Ask Me Why I Hurt (35 page)

“You are
so
dead when she finds out,” Jan said.

That night Amy rushed into the house. She had picked up my dry cleaning and had bags of groceries and take-out Mexican. She stopped short in the living room. By that time I had put some sort of cast on all the kids. Janie and Reed each held up a tiny cast on an arm proudly. Little Charlotte had a piece of cast over her knee. Amy’s eyes followed all over our casts. Charlotte couldn’t restrain herself. “April Fool’s!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

Amy’s eyes narrowed, and then she smiled with recognition and embarrassment. “Dang it,” she said.

Not long after, we again parked downtown, and Nicole appeared, surrounded by a group of kids. Lisa had been watching over her. I could tell she was worried. “She’s really pissing people off. I saw her tell a drug dealer the other day to get off her corner. She’s
been shouting at people to shut up.” Lisa’s face was badly sunburned, as if she had fallen asleep in the open.

“How about you, Lisa?” I asked. “Have you gone to HomeBase yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I’m fine by myself.” I was seeing two extremes. One kid couldn’t be helped because she was too crazy, while another wasn’t getting help because she thought she was too smart.

Nicole was muttering and cursing in the exam room. I looked at her chart. We had been seeing her for over two years and still knew nothing about her. For someone as mentally ill as she was, to survive on the streets for so long was amazing. But it was not a triumph. She had bald spots on her scalp where she had been pulling her own hair out by the clump. The rest hung in front of her eyes. Her heart-shaped face was hollowed. There was an ugly scratch on her chin. Wendy said she thought she was decompensating, the term used when someone with a psychiatric condition begins completely deteriorating. I knew that under the madness was a beautiful girl who had been severely damaged by childhood sexual abuse. But others would not see it the same way. They would see the proverbial crazy person who sat on the street corner, shouting at people who didn’t exist.

“Doctor?” A frightened little-girl voice came suddenly from under the curtain of hair.

“Becca. I’m glad to see you.”

“Oh, Doctor. I’m scared.”

“Scared? What scared you? How can I help?”

But the voice was mute again. Nicole stared at me through flat eyes. Becca was gone. She dug her hands through her hair and pulled out another clump of hair, and another, opening her fingers and letting the tangles of hair drop until the exam room floor was littered with them. I gently pulled down her hands, put them in her lap. I didn’t know what else to do.

The front of the van was crowded with waiting kids. There was one in the intake chair, being interviewed by a volunteer, and a
line down the steps. The volunteer looked up from the boy she was interviewing. The boy looked all of fourteen. As I crossed to the van steps, I could hear him saying in a monotone, depressed voice that he had been kicked out of his home. I called Amy, just to hear her voice, nothing else. From inside the exam room I could hear Nicole muttering and cursing. The noise and chaos suddenly got to me, and I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air.

We discovered a month later that Lisa had disappeared. One of the kids remarked that he had heard she had hooked up with a group of hippies passing through on their way to Mexico. Now there was no one to watch over Nicole. I began to see her less and less, only occasionally, randomly, like the day I spotted her downtown. She was rooting through a garbage can, her hair all over the place. She had found a pair of filthy baggy track shorts somewhere, and her legs were too pale and thin. I parked the van and went to her. She was sitting on the curb, eating a half muffin found in the trash. There was a new bald spot on the back of her head. It looked red and sore. “Nicole?” There was no answer. “Will you come with me?” Crumbs fell from her slack mouth. She didn’t answer. I didn’t think I existed to her. “Nicole?” She got up and wandered away. The tendons of her ankles stood out above scuffed shoes; she wore no socks. I called after her, but she kept walking. As I walked back to the van, I felt despair.

The next time was when a police officer brought her by the van. He had found her sleeping in an alley in nothing but panties and a shirt. With a sad look in his eyes he handed her gently over. We talked for a few moments about her; all the police in the area by now knew Nicole and tried to watch out for her. I got jeans from our supply closet in front, and Wendy helped her get changed. She had lost weight and was looking malnourished. The jeans hung off her hip bones.

And then, out of the blue, Nicole put her arms around Wendy’s blond hair, leaning against her slightly. Tentatively Wendy gave her a hug. Nicole hugged her back, still voiceless, her eyes over her shoulder like a dead doll.

It was a moment that froze in perfect clarity for me. Nicole’s
eyes looked into me. I knew someplace behind them there was a frightened girl, hiding someplace deep in her mind, coming to us for rescue.

Amy called one day while I was at work. Years had passed since her last miscarriage, but I jumped on the phone. I thought it was an emergency.

“We just got this phone call,” she said.

I started to cut her off. “Amy, I am really busy.”

“OK, then, Mr. Big Shot, I won’t tell you it was
People
magazine.”

“
People
magazine?” I echoed.

“Here, let me get some ice for that swollen head,” Jan said teasingly in the background.

“The reporter said to call him when you get a chance.”

He was a likable guy named Johnny Dodd, and what he wanted most was to hear what life was like for children on the streets. Soon he was flying into town. I had thought hard about what to show him. I wanted him to understand what life was really like for homeless kids. So I drove him up to Moeur Park to look at the hole that Mary had lived in. We went sliding down the shale and sand hills. He looked around at the desolate landscape. “You mean kids actually sleep out here? Yikes.”

The storm drain was still there, and we crouched, looking into the fetid pit. It was still lined with old clothes and rags. I shone a flashlight down. There were rat feces scattered over the torn blankets. They could have been the same blankets as when Mary slept there. Only now another homeless kid used them. I stopped for a moment, remembering Mary looking up at me during that storm, rain like tears on her cheeks.

Johnny looked shocked. “This is one hell of a horrible place. I can’t believe a girl actually lived in this hole.”

“Well, it’s true.”

He stood up. “Hey, do you smell something?”

I did. It was warm and foul and thick. I had a flash of memory from Katrina and from visiting the farm where the sheep had died. It was a strong smell of decay. I had caught a whiff before, but the breeze had shifted, and now it was much stronger. “A dead animal, maybe,” Johnny said. There was doubt in his voice. The hills stretched around us. I didn’t want to go on a nature hunt for the source of the smell. I was more in mind of calling the police instead.

“Hey, look at that,” Johnny said. He pointed at a hump of clothes in the bushes at the end of the wash. He walked over, and I followed, starting to argue.

“Let’s call the police,” I said.

Then he stopped short and recoiled. I came close enough to see why. A bloated wrist stuck out from under a dirty pale green sleeping bag. The wrist was swollen. Black insects were scrambling over a cupped palm and curled fingers. The sleeping bag covered most of the body and face. Only the wrist and a swath of reddish hair were visible lying on the hot gray rocks. While we watched, a lizard scampered over a nearby rock. The smell of death was overpowering.

“Nine-one-one,” I said into my phone.

Johnny and I sat for hours in the parking lot, answering questions from the police. It was certainly unusual to find a doctor and a reporter out among the encampments of the urban homeless. A morgue van pulled up, and after some time the body, zippered into a bag, was taken out.

“Did you recognize her?” the detective asked me.

“I didn’t see her face,” I answered. “It was covered with that sleeping bag. I only saw her hair. It looked red. I can’t say if she was a patient or not. I sure hope not.” My mind rattled with thoughts of all the kids I knew with straight reddish hair.

Finally Johnny and I were allowed to go. I was going to suggest dinner, but now I wasn’t sure. Johnny was quiet for a while, making notes in his little white notebook. Was everything that happened today going into
People
magazine?

“You know what I was thinking?” he asked, putting the notebook
in his pocket. “That body could have been the girl you told me about, the one who slept in the hole.”

A few months later Johnny’s article came out. There was no mention of the body, which I had learned had been identified as an older homeless woman who had died of heat exposure. I marveled at the article. So much in a few hundred words, I thought, and I remembered his saying it could have been Mary.

I was running late. The sun, already a yellow stone in the sky, shone over a world flashing from glittering metal from car roofs. I ate trail mix by the handful as I drove to the van.

My cell phone rang.

“Randy? It’s me, Jan.”

“I know, I know. I’m running late,” I said around a mouthful of trail mix.

“That’s not it.”

“Well, what is it then?” I shifted my hand on the wheel.

“It’s Nicole.”

“Yeah, what about Nicole?” I wasn’t paying attention. I was driving.

Jan’s voice was low, serious. “Randy, are you driving?”

“Yeah.” Something about her voice made me catch. Was there a problem with Nicole? Was she hurt? Or was it more serious?

“What is it, Jan?”

“She was found dead. This morning.”

“Dead?” The word caught in my throat.
Dead
. How could Nicole be dead? No, I thought.

“I’m sorry, Randy.”

The sun flashed over the metal roofs.

“How did she die?” I heard myself ask.

“They found her body in a parking lot. They aren’t sure yet, but they think it might have been a homicide.”

Hearing my pulse in my ears, I saw nothing until the next exit. I pulled off the freeway into a McDonald’s parking lot and saw the nose of my truck as I parked. My mind a blank, I watched people pull into the drive-through.
Dead
, I thought. I saw a woman ordering food. She had a full carload of kids, with a baby screaming in the back. Her blond hair was plastered to her cheek with sweat, and she looked harried. As I watched, an older boy leaned his cheek against his fist and looked out the window at me. I thought of Nicole. I thought of her being Becca, the child she always was for me. I looked at the red stone hills in the distance, and I imagined Nicole in a parking lot, dying. Who was Nicole, in those final minutes? Was she that little girl who would have been terrified and all alone? Was she the young brash man? Was she the dark, closed person? Would it make a difference for me to know?

I put my head in my hands, and I cried. The tears felt as if they had been pent up for years. I cried for Nicole and I cried for her scars and I cried for all the other kids I had seen who had been hurt and those who had died. I cried for the people of Katrina and the kids I wasn’t able to reach. I cried for our country and the fact that despite our greatness in so many ways, we had failed this child and many others. More than anything, I cried for the realization that this precious girl was gone and would never return. Our chances had run out.