She still has all her teeth except for one. The gap occupies the upper corner of her mouth. It’s a dark space that can be easily missed if you weren’t looking closely for missing teeth, the way I am.

Her skin is good. There are no sores, no blemishes. She has the skin of a thirty year old, I have the skin of a fourty-three year old, but we are both thirty-nine.

How can she have such creamy skin and how can she look so young after everything she’s be through? I feel jealous and bewildered by her skin, then ashamed. Do I need to begrudge her this? This is the very least she is entitled to, good skin and youthful looks.

A few theories tick off in my mind; she has good skin because of her Greek heritage. Mediterranean’s are known for aging better than say, Celts.

Maybe it’s because I drink too much and she rarely does. She especially doesn’t like to drink when she is doing methamphetamine, which is often.

Perhaps it’s because I wake up every morning way before I am ready, answering the surprisingly well-articulated demands of my toddler who likes to rise at six a.m. or even earlier. Every morning, when I meet those demands, I feel that I am losing years of my life. Isn’t that what they say in Chinese medicine? That every child takes five years off your life?

She has another theory.

“It’s because I was dead, three times. I’ve stopped aging and that is why. Because I died three times last year, and was in a coma for twenty-eight days”

Now seems like a good time to ask her about what happened, so I do. After some tangential meandering she gets around to telling me. And then we end up talking for more than three hours straight, though it feels as if only twenty minutes have passed.

She was eight months pregnant, and wished she could stop using meth, but she couldn’t. Her neighbor urged her to go for pre-natal care, but she didn’t. She was ashamed of being fat and ashamed of her inability to keep a prenatal appointment.

“I didn’t realize it was a child,” she said.

After doing some speed one night, she felt pains. The possible father of her child urged her not to call an ambulance. They will test your urine, he said. You will go to jail. CPS will take your baby. They will take our baby.

Another friend who was there disagreed. An ambulance was called and she was taken to UCSF, where they had to hold her down because she was scared and thrashing around, calling the nurses around her “a bunch of dykes” and demanding that they get off her.

“The last thing I remembered was a needle going in my vein. After that I was in a coma for twenty-eight days.”

When she woke up she was told her baby had died, and she had nearly died, too. She had three heart attacks while unconscious. Her uterus had been removed. She would never bear children again.

She showed me the scar on her abdomen where they had cut her open. I have seen many caesarian scars before, but none remotely like this. There is a deep and vertical, jagged crevice running from the top of her belly down to the bottom. It doesn’t look like a surgeon made an incision, but rather a greedy or angry person who haphazardly pulled out chunks of flesh by the fistful. The only scars I’ve seen similar to this one are the scars of heroin users who had contracted a horrible disease called “flesh-eating bacteria.”

Many bits about her ordeal don’t make sense and I find myself becoming frustrated and stuck on the small details.

“What do you mean; they wouldn’t let you see the baby in the morgue? They still had the baby in the morgue twenty-eight days later?” Eventually I have to let go of my desire to get the details. Talking to Stacy is like this. Her narratives convey a truth through fantastical stories.

That she lost the child I am certain. I am also certain that she is not lying when she says she’s been homeless for many months. She was released form the hospital soon after waking from her coma, her muscles atrophied and weak. She had nowhere to go.

Then a request for a favor. She believes they stole the baby from her and handed him over to her former neighbor, the same one who urged her to get care. She begs me to take down the address and knock on the woman’s door to check if the baby is there.

“I'm going to want to think about that,” I tell her. I am surprised to discover a small part of me is willing to believe that maybe they did hide the baby from her. Stacy always had the ability to be persuasive. She may not have made it this far if she didn’t have that quality.

I am also surprised that throughout our conversation this child of hers has remained an abstraction to me, which is only natural since he is an abstraction to her.

“I didn’t realize it was a child.”

I gather my things to leave. “Do you have a picture of your kid?” she asks.

I do. I open my wallet and show it to her. He is two months shy of being two years old. Her child would have been 18 months old.

“Doesn’t he look exactly like Don and me?” I ask.

It is not accidental that I point this out. There’s a good chance that her story will change and I will be cast as the villain, the one who conspired to take her child, the one raising her child. I’ve been the object of her paranoid delusions before. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve found it impossible to remain friends with her and hadn’t seen her for two years before spotting her with her pit bull on the express line at the Safeway on Potrero and 16th streets.

You are probably reading this and wondering how I know this person. You may even be wondering why I would associate with such a person.

The truth is she and I am not as different as you may think. We’ve known each other for twenty-two years. We went to the same college together in New Jersey. We both come from middle-class suburban homes.

Fate has been exceptionally good to me, and I continuously reap enormous blessings.

Fate and, well, luck, have not been very good to her at all. Since leaving college she’s experienced some incredible “hard knocks.”

We hug and I leave. I don’t know when I will see her again, or if I will see her again.

By Ellen Catalina

Labels: Ellen Catalina, San Francisco

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