Free Have You Found Her by Janice Erlbaum Page A

spent three hours every Wednesday at the shelter, an extra hour to run to the bead store during the week for supplies; I’d been spending four hours a week volunteering, for ten months now. I should have cured homelessness already. Instead, I had decorated it.
    And then there was Sam.
    “She’s in the hospital again,” I told Bill as soon as I got home that night, all hyper and distraught.
    He didn’t have to ask who I meant. “Jesus. Poor kid. Kidneys again?”
    He started shuffling through the take-out menus, and I started rolling myself a joint. “No—hand infection, from the surgery. They might have to amputate it; they don’t know yet. I thought maybe I’d run by the hospital tomorrow and see how she’s doing.”
    “Yeah?” His eyebrows were raised as he handed me the menu from the Thai restaurant. “That’s kosher with everyone?”
    “Well, Nadine’s the one who basically suggested that I go—off the record, of course. She said, you know, because it’s the holidays, and because I’ve become
important
to Sam.” I rolled my eyes at myself, mocking my own “importance,” smiling ironically to cover up the real smile that wanted to bust through. “Anyway, since Nadine mentioned it, and I have some extra time this week…”
    Which I did. Work was slow over the holidays, and I’d already finished all my gift shopping—a jacket for Bill, tennis lessons for my father, an herbal eye mask for my stepmother, Sylvia. Cash for my twenty-one-year-old half-brother, Jake, my mom’s kid, still in college in Boston; a card for my mom, to whom I hadn’t spoken much in the past few years. I loved my mom, but dealing with me made her anxious, and dealing with her made me sad. I sent her cards twice yearly, for the holidays and for her birthday; maybe every other year she sent a reply.
    “God,” said Bill. “The kid just can’t catch a break, can she.”
    She never should have punched that wall
was what I’d been thinking. But what if she hadn’t? She’d have gone straight from intake to rehab; I never would have met her. I certainly wouldn’t have had the chance to get to know her, to become
important
to her. And the reason she’d punched the wall, she’d told me, back in our first week of conversation, was because she was about to punch this girl Dime, and that would have gotten her thrown out. So she’d
chosen
to punch the wall instead. Even with the broken wrist, she told me, she was glad she’d done it.
    Secretly, so was I.
             
    “You came,” said Sam, sitting up in her hospital bed, amazed.
    The hospital, like the shelter, was decorated for the holidays; there were candy canes at the information desk downstairs, where I’d given her name, Samantha Dunleavy, and they’d told me where to find her. I had a candy cane in my fist, along with a bag of cookies; I brandished the booty in front of me as I came around her bedside toward the empty chair.
    “Bearing gifts.” I put the stuff on the table next to her bed, stepped back to look at her. She looked like a dead fish that had been left in the sun, so pale she was almost pearly, dark bruises on her arms and under her eyes. The hand in question was swathed in white gauze, the arm was hooked up to a beeping IV, and there was an angry red line shooting from her wrist to her elbow. Her skinny arms stuck out from her hospital gown; for the first time, I saw the thin, pink, parallel scars she’d carved into her own shoulders, above her tattoo. I hadn’t known she was a cutter, on top of everything else; but of course, why wouldn’t she be? “How are you feeling?”
    “I’m…I’m really happy you came to visit me. I didn’t think…” She shook her head a little, like she was trying to clear a hallucination, then looked at me again. I was still there. “Thanks for coming. Here, pull up this chair.”
    She leaned over, her face strained. “Don’t reach,” I ordered her as I settled myself into the visitor’s chair.