Read Have You Found Her Online

Authors: Janice Erlbaum

Have You Found Her

BOOK: Have You Found Her
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For B, of course

Ooh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world….
I’ll always remember you like a child, girl.

—CAT STEVENS

Prologue

Red

         
T
here’s a redheaded girl panhandling on my corner, sitting on the sidewalk behind a cardboard sign. It reads:
PLEASE HELP ME. TRYING TO GET A PLACE TO STAY. ANYTHING YOU CAN GIVE. I’M JUST A YOUNG GIRL.
I’ve seen her out there on the street for the past few years, on and off—I won’t spot her for weeks at a time over the winter months, but as soon as the sun starts shining in March, there she’ll be, all five feet and ninety pounds of her, her back pressed against the stone façade of the Gap Body store on Fifth Avenue, her cardboard sign propped up against her bony knees, her head dropped between her legs, sobbing.

This is what she does. She sits on the sidewalk behind her sign and sobs. Until you put something in her cup, and then she barely lifts her head and mouths
thank you
. And you can see, for a second, how sharp and drawn her face is, how cloudy her eyes; you’ll note the sores on her cheeks where she scratches and picks. Heroin sores.

Different drugs leave different scars. I’ve learned to recognize the signs, since I started volunteering at the shelter, since I started tracking the street kids who migrate around my neighborhood like stupefied antelopes. The girls with the burnt, scabby lips are smoking coke; the meth addicts and junkies have lesions. Except the meth addicts don’t look sleepy, like the junkies do; they look rapacious, like starvation-crazed zombies, like they’re ready to run up on you and eat your brains. But the redhead’s drug is heroin—you can tell by the way she lolls and slumps between crying jags, the way she goes to wipe her runny nose and misses, forgets halfway.

The first time I noticed the redhead, I was on my way to have lunch with my father at an expensive restaurant near Union Square. It was a cold, wet April afternoon, and she was huddled behind her cardboard sign, which was soaked dark brown, the words barely legible. I was going to walk by her, the way I often did in my pre-volunteer days, strode right past kids panhandling on the sidewalk, thinking,
Go back to your middle-class parents in Westchester, girlie, and lay off the dope.

But the sign—
I’m just a young girl
. And she was shivering, sobbing, her red hair matted into snakes by the rain. Could have been me, once, if things had gone differently.

I stopped and crouched down in front of her, covering us both with my umbrella. “Hey,” I said, reaching for her shoulder, cold and bony as a sparrow’s wing under her wet sweatshirt. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”

She lifted her head and moaned. It sounded like,
Please
. Her body trembled violently under my hand.

Good god
, I thought, suddenly urgent.
Somebody has to help this girl.

I took my hand from her shoulder, dug in my pocket, landed on a crumpled bill. “Hey.” I showed her the bill, a five, and put it in the melting paper coffee cup at her side, empty except for some pennies and a quarter inch of rain. She continued to shake and moan—
Please, please
. “Hey, listen, it’s going to be okay.”

What was going to be okay? Me, I was going to be okay. I was on my way to meet my father at an expensive restaurant; I had on nice pants and heels, nice clothes to prove that I was okay. But
she
wasn’t okay, she wasn’t going to be okay, and my five dollars wasn’t going to make it okay.
Five dollars,
I pled with myself, trying to make myself believe the best: she’d purchase a half hour indoors at a coffee shop, maybe a grilled-cheese sandwich. She wouldn’t put it toward her next bag of dope.

I put my hand back on her shoulder—I’d wash it when I got to the restaurant. Other people were streaming by on the sidewalk; I looked at them desperately. Was there a doctor in the house? A social worker? Somebody’s mom? Could somebody cover this, somebody equipped to deal with it? It was an emergency, and I had to get to lunch.

She rolled her head back on her neck, tilted her parched eyes my way. Fighting for words like she was drowning. “Pl-ease,” she said thickly, her chest hitching. “I’m sick. Nobody helps….”

Her purple lips were stretched into a grimace; she trembled like she might break.
Good god,
I thought again, despite the evidence to the contrary. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. People want to help, they really do. I want to help. Take this.” I took the money from the cup, pressed it into her hand; she grasped it and nodded, still shaking. “Take it, go to a coffee shop, get out of the rain, get something to eat. Okay?”

She slumped forward, her face obscured, the runoff from my umbrella trickling down the back of her neck. A coffee shop wasn’t going to help her. One sandwich wasn’t going to save her life. Her sharp little shoulder was clammy under my sweating hand. I was going to be late; I hate being late. I cringed at the thought.

“Look, I have to go, but I’m going to come back, okay? I’ll be back in an hour. Will you be here? You get something to eat, and I’ll come back, and…we’ll see what we can do, okay?” She nodded into her knees, heaved and jerked. “I’ll come back,” I repeated stupidly, removing my hand from her shoulder, standing up, backing away. “You take care. I’ll see you soon.”

I tore myself away, half guilty, half relieved, and stumbled down the block in my unfamiliar heels. Washed my hands, kissed my father hello, and ate my expensive lunch.

An hour later, I walked by her spot. She was gone.

I’ve seen her I don’t know how many times since then. Fifty? Sobbing behind her sign in front of J. Crew, in front of Esprit, in front of Armani Exchange. Some days I’ll pass right by her; other days I’ll stop, offer to get her a sandwich or something to drink. She’ll lift her weary head and murmur, “
Please, not hungry, spare some change.
” I’ll bring her some food anyway. Some cookies, a Snapple, anything sweet—junkies crave sugar, that’s the lore. I’ll crouch beside her, put the offering at her feet; she’ll whimper a thank-you, then drop her head again. She does not appear to recognize me from one iced tea to the next.

Samantha knew the redhead. Of course she did—Sam knew all the street kids around Union Square—the blond guy with dreads and a guitar (
STRANDED, TRYING TO GET
$
FOR A BUS TICKET HOME
), the brown-haired, slack-faced girl with the scabby lips (
JUST HAD BRAIN SURGERY, PLEASE HELP
). “That guy,” she’d say, pointing out a kid who looked like he’d been rolled from hood to sneaker in a fine gray dust, “that guy huffs so much paint and glue, I don’t even want to light a cigarette near him.”

Sam and I were walking from my apartment to the park one afternoon last summer when I spotted the redhead. I stopped short and nudged Sam, pointing with my chin. “There she is, the girl I was telling you about.”

Across the street, in front of the Banana Republic, head between her arms, curled like a porcupine behind her weather-beaten sign. Sam slowed and narrowed her eyes, squinting at the markered words.

“Oh, her. I’ve seen her at StreetWorks a few times. She’s a junkie. I mean, obviously.” Sam squinted some more, shading her eyes from the sun. “Hah! ‘Just a young girl.’ She’s like twenty-five years old!”

Sam turned to continue walking, but I was still standing, watching a woman deposit some coins into the redhead’s cup as she hurried past. The tiny head bobbed up for a second, then dropped back down.
Twenty-five,
I thought—she’d probably been on the street for years now. It must have been the fear on her face that made her look so young.

“Yeah? What’s her story? Have you ever talked to her?”

“I don’t know, I’ve just seen her there a few times, getting the free lunch. I think Valentina knows her.” Sam wrinkled her nose, bored, ready to move on, to pick up our conversation about cults and EST and Chinese brainwashing techniques. “She’s not
that
interesting.”

There was that hint of chiding in Sam’s voice, the same hint I sometimes got when I inquired after her roommate, Valentina, or when I talked about the girls I’d met volunteering at the shelter that week, the way Sam and I had met. That chiding, like,
What, I’m not enough for you? You want to start seeing other homeless girls?

I turned away from the redhead and smiled to myself, resuming our pace.
Nobody’s as interesting as you, kid.

It’s almost summer again. Sam’s been gone for over six months now. I draft her letters sometimes, the kind you can’t send. I never get past the first few lines anyway. But the redhead is still here on my corner. It’s warm these days, but she’s still shivering, teeth chattering in the white sun on the patch of sidewalk in front of the Gap Body store. Sometimes she’s crying, other times she appears to be asleep. She doesn’t look like she’s going to last much longer, but I’ve been thinking that for years now. Maybe she’ll surprise me, and live.

I shade my eyes as Sam did, watch from across the street as people drop coins into the redhead’s cup, wishes in a fountain.
I wish I could save you
. And her puppet head jerks and nods, like she fell asleep while praying.

BOOK: Have You Found Her
6.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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