Ask Me Why I Hurt (34 page)

We were halfway back to the dock a few days later when smoke began curling from under the hood of the van. The needle bounced into the red zone. I steered the smoking behemoth off the side of the road.

After a hefty tow charge, the mechanics called the next day to tell me the entire engine had to be replaced. It would cost twenty-six thousand dollars. The amount boggled me. We didn’t have the money. Every dime from grants and donors we had budgeted for salaries, supplies, and medications. We were already surviving month to month, always in a state of anxiety about what grants we might get. I fretted at home, on the phone, at our offices at HomeBase. For days the dead van stayed docked. I paced the halls at the hospital. At night I had anxiety dreams. I saw Nicole, alternately yelling at me to shut up and turning into Becca. She was lying on the street. Donald appeared. He was still by the Dumpster. The pastor, he told me, wasn’t real; he was just a silly dream. He needed me to come get him because he was going into the hospital and he had a hole in his head. Other kids appeared, crowding up with sores on their arms. I woke up, my heart racing. I wanted desperately to get the van going again. I could not imagine returning to a time when it was not running.

“I’m counting on getting that grant we applied for,” I told Jan.

“Then you won’t like the news,” she said, handing me a printed e-mail. “This just came in this morning. Our name is not on it.”

“Great,” I said, depressed.

“I refuse to give up,” Jan replied.

“Maybe someone will give us a ton of money and we can live without worrying for just a few months,” I said.

“Are you dreaming or being your usual Mr. Optimistic?” Jan replied.

“No, I’m trying to find a way to avoid more public speaking. You know I hate it. I always get all hot and sweaty, and my stutter still comes back.”

She patted my arm. “I think you do better than you know.”

I wanted to be out on the van, serving my patients. But I knew now just how crucial the speaking was—not just for getting money but also for educating people about the plight of homeless kids. So that afternoon I picked up the phone. I called agencies and groups and task forces. I asked to talk at conferences and galas and events and board meetings.

At home I made notes about what I wanted to say. I didn’t just talk about homeless issues. I talked about the life of teenagers today. They were living lives of unimaginable stress, I thought. The days when a kid with a high school diploma could get a good blue-collar job, enough to raise a family and buy a home, were long over. As doctors we were seeing in children dramatic increases in adult disorders, like chronic stomach pain and fibromyalgia. Depression and mental disorders were rising rapidly. For the average teenager, I wrote, life already seemed impossible. Take all that, and then try being a teenager on the streets.

That was the speech I soon gave at a statewide conference. I had just gotten back when I got a call from Irwin Redlener, from the Children’s Health Fund. “I just got off the phone with CNN,” he announced. “They’re starting a new segment called ‘Heroes,’ and it is about everyday people doing extraordinary things in their communities. Of course I suggested you. So don’t be surprised if you hear from them.”

Sure enough, within a week Allie Brown from CNN was on our van, the cameras trailing cords behind her. Anderson Cooper narrated the segment, and I teased Amy, knowing she had a huge crush on him. She rolled her eyes. When the show came on a few weeks later, Amy and I sat on the couch, ready with a bowl of popcorn, the kids spread across the carpet. The van appeared onscreen,
and Charlotte squealed before throwing an entire box of puzzle pieces in the air to celebrate. I leaned forward to tickle her.

“Daddy’s famous,” Reed said.

Amy corrected him. “Almost famous.” She gave me that sweet teasing smile. “We don’t want you getting stuck up.”

Within days the letters and donations flooded in. I was most touched by the gifts sent in from children. One little nine-year-old girl from across the country sent us a care package with important hot-weather supplies: sunscreen, caps, and bottles of water. Support came from big companies like FedEx and Metronics and Wells Fargo Bank and from various medical departments inside the Phoenix Children’s Hospital. In the last several years, they told me, they had never known we needed money. I realized I had been too shy to approach other medical departments and ask for funds; it would have felt oddly like bragging. The van was getting more recognition now, and I had won humanitarian awards. Hospital staff had taken to teasingly calling me their rock star. I’d been afraid that if I approached departments for money, they would think the awards had gone to my head or that I was ignoring the contributions of my team, but now I saw how my shyness had kept us from getting the funds we needed.

I was overjoyed. I had never known how terrible I would feel if I couldn’t work on the van; it was as if part of myself were missing. We had raised the money to fix the van. I was eager to get back to work. I wanted to see all the kids. As I showed up at the dock to greet Jan with a big bear hug, I thought about how much I had missed the kids, more than anything else, even the most difficult cases, like Nicole and Sugar.

“You’ll never believe who is staying here,” Kim said when I stopped by the UMOM clinic. “They said they used to visit you on the van.” My mind raced through the possibilities.

“I hate it when you say that,” I told her. “Was it that girl with the albino sister that I told you about?”

“I wish,” she said. Maybe, I hoped, Nizhoni and her sister would appear.

“It’s a surprise,” Kim said, opening the door to her little clinic. On the carpeted floor a toddler played, her parents sitting in the soft cushions. Sun poured through the windows. My eyes blinded by the sun outside, it took me a minute to take in the scene. The baby had soft, glossy brown hair and a pair of wide green cat eyes.

“Isn’t that funny?” the mom asked, as I walked in. “She has eyes like her dad.”

The parents on the cushions rose to greet me. The boy held out his hand. I recognized him immediately, the fifteen-year-old who had agreed to be the father of the unborn child conceived by rape. The girl was standing next to him, glowing and happy.

“She does have my eyes anyhow,” he said. He told me how he was working in the catering business and the girl was taking her general equivalency exam.

“Where were you staying before?” I asked.

“Well, we slept for a while on the streets,” the girl said. “Once we were in the hospital having the baby a social worker there called UMOM. We were lucky to get in. Darlene said as soon as we got the room, she had like ten other families apply.”

“How is the baby?” I asked, and she handed her to me.

“See for yourself. Little fatty.” I held the baby in my arms. She blew a big spit bubble and looked with delight at her own trick. I could tell from her skin tone and her clean, sweet breath that she was healthy. I handed her to the young man.

“A baby is always a good thing,” he said. He took her with practiced ease. She stuck her fat paw in his mouth deliberately, and he laughed. “Little turkey,” he said.

The girl took me aside. “Dr. Randy? You remember how you said I could always ask for help?” She acted embarrassed. “I don’t know why, it’s like I keep thinking about it. You know, what happened: the rape. It’s weird, now that I have a place to stay. But
I keep waking up at night. I can’t sleep.” She hesitated. “I keep having bad dreams.”

“That doesn’t sound weird at all to me.” I remembered how Jan had cautioned me this was what often happened with rape victims. I wrote down the name and number of a sexual assault counseling center. “This is a counselor who won’t charge you. Tell her I sent you. And please, do go. It’s important.” As I left the young couple and their beautiful baby, I prayed that she would see the counselor. She would need help for the effects of the rape, and the two of them would need all the help they could get if they were going to be successful parents.

Outside, the sun was still bright. I smelled food cooking. A group of residents had set up old barbecues in the parking lot, and the volunteers from the RV community had joined them. Children darted here and there. “Dr. Randy, join us!” It was LaShondra and her daughter, Chantel, between her dungarees. The little girl was wearing a bright pink dress, pink shoes, and a pair of outrageous sunglasses. She gave me a huge grin as I came closer, showing even white teeth and a set of dimples.

“I really shouldn’t,” I said, and then spied what was cooking. “Hey, are those brats?”

LaShondra laughed and got me a plate. “Here, load up. There’s potato salad too and watch out for that salsa.” She watched me pile food on my plate. I thought she was hiding a smile.

“Dr. Randy needs sideboards on that plate,” someone said behind me, sounding mischievous.

“Dr. Randy is getting sideboards on his tummy,” I said.

I
t was April Fool’s Day 2008, and outside it was sheeting rain, the kind of downpour that flooded the streets and made a distant angry roaring down the dusty washes. We spent the day parked outside a family shelter. It had been an incredibly busy day, and even with Wendy and Jan with me, we were still scrambling.

More than a dozen patients showed up all at once. Three of them had to be sent directly to the hospital for serious issues. One was a pregnant fourteen-year-old with chlamydia. She had gotten pregnant, she said, from her uncle. I made the mandated phone call to the authorities, and the social worker who arrived, dashing through the rain, accompanied the girl to the hospital. She called me later. The girl had been taken into foster care, and the police had arrested her uncle for rape. Six years before, this would have thrown me for a loop. Now I just registered it with sadness.

The next boy was a long-term junkie. “I’ve been using since I was thirteen,” he said. He was thin, with tattoos wreathing his arms, but he didn’t look much like a junkie. He had friendly, narrow black eyes and an easy, self-effacing grin. He brushed his black hair out of the way with a sharp gesture.

“What do you use?” I asked.

“Black tar heroin,” he said. “I like to boil it with a little coke. Then I shoot it. My arms are still pretty good, even though I’ve been using for six years.” He held his ropy arms out. I saw the needle marks. They looked like dark chicken pox scars. Some of his veins had collapsed.

“It will kill you,” I said.

“I know that. My dad died from an overdose. My whole family is junkies.”

I tried to imagine. I pictured a family in a run-down apartment, the carpet stained and filthy, the windows covered with old sheets. I could see the apartment because I had been in many just like it. What I could not picture was a junkie father doing heroin with his thirteen-year-old son.

The kids were coming in soaked and coughing. A huge puddle grew outside the door. The steps malfunctioned, so I had to go out to fix them; I stepped out into a rain that turned my hair instantly into a dripping pelt. I tried to jump over the puddle and landed in three inches of water. Defeated, I went back in with my shoes drenched and my shoulders soaked. Rain ran down the back of my neck.

Along with the kids arriving in a steady flow, the health mobile phone also wouldn’t stop ringing. Jan must have answered twenty-five calls in two hours. Many were from people desperate for help. But somehow, despite the organized chaos, we all were in a high good humor. When the van suddenly cleared for a few minutes, Jan had us in stitches making jokes.

“Let’s play an April Fool’s joke on Amy,” Jan said, her eyes lighting up.

“Perfect!” I said.

I gave it a moment’s thought. For Amy the joke had to be really stupid. I reached for my phone. I knew if I called her in the middle of her workday, she would not pick up. I was free to leave a voice mail. “Hi, honey? This is your dear husband,” I said. Jan stifled giggles in the background. “I don’t want you to worry, so I’m leaving a message. I just tripped coming out of the van. I think I hurt my arm. I don’t know what to do.”

Jan snickered. “The doctor doesn’t know what to do.”

Over the next few hours the joke escalated. I kept calling Amy back, telling her that my injury was looking worse and worse, that I had probably broken my arm.

“Help me cast it,” I said at one point after getting off the phone. Jan was doubling over. A nurse we had for the day leaned against the dashboard, laughing. Some of the stress of volunteering on the van was going out of her face. I hoped she was beginning to see how necessary humor was in this work. Without it we would sail right over the edge into madness.

I made my voice as sad and plaintive as possible for the next message. “Amy? It’s me. You’ll have to do the dishes. And take out the trash. I’m sorry. But don’t hurry home. I’ll probably get there first.” A few minutes later I called again. “Honey? It would be great if you picked up dinner. How about Mexican? That sounds really good. Extra sour cream for me. And we need groceries. Can you get my dry cleaning too?”