Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  Why'd you let the things you did get so out of hand?

  The night of the accident, I left the little girls in their room playing and Stephanie with Amanda and found my husband on the front steps drinking a beer he'd pulled from the refrigerator. I sat next to him, the porch firing up the ache in my bruised body.

  He reached over and took my hand in both of his and gazed at me like he used to when we were young, not yet able to imagine the love and despair we would take on because of the four girls in the house behind us. "Doesn't this prove to you how important it is to stay together?" he said. "Everything can change in one second and all we have is each other."

  I might have given him a different response if I'd been able to see the ways in which my daughters would be torn apart in the years to come because of the battle between their parents, two people who didn't belong in a marriage together but who couldn't manage to find a decent way to split up. If I could have imagined, even, Amanda on a park bench gouging a boy's initials into her skin with a paper clip. If I'd been smarter then, I might have asked Tom if we could find a way, both of us, to cloak our daughters from pain and confusion while we pulled this thing apart and found our way to be done with each other. I might have said that I couldn't stay married to him, but I'd try—try—to be his friend.

  But instead I said this: "I need more time."

  He sighed and got to his feet and set the beer bottle on the porch. "I'm going home," he said, which surprised and relieved me at the same moment.

  At the bottom of the steps he turned and said the words that confirmed for me once again that I was finished with the marriage, with our house in need of repair, the unruly cactus garden planted in front, and with the way we'd been with each other since we were teenagers. I thought then that the reason I could walk away from Tom was that he was still, in so many ways, a boy. What I couldn't see was how I was still, in my own way, a girl, one who didn't understand how deeply my daughters needed me to keep them at the center, to make them the focus of everything, while I unwound my life from their father's.

  "I would have seen that car coming," Tom said. "I would have swerved out of the way."

  "How can you say that? You weren't there."

  "Listen," he said. "I know you and I know myself. If I'd been the driver, there wouldn't have been an accident."

  He ignored the sidewalk and walked instead across the grass, still wet from watering, leaving a line of dark footprints between my porch and his car. He got in and sat for a while without starting the engine. A few seconds later Mary and Mollie came to the door and asked me if we could go for a swim. I told them to get their suits and I'd get mine. "Mom's going swimming!" one of them called out as they ran into the house to collect their things.

  I turned to see an escaped sliver of light stream through the trees and sweep across the lawn in front of me. The grass, refracting that light, shimmered as eerily as the shiver that tended to climb my back whenever I was scared or excited, either one. I stood to go in, bending to pick up the empty beer bottle. By the time I rose again, my husband had pulled out of the parking lot. His car was on the street now, a trail of exhaust puffing behind him. The footprints in the grass in front of me were gone too. In a matter of moments, all signs of him had vanished.

  2

  The day my divorce was final I drove away from Tucson in a battered Volvo station wagon bought with insurance money from the car accident. We settled in Eugene, Oregon, a town about an hour from the ocean, because I'd been offered a job there, and because Tom had said he wouldn't fight my move back to the Northwest, where I'd been raised. The girls and I found a rental house that was walking distance from my university office and their schools, too many miles from their father, my ex-husband now, for me to worry that he might show up and pound on our door in the middle of the night as he had been those last weeks in Tucson, shouting and demanding to be let in. Too far away for him to appear on the porch when I was away at work, pushing past the scared babysitter to ransack the garbage, print out my computer files, tear apart my bed.

  One night, about ten months after we'd landed in Oregon, it was not Tom but Amanda who hovered in the doorway of my room. I put down the book I'd been reading to catch the expression on my oldest daughter's face—she was about to take me on. I drew in a deep breath and the scent of a tired body and sour sheets, which a few minutes before had smelled of comfort and rest. My mind spun, trying to figure out what this was going to be about before she started to talk.

  Earlier that afternoon I'd picked up the girls at the airport; they'd arrived home from a weeklong court-decreed visit with their father—he'd taken them on a spring camping trip in Mexico. The four of them had argued and punched each other on the two-hour drive to our house, Mollie slapping Mary, Stephanie grabbing Mollie's arm hard enough to leave a purplish bruise, and Amanda yelling at all of them to leave her the hell alone. This is how it went when they weren't quite parted from him, weren't quite back with me: two or three days of short tempers and scraps over the slightest transgression until they got oriented again.

  Once inside, they'd opened their suitcases and the smells of baked sand, insect repellant, rotting fish, and, mostly, a sharp, sweet chemical stench poured off the dirty clothes. A can of kerosene had tipped over in the back of their father's truck on the way from Tucson to the campsite in Mexico, Amanda told me—news that instantly sent me into a rage about Tom's jackassness, his endless irresponsibility, his refusal to be a grownup. The girls slunk into their rooms and closed their doors as I began complaining about their father, and I found myself standing alone in our living room, not yet getting how utterly predictable this was—not yet seeing how I was encouraging my daughters to believe, again and again, that they had to choose between the carefree father and the fastidious mother.

  The gas-soaked shorts and tank tops and bathing suits they'd carted home were now airing on the back porch railing. The stench had jammed in my nose and the back of my throat and a headache had set in behind my eyes. It had taken us to nearly ten o'clock to get dinner eaten, baths done, packs and homework located, lunches planned—and now this. Amanda at the door, wanting, I guessed, to duke it out with me.

  "What's going on?" I said, patting the edge of my bed.

  She stepped closer, but didn't sit. She wore an oversize T-shirt that hung to her knees and made her look younger than fourteen, though her bright red toenails glittered the color of adolescence. Her face, sunburned from Mexico, showed every line of the scowl set across her forehead. It was quiet for a few seconds between us; I sat with my hands around my book, while she moved a couple of things around on my dresser, rocks I'd picked up on a hike, a photo of my grandmother. Then she turned toward me. "I need to go live with my dad," she said.

  I sat up taller in my bed. "Why would you need to do that?"

  "Mom," she said. She dropped her hands to her sides, grabbing up handfuls of T-shirt. "He's alone. He doesn't have anyone there and he can't stand it. One of us has to go."

  I got out of my covers and stood in front of her in my cotton nightgown and scrubbed face that suddenly felt dry and older than thirty-five, cheeks and lips tightening as I spoke, as if my skin itself were trying to keep me from saying too much—how he was remarried now, for example, as well as surrounded by his sisters and other family. "It's not your job to take care of your father," I said, resting my hands on her shoulders a little too heavily with a desperation I didn't want to recognize—my desperation for her to stay with me and not disturb the picture I had of my own new and improved family.

  "Yes it is," she answered, staring me down. "He needs me to take care of him."

  "Amanda," I began, but I stopped there. Anything else I said would be taken as criticism of her dad, would be criticism of her dad.

  "You don't care about him, but I do," she said, pushing my hands away.

  She whipped around to leave the room and I let her go. Back in bed with the covers to my chin and my book fallen to the floor, I thought about getting
up again to follow her upstairs and talk until we hammered something out about her jumbled heart. I should have done that. But instead I let the urge wither—I didn't have the energy for soothing and solving; I wasn't sure I had energy enough even to climb the steps. Besides, she'd forget about the whole thing in a couple of days, wouldn't she? She'd get back to school, to dance lessons and art class, to the mission of finally making a couple of friends, and drop this fresh-from-daddy insistence.

  But I was wrong about that.

  ***

  The next afternoon I answered my office phone to hear from the middle school secretary that Amanda was being questioned by the police in the principal's office.

  "For what?" I said, reaching over to close my office door so my coworkers couldn't listen in.

  "No reason for alarm," she said, a statement that in fact alarmed me. "There's a group of girls waiting to talk to the officers and your daughter's one of them. Can you get over here?"

  At the school a half-hour later, I looked for the group of girls in the principal's office, but the square space was strangely empty, oddly silent—blank chairs and shut-down computers. The vice principal's door was open a crack and through it I saw Amanda sitting at a table, her hands flat on the surface in front of her. I pushed the door open. Two cops stood up, as did the vice principal. "Are you Amanda's mother?" that official asked me.

  I sat in the empty chair next to my daughter.

  "What is this?" I asked her, but she only shook her head, her hair hanging in her face.

  "There was a fire in the locker room," one cop said, "and we've charged your daughter with arson."

  "A fire?" I set my soft purse in my lap, squeezed it.

  While the vice principal told the story, Amanda kept her hands pressed against her eyes like a blindfold. He said that Amanda had skipped math class with another girl that afternoon. They'd hid out in the locker room behind the gym. The other girl had a lighter in her pocket, which she'd used to try to set fire to the loose laces on Amanda's Converse shoes. The shoelaces didn't catch, barely smoldered in fact, and that's when the girls really got going—determined to set something, anything, aflame. Amanda picked up a garbage can and dumped the contents on the ground. She took the paper—towels, wadded-up homework, candy and gum wrappers—and made a pile in one of the sinks. The other girl, the owner of the lighter, claimed that Amanda had called to her, "Toss it here," and reached out her hands to catch it. The girl said she had looked on as Amanda lit one edge of the paper mound, then another, until flames shot as high as the mirror.

  A few seconds later, Amanda twisted on the water faucet to douse what was left of the embers, but not before a sixth-grade girl had swung the door open to see what was going on in the locker room, which would soon be jammed with other sixth-graders getting ready for afternoon PE. She shut the door and ran to the office to report: fire.

  "We had to take the appropriate course of action," the vice principal said as if reading a prepared speech, his hands folded on the table. "This is for the police to handle, not the school district."

  The only students questioned were Amanda, the girl who'd been with her, and the sixth-grader who'd reported the fire (and who would be mercilessly dogged by Amanda and Stephanie for the rest of the year). For whatever reason, the secretary had made up the part about a group of suspects—did she think she was making it easier on me? Because it wasn't easier.

  The girl with the lighter was charged with damaging school property, a misdemeanor. My fourteen-year-old was charged with first-degree arson. A felony.

  When the vice principal finished talking, Amanda put her head down on the table and wrapped one arm around the top of her skull, as if to make sure she couldn't rise again. I wanted to scramble into her self-made cave. Or take her hand and pull her under the cheap oak furniture with me and hide until these men with their heavily starched clothes and buzz haircuts went away. I wanted to curl up until I could make some sense out of this fire she'd started and whatever was going to happen next, which I already knew was beyond me.

  Instead I glared at my daughter with a parental scorn I thought the men would approve of. At the moment that's all I could think to do: show that I was in control, that I was disappointed, that punishment would be delivered. It wasn't a lie; I was beyond furious, though not sure at what or whom, and I put on a display of rigid contempt I didn't actually feel. I did this rather than what was best for Amanda—best would have been to turn whatever tender attentiveness I could muster to the frail daughter next to me. I was racked with remorse about our talk the night before, but I didn't want to admit to any part in her confusion or heartache, especially in front of these authorities across from me or even to Amanda—I couldn't handle admitting weakness in the middle of being weak. These men expected me to show the "tough love" that was the parenting rage in those days, and I did my best to sit straight in my chair and look tough.

  I felt nowhere near tough. How would I tell the other girls what had happened? How was I going to tell Amanda's father without hearing for the thousandth time that I couldn't handle raising our kids on my own after all and without his getting Amanda on the phone to say, See? Your mother doesn't know what she's doing.

  I wasn't even certain what it meant for a fourteen-year-old to be arrested for a felony. The cops handed me paperwork telling me whom to call, where to appear. Amanda wouldn't be taken into juvenile custody that night but she was suspended from school for two weeks and would be prevented from attending any student activity deemed enjoyable for the rest of the year. We'd meet with a court counselor the following day and schedule a hearing in front of a judge. The judge would decide her sentence. Her sentence. The permanence of that rang in my head.

  I took the papers and folded them into my purse, refusing to believe what was going on in this room. This was something that happened to other people. To people with bad kids, not to parents with kids like Amanda, a tender and sweet girl who wanted to help and who wanted to please.

  Once a week or so Mary and Mollie and I dragged in tired after work and daycare and found the two older girls, who'd walked home from school, all decked out in the old thrift-store prom dresses I'd bought them for Halloween, one mint green, one sea blue. Stephanie, who had a gift for coming up with colorful adjectives and for drawing fleur-de-lis, had written and decorated menus, which she handed to me, and the delighted little girls as soon as we got our coats off and seated ourselves at the din ing room table. Creamed peanuts on crispy toast wedges, $1; Melted cheese on crackers, $1.50; Tea with cream and sugar, free with any purchase. The ink bled down the edges of the paper in long strands of yellow, blue, orange.

  Amanda held a tray spread with tiny sandwiches and barely brewed tea. The ripped seam of her dress's waistline tore open another few inches as she walked toward us, her milk-white belly skin peeking through the separated fabric as she balanced the rose-covered china cups I'd inherited from a great-great-aunt. Amanda hurried back into the kitchen for plates and napkins and silverware, which were supposed to have come out first, while Stephanie turned on the Bach Concertos. I smiled at my oldest daughters, tamping down the impatience I tried desperately not to show—I had laundry to do, bills to pay, I smelled cat pee somewhere in the living room, and now there was fine if chipped china to wash by hand. I had no idea what to cook for dinner or how much homework stretched out in front of us before I could finally collapse on the couch and prepare myself for the next day's early rise. I didn't have time to stop everything to sip Earl Grey laden with sweet milk and chew on half a peanut butter sandwich, and yet it was ridiculous to be anything but thrilled, silly to be anything but relaxed—Amanda did this and Stephanie did this because they wanted our everyday life to include some possibility of elegance, or at least to offer a good dose of ease among us.

  Now here I was, a few months after the last tea party, surrounded by three men who wanted me to believe that my oldest daughter was a criminal. That she deserved to be punished by the state. That she had to be slappe
d with a sentence. "I'm sure she wasn't trying to burn the school down," I said, finally finding a few wits with which to defend her, mild as that defense was. I couldn't tell if Amanda had heard what I'd said. She'd sat up again, her face blank.

  The cops stared at me. The vice principal cleared his throat. "Give me a call in a few days and let me know what's happened," he said, nodding to us, releasing us from his office, leaving us to sort out our own disaster.

  ***

  In late August, five months after Amanda's arson arrest, I waited again at the end of a passenger tunnel that led from plane to terminal. Post-divorce, I realized how often I'd find myself in this very spot, ready to catch my daughters as they swung from one life to the other and not knowing what to expect. This time I was even more nervous than the others. This time Amanda had threatened not to come back from her father's house.

  "You can't just decide to ignore the custody agreement," I'd told Tom the night before, our last talk before the girls left Tucson. I still believed, despite his often-expressed opinion that all rules were made to be broken and that he was the right guy to do the breaking, that the expensive divorce documents bore some weight.

  "It's ignored," he said. "She wants to stay with me and she's going to."

  Still, standing there at the airport, I had to think he wouldn't go through with it. I couldn't believe he'd actually keep her from me. How would he wedge Amanda into his new family? Besides, she'd done her community-service hours, paid the fine, attended droning fire-prevention and anger-management classes, caught up on her schoolwork, and, worst of all, sat in a cold empty room at the middle school while the rest of the eighth-graders went off to a graduation celebration from which she was banned. The only thing she would prove by not returning was that she'd been chased away—that was my argument when I spoke to her, that she needed to walk back into the school, head lifted high. What I couldn't think too much about was the panic that stirred in me every time I contemplated living without one of my children. I certainly didn't consider for a moment that Tom could ever feel the same terror. It was sharp and mean and unrelenting.