Have You Found Her (33 page)

She scowled at her lap, arms crossed, as she spoke. “So…when are you coming back?”

In previous days, I would have been charmed by her pouting, flattered by how much she needed me; now I was annoyed, and angry at myself for feeling that way. “I’ll come back next week, how about that? I’ll check my schedule, and we’ll pick a day. And this time, I’ll make sure I can stay a little longer, okay?”

She nodded, chin still down. “Okay.”

I rose from my seat, gathered my bag and jacket. “And don’t forget to have your doctor call me. Or tell me who to call. Eng or Gambine, right?”

“I’ll let you know.” She looked like she’d shrunk in her chair, all of her limbs pulled in, her head dropped. “Here, I’ll show you how to get back to the front.”

I followed behind her as she rolled through the halls, quieter this time, going through the same internal tango of relief and guilt that I always went through with her. I professed to love her so much, and yet here I was, practically running down the corridor to get away from her, acting like it was a chore to come see her instead of a rare and extraordinary privilege. I should have been grateful for her presence—I’d be missing it soon enough—but right now, I couldn’t wait to get home.

We made one last turn, and I was at the front door.

“Okay,” said Sam, her voice small. “I guess I’ll talk to you soon?”

“Of course you will.” I leaned down and kissed her on the top of her head again, like a blessing. “And you know, you can call me anytime.”

“I know.” She picked up her head and tried to smile at me, making her jut-chinned brave face. “Well, thanks so much for coming, Janice, it always makes my day.”

“Mine too.” A cab rolled up to the curb outside, and I opened the front door, feeling the rush of the fresh air. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

Bye,
she waved, as I stepped outside and into the taxi. Then she spun around on her wheels, and we both rolled away.

I got the message the next day.

“Hi, Janice, it’s Maria. Listen, I just heard from the nurses at Westchester—Sam crashed again this morning, spiked a really high fever, vomiting, so they moved her back to the hospital in the Bronx. We should be able to see her tomorrow. I’ll let you know if I hear anything else, and please call me if anybody calls you. Take care. I’ll talk to you soon.”

Not this again.
I closed my phone, feeling the rage and frustration rippling through my body, like my muscles were expanding, ready to burst through my skin. I couldn’t do this anymore. There was no way I could go back to the hospital in the Bronx. I physically could not get on that train, with the brakes shrieking as it pulled out of Union Square; I couldn’t take that ride, trying not to count the stops, trying to steady my breathing when the train stopped between stations, as it always had to do, because god forbid it should just take me to my dying friend in the hospital, without stopping for a little
break
every now and then.

Bill was drying off after his shower the next morning, and I was doing my sit-ups, except today they were more like lie-backs—I was just lying there on the bedroom floor, completely lacking the will to move.

“I can’t take this anymore,” I called to Bill, eyes staring unfocused at the white ceiling. It looked so peaceful up there, uninterrupted and blank. “I’m serious. I can’t.”

Bill came into the bedroom, towel in hand, stood sadly in the doorway. “Oh, babe,” he sighed.

My face crinkled into a crying face, but I couldn’t even cry anymore. It was insincere. I wasn’t sad, I was angry. At whom, I didn’t know. At Sam’s doctors, for not catching it sooner; at our government, for not taking this disease seriously years ago so we could have a cure by now. At Sam, as unfair as that was; I was mad at Sam, for being so sick.

I’m going to nail down the doctors
today, I decided, and swung my torso to meet my knees. There it was—action. Action was what I needed.
Eleven, twelve
…Fuck Dr. F. and her vacation and “Oh, I don’t know if it’s Eng or Gambine”—today I was going right up to the nurses’ station, and I was going to bitch at everybody in a lab coat until someone told me something I could use.
Thirty-three, thirty-four
…I needed a deadline. A literal deadline. A line that demarcated when she was going to die.

Fifty.

It was this selfish, macabre, unconscionable thought that propelled me forward that morning; the only thing that got me through my shower, through getting dressed, to kissing Bill good-bye.

“Let me know what the doctors say,” he said, his eyes drooping with the forecasted bad news. “And tell her…hang in there, from me.”

“I will.” I tucked my head into his chest for another hug. “I love you, babe.”

“I love you, too.”

Hang in there.
But I didn’t want her to hang in there, I thought, as the train shucked and lurched uptown. I wanted her to let go.

A few autumn leaves were starting to fall from the trees, I noticed, walking the familiar blocks from the subway to the hospital, though most of the leaves were still hanging on. Hanging in there. It had been a warm fall, so far; the leaves weren’t so much bursting with autumnal color as they were giving up, turning pale yellow and dropping indifferently to the ground. Soon there would be a frost, snow on the ground; how many seasons would I see from the window of her hospital room?

My breath was coming shallow and fast in the elevator.
Calm down,
I told myself. I couldn’t let her see how distraught I was over this latest setback, how little I wanted to be there today; I had to project warmth, love, and acceptance. I smeared a haphazard smile on my face, like cheap lipstick on a crazy woman. I hoped she’d be sleeping.

But it was even better than that—I opened the door to her new room, and she wasn’t there. One of the orderlies I recognized from her last stay was changing the garbage. “How you doin’ today?” he said, nodding to me. “Your girl’s downstairs getting a test, should be back in a half hour or so.”

“Thanks.”

Perfect. I left my bag in her room and started trolling the hallways for more familiar faces. The short Indian nurse nodded at me when she saw me coming. “She’s downstairs getting an MRI,” she said, before I could say anything. “She’ll be back up soon.”

“Oh, thanks, but I’m actually looking for her doctor.” I smiled, ingratiating. “Is there someone around who I can talk to about her condition?”

The nurse peered over her desk down the hall. “I think Dr. Rice is in the doctors’ lounge.” She pointed to an open door. “She should be there; if not, I can page her.”

“Thanks.” I headed toward the door she indicated.
Okay, Dr. Rice. Tell me something good.

Dr. Rice was a tall, thin woman with straight, sandy brown hair and bangs, about my age, currently sipping a cup of coffee and glaring at the pager on her hip. I’d seen her around the floor, though we’d never had a chance to speak. “Excuse me, Dr. Rice, I’m a friend of Samantha Dunleavy, and I was wondering if you had a minute. I’ve been trying to get some information about her prognosis—”

“Oh, right, hi.” She turned to face me. She recognized me, too; I was the girl in the chair by Sam’s bedside all last month. “I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”

“It’s Janice Erlbaum. I’m her health-care proxy.”

“Oh, her proxy, great. So, yeah, okay.” She leaned one shoulder against the wall, and I faced her, doing the same. “So, the main problem she’s having, obviously, is the recurring infections—the bacterial sepsis, the fungemia, the other opportunistic infections she keeps manifesting—and we’ve been throwing everything we can at them. We keep changing the antibiotics, you know, and for a few days she’ll get better, but then she’ll just…” Dr. Rice made a nose-dive gesture with her hand.

“Right,” I agreed. “Which is why I was surprised that you guys had discharged her to Westchester. I mean, she keeps getting so sick.”

Dr. Rice raised her eyebrows a little, defensive. “Well, she
had
made a lot of improvement, and you know we can’t keep her here forever.”

Well, you won’t have to keep her here forever,
I thought.
Just until she dies.

“So what’s the course of treatment now?” I asked. “Just continue to treat the infections, and…”

Dr. Rice turned up an empty hand in frustration, shook her head. “Well, if we knew the source of the infections, I might have a better answer for you. Unfortunately, we can’t seem to figure out what’s causing them. We’re still waiting on the results of the lung culture, to see if maybe some of this was airborne….”

I tried not to let my eyes bug out. She didn’t know what was causing Samantha’s
multiple opportunistic infections
? Did she need to go to remedial doctor school? “Well, it could be stemming from the AIDS,” I suggested.

Dr. Rice frowned. “But she doesn’t have AIDS. We’ve tested her twice, and she’s negative. Believe me, that’s the first thing we thought of. I mean, this would all make a lot more sense if she were HIV-positive, but she’s not, so we’ve had to look for other potential causes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re telling me she doesn’t have AIDS?”

Dr. Rice’s eyes were as wide as mine. “Not to our knowledge, no. That’s one of the first tests we ran. We even reran it two weeks ago, just to make sure. Because it’s definitely an immune disorder, we’ve just never seen anything like it.”

I interrupted her, stunned, my ears ringing like I was standing inside a bell. “You’re saying she’s HIV-
negative
?”

What had Sam just told me on our last visit?
My T cells are practically gone, but the antivirals are finally getting a chance to work—at least my viral load’s gone down.
She couldn’t be HIV-negative; she was dying of AIDS, and everybody knew it—me, Maria, the social worker who’d been wrangling with her benefits, the spinal-tap nurse with tears in her eyes.

I shook my head violently. “She’s not HIV-negative. She can’t be.”

“So you’re under the impression that she’s HIV-positive?” Dr. Rice was looking at me, brow fully furrowed. “Because that would explain a lot. If there’s been some kind of mistake—”

“There’s
definitely
been some kind of mistake. There’s
definitely
been a mistake.”
This goddamn hospital,
I thought, my confusion flaring into anger. They probably mistested her, or the doctors weren’t communicating. Samantha had AIDS; this was
obviously
a mistake on their part. It had to be.

Dr. Rice reached out as if to steady me. “Did she tell you that she’d tested positive in the past?”

I nodded. “First week of June. She was living at a halfway house in Brooklyn, and she was diagnosed at a hospital in Bushwick—”

“We’ll get their records,” Dr. Rice interrupted. “Go on.”

“She was in Bushwick for a week or two back in April for acute pneumonia following a punctured lung, and she was doing follow-up there for her asthma and her kidney dysfunction, and they wondered why she kept getting hospitalized for infections, so they tested her. And they told her she had full-blown AIDS—multiple, virulent strains. They said she had less than a hundred T cells.”

Dr. Rice’s eyes were trained intently on mine. “We just tested her T cells the other day. They were normal.”

“No.” I shook my head, frustrated. “No. She just told me the other day, she’s got less than twenty. She’s been dealing with Dr. F. since she’s been here, maybe if we call Dr. F.—”

Her eyebrows inched even higher. “Dr. F.?”

“Dr. F.—she has a long, foreign name, hard to pronounce. Samantha said they call her Dr. F. She’s—”

“I don’t know any female doctors on the floor named Dr. F.,” said Dr. Rice.

“You don’t…maybe she’s…she’s the AIDS specialist, she’s…”

She’s in her mid-fifties, blond, stout, slight accent, Eastern European.
Of course I’d never seen her, but this is how I’d pictured her, every time Sam told me, “I spoke to Dr. F. this morning,” or “You just missed Dr. F. I really wanted you to meet her.”

Dr. Rice shook her head, looking almost as lost as I must have looked. “There’s no Dr. F. here. Something very strange is going on.”

Oh, yes, it was. Something very strange, supernatural, even. “I can’t believe…this has got to be a mistake.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” said Dr. Rice. “But I’m glad we’re having this conversation right now. If you’re telling me she’s tested positive in the past, then we’ve got to retest her again, as soon as possible. All of her symptoms are consistent with late-stage AIDS, and if we’ve missed that somehow, then the whole strategy changes.”

She’d already straightened her posture; she was looking over my head, ready for action. Her surge of confidence was inspiring. I straightened up as well, snapping to, all business. “So you think this is some kind of false negative test, you think this is a mistake.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know how, but it must be.”

“Or…” Or what? There couldn’t be another explanation; this had to be a mistake. And yet a nagging doubt was squirming its way from my queasy stomach into my brain. Sam and her pranks—the way she bragged to me, back at rehab,
I held my breath until I passed out—they thought I had epilepsy!
The day she told me,
Tell Maria I’m doing real bad, I’m back in the ICU.
And just last week, when I called from Bermuda—
You remember that night nurse, who was such a bitch to me? I loosened the leads on my monitors…
“I mean, she couldn’t have…she couldn’t have faked all of this somehow, could she?” I forced a little laugh, to suggest how crazy the idea was, but the laugh felt like a retch.

Dr. Rice smiled wryly. “Fungemia in her eyeball? No, she’s definitely not faking it. Listen, I know this is confusing, but let us retest her, and you should be able to get the results when we do. If we can test her this evening before dinner, we should know something within twenty-four hours.”

“Okay. Okay.” I nodded.
Okay
. Twenty-four hours. And then maybe they were going to tell me that Sam was okay. They might tell me that she was all right, and she didn’t have AIDS, and she wasn’t going to die.