Have You Found Her (6 page)

I showed up ten minutes early for dinner, landing at the top of the stairs on the Older Females Unit out of breath, too anxious to wait for the elevator.

“Bead Lady!” yelled Ellenette, the bossy girl from Baltimore, from her seat in front of the TV. “You came early!”

“I sure did,” I agreed, smiling at her.
Yell louder,
I thought.
So everyone in their rooms can hear.

Samantha came around a corner with a small bag of clean laundry in her cast hand. “Hey!” she said, pleased. “I forgot you came tonight. Cool.”

“Yeah.” I grinned. She didn’t forget, I could tell; she was just trying to play it cool. Which proved how much she liked me. “How’s it going? I was worried about you.”

She nodded. “It’s good, thanks. Better. I was only at the emergency room for a few hours. My kidneys are still messed up, but they’re not so bad right now. They told me in a few years I might need dialysis. But I’m okay right now.”

“Oh, wow. Dialysis. Jesus.”

“Yeah.” She looked downcast at the possibility but quickly perked back up. “Hey, thanks for the notebook. I been writing in it a lot; do you wanna see it?”

I laughed, giddy with the pleasure of her company, her enthusiasm, her writing. “Of course!” She put down her laundry and fished the notebook out of its cargo pocket. Its cover was worn, and it had already acquired a satisfying curve from being curled up and stuffed in its place. She flipped through it, located a page she liked, and handed it to me.

That handwriting—careful, shaky, spiky, every letter distinct, straight up and down, like it took hours to etch, and that was with her good hand. The poem was about watching the stars from the back of a pickup truck, hitchhiking by the constellations. You could feel every bit of it: the piney smell of the Oregon trees, the jolt of the rocks in the road. I cleared my throat, which had gone froggy, and closed the book.

“This is great,” I understated. “I mean, this could get published. I’m serious. I could even help you. I know people—”

She reached out for it, demurring, and I didn’t want to hand it back to her, but I did. “Naw,” she said. “It’s just for me. And…people I choose to share it with.”

I basked in the glow of the compliment as she went off to stash her laundry in her room, and the rest of us filed downstairs for dinner and lined up outside the cafeteria. The other girls clamored in her absence—“Miss, we gonna do beads after dinner? How late you stay till? I gotta go meet my man, but I’ma come up and make some beads with you before you go. Bead Lady, you got more pink this week?”

I got my tray and grabbed the corner table; Sam came along shortly and joined me. Ellenette put her tray down at the next table, observing the two of us already gabbing away—“So, who do you like to read?” “Kerouac’s all right, and I like Bukowski.” “Have you ever read Augusten Burroughs?” “No, who’s that?”

“Miss, Bead Lady,” Ellenette said, pouting. “Why you love the white girl so much, and not me?” She was kidding, but she had a point, and she’d made it loud enough for everyone to overhear. “Why don’t you pull up your chair with us,” I suggested. “I can’t love you so much if you’re all the way at the other table.”

And so Ellenette was glued to my side all evening, from the cafeteria to the bead table, where I had an unusual number of takers; every seat around the table filled up fast, and the action was spilling over to the couches. The girl they called St. Croix took the seat immediately to my left, the seat Sam wanted. “Move down,” Sam insisted, trying to poke her chair between mine and St. Croix’s.

“Move yourself, heifer,” said St. Croix genially. “Don’t sleep, next time.” But she scooted over a few inches to her left, and Sam shoved her long legs between our short ones.

“Can I have a
J
, an
O
, a
D
, and an
I
?”

I passed Samantha the box full of alphabet beads. I’d never met Jodi the drug counselor, but I’d heard about her from some of the other girls—she was one of those tough-but-fair types, like Nadine; the girls trusted her. Jodi had been an addict herself, like all the best drug counselors; with more than twenty years sober, she hadn’t lost a single bit of empathy, or any of her street smarts. It was obvious that Sam had bonded with Jodi, the first adult she’d bonded with in a long time.

Funny, that I’d feel jealous of Jodi when there was a table full of girls entreating me—“Bead Lady, help me tie this? Lemme get a long string for a necklace? Can you put the hook on for me? Who’s got the letters? Someone pass me the letters.” It should have been enough attention for me; sometimes, in fact, it was too much. Sometimes I was so busy cutting and tying and hooking and gluing, I felt more like a shoe salesman than anything else. Nights like these, I barely even got to talk to the girls, barely got to
listen
and/or
believe
.

Still, I got to sit there, with Sam at my side, and even if we weren’t all having the deepest conversation (“Usher is not gay, don’t you dare say that about my boo” “He’s gay, son, I saw it in a gay magazine”), I could tell she was watching me, listening to me, observing everything I did. So when my golden moment came, as it so often did—“Miss, you pay for all these beads you bring? Out your own pocket? Why you do that?”—I took it and ran.

“Because I remember how boring it could be when I used to live here,” I said, eyes on the string I was tying. “So I like to bring something with me when I come to hang out with you all.”

“You used to live here?” The question didn’t come from Sam, but it might as well have; I could read it all over her face, and I wasn’t even looking at her.

“You didn’t know that?” bellowed Ellenette from the chair on my right. “Bead Lady is old school.”

“When were you here?” asked Sam politely.

“Twenty years ago,” I told her, launching into my spiel. “Nineteen eighty-four. Right around this time of year—from November to January. Then I went to a group home for a year or so. I’m really grateful to this place—”

She interrupted me, incredulous. “Wait,
how
old are you?”

“Thirty-five. I was here when I was fifteen.”

“You’re
thirty-five
? You’re only one year younger than my mother!”

Oh, the joys of volunteering. Having ten girls drop their bead projects to crane their necks and get a better look at you, insisting that you couldn’t possibly be thirty-five, you couldn’t be any older than twenty-five—“Miss, first time I saw you I thought you was a resident!”—there was no greater reward. I mean, most of it was the way I dressed in my downtime, with my scruffy jeans and Pumas, but when it actually worked—when one of the boys loitering outside whispered “’Sup,” as I passed—well, I was probably a little bit too complimented by being mistaken for a twenty-year-old homeless girl.

“Thirty-five,” I confirmed. “I am
seriously
old school.”

Yeah, volunteering has always been a selfish enterprise for me. If I didn’t recognize it before, I definitely felt it that night, sitting around feeling downright cozy in the company of my girls.
My
girls. I could use the possessive, couldn’t I? Sure I could. I mean, who sought them out, who tended to them? Who was one of their own? Me! Carl the volunteer might have been there for fifteen years, but I was there
as a resident
. Plus, look at them. I gazed over the table beatifically, choosing to ignore the argument bubbling at the end of the table about the “sin” of homosexuality (“What you mean, you don’t believe in being gay? I’m gay and I’m sitting right here, you don’t believe I exist?”)—look at how industrious they were, how young and sweet their faces looked, their mouths slightly slack with absorption. How everything else had melted away for them, except for the moment.

Sam, at my elbow. I looked up at her and she was looking at me; she grinned a little and went back to the key chain she was making for Jodi. It was one of the more intricate creations I’d seen, woven like a braid with four separate strands of elastic. “This will be good,” she told me, “because it won’t be, like, some stupid piece of jewelry she feels like she has to wear or something.”

“It’s cool,” I agreed. “And it’s useful.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “And if she doesn’t like it, she can just stick it in her drawer and forget about it.”

“I bet she puts her keys on it,” I said. I knew I would.

Samantha stayed at the bead table until cleanup time—until about fifteen minutes after cleanup time, actually, because once again I didn’t feel like cleaning up and leaving. While most of the girls had already made their fill of jewelry and wandered off, Sam stayed put, helping me to bag the loose beads that other people had neglected to put away. I went to the counselors’ office to grab the broom and dustpan, then made a last-minute detour and knocked on Nadine’s office door.

“Come in.”

I didn’t catch Nadine in her office very often, not that I tried to. I knew she was there at all hours—nights, weekends, Fourth of July—but it was still hard to get an audience with her. I entered her office, crammed as usual with the recorded evidence of human misery, and she turned briefly from her computer to greet me.

“Juh
neece
. How is everything?” She glanced back at her computer, like she’d prefer the short answer.

“Great,” I said. “It’s great. Listen, I was just wondering about Samantha….”

Now she looked right at me. “What about her?” she asked, half suspicious and half amused. Fully intimidating, as ever.

“Well, I know she’s on house restriction—”

“When she’s not in the hospital.” Nadine shook her head. “That girl has got to make it to rehab soon. They can’t take her until her wrist is healed, and they had to postpone the wrist surgery because of her kidneys.” Her voice softened and lowered. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know how long she’s going to make it here. She’s got a very tough case.”

I nodded seriously, honored to be vested with Nadine’s confidence. “Yeah, actually, that’s why I was wondering, maybe if I could escort her, we could just go to the coffee shop on the corner for ten minutes or so—it seems like she’s got a lot to talk about, and it must be hard for her to be here day in and day out—”

Nadine shook her head. “Juh
neece
. I appreciate what you are trying to do for Samantha, but you know, if you take her out, everybody else is going to want you to take them out, too.”

Of course. The rules. No favorites. And no buying them stuff. So why didn’t I just knock on Nadine’s door and ask for permission to break both at once? That was bound to go well. “Right, I know, I just…I thought maybe because she was restricted, you know, they’d understand.”

Nadine was still shaking her head at me. “If one of these girls gets an extra canned peach in her dessert cup, we have a riot on our hands. I know you want to help her, just like you want to help all the girls…” Here she paused, to let this sink in.

“Of course,” I said, smiling, shaking my own head—what was I thinking? “You’re right. I’m sorry to bug you, I just…thanks, Nadine.”

I turned to go, but her voice stopped me. “Listen, Juh
neece
. I really do appreciate what you want to do for Samantha. I’m glad she’s talking to you. She’s a very…unusual girl.”

“She is,” I enthused. “Unusually bright.”

“Unusually damaged.” Nadine was dead serious now, pinning me with that stare. “Some of the things that have come up with her drug counselor—she’s got very serious issues. If she feels comfortable talking with you, I think that’s a good thing; I just want you to be careful with her, you know? A little bit goes a long way with these girls. They can’t always handle a lot of emotion, even if it’s good. They don’t know how to react. And you might not know how to react to some of the things she might tell you.”

“I…I guess that’s true.” Of course it was. I recognized it with a shiver. What Sam had endured, the amount of pain she’d absorbed—she was a junkie street kid, an addict since childhood, abused every second of her life. I liked to think I could relate to the girls, that I’d been just like them once; but I’d never been through anything like what most of them had been through, and Sam was an unusually hard case. And now I was acting like this was a talk-show makeover or a Lifetime movie; like I’d buy her a notebook, and then there’d be this montage of her struggling through rehab, and then she’d come out the other side perfectly cured, and the two of us would go off laughing in the sunshine. When really, this was going to be years and years of trying to convince this girl not to kill herself; this was going to be relapses and crises and bottomless sorrows, and there was no guarantee of success.

Nadine kept up the penetrating stare. I tried not to wither, tried to appear capable and strong. “I know you mean well, Juh
neece
. And you do a good job. You know, the girls look forward to the beads every week. They’re very grateful that you come.”

Subtext:
And isn’t that enough? They don’t ignore you in the lounge anymore. Instead they pout when you don’t sit with them at dinner—what more could you ask for? You always wanted the girls to accept you, even back when you were a resident; now they do. You’re the Bead Lady. So why don’t you just keep being the Bead Lady, and leave the rest to us.

“I know. I’m grateful, too.” I shifted my weight, stepped back a step. “Thanks, Nadine. Sorry again to bug you.”

She swiveled back to her computer. “Okay, Juh
neece
. Good night.”

I took the broom and dustpan and went back to the lounge, where Sam sat, casually guarding my bag.

“Thanks,” I told her. “Had to pee.”

“Oh.” She reached out her good hand for the dustpan. “Can I help?”

We swept in near silence for a minute—“Man, these things get everywhere, don’t they?”—then I returned the broom to the counselors’ office. Then back to the lounge, where Sam watched me zip up my coat, shoulder my bead bag, and put my knit hat on my head. I stood there awkwardly for a minute, like at the end of a first date.

“So listen,” I blurted. “I was thinking of coming by on Saturday. I’ve got some old books and clothes to get rid of, and I want to drop them off at the donations room. Probably about one o’clock. You think you might be around then?”