Ask Me Why I Hurt (12 page)

“How did you get all these scars, Donald?”

There was a slight pause. Then quietly he said, “My dad.”

“Why did he do that, Donald?”

“He wanted to make me mind.”

“Did he hit you?” I felt his ear. It was lumpy with scar tissue.

“Uh, yeah.”

“What did he hit you with, Donald?”

“A board.”

I cupped my hands over his head above his ears again and felt the scars and knobs. He turned his cheek slightly into my hand. I felt I was absorbing his pain as I touched him.

“How many times did your father beat you with the board, Donald?”

“Lots.”

“Did he ever take you to the doctor?”

“When I was little, maybe.”

“What did he do when you got hurt from the beatings?”

“He put a towel on it.”

“Donald, where are you from?”

This time came another smile. “They call it the Heart of Dixie.”

It wasn’t until later I figured it out. “The Heart of Dixie.” Alabama.

I was discovering that many of the physical problems ailing these kids—the untreated asthma or the cutting or the drug use—had roots in their past. They were homeless for a reason. Sometimes it was poverty at home, abuse, or neglect. Other times it was their parents’ alcoholism or drug addictions. A surprising number had parents with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or clinical depression. Understanding their family backgrounds, I thought, was key to understanding their health.

My questions seemed casual to outside observers, but actually followed a pattern. I started easy and broad. Who was at home when he was growing up? Donald said it was just he and his dad. His mom had left when he was young. Did they always live in one place? Yes. The farm. Did he remember going to school? He remembered a nice teacher in first grade. How long did he go to school? He wasn’t sure when he left, but it was when he was young.
Did he ever see a dentist? One time. He couldn’t remember. Did anyone ever evaluate him for learning problems? He wasn’t sure what that meant. But he mentioned that a home nurse came by a few times and told his dad something.

The longer I spoke with Donald, the clearer it became. He had significant developmental disabilities. The only thing I didn’t know is whether the delays were caused by prenatal or birth issues or acquired through the injuries he had suffered at the hands of his father, or both. Complicated questions boggled him. But he was sweet in nature. I began to get more specific, gathering a picture of his past. I asked about his favorite meal when he was growing up. He smiled. He liked spaghetti, the Chef Boyardee kind that came in the can. Did he get fresh milk? Yes. How did he spend his free time? He worked the farm. Did they have a television? Of course, he said. Did he read books? He wasn’t too good at reading, he said. Had he ever used drugs? Never. Coffee, tobacco? No. Sex? He blushed when I asked. No. Had he ever left home before? No, he said, suddenly sad, his eyes starry with tears.

“How did you get all the way to Arizona, Donald?”

“My daddy put me on the bus.”

“The Greyhound?”

“Yes, sir.” He looked at his calloused hands.

“That must have been a long bus ride.”

“Oh, it was.”

“Did your dad tell you why he put you on the bus?”

“He said I was going to stay with my cousins. He couldn’t take care of me anymore.”

“What cousins?”

“I never met them. I got their address here.”

He handed me an address written in crude block script on the back of a feed store receipt. I knew Phoenix well enough to know there was no such place. The boy’s father had put him on a bus to nowhere.

“I kept looking,” Donald said. “I couldn’t find the place. Those kids were throwing rocks.”

“How long have you been looking?”

He suddenly looked close to breaking down. “That nice man found me. I’m hungry.”

I asked Jan to get him something to eat. I knew she wouldn’t mind running for food; it would give her and Scott a chance to take a break. “Make it soft,” I said, looking at his teeth.

Jan came back in a few minutes with a large burrito. We led Donald outside to sit in a chair under our new awning. The Jaycees had given us yet another generous gift, this time bringing shade to our patients. The girl who had had the cockroach in her ear was sitting in a lawn chair. Scott joined her and began talking about why she was homeless and what we could do to help. Donald sat in another chair and began eating with small, hasty bites. Jan and I talked in low voices.

“I don’t know if he is brain damaged from the beatings,” I said, “or perhaps he has some congenital problem; even some infections can affect the brain at the time of birth. In any case he needs some sort of work-up.”

“I’d be brain damaged if someone beat me in the head with a board,” she said.

I felt the anger that was there and pushed it down. “We need to get him tested in a hospital,” I said. “He needs a full work-up with neurological tests. If he has brain damage, we need to know.” Sometimes brain damage came with life-threatening seizure disorders.

“He won’t be able to get tested without insurance,” she said.

“Do you think we can get him on AHCCCS?” I asked. This was Arizona’s Medicaid program, the state insurance for the poor. The initials stood for Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. I was starting to suspect that the way the state contained costs was by making it impossible to get services. We had discovered very few of the homeless kids had insurance, while getting the insurance was a nightmare requiring multiple personal visits to a building downtown, along with proof of identity. It amazed me that the government expected homeless children to take all these steps by themselves.

“It will take a good three months,” Jan replied crisply. “And that is after he applies in person and with identification. If he doesn’t have identification, then he can’t get on it.”

“We’ll have to get him identification first then.”

“You know how hard that can be,” Jan said. We had friends at HomeBase who helped get the kids their identification, which itself was a huge challenge. Before anyone got identification, a birth certificate had to be obtained. Not many homeless children had their birth certificates, and efforts to track them down from uncooperative or imprisoned or addicted parents often proved fruitless.

“We can’t just let him wander the streets for three months,” I said. “He’ll starve or get killed.”

Donald ate his burrito while we saw other patients and pondered his future. A homeless boy walked by, looking surly. He let out a cussword at another kid, and Jan swooped down on him. She had her hands on her hips. By the time she was done reading him the riot act he was as passive as a kitten. I held back a smile when she offered to fetch a bar of soap and clean his mouth herself. The next time I checked, Jan was bringing Donald a box of apple juice.

“Have you found my cousins yet?” he asked.

“Still looking,” I said. I wasn’t about to crush the spirit of this delayed boy by telling him what I really thought, which was that the cousins had never existed and his father had abandoned him, shipping him on a bus to nowhere.

All that day Donald sat outside the van. I was at a loss. I knew the shelters were above capacity, and the current wait for a bed was months. With the budget cuts to social services many shelters had closed or sharply reduced their number of cots. In reality Donald should be in a hospital, I thought, getting those head injuries looked at. But if he walked into a hospital without insurance, he would be turned away.

I felt I was leaving him to get hurt. He’d probably end up spending the night outside with the kids in the Dumpster cave. Maybe they could at least protect him. They did that for one another. But it seemed like no choice at all. I went out to tell Donald we were leaving. He tilted his head back to look at me. The vulnerability of the gesture struck me. His blue eyes were rimmed with pale, sun-bleached eyelashes. The scars and knobs of his scalp were visible through his short hair. The scars looked like silverfish against the pinkness of his scalp.

Across the street a familiar car pulled in. It was the pastor. He came quickly across the lot, breathing lightly.

“Sorry, in a hurry,” he said. “Suppertime. Wife’ll get mad if I’m late. I wanted to check on this boy here. I’ve been thinking on him all day.”

I explained to him the problems of finding Donald shelter or getting him admitted to the hospital for tests without identification. The boy had no place to go. The pastor stopped me with a wave of his hand. “I’ll take him,” he said without hesitation.

I was flabbergasted. “You’ll
take
him?”

“Sure. Got a hot supper waiting. And there’s the kids’ old room. I’ve got a cousin staying there, but he can make way.”

“You don’t have to—”

“There’s always room for one more. I’ll put him to work tomorrow in the church.” He gave a throaty laugh. “He’ll earn his keep.”

He went and touched Donald’s shoulder. Then the pastor turned to me. “I’ll be bringing him by, and soon. You’ll help him, right?”

“Right.” My throat felt thick.

Jan came out as the two were getting into the car. The pastor was opening the back door for Donald. He was crawling in, the dirty back seat of his coveralls visible. “You’ll never believe what just happened,” I told her.

“What happened?”

“People are good, Jan. That’s what happened.”

That night I gave Amy a big hug. “It’s been a busy year, hasn’t it?” I said. “The van, the kids …” I trailed off. I didn’t want to say
the word
miscarriage
out loud. It had been two months now since it had happened, and Amy seemed fully recovered. I was the one who still seemed bruised. She added a handful of fresh basil to the saucepan and gave me an amused look. “I’m trying this new sauce,” she said. “Want to try it?” I took a spoonful.

“Spicy, in a good way,” I said.

“It’s got red pepper in it,” she said, taking back the spoon. The cutting board was covered with chopped vegetables, and there was sausage sautéing nearby, along with a bowl of freshly grated Parmesan. I remembered Amy’s inviting me over to her place for Thanksgiving right after we had met. I had walked in expecting a few people and maybe a burned college student turkey. Instead I walked into a festively decorated, crowded room, Amy wearing an apron, her table set with linen and candles. She had been cooking for days. Something about the homespun Betty Crocker moment struck me as poignant, knowing that Amy had lost her own mother very early. Here is a woman, I had thought, who believes in family.

“There’s something I want to ask you.”

“Waiting.”

“You know about Camp AZDA?”

“Sure. I refer kids there all the time,” she said. Camp AZDA was one of the largest summer camps for kids with diabetes. It was held in nearby Prescott, Arizona. The camp was staffed by medical professionals who taught the kids how to manage their diabetes and live healthy lives.

“Well, they want me to be their medical director. It means spending a week there every summer.”

“Sure.”

“Really?” As supportive as Amy was, sometimes her attitude was startling. The most important thing in the world to her was family. Why would she accept yet another drain on my time?

She was wearing her glasses, which she did only when relaxed. One lens had a smudge on it. With her hair pulled back, no makeup on, and tomato sauce splattered on her apron, I had never loved her more.

“It will be a lot of work, but you’ll enjoy every minute.” She
stirred the sauce. She stopped. “You have good leadership skills. You should put them to work.”

“Only if you come with me,” I said.

That night I held Amy and felt her heart beating through the T-shirt she had stolen from my drawer for that night. Her bare leg touched mine. “I want to try again,” she whispered.

“Isn’t it too soon?” I whispered back. Our doctor had told Amy that as long as she had a normal period, getting pregnant again would be OK. But I didn’t want her to hurt again. The days following the miscarriage it had hurt even to look at her. Amy had told me several times how normal it was for women to lose pregnancies.

“You know, my grandmother lost four pregnancies before she had my mother,” she said. “Almost half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. It’s part of life, Randy.”

If only I could feel that way. “What about the baby we lost?” I asked her, our voices soft in the night. Outside I heard a dove call.

“It was never our baby,” she said. “It was never meant to be.”

I remembered when I had wondered if Amy’s losing her mother had made her reluctant to risk falling in love. But in that moment I saw how that loss had made her the woman she was now, strong and willing to take risks.