Free Ask Me Why I Hurt by M.D. Randy Christensen Page A

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    I felt just as nervous as Mary. Her aunt drove up in an old Datsun. When she got out of her car, she was crying. She hugged me, tears wetting my shirt. She was crying so hard she could barely speak. “I almost gave up,” she said.
    Mary stood off to the side. Her aunt approached slowly. She touched Mary’s hair and then gently brought her close. “I know we’ve never met,” I heard her whisper into Mary’s hair, “but we’re still going to be family.”
    We hugged Mary good-bye. I gave her a little stuffed bear I had found. It had a heart sewn on the chest. “Friends Forever,” it said. Hokey, I thought, but I wanted her to know she could always come back.
    “If you need medical care for her, or for any reason, bring her back,” I told her aunt, whose name was Diane. “We’d love to see our Mary.”
    Once inside the car, Mary waved a little. She held the bear up, bending its arm as if it were waving good-bye. I was shocked at the changes in her life. It was as if Mary had been a piece of luggage sent here or there. I knew it was wonderful she had a place to live. But I had mixed feelings. I wanted Mary to be safe. I wanted her to be successful. I wondered if this was possible after what she had been through. Could a girl who had lived in a hole make the transition to a normal life? Would she be able to go to high school? How would other teenagers treat her? Could she fit in? Could sherecover? Or did her past mean she was damaged forever? Still, I knew she had to try. And we all had to help. There was no alternative.

    Monsoon season struck a month later. Dark and gray, the dust storms came over downtown Phoenix. We called them Arizona dusters; they were great black and gray roiling clouds that came in solid walls over the city. It was like watching something from a natural disaster movie. The man on the radio had warned drivers to pull over, far off the road, and turn off their lights. If you were driving and got caught in those storms, it was like being immersed in black soup. When the monsoon season came, I worried for the homeless kids. Arizona storms are nothing to ignore. Homeless people have drowned after falling asleep in the washes and getting caught in a flash flood.
    When the rush of patients subsided, we stood for a moment in the van door way. The distinctive smell of the creosote bushes drifted from the desert, and the hum of the cicadas was so loud it sounded like the buzzing of hundreds of rattlesnakes. It brought back old memories of monsoons, time spent as a kid playing board games with Stephanie inside our house and listening to the rain roar down the washes, or sitting in a café while the rain poured in sheets outside. After, I knew, the air would smell fresh. The streets would be washed, and all of Arizona would seem clean. But for the homeless kids it was different. The storms left them soaked, miserable, and sick. Their socks and shoes and sleeping bags became sodden. Infections and illnesses quickly set in.
    We watched as the sky turned the thick, menacing dark color of dust clouds. A boy came running ahead of the storm toward us, the sheet of black dust behind him. He was coughing as he ran—asthma, I thought. “Hurry!” Jan called.
    She interviewed the boy with the new intake forms she had created. He said his name was Matthew and he was seventeen. Hehad been sleeping under an overpass since his stepdad had kicked him out of his home. He had been mugged repeatedly. “He’s lost count of how many times he has been assaulted,” Jan had written. I took a deep breath and went into the exam room.
    He was small and thin, with thick blond hair. He wore a dusty long trench coat over black clothes. My heart knitted a little bit at seeing the outfit. It looked like the sad posturing of a boy trying to look tough. But he didn’t look tough at all, not with thick glasses mended with Scotch tape and rubber bands. One lens was shattered inside the frame, and he kept turning his head