Have You Found Her (4 page)

Stupid,
I told myself, rocking back and forth in my seat on the subway home. I shouldn’t have given up so easily. I should have at least stayed. I mean, what was I going to do now? After weeks of yammering to everyone about my plans to volunteer, and how profoundly life-changing it was going to be, I couldn’t just flake out after my first shift.

Two days later it came to me, the thing that would help me get in with the girls: beads. I’d worked at a bead store when I was in college, and I still had a shopping bag full of supplies in my closet—all my old tools and materials, packs and packs of seed beads, perfect for making friendship bracelets, earrings, necklaces, what have you. I could bring my beads with me, set them up in the lounge; maybe people would spot them on their way past and stop in to see what was up. And okay, it was tantamount to bribing the girls to sit and talk with me, but I didn’t see any other way to get them close enough for me to
listen to
and
believe
them.

That night, I went digging in my closet. The cats, initially attracted by the noise, scattered as I hefted the shopping bag full of rattling plastic boxes, bags, and vials, a few loose beads raining from a small hole in the bottom. I used to spend hours making jewelry when I was these girls’ age—it was therapeutic, especially during my college-era depression, but I burned out on it in my early twenties. Still, it looked like I had enough supplies on hand to keep a whole flotilla of girls handily occupied for a week. I started sorting through the contents of the bag, gloating over my own ingenuity.

My second shift: an unqualified success.

I was nervous, coming down the block with my heavy, clattering bag of beads, but I kept my head up, smiling at the two butch girls on the corner, one with a pick stuck in the back of her picked-out ’fro. This time I was prepared to sit all night in the empty lounge if I had to, but I’d also prepared myself to be more assertive in my volunteering. “How you doin’ tonight?” I asked the girls as I passed.

There was no audible reply.

I checked in with the counselors again—they, barely, duly noted my presence—then headed into the empty lounge to set up shop on the long conference table in the back. I’d just started unpacking my supplies when a short, gap-toothed girl in a head wrap strode past the entrance, saw me there with the glittering pile of beads, turned around, and came over to the table.

“How you doin’, miss? What’s this, arts and crafts? It’s free? TENEISHA! TENEISHA! Come over here, we got arts and crafts today!”

Her name was Precious, and she and her roommate, Teneisha, sat right down next to me at the table and started sorting through the beads like old ladies at a swap meet. Precious, I quickly learned, was from Brooklyn, and she worked at McDonald’s. Teneisha was from North Carolina, and she wanted to become a model.

I glowed, thinking about it the next day—talking with them, how self-aware they were. Precious, making a crystal-colored bracelet, telling us about her abusive father—“I am
not
my mama, and I am
not
my aunt, and I am
not
my grandma neither; I will not let
any
man put his hands on me, or my child when I have one. Not me. I’ma have a
better
life.” She waved her arm to indicate the dingy room, the cinder-block walls. “I’d rather come kick it here, do what I gotta do. It’s grimy, but it’s better than where I came from.” She was so motivated, so full of faith and optimism that life was going to get better. The shelter was just the first step for Precious.

Precious stayed at my side all night, making bracelet after bracelet, even after Teneisha was distracted by a gentleman caller from the boys’ floor—literally a caller, who stood in the hallway outside the forbidden Older Females Unit calling,
’NEISHA! YO TENEISHA!
until she slammed her beads down on the table and went to go deal with her admirer. Precious and I talked about her job in the Mickey D’s kitchen (hot, she said, but better than working the counter, where you had to deal with the public), her lifelong desire to be a writer/producer/TV host (“Like Oprah,” she elaborated; “that’s me in ten years”), and her disappointment with the ongoing Michael Jackson child-abuse trial. “I
know
Michael is innocent,” she swore. “I just
know
him. I’ve been listening to his music since I was a little girl.”

Which was when?
I wondered, looking at her wide brown eyes, the baby fat under her chin.
Two weeks ago?

The next Wednesday seemed like such a long time to wait to see her again; I thought about maybe dropping by the shelter on Friday after work for an hour or two, just to volunteer a little more. I might have even mentioned the possibility to Precious—“Maybe I’ll stop by on Friday and we can hang out.” It wasn’t against the rules to volunteer a few extra hours a week, was it? I figured I should be welcome to drop by anytime, even if I wasn’t on Nadine’s schedule. It would just be extra credit.

Nadine had warned me:
Don’t play favorites; treat everybody the same.
That probably meant I shouldn’t go by on Friday to hang out with Precious. Right? I thought about it all day Thursday—her shy smile with the gap between her teeth; the way her face lit up when I told her I’d bring some Michael Jackson CDs with me next time. I thought about it on my way to the grocery store that evening, passing the shoeless guy lying on the street wrapped in a filthy blanket, the hunchbacked woman, face obscured by a plastic bonnet, with her shopping cart full of empty cans. I thought about it as I mixed a special old-school Michael Jackson compilation, including a song Precious had mentioned as a favorite, “She’s Out of My Life.”

And I smiled, remembering how she’d helped me clean up the loose beads at the end of my shift. How she’d grabbed the broom and dustpan—“I do this every night, at my job”—and made short, efficient work of sweeping the floor. How she shook my hand on my way out and called after me as I headed down the stairs—“Bye, Bead Lady!”

What the hell
, I thought. I’d known it since the interview: I was in over my head.

Chapter Two

New Favorite Alert

         
N
ine months later, nearly Thanksgiving, and I was still breaking the no-favorites rule. I’d been breaking it since my second week of volunteering, when I went to the shelter on that unscheduled Friday to bring the CD I’d burned for Precious. But Precious wasn’t there. Her friend Teneisha saw me lurking around the block and told me the good news: Precious had been moved to a different program, at a better, longer-term facility. She was, as Michael Jackson sang, out of my life.

You might have thought I’d have learned from that day, dragging my feet back down the block in a daze, bereft; maybe I might have figured out that playing favorites was going to hurt me more than it hurt anybody else. And then I met Amaryllis. A member of the Latin Queens, a reforming cokehead with six months in Rikers Island under her belt, she threw herself down at the bead table with a whoop—“Ho-oh! What’s this? What’s this all about? I want to make me some beads!” She had that throaty voice, that wild energy, and she was razor-sharp, dispensing wisdom to the rest of the girls who floated by—“Girl, don’t let them put you in the mental-health program. You got nothing wrong with you, you don’t need no Section 8 voucher. You want to go live in the projects with all the other Section 8s? Once you go Section 8, what happens when you wanna get a job, get a real place? Tell me you never gonna wanna get a job. You wanna live in the pj’s all your life? Not me, miss. I want to live good. I want to live for real. They ain’t gonna put me in mental health, not me.”

I loved Amaryllis. She sat with me for four weeks at the bead table, always right there at my shoulder, making long black-and-yellow necklaces, her old gang colors, which I never saw her wear. I made her promise me that nobody was going to get shot because of the gang beads—“Please, miss,” she assured me, rolling her eyes. “The beads is the least of it. Once you bangin’, you bangin’. If anything, these protect you.”

Then she relapsed, hard. I came in one night, and she was being carried out in an ambulance, with a police car behind it. The counselors had discovered her coked to the gills, raving with paranoia and shaking, and they sent her to detox at a hospital on Staten Island. I would never see or hear from her again; I’d never know what happened to her after that. Just, good-bye, Amaryllis.

After Amaryllis came Jerrine. Jerrine broke the no-hugging rule for me right away. “Miss, I love you,” she told me, throwing her arms around me for a squeeze. How could I not hug her back? Jerrine had a two-year-old son who’d been permanently placed in foster care; she’d met her abusive ex-husband here at the shelter when they were both minors. Now she was back, solo, working at Subway, making a baby-blue bracelet with the name
HECTOR
on it. It was too tight, but she wore it anyway, rolling it up and down her arm, rubbing the indents it left on her wrist. She was supposed to move to a better program, and then she went AWOL. Good-bye, Jerrine.

After Jerrine was Belinda, from Ecuador—she got so good at making earrings, I bought an extra set of pliers just for her to use, and the rest of the girls clamored for her to make something for them. “Do one for me, Belinda, like you do, with the loops; it looks fancy that way.” Belinda and I spent a month of Wednesdays with each other over that summer; I even dreamed of taking her on a day trip to Coney Island with me and Bill, but I knew it would never happen—the rules expressly forbade it. Then she graduated to Independent Living.
Adiós,
Belinda.

It didn’t stop hurting, and I didn’t stop doing it, finding new favorites. Coming home and raving to Bill, “Tiffany, her mother died of AIDS when she was sixteen. And she’s so funny—‘That motherfucker’s so white, he’s blue!’” “Hazel, she’s my new favorite, she’s the sweetest thing, making a necklace for her stuffed elephant.” “Mimi, she’s this teeny-tiny stone butch, and she rules the lounge—she made everybody clean up their beads and tell me thank you at the end of the night.”

Breaking the favorites rule, breaking the confidentiality rule, telling Bill everything the girls told me. Justifying it by telling myself that Bill wasn’t ever going to meet these girls, as curious as he was about them. And he was curious—every week, he’d ask me, “So how’s Brenda? How’s Priscilla? How’s St. Lucia?” and I’d run down the list. “She’s all right; she just found out she’s having twins; she got discharged for fighting.” And every week there was the unspoken question behind it, the one I didn’t know enough to ask myself—
Have you found her yet? The one who reminds you of you?

They all reminded me of me. Black, Latin, Indian, it didn’t matter what color they were; whether they were gay, pregnant, Christian, or all three. They were fierce, they were confused, they were striving, they were in pain. And yet none of them reminded me of me. None of their stories matched mine. I had yet to meet a middle-class white girl, not pregnant, no kids, not too much of a drug addict yet, who just couldn’t hack it at home. More than that, none of them
felt
like Little Janice to me.

Until Sam.

I met her right around Thanksgiving, sitting alone in the cafeteria—this tall, rangy, white girl with a shaggy mop of brown hair, a grunge-butch affect, and a cast on her hand, cheerfully shoveling meat loaf and mashed potatoes into her mouth. I hadn’t seen her the week before; she was probably new. Probably in need of someone to eat dinner with.

“Can I join you?” I asked, motioning toward the empty seat across from her.

She continued chewing, eyebrows slightly raised, and signaled a welcome with her busted hand. I sat.

“How’s that doing?” I asked, pointing to the cast.

She waved her hand,
So-so
, and swallowed. “It hurts a lot. I snapped a ligament in my wrist. I have to have surgery before I can go to rehab.”

“Ouch,” I said, wincing in sympathy. “How’d it happen?”

“Punched a wall.” She grinned a little. “I thought it was just Sheetrock, but it turned out to be concrete.”

She had a hint of a West Coast accent, or something, I couldn’t exactly place it, and there was a frankness in her voice, something knowing and wry. The way she said “rehab”—so matter-of-fact, with no dread, no shame—she might as well have said, “I have to have surgery before I can go to the bank.” Rehab was just a place she had to go. And she met my eyes easily, her own eyes large and clear. Most of the girls avoided eye contact; that’s why the beads were such a handy trick—they didn’t have to be looking at anybody while they talked; they could look at their hands. This girl looked at me like she was studying me, memorizing me, and unafraid to have me do the same.

“You gotta be careful about punching unfamiliar walls,” I cautioned, smiling. “Apparently, some of them punch back.”

She raised the wrist as proof that I was right. “When I was a kid, my dad used to punch out all the windows. Then he’d put boards over them, and then he’d punch out the boards.”

“Sounds like a great dad.”

She smiled with one side of her mouth, her eyes still on mine, and I felt that instant rapport, that excitement—
new favorite alert
. In truth, I never chose any of my favorites; my favorites were the ones who chose me, the ones who acted like they’d just been waiting for me to sit down next to them so they could spill their stories: “I don’t tell anybody this, but I trust you, miss.” And maybe they’d told someone before and maybe they hadn’t, but right now they were choosing
me,
because I made them feel safe; they were going to imprint on me for the next three hours, or five minutes, whatever it was, while I sat there feeling honored and astonished and vitally important for as long as it lasted.

So it went with Samantha—“Sam,” she introduced herself, formally shaking my hand with her good one. She was nineteen, she said, and had been on the streets since she was twelve. I asked her where she was from, and she laughed. “All over.” Her father cooked crystal meth for a living, and whenever the heat got too hot or the kitchen blew up, the family would move—Sam, her brother and sister, their meth-cooking dad, and their junkie hooker mom. From the Florida Panhandle to the outskirts of Chicago, through Arizona, Texas, and Colorado—that’s where she ran away from, Colorado. She was tired, she said, of what her parents did to her, what they made her do for money and drugs. “I figured, fuck it, I can get my own money and drugs.”

I walked out of the cafeteria with her, and we paused under the scaffold that surrounded the building so she could smoke a cigarette. She told me about Portland, Oregon, and the street scene there; about how easy they made it to be homeless in San Francisco. She told me how, just a month ago, she was sitting in a doorway in Cheyenne, Wyoming—

“And it was that half rain, half snow, the kind that really stings when it hits you, you know? And it was coming in from all sides, even in the doorway, I couldn’t get away from it, and all my clothes were wet, and I was freezing, and dope sick, I really needed another hit, but I couldn’t get any because I didn’t have any money or any way to get any, and I said to myself, ‘I am tired of living this way.’”

Her brown eyes still met mine as she spoke, her voice clear and sincere. Nearly six feet tall and as hard-assed as any of the kids I’d met, and yet there was something so vulnerable in her face.

“And all night that night, I did the ‘poor me’ thing, and I got mad at my parents and my fucked-up life and everything, and I just felt so fucking sorry for myself. It was the worst night of my life.

“So I tried to figure out what kind of life I wanted. And the first thing I knew was that I wanted to get a place to live indoors. And then I knew I needed to get a job to get money for rent, and that nobody was going to hire a junkie. So I decided to quit using.”

Over the next week, she said, she put together some money from meth deals and got on a bus to New York. She figured the meth scene wasn’t as big in New York, she wouldn’t know any dealers here, she’d be forced to kick it. Within two hours, she’d scored a bag of her second-choice drug, heroin, and snorted it. But she was trying not to shoot it, trying to keep increasing the hours between fixes, sleeping on the street around Port Authority during the day.

One night a woman walked by and saw her sitting on the sidewalk, dope sick. She shook her head, assessed her, and told Sam to go to the shelter, right down the block; she said they’d help her there. And Sam peeled her sick, aching bones off the cement and came in from the cold, for the first time in seven years.

“I’m really glad you came here,” I said.

“So am I,” she said, earnest. “It’s hard, dealing with all the rules and the other residents and stuff, but this is, like, the best place I ever been.”

I was late in reporting to the floor after dinner, and the rest of the girls were probably waiting upstairs for the Bead Lady, but I lingered while Sam carefully stubbed out her cigarette, saving the few un-smoked centimeters in her near-empty pack. Together we trudged back inside and up the stairs to the Older Females Unit.

Samantha had been at the shelter for ten days already, she told me as we huffed up the stairs, and had used heroin twice. They didn’t catch her, so she went to the drug counselor, Jodi, and told on herself. “Listen,” she told Jodi, “I don’t want to keep using drugs; please help me get into rehab soon.” Jodi congratulated Sam on her honesty and gave her a full house restriction. Sam was not allowed to leave the premises, all day and all night, except for doctor’s appointments, but she was okay with that. “It’s what I gotta do right now,” she said with a shrug. Then she took a seat at the bead table and, even with the cast on her hand, started making a key chain for Jodi the drug counselor.

It was a busy night at the bead table, but I pretty much neglected everyone else—the shy Panamanian girl from the week before seemed to be adjusting well. One girl made six pairs of earrings, put the clips on herself, no help from me, didn’t say a word but looked satisfied. A girl named Heaven showed off her sonogram photo. There was a bossy girl from Baltimore named Ellenette, and another girl who made earrings that said
SEXXY
, except the
Y
was upside down. Ellenette asked me to read her horoscope from the paper—not because she couldn’t read but because her eyes hurt.

Sam bantered easily with the other girls, praising the shy girl’s bracelet-in-progress, busting on Ellenette for believing in astrology. (“You don’t believe in astrology?” asked Ellenette. “Naw,” said Sam. “I believe in astrophysics.”) Every once in a while she looked up at me and caught me looking at her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just gave me that half-smile, her lips flattened like she was trying to suppress it.

“This is pretty meticulous work,” she observed.

Meticulous,
I noted. Where the hell did she get
that
word from?

I could have stayed forever that night, but I’d learned to set limits for myself long ago, back in the days when I used to hang out with Amaryllis until it was time for the nightly floor meeting, until I was starving and mentally fried and practically weeping on the subway home. “Almost time to pack up,” I told the girls regretfully.