"You can live with your dad when you like your school again, not when you hate it," I'd told Amanda the night before, after her dad had handed her the phone. This was my last plea.
"Do you know how crazy you sound?" she said.
Now at the airport, I could tell by the slump of Stephanie's shoulders when she came out of the tunnel that her big sister wasn't with them. Steph wandered into the waiting room, Mary and Mollie behind her. I studied the face of every passenger, but there was no Amanda.
"That's it?" I said when the three came over to me. Mollie wrapped herself around my leg, held on. "She isn't here?"
Mollie started to whimper and I picked her up. Mary took my hand. Stephanie was crying too, but with no sound. The bright red rims around her eyes and the sag and tremble of her bottom lip gave her away. She slung her orange-flowered bag across her shoulder and took off in front of the rest of us, heading toward the baggage claim, her ponytail slapping her back. Stephanie's gloom wouldn't ease, I'd realize soon enough, until she was with her sister again.
In December, Amanda came home to Eugene for Christmas. She was subdued but glad to be at our house—to my delight, she said so many times. Then she and the other girls flew to Tucson for the rest of their winter break. Stephanie, Mary, and Mollie arrived back in Oregon on the second day of January to start school.
On January 3, after her first day back at Tucson High, Amanda rode her bike home as usual. Over the coming weeks and months I pieced together the details of that day's story, until the scene became as vivid as if I'd been there, unable to stop what she'd set out to do. This is how the reel runs in my mind: No one else in the house. It's about three thirty in the afternoon; Tom and his wife, Ellen, will get home after five. Amanda has watched television for a while and has eaten a microwaved corn dog. Now she goes into the bathroom and dumps a bottle of Tylenol on the counter. She pushes the bright pink capsules into the palm of her hand. Thirty-two pills. She fills a glass of water and swallows them.
Later that evening, Stephanie handed me the phone and said she'd called the Tucson house to talk to her sister and had been told by one of Ellen's children that Amanda was in the hospital. They didn't know which hospital. I dialed until I found the one that had admitted Amanda several hours earlier.
I spoke to the doctor. He told me that Tom had discovered Amanda unconscious when he went out to her room—a shed in the back that they'd turned into a spare bedroom, which I'd complained to Tom was exactly wrong for a child who needed less isolation, not more—to get her for dinner. At the emergency room, her stomach was pumped and she drank a charcoal solution to decrease the effect of the Tylenol, but the drug had likely already damaged her liver. "We won't know for a day or two what shape she's in," the doctor said.
I spent the rest of the evening arranging for people to watch my three girls. The next morning, Stephanie shouting at me from the front door that she had to go too, that I couldn't possibly leave her behind, I left to fly alone to Tucson.
One thing I wasn't ready to face during those days at the treatment center, where Amanda had been transferred after the doctors decided that her liver was compromised but would continue to do its job, was that good parents don't stretch a daughter so tight between them that she has no recourse but to unscrew a medicine bottle cap and dump the contents into her belly. Though I did notice that from the moment I walked in, when the woman at the reception desk glanced over my file, lifted her gaze slowly, arched her eyebrows in disapproval, and tapped her pen smartly against the page, I had felt nothing but scorn from the center's staff. A hidden-away part of me welcomed their disappointment—the part that desired the castigation and punishment a bad mother deserves. The bigger part of me, though, wanted to blame what had happened entirely on Tom.
Over the week I was there, I spent much of my time adding up the ways he was at fault, while he and Ellen spent much of their time adding up the ways I was at fault. We were each allowed two hours a day to visit Amanda, no more. Other chunks of the day, I filled counselors and nurses and doctors in on Tom's neglect and irresponsibility, portraying myself as the real parent to Amanda and her sisters. I'd bought a house, and, in need of repair though it was, it gave my daughters a stable place to live. I had a job and health insurance. I'd found daycare, took them to music lessons, bought many gallons of milk a week, cooked every meal at home, served dinner at the table and not in front of the TV, met with their teachers, drove them to friends' houses. I laid it all out to the professional counselors: didn't this prove I'd done the job of mother?
Not once did I suggest to the teams of doctors and nurses and therapists trying to put Amanda back together that I was willing to deal with my ex-husband in taking care of our daughter. Nor did I address the ways I could have helped her love her dad without inflicting stabs of guilt. In fact, by the Friday morning of my stay—I would fly home on Sunday—I'd told anyone at the clinic who would listen how right I was and how wrong he was in regard to our children. This child, Amanda, the one he'd talked into moving to Tucson, who'd become miserable and lonely enough to want to kill herself. Hadn't I said it to Tom a hundred times? The girls couldn't be parted from one another, nor could they be parted from me.
During that week in Tucson, I'd calculated Tom's visiting schedule down to the minute so I could avoid having to see even the faint hint of his shadow down the hallway. Or his wife's. And they did what they could to avoid me. Linda, Amanda's main counselor, had already told me that because of my "inability to communicate" with Tom, and his inability to communicate with me, she and the others would decide where Amanda would live after the month-long treatment. That suited me. I had no doubt that they'd send her home to Oregon. I'd already told Stephanie that Amanda would soon be with us, at our house, going to the right school, belonging to the right family.
My last Friday morning there, I went past the nurses' station and down a narrow hallway painted with aqua-greens and blues of a seascape most of these kids would probably never see in real life—dancing dolphins, smiling lobsters, breaching orca whales—and spotted Amanda in the unit's common area. A pungent mix of sweaty feet and Lysol drifted from the doorway of the institutional space posing as a living room, with a few soft chairs and worn sofas and untouched jigsaw puzzles on round tables. I stood there and took her in. Amanda was curled at the end of one of the couches wearing the clothes she'd been issued by the clinic: white cotton pants with no belt or drawstring, long-sleeved T-shirt, flat slippers, no socks. Her hair was in a tight ponytail, and with fluid gestures of her hands, she spoke with a like-dressed girl on the other end of the couch.
They both fell silent when I came in, which made me sad. They'd seemed like such normal teenagers before they were aware of me. The other girl hurried away, leaving Amanda and me alone. I sank into a battered cushion next to her and put a volume of Gary Snyder poetry, which she'd asked for, in her lap. She reached over to hug me, her bony hands resting lightly on my shoulders, and her chin burrowing under mine. When she'd nuzzled her face deep in my neck—an embrace that would last only a second, I knew—I told her I loved her, a statement that, as it had all week, made her recoil. She pushed herself into the far corner of the sofa, away from me. My arms and hands cooled, suddenly emptied of my daughter. She yanked pillows in front of herself and huddled in the corner.
"Why can't I say that?" I said, reaching over to push a strand of hair behind her ear. "Why can't I say I love you? Don't you know how many people love you?"
Knees to her chest, she lowered her head then raised it again. "That makes it worse," she said, "not better."
We talked, a little, in between silences I'd almost grown used to. Then, five minutes before my visit was to end, I kissed her goodbye and slipped into the dim hall, sure that if I hurried I'd miss Tom and Ellen, whose appointment to see Amanda began at noon. But heading straight toward me was Amanda's counselor Linda, tightlipped as usual, with Tom and his wife walking right behind her. Ellen's cantaloupe breasts bounced under her skimpy tank to
p, her peasant skirt flowing from generous hips. I had on a pair of cords, a long-sleeved T-shirt, sandals, my usual getup. No matter how I tried to talk myself out of it, Ellen made me feel like a pencil-shaped little kid.
I slowed down, wondering if I could turn around and walk off in the other direction. Stopped dead and heart pounding, my hands in midair as if trying to decide how to react, I remembered a bathroom a few doors away I could slip into before they reached me. But then Linda called my name.
"Can we step in my office for a minute?" she said.
My throat was too constricted to answer. I couldn't stand the idea of being in her small, cramped space with Tom and Ellen, but it seemed impossible to get out of it. Once there, I paused, then lowered myself into the metal chair closest to the exit, right foot angled toward the door, determined to slip away as soon as I could.
Linda placed her bag under her tidy desk, a splotched banana sitting on the corner. She cleared her throat and riffled through papers, while I imagined her peeling the banana after the three of us had left, breaking off small chunks of gooey fruit and chewing on them until they were mush. She started talking then, getting my full attention when she said that the staff had put together notes from their interviews with each of us, including Amanda.
"We plan to make a decision about where she'll live in the next week or two," she said.
"Why can't you decide now?" I asked her. "I'm leaving day after tomorrow."
Tom interrupted me before I could argue that he'd try to sway things his way once I was gone and he had the staff to himself. "Amanda wants to be with us," he said, leaning forward in his chair and pointing his index finger at me. "You'd better learn to live with that."
I remember wondering—in one quick flash and no more—how things had become so vicious between us, especially since everyone, from doctors at the hospital to this stiff-backed counselor across the room, had urged us to get along for the good of our child. All of our children, in fact. Why couldn't we do that, get along? But the fleeting thought to do better by our daughters, to take on the mantle of this parental responsibility, was obliterated by my need to fight with the man I was sure had driven Amanda to despair. I'd be sorry for it later, but at that moment I could not rouse a spirit of cooperation when it came to Tom.
***
During our first winter in Oregon, two years before Amanda's Tylenol overdose, Tom had flown up for Thanksgiving weekend. We all six hiked in the wet, mossy woods, Mollie riding on her dad's shoulders, while the bird I'd stuffed that morning roasted in the oven at home. The path up Mount Pisgah was damp and muddy, and the girls slid over the slick Douglas fir tree roots that rose from the black ground like miniature whale backs. Mollie, who hung on tight to her dad's neck with one hand, picked strands of gray-green moss off the trees with the other to make a wig for Tom's head. She was, she called out to me, turning him into a troll; she stuck twigs behind his ears for horns. When I got around one corner, Amanda, Steph, and Mary ahead of us on the path, I turned to look at the man I was once married to, surprised in that instant that he was there and that I was tolerating the heft of him around us again—the sound of his voice, the weight of his footsteps, the way he'd left a scattering of his whiskers in the bathroom sink that morning as if planting seeds. He lowered Mollie to the ground, putting an end to the game. She scampered off toward her sisters while he shook off the long shreds of moss-hair, brushing his shoulders and the front of his jacket. He looked up and saw me watching; he smiled, showing those same brown squiggles on his front teeth, and pulled at a few last sprigs stuck in his short, graying hair. I whipped around fast, calling for the girls to slow up and wait for me, keeping a distance from the person behind me I'd now firmly relegated to the past.
After dinner and pie and cleanup that night, Tom and I got the girls to bed as we had in the old days—reading stories, watching over teeth-brushing—then sat in my living room to talk. The week before, my guts had churned every time I'd thought of him in my town and in my house, but things had gone okay the first night. He was leaving Saturday, so we only had one more full day to get through. My shoulders relaxed a little. I pitched off my slippers and tucked my stocking feet under my legs. I remembered the old days in a way I hadn't for a long time—the two of us as young parents with barely enough money, lying side by side on our living room carpet while Amanda and Stephanie galloped My Little Ponies down our legs and across our chests, baby Mary napping between us. The train-hopping hard drinker from college had become someone else—a man trying to make an ordinary life, with a job and a house and a family. He'd get fed up with the tedium of that life and would quit his job or get a speeding ticket or empty our savings account for some insane purchase—or build another tree house or bonfire to terrify me—but in those early years, I had to admit now, he mostly tried to keep it together.
I drank a mug of tea on the sofa, nearly forgiving him for not becoming the man I'd wanted as a husband and almost forgiving myself for not being the right wife for him, realizing again that the marriage between us was simply a bad idea from the start, and I let down my guard. He began to tell me about a new woman in his life, Ellen. They'd met at work. She'd kept making excuses to come by his office and had scheduled meetings that included him. They started having lunch together. He met her kids. "She thinks I'm wonderful," he said, grinning into his own cup.
A weight I hadn't even known was strapped across my back lifted when he said that. She thinks I'm wonderful. The first sentence having to do with his emotional life or mine that wasn't some kind of ammunition. My God, I remember thinking, we might actually be able to do this. We might be able to be divorced and not hate each other.
Yet that moment of hope crumbled soon after his Thanksgiving visit as we fought endlessly on the phone about our differences and our objections over the raising of our daughters, and it was now utterly gone. In Linda's crowded office, I lifted my arm to block Tom's pointed finger. "Why would she want to be with you?" I said. "What she did means she can't wait to get away from you."
"What she did—" Tom began, leaning harder, nearly poking my chest. When he tipped in I noticed how much he'd aged since I'd last seen him. At thirty-eight, he was no longer the eternal boy, his family's Puck. His hair was gray and spiky, his square face dented with lines. I bent away, but he came in so that he was only an inch from me and said: "She did what she did because of the guilt you heap on her."
Tom turned to Linda and started to tell her a story that made me stand and put my hand on the doorknob. But Linda raised her flat palm in my direction to tell me to stop, and, reluctantly, I did. A few weeks earlier, Tom was saying, Amanda was making a cake in their kitchen and accidentally dropped the bowl and spilled the batter across the floor. Ellen walked in as the bowl fell and dough oozed out across the linoleum. Tom, glowering now at the counselor, went on about how Ellen was surprised when Amanda leaped back, cowering, sure she was in trouble.
"Amanda told us she couldn't believe it—that she wasn't getting yelled at, that she didn't have to be scared. She couldn't believe Ellen got down on the floor and helped her clean up," Tom said, getting up and stepping close to his wife, putting a hand on the back of her chair.
Ellen leaned against him and piped up before I could defend myself about this cake story—before I could admit that, sure, I'd snapped a time or two over a spill, but I could also recount dozens of other baking days when Amanda and I had made a cake or bread or muffins or cookies without harsh words or hurt feelings. I'd been stretched since we'd moved to Eugene, but not every minute, not every day; not, I had to believe, to the point that my children considered me the kind of tyrant Tom was creating in front of a counselor who was about to decide our daughter's fate.
Ellen spoke then, directing the words at me but mostly looking at Linda. "You're going to have to accept that Amanda thinks of me as her mother," she said, picking up the edge of her skirt and dropping it again.
Before I got myself far away from the room and from that clinic, I t
ook two big steps over to Ellen, a strand of my hair stuck across my chin. "You can fuck yourself," I said.
That brought Tom around the chair and Linda to her feet. He grabbed my arm and spun me around. "Don't you talk to my wife like that," he yelled.
The counselor stepped between Tom and me, pushing us from each other while the shouting continued. "You know what?" Linda said to the ceiling, her dark eyebrows knit together and her hands fisted. "If I was your daughter, I'd want to kill myself too."
Two weeks after I returned home, Linda called me late one evening to tell me that a decision had been reached. I happened to have a glass of wine in my hand and took a gulp as I waited for her news. She told me the unanimous vote of the team was that Tom and Ellen were the more stable parents. Amanda, after the last week of her treatment, would go back to their house.
I set down my glass and reached over to grab a cloth from the sink, wiping off the counters as Linda dribbled on, a few more comments I couldn't hear over the ringing in my ears. I scrubbed the circles of dried milk and swept up the toast crumbs I'd missed after dinner. I cleaned around the flour and sugar canisters and knelt down to get the fingerprint-smudged front of the stove. "What are you talking about?" I asked her, breathless. "Is this because of that day in your office? You didn't even let me explain about the cake—is this about the cake?"
"It wasn't anything Tom said," she told me. "It's just what we think is best for your daughter."
I hung up and flung the damp cloth across the room; it dangled from the sink's faucet. I stood still in the middle of the quiet of my house. I had to tell someone. I needed to find someone equally as disdainful of and furious over this misguided and wrong-headed decision made by people who hardly knew Amanda and who surely didn't know me. I wanted to bake ten cakes with my daughters, letting the girls spill egg yolk and flour all over without a single reaction from me and then send the cakes to smug Linda, but instead I hovered there in my kitchen, fed up, indignant, crushed.
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