Ask Me Why I Hurt (18 page)

“At first he kept me for himself. Not too long. Then, well, you know.” The sneaker was still rubbing. Under that veneer of bravado, I thought, this girl carries an immense amount of pain. “They liked me,” she said, sneaking a glance to catch my reaction. “He called me his Sugar.”

Never again would I want to call her by that name, I thought. Never.

The rub of the sneaker stopped. Her clear eyes were wide and full of questions. “I feel so bad I left my little sister. I wonder what happened to her. I think of her all alone in the house. Can God forgive you for that? I don’t know.”

I took my time before replying. I wanted to make her understand that she was the victim and that she couldn’t blame herself for what had happened. But I also sensed how strong her love for her sister was still. If she wouldn’t fight for herself, maybe she would fight for her sister.

“Maybe there is a way to see her again,” I said gently.

“I’d just like to know she’s OK,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect her to talk to me or anything. I’d just like to know if she is OK.”

“If you go into a shelter …” I said. I quickly added, “We could find a safe shelter for you. Like HomeBase.”

There was a quick shake no of the head.

“Or a counselor. You could tell this to a counselor,” I said.

“Naw.” She looked as if she were ready to bolt. “Look, it’s too late. Hell, the last time I was in school I was in seventh grade. I can’t even do math or nothing.” She was being tough.

But I saw under that hard shell of sexuality a twelve-year-old girl who had never been loved, a twelve-year-old girl who loved her baby sister. Just like Mary, Sugar was hiding.

When I got home that night, I crouched down to pet Ginger and rolled her on her back for a belly scratch. She was a little fluff ball. I asked Amy if she wanted to go out for pizza. I had to spend the night studying for my certification tests, and I wanted at least a little time with Amy. I was worried about her. The doctors had told her she needed to gain a good fifty pounds for the pregnancy, twenty-five for each of the babies. She was a healthy weight but needed the extra weight to carry the twins. This task already seemed impossible. Amy had been nauseated from day one, and not mild nausea either. She vomited much of what she ate. We kept expecting the morning sickness to pass, but as the weeks went by, it was getting worse.

“You know what sounds good?” she said. “Chinese hot-and-sour soup.” On the way to the Chinese restaurant, she rolled down her window and let the cooler air flow over her face to calm her nausea. We drove past a girl standing conspicuously on a street corner. Wearing shiny blue shorts and a blue zip-up jacket, she was under a dome of light. I thought immediately of Sugar.

“How sad,” Amy said, glancing at the girl as we pulled up to the light.

“Why do you think a girl like that wouldn’t want to get help?” I asked Amy.

“What do you mean?”

“If you offered a girl like that other options, why wouldn’t she accept them?”

The girl turned her face toward Amy and then quickly turned away when she saw us looking. I saw a car across the street slow down. The girl’s face migrated to it as if by instinct. A frown line appeared between Amy’s eyes.

“I imagine she would be afraid,” she said slowly.

“Afraid of what?”

“She’d be thinking she didn’t deserve any better.”

“Why?”

The light turned green. The car across the street had stopped, and the girl was sashaying toward the open window. The man inside had to be three times her age. The girl was leaning through his window as we drove away.

“Why do you think?” Amy said softly.

Jan was bouncing with pep, having just racked up yet another BMX win. She was now a national champion. I didn’t realize how big this was until some of the kids on the van went gaga over the news. Her taut forearms had a fresh set of freckles. She showed off her new trophy. I watched with bleary, tired eyes. Between the van schedules, my hospital work, cramming nonstop at night for my certification tests, Amy’s pregnancy, and the troubling ongoing severe nausea, it seemed I never got sleep. I felt constantly stressed, and the pressures were only rising. I was on call for two hospitals along with the van and working nineteen and twenty days straight at a time, with only one or two days off a month. It was becoming typical for me to work eighty- to ninety-hour weeks, and I wondered how long Amy would put up with it. My mind shied away from the worry.

“You won against women twenty years younger than you,” I told Jan, yawning. “Aren’t you ashamed?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Hey, I made a new schedule.”

I yawned again. A new schedule, I thought. OK. She handed me an extremely detailed chart. For a moment the lines moved into a wavy pattern and then reorganized back to where they had been. I really needed to start getting more sleep. “What’s this?” I asked.

“I told you, it’s a new monthly schedule. See? Here is all the places we take the van, here is how many hours we spend in each location, how many times a week, and when we finish for the night.
Over here I have the staff and interns and medical students and their availability. I worked it all out so we aren’t so short staffed, and the kids know where to expect us and when.”

For a moment nothing she said made sense. I had to think about it. A new schedule. Right.

“When did you do this?”

“Last night, after I got back from the race.”

“You must have been up all night.”

“Only until one or two or so,” she said. “But I had to get up at five to do the laundry and get my lazy teenagers out of bed.” She drank a slug of water and smiled.

“You are crazy. Really, Jan. Stone-cold crazy. I’ll present this to the administration at our next meeting.”

“When will that be?” She looked cross.

I glanced at the calendar on the wall. “Next month.”

“You remember how long it took them to approve the intake forms I made,” she said. “And then as soon as they did, it was like everyone agreed they had been needed all along.”

“We can’t just make big changes without going through the administration and our supporters,” I said, “no matter how good the idea.”

Jan had a reputation for going toe to toe with people. Just the other day she’d had a huge battle with one of our supporters. For religious reasons, he was opposed to giving out birth control. While I diplomatically tried to handle the issue—or so I thought—Jan marched into his office and asked him how many child prostitutes he wanted to see die because they caught HIV. I had heard the fireworks were pretty spectacular. While I agreed with her, I also worried about losing a key supporter.

She pursed her lips and went back to work. We were quiet as we took the van out. It was Jan who made an overture later that day. She touched my forearm. “I have a feeling you’re mad at me.”

We have to work as a team, or this will never work, I thought. In order for the van to be successful, I have to create a strong team. I can’t do it by myself. And one of the first things I need to accept is that I can’t always be the boss. I needed to learn to meet Jan halfway.
I knew she cared about the kids as passionately as I did. We just had different styles, and it occurred to me I should probably back off and let her do things her own way too.

“I’m used to working with administrations,” I said. I explained to her I was willing to work slowly because I knew there could be big results down the line: funding, support, ongoing programs. I didn’t want to anger anyone or turn people against our work.

“Yeah, but I like to get things done,” she said.

“That,” I said with a laugh, “is abundantly clear.”

I had been excited all morning. Mary’s aunt had called and said they were coming from Chandler into Tempe for the annual Tempe Arts Festival, the local art-crazed street festival that drew people from all over the state. Afterward her aunt was taking her out to lunch for her birthday. Mary was turning eighteen. They had promised to stop by the van and say hello.

I kept peeking out the door of the van to see if they were coming. The street festival was only a few blocks from where I was parked. I was busy. Several kids had told me the festival was a good place to panhandle and get free food. Jan poked her head into a room where I was finishing with a kid. “Guess who is here?” she said.

A suddenly grownup-looking Mary was carrying a balloon and had her cheek painted with a little flower. Her hair was longer, the dark silky strands growing past her shoulders. She had clipped the hair in front into straight bangs. The style showed off her features, her high cheekbones and dark eyes. I suddenly realized what a pretty young woman she was.

Her aunt’s face was flushed with heat. A large purse was slung over her shoulder. “This is an amazing festival,” she said to me. “We visited all the booths. I got a paint set for Mary for her birthday present.”

“Can you come to lunch with us? Please?” Mary asked. “We’re having Mexican.”

I hesitated. In general I didn’t see the kids outside the van. I wanted to maintain good professional boundaries. But we had decided as a team that while it wasn’t direct medical care, there were times we might want to celebrate a milestone with a child. Giving cards for birthdays, for instance, seemed appropriate. While cards were OK, we had drawn the line at giving out money or expensive gifts. When a child asked for money for a Greyhound bus home, or there was some other legitimate need, we dealt with it on a case-by-case basis.

“It’s not expensive or fancy,” her aunt hastened to say. “Just that little Mexican place down the street.”

“It’s my birthday lunch,” Mary said.

“Go,” Jan said, making shooing motions. “I can handle it here.”

On the way out I opened a storage cupboard up front and took out a small envelope. Jan had gotten Mary a birthday card. She had picked out the card because it looked artistic, with beautiful watercolors on the front. The inside read that we were wishing Mary the most wonderful year. I put the envelope in my pants pocket.

“It turns out Mary is a computer whiz,” her aunt told me as we scooped up warm artichoke dip with tortilla chips in the restaurant. She was proud. Mary stared at me briefly over her plate, her cheeks high with color. Her dark eyes studied me intently. I wondered what she was thinking.

“I made new friends at school,” she said.

“They’re all computer kids,” her aunt said with a laugh. “She fits right in. She’s smart.”

Mary dug into her food. I noticed she held her fork awkwardly, like a spade. Her aunt reminded her gently about “manners” under her breath. Mary immediately switched the fork to the other hand. She soon scraped her plate clean. “Can I be excused for a second?” I watched as she stopped and asked a waitress where the restroom was. Her shoulders were back, and she held her head high. She had gone from looking like a fearful animal to looking like a confident young woman.

Her aunt spoke quietly. “She spaces out sometimes. The counselor says that will get better over time. She’s got PTSD, you know.”

“You must be proud of how far she has come.”

“Dr. Christensen, she’s never celebrated her birthday before. Not once in her life did that girl have a birthday.”

When Mary came back, I handed her the card. “Happy birthday, Mary,” I said. Her eyes widened. She opened the card. This is amazing, I kept thinking. When I met her, she couldn’t remember her age.

I
t’s kind of hard to celebrate the pregnancy when you are puking so much.” I tried to tease Amy as she knelt over the toilet bowl. She wiped her mouth and gave me a look. We were enjoying pregnancy, despite the still-sharp memory of the miscarriage and despite Amy’s constant sickness. But she was not gaining any weight, and I was getting more concerned all the time.

“What happened to my famous cast-iron stomach?” she said, moaning.

“Remember how you used to drink milk that was weeks old and not even notice?”

“Oh. Don’t talk like that.” She retched again. Her stomach was empty. “I’ve got to get to work,” she said, standing weakly.

I wanted to argue but didn’t. Amy was still putting in her own twelve- to fourteen-hour days as a pediatrician. Part of the reason she understood my dedication to the van was that she had the same dedication to her patients. She was a driven person. Amy was a hard worker. And stubborn too. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue with her.