and called DTP, where the receptionist offered to take a message for Sam’s counselor, Luwanda—“She’s in a staff meeting right now, but I’ll have her call you back.” Then I watched three days pass, stewing with growing incredulity as I realized that Luwanda really wasn’t calling me back. On the fourth day I called again; again Luwanda was “in a staff meeting.” Again she did not return the message.

“Maybe Luwanda’s busy,” suggested Maria when I called to report my findings. “Maybe I’ll try, too.”

Maybe
was not cutting it for me anymore. I’d lived with
maybe
for the past year—maybe Sam would make it to rehab, or maybe she would break a mirror; maybe we’d cancel our honeymoon; maybe she’d die. Maybe she wasn’t who she’d said she was from the first minute I met her. I was sick of maybe; I wanted some certainty.

“I’m going to try to find Sam’s parents,” I announced to Bill, calling him at work with the breaking decision. “I know Jodi and Maria want the truth to come from Sam, but it’s not going to, and I can’t stand not knowing anymore.”

“Great,” said Bill, unsurprised. I’d been threatening to find her parents on and off since October; I’d only become more adamant about it as I waited for Luwanda’s call. He and I were both curious; he’d just been waiting for my curiosity to outweigh my dread. “I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

What do you want to find?
Maria had asked me back at the Meeting of the Moms. I didn’t care anymore, as long as it was the truth.

I opened the folder where I kept all of Sam’s writings, letters, and cards, pulling out the pages of the autobiography she’d been working on last summer. Edward Liam Dunleavy, she called him, the father who’d abused her since birth. Born in 1958, son of Canadian missionaries; met and married Ruby Delosantos, a teenage hooker whose family had emigrated from Bolivia. I opened my laptop and looked up “private detective,” and found a page full of sites promising
background checks, all public records: criminal, assets, lawsuits
. I went to the first site listed and typed in “Edward Liam Dunleavy.”

There he was. And for forty dollars, I could read his file. I typed in my credit card number and six pages of results unspooled onto the screen.

Edward Liam Dunleavy, age forty-seven, lived in Glendale, Colorado; the website gave his address. He was married to Ruby Dunleavy, also forty-seven—not thirty-seven, as Sam had often told me—
You’re only one year younger than my mother
. Ed and Ruby owned their home, which was worth over a quarter of a million dollars—no bankruptcies, tax liens, or judgments. No criminal history for either of them—just one unspecified civil charge against Dad from April 2004. The report didn’t say anything about their kids. I hit the “print” button, and the pages started spitting from the printer next to me.

My pulse pounded until I could practically taste it in my mouth as I opened another browser window: Google Maps. I typed in the Glendale address, and there it was—a satellite picture of a suburban subdivision, the aerial view of a bunch of look-alike houses on a winding, nondescript street. I zoomed in once, twice, three times, until I was as close up as I could get, looking at the roof of the Dunleavy house like I was Santa Claus sussing out the chimney. It was a nice-sized house. It didn’t look like a meth cookery. And that was a swimming pool in the backyard. An
in-ground
swimming pool.

Goddamn.

I leaned back in my chair, smiling furiously at the screen.
Of course
. Here was the certainty I’d been looking for. Sam had grown up in a middle-class home with a pool and a piano, hardbound books on the shelves; she’d been driven to school in the SUV in the driveway. The ghettoes, the drug runs, the gangs, and the guns—they were all lies, just like the AIDS.

The search results listed a telephone number for the Dunleavys. I stared at it, willing myself to pick up the phone and call, unable to imagine what I’d say. “Hi there. I’m calling about your daughter, Samantha. I met her at a homeless shelter in New York; she said you used to sell her for drugs. Any comment?” I didn’t know if I wanted to reach out to the residents of this house, now blown up to nearly full screen on my monitor—sure, they might have had money and a home, but they might still be sadistic, abusive creeps. It must have taken
some
kind of fucked-up parents to produce their daughter.

It wasn’t enough information. It was the wrong information. I wanted to get information about Sam, what schools she went to, what hospitals she’d been in, but I couldn’t—according to the record-search sites, that was kept private by law. Here were Sam’s parents, but who was
she
?

She was someone who walked, talked, and acted like a hard-core street kid—the scars, the homemade tattoo, the same weathered clothes every day. The hunch, the quickness on the trigger, the instant rapport she had with other street people. She’d demonstrated her excellence at petty theft, breaking and entering, talking her way into and out of things; she had track marks and busted veins. The streetwisest of the street kids at the shelter gave her respect; they knew she was one of their own. I remembered her old roommate, St. Croix, telling me, “You know Samantha, she wouldn’t sleep in a bed for the first few weeks. She slept curled up in all her clothes on the floor.”

Can you really fake how you sleep?

Bill got home from work, and I dragged him straight to the computer. “Look,” I said, showing him the aerial view of their house. “Her parents’ house. With an
in-ground pool
.”

Bill leaned over and peered at the screen. “Not exactly a drug slum.” He straightened up and looked at my eager, angry face. “I’m sorry, babe.”

“Hah,” I huffed. I wasn’t sorry; I was vindicated. I’d solved even more of the mystery—Nancy Drew and the Case of the Homeless Girl Who Wasn’t. I
knew
she was full of shit, I
knew
it. This was why she hadn’t replied to my letter; this is why Luwanda the counselor wasn’t calling me back. Sam had to distance herself from me, before I caught on to who she really was, which she knew I would. “I’m just glad I found out. Knowledge is power, right?”

If only I knew what to do with all this power I had. I waited a few days for the shock and anger to subside, paging through Dr. Feldman’s book, thumbprints and dog-ears on every other page. I’d hoped that finding Sam’s parents would answer some questions for me; instead the questions multiplied. Maybe Sam was psychotic; maybe she was really beyond help—anybody who lied as thoroughly and consistently as she did had to be living outside reality. I was starting to think that faking illness was only part of her problem, just another symptom of some super-mega, never-before-seen, off-the-charts kind of craziness. Obviously, she lived inside a three-dimensional fiction that was as real to her as any schizophrenic’s delusion—there’s no way she could have sustained the ruse otherwise.

I fell into another funk. There really wasn’t going to be a happy ending here. Sam wasn’t going to leave DTP any better than she was when she arrived. She was up there right now, giving her counselors the same bullshit stories she’d fed me and Jodi and Maria. She wasn’t telling them about the subdivision in Glendale; she was feeding them jazz bars in Oklahoma City, street rapes in Boston, shivering in a doorway in Cheyenne, Wyoming, thinking,
I want to get sober and change my life
. And who even knew what she was telling them about me? I’d probably molested her, or tried to. She had to discredit me somehow. She knew me well enough to know that I was onto her by now, and she couldn’t risk my contacting DTP.

I called DTP yet again and asked for Luwanda. “She’s in a staff meeting,” said the receptionist. “I’ll have her get back to you.”

I rolled my eyes with disgust. No matter what time of day I called, the counselors were “in a staff meeting.” Even Sam knew how to switch up her lies, throw a little variety in there for verisimilitude’s sake. “Please do,” I said, testily reciting my name and number for the third time. “I have some important information for her about Sam’s health.”

But Luwanda did not call me back. Luwanda was too busy “in a staff meeting.” She was too busy sitting in session with Sam, listening to her tell stories about forced prostitution, comforting her through imaginary flashbacks. Luwanda was wasting her time, at the expense of other patients—at her own expense, no doubt. It looked like I was going to have to hire a blimp if I wanted to get her my “important information.”

Maria, meanwhile, had better luck. She called to fill me in.

“Hi, Janice, just wanted to let you know that I heard back from Luwanda. Sam gave her permission to give me a quick update, and she says she’s doing fine. She had some adjustment problems to start, but she’s been doing well for the past few weeks. No health issues, as far as she mentioned. I tried to press her for more information, but she wasn’t all that forthcoming, and I didn’t want to say anything that might jeopardize Sam’s spot there.”

“Oh.” I smiled tightly. So Sam was still playing favorites—Maria got a call from her counselor, but I didn’t—and it still somehow managed to irk me. “So, she’s basically not letting her counselors talk to us, like she promised.”

“Correct,” said Maria. “It’s a little frustrating. And I’ve kept writing to her every week, but I haven’t received any letters from her. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but…”

My smile got even tighter. “Well, I think I might have a clue.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” I paused for a second, gathered my nerve. Maria hadn’t asked to have her faith in Sam shattered again; that was me. “I looked up her family online. And I found them. And they’re not who she said they were.”

“Okay.” Maria’s voice dropped an octave. “Who are they?”

“They live in a quarter-million-dollar house, that they own, with an in-ground pool, in Glendale, Colorado. They’re both forty-seven—so Sam’s mom aged ten years overnight. No criminal records. They look like upstanding citizens. No information about their kids.”

“Wow.” There was a pause, and then her voice came back, harder and more peeved. “I wish I were more surprised.”

“Me too.”

“Have you contacted them?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you plan to?” Her words were clipped, terse.

“I don’t know.” I knew Maria was angry about the revelation—it was another bitter pill to swallow, after all the ones we’d already choked down—but it sounded more like she was mad at me. “Look, I know we were going to wait for Sam to tell us—”

“Well, like I said, I wish I was more surprised.” Maria exhaled wearily and tried to turn her tone back to upbeat. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I’d heard from Luwanda. Oh, and she mentioned family day, it’s the third weekend of February. So, you know, maybe Sam’s not cutting us off just yet.”

“I hope not,” I said. “I guess the call’s a good sign.”
Or,
I thought,
a defensive maneuver, to head us off before we got too close.

I promised to call Maria before doing anything else that would preclude Sam’s own spontaneous confession about her past; then I hung up, feeling alienated and shitty. Even in absentia, Sam was still managing to play me and Maria against each other, to keep us in competition instead of cooperation. Even in absentia, she was still running the show. I pictured her up in DTP, humming to herself as she went about her chores, those enormous eyes of hers narrowed with satisfaction.

I hadn’t cracked her after all.

Two weeks passed, and the Dunleavys’ phone number sat on the pad next to my laptop, mocking me in my own handwriting as I tried to ignore it. I didn’t need to call them, I told myself, because I’d already learned everything they would possibly tell me. They weren’t going to talk to a total stranger about their estranged daughter; it was a fool’s errand. Besides, if they were anything like the kid they’d produced, I didn’t want anything to do with them. They were probably psychos themselves. I was afraid that calling them might only expose me to further misery.