Have You Found Her (29 page)

“Oh.” I frowned again. So instead of going to Coney Island with us, Valentina would be going with her trans family to a two-day trick in the suburbs. She wasn’t supposed to be tricking anymore—she was supposed to be going to school, doing her homework, fencing with sticks by the Bronx River. “Well, I’m sorry she can’t make it.”

“Me too,” said Sam. “But it’s still going to be
awesome
.”

Over the next few days, I monitored both Sam’s health and the weather anxiously, but Sam stayed hearty enough, and Saturday dawned with a golden sun, beaming bright but not too hot through a few pudgy clouds. Bill and I woke up, ran, showered, and tossed down some breakfast just as Sam rang the bell from downstairs. “Be right down,” I called, strapping my fanny pack around my waist.

In the elevator, I rifled through the pack—water, alcohol wipes, hand sanitizer, Band-Aids, Tylenol, tissues. A mini-pharmacy, in case Sam needed some kind of treatment during the day. And germ prevention—she had to be wary of viruses, infection, all that. All I needed was a bottle of Lysol hooked onto my belt like a firearm.

Sam was standing in the lobby, grinning from ear to ear. Thin, maybe, but full of energy, practically bouncing on her heels. “Hey there,” she hailed us. “Hey, Bill.”

“Hey, Sam.” There was a second of awkward foot shifting between them—how should they greet each other? Sam didn’t accept social kisses—she was more of a hand slapper. She and Bill settled on a firm shake, and we started moving toward the door, down the block, to the subway.

Again, conversation was easy between them. Bill and Sam shared an interest in forensics and the science of death, so we spent most of the train ride grossing out the riders around us, talking about the infamous “body farm,” where scientists study decomposing humans under varied conditions. “You know what would be a cool job,” said Sam, “is the person who studies the bugs that feed on dead people. ’Cause they can tell how long you’ve been dead by how fat the maggots are.”

They laughed and drew diagrams in the air, now moving on to the subject of victim disposal and the perfect murder. “Cruise ship,” I volunteered. “Right over the side. They never recover the bodies out there.”

“Remind me never to take a cruise with you,” said Bill.

“We’re taking a plane to Disney,” Sam asked with mock concern, “right?”

So it went all day long—the chatter, the perfect murder scenarios, the jokes. We went straight from the subway to Nathan’s Famous, and I claimed a table for the three of us, watching as they stood in line, gesturing and smiling.
Look at Bill,
I thought;
look at how fatherly he can be
. And not in a patronizing, heavy-handed way; he was just a natural—elbowing her to point out one of the freak-show performers, blocking a path for her through the crowd as they exited the line. They brought over three cardboard trays of hot dogs, fried shrimp, and French fries. “Gotta get a good, solid base of greasy food under you for the day,” said Bill.

I kept an eye on Sam while she ate—
Good, a whole hot dog, and a bunch of fries.
So her appetite was okay, at least for today. She wiped ketchup from the side of her cheek and belched loudly, content. “So what’s first?”

We took a digestive walk down the pier to start; a group of sun-bronzed men in open shirts played instruments at the far end, singing and rapping sticks together, using an overturned bucket as a drum. Seagulls cawed overhead, children shrieked in the surf below, and the breeze was briny and damp against my cheek. People fished from the sides of the pier using poles, or small wire cages full of raw chicken. “Look,” said Bill, pointing. “That guy’s using a bucket of KFC to catch a sardine.”

Then it was time to get serious. “Let’s start with the International Speedway,” I suggested. We hastened to the track and threw ourselves into consecutive race cars, decorated with the flags of various countries. Sam was Germany, Bill was Italy, and I was the United States. “I’m going to kick your fascist
asses,
” I promised.

But the two of them were just as determined and lead-footed as me, and in the end we were all thwarted by the kid driving for Brazil. Undaunted, we moved on to the Polar Express, one of those rides that whips you around a circular track until the centrifugal force pushes you practically into your seat mate’s lap, tossing you in the air and catching you with each revolution. This version featured a mural of hip-hop polar bears spinning records and driving Beemers, with the disembodied heads of Biggie and Tupac floating in between; it also featured a live deejay playing ear-blasting Beyoncé and exhorting everybody to “say ho! (
Ho!
) Say ho ho ho! (
Ho ho ho!
) Say ho ho ho ho! (
Ho ho ho ho!
) Now screeeeeeeam!”

“Aaaaaahhhhh!”

After the Polar Express, it was the Wonder Wheel, the Break Dancer, the Top Spin, and the Zipper, which scared me so badly my shirt was drenched in pungent sweat by the end, though I laughed my ass off, between screams. The Zipper bore a sign advising against the following people riding: pregnant women, people with heart conditions, people with a history of seizures….

I pointed it out to Sam, and she scoffed. “I haven’t had seizures in weeks!”

Then it was time for ice cream and candy. We stopped at an arcade for a few games of Skee-Ball, and Sam started in on a giant blue jawbreaker the size of a small child’s fist. It stained the entire lower half of her face blue.

“Okay,” said Bill, serious. “Enough screwing around. It’s time for the Cyclone.”

Yeah. Time for me to stand and watch them go on the Cyclone from across the street. Just the previous summer, Bill had talked me into trying the rickety old wooden coaster, and I’d spent the entire three-minute ride cursing his name and threatening his life, in between weeping in terror. “I’ll be waving to you from over here,” I said.

I watched Sam and Bill go through the turnstile, waited a few minutes while they stood on line, then saw their car start to rise—
chik-chik-chik
—up the first hill. They turned and waved. I waved back.

Then the car stopped. I knew for a fact that it was not supposed to stop there, halfway up the first hill. Everybody in the car turned around, started craning their heads. Bill leaned over and gave me an exaggerated shrug. I gave an exaggerated shrug back.

A mechanic in overalls started to climb the tracks.
Oh my god.
They were stuck. The ride was malfunctioning. This was going to be a disaster, I was going to see it in the
Post
the next day,
KILLER CYCLONE
!
CONEY COASTER KILLS TWENTY-SIX ON OTHERWISE IDYLLIC DAY
. I shaded my eyes, sweating, watching the mechanic kick the tires of the car. I wondered if I should take a picture with my cell phone. It could be the last picture of the two of them, ever.

Just then the car started to move, and everybody cheered. Sam and Bill waved again as they resumed the climb up the hill.
Chik-chik…“Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
I kept my eyes on them, their arms up in the air as the car screeched and jostled along its track, whipping over the camelback humps, ending in a pneumatic hiss. A glut of riders emerged from the exit, but Sam and Bill were not to be seen. Until the car started up again, and there they were, this time in the very first seat.

I had to wipe away tears, watching them together, hearing their yelps of surprise, seeing their grins flapping in the wind as they tore around the track. I managed to get it together by the time they came through the turnstile again, Sam’s eyes the size of saucers.

“That was AWESOME!” she confirmed. “I LOVE roller-coasters!”

The shadows were getting longer as we walked along the boardwalk, taking in the karaoke stand and the guys with giant snakes around their necks and the Shoot the Freak booth. Bill let out a yawn, and I saw Sam stifling the same.

“It’s getting late,” I said regretfully. “We should probably head home soon. You’ve got a long ride back to the Bronx.”

I expected Sam to quibble, but she agreed right away. “Okay.”

We made our way to the subway, ears still ringing with the swinging sensation of the Zipper, the Break Dancer, the Polar Express. My fanny pack bulged with the prizes we’d won at Skee-Ball—miniature Slinkys, Magic 8-Ball key chains, and Day-Glo tubs of squishy “moon goo.” I smelled like French fries and sea brine.

Bill took my hand and smiled at me, sidelong.
I love you,
he mouthed.

I love you, too.

“This was one of my best days ever,” said Sam, her teeth faintly blue in her smile. “I’m never going to forget today.”

Chapter Twelve

Unlucky

August 29, 2005

Dear Janice,

Happy Birthday! I was very happy to get the birthday card and photos that you sent, and I’m glad you understand how busy Jerry and I are these days—we’re planning to open our new store on the day of your wedding! I wish the timing were different, but I am afraid we will have to miss your big day. But I’m delighted that you’ve found someone to love and be happy with, which is what you deserve. We will be thinking of you, and send love to you and Bill!

Love,

Mom

         
I
reread the card from my mother, closed it, and put it in the out-box on my desk. I’d figured as much. I was relieved, really; I didn’t want to spend the whole wedding worrying about whether my mom felt awkward around my dad and Sylvia, whether she was having an okay time. I felt protective of her. But part of me had hoped maybe she’d come, just for a little while, just long enough that I could get a picture of the two of us, my mom and me, on my wedding day.

Well, my dad and Sylvia would be there, and my brother, Jake. So would all my honorary aunts and uncles; my stepsister, Satia, from Georgia; Bill’s family; and all of our friends—Edward from the museum, Jay the volunteer, Adam the ex-hacker—friends and colleagues from high school, college, and old jobs; folks from North Carolina, Los Angeles, Oregon. And, of course, Valentina and Sam.

Only three weeks to go.

But first, I had to celebrate turning thirty-six. Bill took me out for dinner that night, squiring me down the block on his tweed-jacketed arm to the cab he hailed. I wore the same dress I wore the night we got engaged, just ten weeks earlier, and the same candlelit glow, as he held my hand and I hooked his leg with mine under the table.

“Happy birthday,” toasted Bill. “To the future Mrs. William K. Scurry, Jr.”

I pretended to choke on my drink. He laughed and amended himself. “To the future Ms. Janice Erlbaum. Happy birthday, Shmoo.”

We clinked, kissed, and sipped, our gold rings gleaming in the candlelight.

I clung to his arm as we walked toward home, done in again by two glasses of wine and an extravagant meal. The doorman stopped us on our way through the lobby. “Got something for you.” He handed me a small gift bag, an envelope with Sam’s handwriting on it sticking out of the top.

I opened the card in the elevator.

Dear Janice,

Happy Birthday! You’re such a great person, and I’m really grateful for all that you’ve done for me. I hope you’re having fun—remember to take time to take care of
yourself
today. Have a great birthday, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Sam

Inside the bag was a vanilla-scented candle. “Look at her,” said Bill, kvelling. “So thoughtful.”

My eyes filled, mascara threatening to run from the corners. She wanted me to take care of myself. What a sensitive and loving girl she was; how lucky I was to have found her. I’d have to call her in the morning, thank her for the gift, maybe see if she wanted to meet me in the park after work and browse the bookstore. “She is.”

And yet I didn’t call her the next day—I got up, ran, and sat down at my desk, where a pile of overdue projects sat steaming and attracting flies. I meant to call her at lunch, but I called my dad first, and we wound up talking for a while; then my friend Emilie came by after work and we split a bottle of wine in celebration of my aging. By the time she left and Bill came home, I was all giddy and sloppy and laughing excessively, and we picked at leftovers from the fridge in front of the TV until I fell asleep, my head in his lap.

But I meant to call Sam—I kept thinking of her, as I always did, when something reminded me of her lopsided smile, her loping stride, the way she’d turned her face upward to the sun last weekend at Coney Island, closing her eyes and basking.
I’ll call her after I finish this one thing,
I kept thinking.
After I scoop the cat litter. After dinner. After this show.
And then the day ran away from me again, and I still hadn’t called.

I was at my desk on the morning of September 2, alternately working and checking the news, which was sickening. The entire city of New Orleans was drowning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; stadiums full of people suffered without water, food, or care; people were dying in attics, on roofs, on the streets, in hospitals, and nobody was helping them. It was a codependent’s nightmare.

My cell phone buzzed:
Maria
. I braced myself and answered. “Hey there.”

“Hi there!” She sounded like she was walking somewhere in a hurry. “Guess why I’m calling.”

Great, another tragedy
. I should have called Sam; I should have been suspicious that she hadn’t called me. “She’s in the hospital again,” I said.

“Yep. Same one as last time. She just called me. She was running a fever, so she went to the ER, and they admitted her right away. Apparently, she almost hit 104.”

“Ay yi yi.” I put my head in my hand. “So what’s the drill? You’re on your way there now?”

“Yep. I’ll call you when I know more.”

I looked at the calendar over my desk, already blocking out the next week of evenings to go spend at Sam’s bedside. “Thanks, Maria. I guess I’ll talk to you soon.”

And often,
I predicted, closing the phone.

Sure enough, I’d heard from Maria twice more by the time I got on the subway the next afternoon, armed with my cardigan and my books and best wishes from Bill. And I called Jodi on my way uptown; we hadn’t spoken in weeks. Sam had told me she’d visited Jodi’s recently, played Xbox with her son, Evan; they were thinking they might want to join us at Disney World, if Jodi could get the time off from work.

“Just wanted to let you know,” I told Jodi’s voice mail, “Sam’s back in the hospital. Same one as last time. She had a high fever, but she’s stable now. I’ll give you a call when I know more.”

The familiar walk to the hospital; the same brightly lit liquor stores, fast-food joints, and unisex salons; the same old drunk slumped over the mailbox on the same old corner. The guard at the hospital entrance nodded at me—no need to sign in; he recognized me from last month. Same elevators opening onto the same mural—planets, comets, stars.

Sam, attached to the same battery of machines, her mop of hair damp with sweat. “Hey,” I said, coming around her bed to the visitor’s chair, studying her face. Pale, very pale, with bruise-colored circles under her eyes. “How’re you doing?”

“Not so good.” She spoke with effort; I could hear phlegm in her lungs. “Dr. F. just stopped by a few minutes ago. I told her you were coming, but she had to go.”

Dr. F. was the AIDS specialist, the one Sam had been seeing on her last visit here, the one in charge of the antivirals. She had a complicated last name, Eastern European or something, so Sam called her Dr. F. I’d missed meeting her the last time around, but I was looking forward to tracking her down as soon as I could. “What’d she say?”

“Dunno. She said it looks like MAC, but they’re not sure yet. They gotta do some more tests.”

“What’s MAC?”

Sam indicated the flat-screened monitor on the wall. She’d looked it up on the hospital’s kid-safe intranet. I took the wireless keyboard off the nightstand, moved the cursor to activate the darkened screen, and the page bloomed into view. MAC, it said on the screen, in cheerful purple letters accented with cartoon flowers. “(Mycobacterium avium complex): A group of germs found in food, water, soil, or air that affects people who are living with AIDS.”

“Is that all it says?” No prognosis? No suggested course of treatment? I determined to look it up myself when I got home, get the unflowered version for adults.

Sam’s eyes looked cloudy, lost. “Dr. F. says it’s like an infection you get when your T cells get real low. They’re giving me these.” She indicated the bag of antibiotics with a tired nod. “Painkillers, too.”

“Good.”

“Well, not good…”
Right
. Because she didn’t want to relapse upon leaving the hospital, the way she had in the past.

“Don’t worry about that now,” I told her. If she made it out of the hospital this time, I’d buy her as much heroin as she wanted.

She was exhausted, her heavy lids closing, but she didn’t want to sleep while I was there. “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me about Disney again.”

I smiled. Finally, something I was qualified to do to help. I could tell stories all day and all night; I could be Scheherazade, keep her alive just by drawing out the plot. “Well, it’s going to be great. Except you and Bill are going to have to put up with me on the plane ride down there—I hate flying. I get so scared. Remember how much I screamed on the Zipper?”

She nodded, barely, and a faint smile crossed her face. “You were screaming so loud.”

“That’s how loud I feel like screaming whenever I’m on a plane. The whole way down to Florida. I’d be like,
‘Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!’
”

“Except…except they’d throw you off. Out the window.”

“Yeah, they’d make me go sit on the wing.”

Her head drooped, and I fell silent for a minute. “Tell me more,” she murmured.

“Well, so we’ll get to the airport in Orlando, and we’ll take the special Disney bus to the hotel, and we’ll put our bags in the rooms, and then we’ll get right on the monorail, which is like a really clean, quiet, above-ground subway, and we’ll take it to the Magic Kingdom. And we’ll go straight to Space Mountain—I’ll be screaming my head off on that one, too, but in a good way—and we’ll ride it as many times as we want. And when we’re done with that…”

Sam’s mouth had fallen open a little bit, and her eyes were fully closed, a slight buzzing sound coming from her nose as she fell completely asleep.

And when we’re done with that, Sam, we’ll hop onto the back of a unicorn and ride it all the way back to fairyland
. I wanted to believe it so badly, the story about Janice and Sam and Bill in Disney World, running around and laughing like we did at Coney Island, just a week earlier. It was the only story I wanted to tell. But for now, all I could do was sit and watch the orange line of her heart monitor, rising and falling like an amusement park ride.

I rode the train uptown the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. I sat by her bedside and watched her sweat, writhe, vomit bloody bile into a kidney-shaped trough. Watched her sleep, watched the heart-rate monitor, the breathing monitor, both of them so slow. When she was awake, she was in pain, she was afraid. She held my hand and rasped to me, “I don’t want to do this anymore, Janice. I’m scared.”

I didn’t want her to have to do it anymore. “I know,” I told her. “I’m so sorry, babe. I’m right here.”

Once again, everything else fell off my calendar—I sent e-mail after e-mail canceling, apologizing, rescheduling.
Of course,
said my friends,
you have to be there for Sam
. Fortunately, most of the wedding plans were already set; there were only a few last details to take care of over the next two weeks. The week after that, we’d be leaving on our honeymoon.

If
we’d be leaving on our honeymoon. I didn’t want to bring it up with Bill, but I was worried that when the time came, Sam might be at the very end of her life, in which case I couldn’t possibly go away. I had to be there for her. I was supposed to be her guardian. I’d promised her all those months ago:
I’m going to be in your life from now on
. Now was not the time to renege. I couldn’t flake out on my dying adoptive daughter, not even for an afternoon. I couldn’t tell her I was busy, or I had to meet my stepmother at the florist to pick out flowers. And when I was desperate to go home and get high and get away from the stinking chill of the recycled hospital air, and she reached out her fevered hand and said,
Please stay, just a little longer,
I had to stay.

Bill watched me fidget through dinner at night, watched me smoke joint after joint on the sofa, waiting for an unwanted call from a nurse, or from Maria—
Come quick, there’s an emergency
. He knew what I was thinking, especially after I hinted around to him about it one night.

“I don’t know if I feel great about leaving Sam right now,” I ventured.

“Well,” he said, his top lip stiff as stone, “you don’t have to leave her right now. You have to leave her in three weeks.”

I didn’t mention it again. It would be a terrible precedent, I knew, to start my marriage to Bill by canceling our honeymoon to stay home with Sam. I
had
to go on our honeymoon; I
wanted
to go on our honeymoon. I wanted it more than anything—I could have skipped the wedding and gone straight to Bermuda with him, right then and there. We could have thrown ourselves into the warm ocean, bobbed in the waves; wrapped ourselves together in a big beach towel, sharing one chair in a sandy cocoon. I could have pressed my cheek against his chest, heard his heartbeat, felt his toes wiggling under mine.

I could, and I wanted to, and I would. Sam just had to get better, that was all.

I entered Sam’s room the next evening to find her sitting up in bed, the wireless keyboard on her lap, squinting at a picture of the Coney Island Cyclone on the flat-screened monitor. She’d hacked through the child-safe intranet to get to the real thing; she’d even signed up for a freebie e-mail account, so I could send her e-mails when I wasn’t there by her side.