Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

I reached for the keys but he jerked his hand away. "It's not a bad place," he said, standing up and brushing the dust from the back of his pants. "I left a drawing on the table to show you where to fit the furniture." Shoving my keys in his pocket, he slid on the sunglasses that had been hanging from his shirt's neck and walked past me to his car.

  "Don't come back here!" I shouted at him. He smiled, waved, and then he drove away.

  I talked the landlord into changing the locks on the doors, but that didn't keep Tom from appearing all the time. There he was in the pool delighting the girls with four new squirt guns when we went out for a swim. There he was parked in my space when my daughters and I arrived in the late afternoon, inviting us out for green-corn tamales and cheese quesadillas. At night, he'd phone me five or six or ten times to ask when I was coming back, when I was going to get over my bad stage, my crisis, my fit of selfishness.

  Five days before Halloween in 1991, a few months after my move into the apartment, I drove to the elementary school to pick up nine-year-old Stephanie from basketball practice. I pulled to the curb and slid open the door, and she climbed in over sacks of groceries, past Mollie, who was strapped into the middle seat of our van, past the box of clothes I'd been intending to drop at Goodwill for weeks, and into the far back corner. Stephanie wasn't speaking to me at the moment. During a costume-buying trip the day before, I'd declined to rent her a real cheerleader's uniform for $24.99. Yes, it came with thick pompoms and had a fat blue S sewn on the peppy red sweater. And it had a swingy skirt that flashed a blue satin lining when she danced about. But it was $24.99. That was too much when we could throw one together at home that would be just as good, I told her: she already owned a skirt and a too-big red sweater. I could pick up football pompoms at the university's bookstore, and bows for her hair. I was sure, I said, that we could find an old school letter at a thrift shop to sew on the front of her outfit.

  Now Stephanie buckled herself into the farthest bench seat back and stared out the window. Amanda had stayed home to play with a friend from the other end of our apartment complex—the first of the girls to enter this new circle of apartment friends—Mary was in the passenger seat next to me, while Mollie sat behind us in her car seat. Stephanie was alone in the far reaches of the van, sighing out her disappointment. "Is that belt on tight?" I said, watching her in the rearview mirror. Another sigh, this one louder.

  Fine. I had enough on my mind. I preferred silence over the morning's argument about the costume. Stephanie hated the homemade idea, and Amanda was her champion in dissent. Didn't I know how important it was for Steph to look right when she hit the trick-or-treating with her fourth-grade friends? With everything they were going through, the two girls as a unit told me, the least I could do was make sure Stephanie had the perfect costume.

  I drove the school's circular driveway and turned sharp out onto the street, tipping over a couple of grocery sacks. Cheese, toilet paper, a package of hamburger, and apple-strawberry juice boxes tumbled onto the floor. "I want one! I'm thirsty!" Mollie cried when she saw the drinks. I ignored her plea and Stephanie's silence and raced home to get Amanda to afternoon theater rehearsal—off to her new play.

  Soon after the girls and I had moved into that apartment several miles from their dad's house—and many weeks post-Annie—the same troupe of New York actors came back to town. Their director called Amanda and asked her to be in the new production—Jesus Christ Superstar. She spoke on the phone with him for only a minute, giving him a quiet answer of yes, as if the theater were a tedious habit now, the fun wrung out of it. Her separated parents, who lived in different houses, would juggle the rehearsal schedules and the performances in which she would play a leper, a child at Jesus's feet, and an angel in the afterlife. Opening night would fall on Halloween.

  In the evenings after rehearsals and dinner and homework, Amanda went over her dance steps and songs for the musical, Stephanie a skinny shadow behind her and Mary and Mollie watching from the doorway. The dark and strange un-Annie songs sank into the girls' imaginations, and a steady stream of musical ques tions floated through our house: "What's the buzz?" "Who are you, what have you sacrificed?" "Why'd you let the things you did get so out of hand?"

  The play confused Amanda. In Annie, right and wrong were cloyingly obvious. But what was Judas, she asked me, a good guy or a bad guy? She brought me a Bible from our bookshelf, asking me to locate the part about the betrayal, the blood money. I rifled through the pages and read a couple passages that seemed to relate while she slunk down next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. "What does it mean?" she said. She couldn't put the Scripture together with the rowdy scenes on stage: Judas wailing in the disco afterlife.

  I set the book on the floor and pulled her closer to me. Maybe the play was too sad, I said, running my fingers through her long hair. Maybe it was too big a load of sadness and darkness in the middle of my separation from her dad. "It's not too late to quit," I told her.

  She sat up straight and turned to me. "No way," she said. "You can't make me quit."

  "I didn't say you had to, only if you want to," I said to her shaking head, her outstretched hands that were pushing me away.

  No matter what, she'd stay with it. She was too enchanted by the dazzling Mary Magdalene, who'd promised to help layer on the gray leper makeup and attach the angel halo once performances began. And she couldn't leave Jesus, who gently touched the top of her head every time he passed her on stage.

  I was thinking about all this driving back to the apartment after I'd picked up Stephanie. I'd promised cookies for Mollie's preschool class and it was my week to cart Amanda back and forth to the rehearsal hall. Tom's phone calls were coming in a steady stream every night; if I couldn't think about him, he said, then think of our children, who would soon come unglued without both parents in the same house.

  In the rear storage section of the van I'd stashed a plastic bag I'd picked up earlier at a friend's house. In it was an orange jump suit, the type made for an industrial cleaning team or a highway flagger. A friend had bought it for me because she and her boyfriend were going to a costume party that night and wanted me to go along; the three of us would dress as Biospherians, the faux scientists who'd been sealed up in a giant glass terrarium outside Tucson the month before. On their 3.2-acre replica of Earth, these orange-clad Biospherians were to spend two years learning to "harness nature," as the PR person told me at the sealing-in festivities. I'd covered the party for Newsweek, a job I'd landed only because the magazine's editor had called one of my old journalism professors in a panic and he'd given her my name. The press badge granted me access to the private gathering, to Timothy Leary, to the cast of Cheers. That night after the Biospherians were locked in tight, I went back to my apartment, the girls at their father's house for the weekend, and wrote a story that was faxed to New York by midnight. Now my friend wanted to celebrate my first national story—even though my name appeared only at the bottom in six-point italics—at this party. I didn't know if I should, or even could. Still, the idea of a party flooded my mind. Standing in a group of adults, holding a cold beer, talking to people who weren't thinking about how to pay for cheerleader's uniforms and who might want to ask me what it felt like to write for a real magazine. Was that what would make me happy?

  Fuming about Stephanie's mood and about Tom's ire if I went to a party without him, worrying about cookies due in the morning, and my wedding band that tapped, tapped, tapped against the steering wheel, I never saw the car. And the car's driver didn't see me. He raced through the intersection, blowing through the stop sign, and slammed into our silver van. His sports car was so low to the ground that it slid under us. I felt a slight rise and suddenly heavy, as if we were in an airplane whose wheels had just left the runway. The van tipped, pitched hard, and leaned in a way that no car should. I turned my head to try to see Mary next to me, thinking that keeping my eyes on her would prevent this daughter from getting hurt, but I was pressed into my seat as if by the gravit
ational force of a carnival ride, the tilt-a-whirl or the space rocket. Mollie behind me and Stephanie behind her were a million miles away. It was dead quiet inside as we rolled like a steelie down the street: first sideways, then upside down, skidding, a screech of metal against roadbed. I listened for some sound of the girls above all that noise while the seat belt tightened across my chest and my ribs collapsed inward toward my stomach—hair flying in my face—but there was nothing. Nothing human, anyway. The movement of the car was slow and without human protest, as if we had already resigned ourselves to what was happening. What I knew was that we couldn't stop moving—because I couldn't face what was at the end of this when we did.

  Still upside down, we did stop, the force of nature and a jutting sidewalk curb taking care of that. I was able to move my arms, enough to push my dangling hair out of my eyes and turn to look around. Mary, hanging toward the top that was now the bottom, reached over to press the button on my seat belt, but it was jammed shut and wouldn't budge. Mollie whimpered. I twisted harder, enough to see my youngest child suspended from her car seat, and then to see the rear seat—the rear seat was empty. The window that had been next to Stephanie was gone, disappeared as if it had leaped off and run away like the gingerbread man I had read about to Mollie the night before. I shouted Stephanie's name and then I screamed it. Mary said, "There," and I looked out her window, my head now so full of blood I felt as useless as a tick. I saw Stephanie lying on the road, curled into herself, the way she had looked once at the park when she'd fallen wrong off the monkey bars and sprained her ankle. Maybe that was all it was, an ankle or a shoulder. I called her name again. "Get up, Stephanie, get up!" I yelled. I knew those were the worst instructions possible to give a hurt child, but I had to see her move.

  She did sit up, legs spread in front of her and blood streaming down her face and hair. Onlookers gathered, pouring out of their houses and cars. "My mom and sisters!" she shouted at them. But no one stepped forward. "Somebody help us!"

  A woman's voice from far away: "Tell your mother to turn off the engine." I pawed the space in front of me, what I thought was the dashboard, but I couldn't find the ignition. The steering wheel was cockeyed, staring at me blankly. Nowhere could I locate the metal jut of the key. Outside, the wheels of the van turned while the engine raced, as if the car were trying to find some way to escape through the air. My head was bulging now, or felt like it was; I was dizzy, and my body, like Mary's and Mollie's, hung in angled suspension from the seat belts. Five years of dust and grime crawled up my pants and covered my glasses, wove itself into my hair. I'd feel all of it later, the itchy dirt, the bruises and broken ribs. But right now, I needed to get my kids far from this car. I had to reach Stephanie.

  "Get us out of here!" I shouted at the people beyond the shattered windshield. They stood on the sidewalk, held at bay by the car whose engine roared and kept roaring.

  Stephanie stood up and moved toward the van. She pushed herself back through the hole from which she'd been thrown, first her head, then her chest, then her legs. "What are you doing?" I said, more alert by now, smart enough to know she needed to keep still until someone checked her out. "Sit down, don't move. Tell someone to call an ambulance."

  But she squeezed through the interior of the car, through the spilled milk and broken eggs, the bricks of cheese and smashed bread, blood dripping from her face and down her arms and legs, until she got to Mollie. I heard rather than saw what happened next: Stephanie pressed the button of her sister's seat belt and caught her as she fell free.

  "I want Mommy," Mollie whimpered.

  "She's coming," Stephanie said. "She's right behind us."

  A minute later I saw upside-down Stephanie and Mollie on the sidewalk, and an upside-down woman with a topknot of hair and a green facial mask hardened across her cheeks, chin, and forehead rushing toward them with an open blanket. I turned to Mary. "We'll be out in just a minute," I said, my head throbbing now. "I promise."

  A bare-chested man appeared at my window. He was huge, mus cled, and had inky tattoos on both upper arms. He was talking to me but I couldn't tell what he was saying. He was on his knees, reaching toward me through the opening, pushing his wide body in the broken window until I saw rivulets of red across his skin. With the knife in his hand, he started to cut me loose, but I reached out and grabbed his wrist. "Get my daughter first," I said over the still-roaring engine.

  "I'm here already," he said with an exaggerated shrug, which for some reason made me furious at this person who was trying to help when no one else would. "Get my daughter first," I said through clenched teeth. He sighed and pulled himself out the window and walked far enough around the car that he didn't come anywhere near the spinning tires, and in a minute he'd cut Mary free—she braced her knees and palms against the floor of the van to hold herself steady while he moved her toward the blanket he'd packed across the jagged base of the shattered window. He lifted her out. Then he came back for me.

  The next day the girls stayed home from school, and I called the director to say Amanda wouldn't be at rehearsal that afternoon. A few hours later Jesus phoned to ask about her. I told him she hadn't been with us during the accident, and he let go of the air I could tell he'd been holding in his lungs. The hospital had released Stephanie, stitched back together, jagged black threads poking like buried insects from her face and arms and kneecaps. Hair shaved in patches for more stitching, a purple ring of bruise around one raccooned eye. The doctor had pointed out the long dark streaks under her skin; he called them road tattoos and said that over the years as she grew and her skin stretched the wounds would reopen and gravelly remnants of that skid across asphalt would squirm out, the way shrapnel eventually worked its way out of a wounded soldier.

  My husband's mother, who'd not spoken to me since I'd left her son, came to sit with sleepy Stephanie and vigilant Amanda while Tom and I, along with Mary and Mollie, went to check out the car and to sign the papers for its dismantling. We drove to the lot on the outside of town where the van had been towed. It had rained in the night, the sharp smell of creosote and new mud puddles attesting to the recent moisture. I held Mary's hand, and Mollie sat on her dad's shoulders, while we walked up and down the gravel rows, battered automobiles on either side, looking for the one that belonged to us. "There it is," my husband said, pointing to a smashed and twisted hunk of silver metal squatting on four flat black tires. Mary yanked at me as she came to a stop on the path.

  "What's wrong?" I asked her.

  She stared up at me. "Who turned it over?"

  "What do you mean?"

  I picked her up and she buried her face in my shirt. "Tell them to put it back," she whispered.

  And then I realized I agreed with her: if force and speed and gravity came together to create such havoc, it ought to have been left alone. At least until we could make some sort of amends with our rolled-over car.

  The sliding door had broken off and was resting against the van. During the rainy night, coyotes had smelled the groceries, the hamburger and butter and big ripe tomatoes, and I suppose Stephanie's blood, and had squeezed through the fence to consume what they could and to tear everything else into slimy bits. Their paw prints were everywhere, floor, ceiling, seats.

  Tom climbed in to have a good look around. "It couldn't be more wrecked," he said when he stepped back out.

  When we arrived at the apartment an hour later, papers signed, I went upstairs to check on Stephanie and Amanda while Tom and his mother muttered to each other in my living room. She left without telling me goodbye, which didn't make me seethe as it might have before; I was willing to concede that from her point of view my desire to be rid of her son was appalling. On the outside of Stephanie's closet, I hung the cheerleading uniform wrapped in plastic. I'd asked Tom to stop at the shop on the way home and I'd run in to pay for it.

  Amanda sat in a chair on the other side of Stephanie's bed, her legs curled under her. She looked at the costume without a word. The evening before,
after we'd come home from the hospital and were reunited with her, after I'd assured her that everyone was okay—even the out-of-control boy in the sports car had walked away unscathed—Amanda told me she knew what would have happened if she'd been in the car with us. She would have been sitting on the other side of the rear seat, opposite Stephanie. The point of impact. She'd probably be dead. That's what she said as I tucked her into bed. I'd probably be dead. I sat down next to her and put my hands on either side of her head. "No," I insisted, "that wouldn't have happened. You'd be okay."

  "I feel like a ghost," she said.

  But she was not a ghost and she was not an orphan. She wasn't a leper or a child at a master's feet or an agent of heaven. She was a child, wondering, I was sure, what was to become of her and her sisters after I ended this marriage for good. Whether we could keep surviving collisions and mishaps and all the dangerous things that might sneak in while I was too busy to notice. I wanted to tell her we were going to be fine without her dad, maybe even better than before, but I managed, for once, not to say anything.

  A few days before the accident Amanda had announced that she finally understood the play. At least in the rock-opera version of the story, Judas was fed up with Jesus. They'd made a plan together that Jesus wasn't sticking to. Jesus had bigger ideas and wanted to do his own thing. Judas insisted that Jesus rein himself in and get back to business, but Jesus refused. That's why Judas had gone to the church leaders, a self-serving lot, and unwittingly created a disaster. As Amanda told me about the meaning she'd gleaned from the big drama that now included her, she scrutinized my face. I stepped back from her. What was going on here? Had she already cast me in one of those roles? If so, was I the one desperate to keep the plan in place or the one who'd blown the plan apart?