Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  Then I realized: the person I could spill my troubles to was Stephanie.

  I stumbled to her room, the one she once shared with Amanda, an empty twin bed across from hers waiting for a sister's arrival that now wasn't going to happen. I ached for sympathy, a longing that let me convince myself that Stephanie would see things exactly as I saw them. I didn't stop to think how this news would hit her, reshape her, pull her from me in yet more ways. I moved in greedily to be close to her. This second daughter's schedule, since I'd been back from Tucson, had become almost dangerously rote: up and dressed for school with little said between us. She caught her bus, went to her afterschool program, waited for me to pick her up after I'd retrieved the little girls. She rode home staring out the window, and she lived only for the nightly telephone call she was allowed with Amanda.

  I sat on top of her covers and rested my hand on her narrow waist. She opened her eyes and looked over, but instead of reaching for me as I'd expected, she sat straight up, wagging her head from sleep. "Amanda," she said. "What happened? Where is she? Is she okay?"

  I wrapped my arms around her. "She's fine," I said, hugging hard and waiting for the tension in Stephanie's body to fall away and for my daughter to give in to my need for comfort, and to give in to her own need for comfort from me. "But she's going to stay with your dad. They say she has to live with them."

  Stephanie sank back, away from me, all angles and stiffness, and I saw a plan flit across her face that was unmistakable: She, too, would move to her father's house. She'd go where Amanda was. As soon as she could. I reached for her again, terrified now and planning to squeeze the desire to leave me from her skinny body, but she drew farther apart. She lifted her covers, forming a cloth barrier to keep me separate. She pulled the blankets and sheets up to her neck as she rolled to face the wall. I rubbed her back through the blankets until she cried herself to sleep, neither of us admitting to the other what was already set in motion, both of us frightened—she would not be without her sister, and I would not lose another child.

  It was a rainy February night a few weeks after Linda's call, and I was making dinner for the girls. Mary and Mollie were in their room pitting the elephant family against the polar bear family. Stephanie was making a mix tape for Amanda of Madonna's most angst-ridden songs. The phone rang and I answered. The voice on the other end was Linda's, which surprised me. Once I'd lost the competition for our daughter, I'd figured there wasn't much more she had to say to me. I certainly had nothing to say to her.

  "Things didn't go as well as we hoped today," she told me, with a slight—was it?—tone of contrition.

  I immediately began to gloat. I felt it in my arms and legs, in my chest, in the tingle of my scalp. "Did Tom do something?" I asked. Linda cleared her throat, and I knew he'd messed up. This was the day he was to take Amanda out of the clinic and to his home, and on his first chance to get things right for his daughter, he'd failed. This, I have to admit, made me very happy.

  "What happened?" I asked her.

  It was several days before I put the whole story together—Linda gave me only the skeletal version that night about why Amanda had been removed from her father's house and taken to a state group home for teenagers. What I got later from Amanda was that she and Tom had arrived home from the treatment center to find Ellen waiting in the house, ready to continue an argument they had apparently started the night before about which room was to be his daughter's—Ellen wanted her back in the outside cottage; Tom wanted her inside the house.

  The fight was going full-bore a few minutes later, and Ellen threw the coffee from her mug into Tom's face. Tom went after her in the kitchen and that's when Amanda ran to the bathroom in the hallway and locked herself in. Ellen called the police. When they showed up, one arrested both Tom and Ellen for domestic violence, handcuffing them and loading them into the police cruiser. The other talked Amanda into opening the bathroom door—once she'd cracked it, the officer found the sink and counter covered with blood. Amanda had dug a razorblade out of the drawer and used it to make zigzag cuts down the inside of both arms, from wrist to the bend of her elbow. "Surface wounds," Linda called them.

  "Where is she?" I asked, sitting in a dining room chair, my free hand half strangling my own neck, the self-satisfaction that had risen up a few seconds before gone, chased from the room and from the house.

  "No one seems to know that right now," she told me. "The police took her to a state home, but I can't tell you which one or where. I don't know where she is. They said they'd call in the morning, once the paperwork is sorted out."

  I'd been waiting the whole conversation to give her my You should have listened to me about him, my I told you so. But when I opened my mouth to start in on her, the desire was dead. The gloating was gone. Maybe I was the winner, but the winner of what? Amanda was stuck in some stranger's dwelling or in yet another center for lost and empty kids, wondering why no one was coming to get her. After all our fighting over who got to have her, our daughter had ended up alone.

  Once Amanda was found, in a downtown group house in Tucson where social workers stashed kids temporarily for all kinds of reasons, Linda went to pick her up. Amanda had to stick around the clinic for another couple of days after that—the staff wouldn't send her to me until I'd made appointments with a psychologist, for regular talk therapy, and a psychiatrist, who could prescribe drugs. Getting the latter appointment turned out to be tough. Even when I explained I was calling about a suicidal fourteen-year-old, I got each receptionist's ho-hum. Her so-what. Her Get in line with everyone else's same sad story. Finally, I managed to schedule an appointment with a board-certified child psychiatrist brand-new in town; he'd see her once a week. (I'd have to take afternoons off work; hours to be made up when I had no extra hours to give.) James Grim was the doctor's name. Jim Grim.

  A week to the day after the police carted her away from her father's house, Amanda met me and the three girls at a Denny's near the Portland airport. Linda had said Amanda couldn't fly alone, so Tom had brought her home. Mollie and Mary, penned into one end of the red vinyl booth, ordered pancakes, though neither ate a bite. Tom sat next to them. Stephanie held Amanda's hand on the tabletop, their silverware scattered to the side. Amanda, white and thin and folded into herself, said little. I, across the table, sipped bad coffee and watched her, counting the minutes until her father was once again headed south, and I could show him how much better I was at taking care of our daughter.

  "Guess what?" Tom said, dragging Mollie to his lap, her tummy squeezed against the too-close table. The bright light over us threw a scaly shadow over both of their faces, and the smell of fake maple syrup and fatty bacon rose from the girls' plates. "You're not going to be the baby anymore."

  Mollie grinned, but I could tell she had no idea what he was talking about. "What do you mean by that?" Stephanie said, with just enough strain in her voice that I was sure she knew exactly what he was saying.

  "What do you think it means?" Amanda said. One sister looked hard into the other sister's face. Stephanie gripped Amanda's hand and Amanda gripped back.

  Then he was gone. Flown south. And in the days that followed, the thing I'd not known to prepare for when I'd insisted she come home showed its face, reared its head, made its presence known: Amanda's despair. I was left on my own to deal with a planet-size and utterly unreachable sorrow in my daughter, a hole in her I could make little sense of. It stemmed, I knew by then, from the divorce and how her parents had become with each other because of the divorce—but it had to be more than that. It was too big to be just that. Whatever its multipronged source, I didn't have a single clear idea about how to deal with its magnitude.

  A couple weeks after she'd arrived, Amanda called me at work and asked me to come home. "Please," she said. "Please get here."

  "What's going on?" I asked her, the hard metal edge of my desk digging into my ribs. I already knew what this was about—it was the fourth, fifth, sixth time I'd had such a phone call from Ama
nda telling me she needed me to scrape her together again. To hurry and get to her. The sound of her voice this time sent exasperation through me that nearly displaced compassion or anger. Tired was all I was, though that included a jittery fear, a pinching anger, and mean twists of shame over the intensity with which I wanted Amanda to stop behaving this way. "Why aren't you at school?"

  "Mom, stop it," she said. "Get home."

  It took me fifteen minutes to reach my car, even though I ran most of the way. Ran with my keys in my hand, nearly out of my mind over what I was about to confront this time. I'd sorted through every drawer, taken every knife and scissor and razor and sharp thing out of the house, gathered up every bit of medicine, benign and otherwise, and padlocked it all in a cupboard. But precautions were useless—I'd soon enough figured that out. The image of what the cop had seen when he opened the bathroom door back in Tucson ripened in my mind. Blood everywhere and my daughter collapsed on the floor. Amanda could have stopped at the store down the street this very day to buy more pain pills or a package of razors. She could be hanging or drowning or falling into an irretrievable sleep.

  If I did get there this time, what about the next? How long could we keep doing this? Mary and Mollie were ragged. Stephanie hovered, fretted, every day. And I was getting shaded comments at work about projects not done well, about not showing up where I needed to be. How many afternoons could I leave without somebody finally saying that the job wasn't mine anymore, not with these distractions and interruptions and disappearances? I was the one bringing in the money, the one with the health insurance paying for the pile of Amanda's drugs meant to help her sleep and calm her down. I couldn't lose my job. But I couldn't not go to her.

  I pulled my car into the driveway and ran in the front door calling her name. "Amanda!" She wasn't in the living room or in the kitchen. I tossed my bag aside and hurried down the hall to her bedroom. The tiny space that used to be my office was now her room, so she'd have at least a little privacy and quiet. It hadn't mattered, though—Amanda spent most nights in Stephanie's bed, the two of them entwined, a tangle of legs and arms.

  Now I found my daughter in her own room, sitting on the wood floor, leaning against her bed, legs straight out in a V. Drawers were pulled out of her dresser, dumped clean. Blankets and sheets torn off the mattress, wound in a heap. Slatted blinds yanked from the window—they had landed on the floor like plastic pick-up sticks. I knelt down in front of her, dust motes rising between us as she pulled her legs to her chest. A plastic container rolled toward me, and I picked it up. Her bottle of Prozac, full this morning, now empty. In one of her hands she held a ballpoint pen. I unclenched her fingers and took it into my own hand.

  Amanda had used the pen to draw circles around her eyes, thin black trails of ink, round and round and round again. Lines that ran through her eyebrows, up to her forehead, across her nose, into her hair.

  I pulled her to her feet to get her to the hospital. One more time. More black, sticky vomit that would smear across her face until she looked like a baby eating mud out of the garden. Another scowling visit from the psychiatry resident, who would call Jim Grim to tell him Amanda had crashed and who would send us home with nothing more than another bottle of drugs that might work better than the last or that might make her worse.

  I led her to the bathroom and began scrubbing her face with a wet, soapy washcloth while she flailed under the grip of my arm. "Leave me alone," she cried. "Get away from me." She shoved me with her flat hands, but I tightened my hold on her, the sweat from her armpit glossing my palm, and her knob of shoulder hard in my chest. I glanced at myself in the mirror while I washed my daughter's face. The woman who peered back wasn't the conqueror of anything, she wasn't the winner of anything. Far away, Tom was starting over with a wife and a baby-to-come and, I was sure, a newly minted story about how he'd done his best with Amanda but that it hadn't worked out. He could tell himself and others that he'd given me exactly what I wanted, because he had. I'd insisted on being the only one who could save her; I'd given him all the room he needed to release himself from the day-to-day care of a scared, lost girl who believed she wanted to be dead—or as far as possible from parents more interested in squabbling with each other than in taking care of her.

  Amanda had drawn a hundred circles on her face, and no matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn't get them off her skin.

  3

  On Christmas Day three months after the five of us were together again—Amanda returned to our house from her time living with her father—I opened a big box that had come by mail from Idaho, sent by my sister Cindy. The gift underneath the candy-cane wrapping was a tent. Olive green with a rain fly, it was the kind you erected with long, flexible poles and kept in place with metal stakes tapped in the soft ground of the woods. The cardboard box, from Sears, had a picture of Sir Edmund Hillary on one side. On another side was a list of the tent's best qualities: its waterproof coating, its sturdiness, its roomy interior that comfortably slept five.

  When I tore off the last of the paper and saw the family photo on the front—mother, father, kids, all in ironed shorts and smooth tank tops, lolling around a pristine campground with burgers on the grill and a tent in the background—I let myself imagine my family that way. Except my fantasy had no dad involved, and it took place at night with the girls cocooned in sleeping bags, my own bag smack in the middle, all of us surrounded by the walls of our tent from which wafted a particular odor—the smell of brand-new canvas that had soaked up sunshine all day and campfire smoke all evening. In the cool, damp darkness, Mollie would roll closer to me, complaining about a rock under her sleeping pad and asking about the sound of yipping coyote pups calling for their hunting mother. Mary would say she had to pee, and Amanda would stand up to pull back the skylight flap so we could see the stars and so Stephanie could point out Cassiopeia. We'd hear crickets and frogs in the marsh, the creek gurgling by, the soot of wood smoke and the campsite's dust caking our bodies and hair.

  It had once been sweet like that among us—if I forgot about the sister squabbles and bee stings and sunburns and the melted marshmallow stuck to the bottoms of our shoes and the endless dirt—but those days were long over. At least I'd given up on living any more of them.

  "A tent," I said, holding the box up in front of my kids, the picture of woodsy togetherness vanquished. I set the still-sealed box on the floor and shoved it aside with my bare foot, tired of how things that used to be so simple—going camping with my children, for one—had become impossible and distant.

  I was settled in the big, soft wing chair in our living room, with Mary on the floor in front of me leaning against my legs. Mollie's pink-nightgown-covered bottom popped out from under the tree as she sorted through the couple of dozen presents left, counting and recounting her stash to make sure she and Mary were perfectly even, while Amanda and Stephanie sprawled on the long tan couch, one at each end, their wool-socked feet tangled in the middle. We wore rumpled nightclothes even though it was past noon—nobody had bothered to get dressed.

  Our tree, perky green the evening before, had started to slump under the weight of salt-dough snowmen, feather angels, decade-old paper chains, and the dozens of lovely and fragile ornaments my mother had sent the girls over the years. It didn't even smell that good anymore, this five-footer that Mollie and Mary and I had picked out a few days earlier from the lit-up lot on the corner. The sinus-opening pine scent that had filled our car that evening had ebbed away as soon as we set the tree in the corner and poured water around its amputated trunk. The branches had been raining needles ever since, and now some of those needles dropped on Mollie's head and cascaded down her shoulder.

  I scanned the five separate piles of presents Mollie was tending and guessed it would take us another hour to get through the package-opening. I wanted this part to hurry along. Once we were done eating our holiday breakfast on holiday china and once Amanda and Stephanie had slipped away with their new black-clothed and Technicolor-haired
pals, as they'd been antsy to do all morning, my plan, if the little girls didn't protest too much, was to pull the decorations off the limbs and yank the tree from its stand, then toss it into a wet corner of the backyard where raccoons might use the branches to hide from winter rain. I was itching to sweep the room clean of every last piece of tinsel and green waste, wind up the lights, and wrap up the star for another year. Shove everything to the back of the storage closet. Just get it done, over with, finished.

  I doubt I was the only one out of steam, faking a happy Christmas.

  Mollie laid a package in Stephanie's lap, and Stephanie—a few days from her thirteenth birthday—stared at it for a long beat before she groaned as if attending to some tedious task, math homework, say, rather than a Christmas gift. She swung her feet to the floor, sitting up with her long T-shirt twisted around a body thin as a drinking straw. She picked at the bow atop the box and sighed.

  "If you don't want it, I'd be glad to send it back," I said, thrusting my hand toward her.

  "What did I say?" Stephanie asked me, holding the bright red package to her ear and shaking it, and shaking too her crop of chopped hair—a chemo cut, she called it. Amanda laughed from the other end of the sofa. "Did I say I didn't want it?"

  "You don't have to say anything," I said.

  "Jesus," Amanda said, her hands under her head, chin pointed to the ceiling. "Get off her back."

  I reached down to scoot Mary out of the way—suddenly, I had to get out. As soon as I touched Mary, I felt the hardness in my third daughter's shoulders as her sisters and I went at it again, like we did every day, ten times a day. I gave this daughter's back a quick rub, as if that were enough to soothe her worries, and headed into the kitchen. I was glad to be away from the scene I myself had concocted, glad to be away from the two older girls who wanted nothing to do with a family holiday anymore. Mary was ten and Mollie eight—they deserved a Christmas with stockings stuffed to the hilt with candy and new socks and sparkly tubes of lip-gloss. It was for them that I'd sprung for the tree and baked trays of star- and tree-shaped cookies, which we'd decorated with frosting and sprinkles, and mixed up my great-grandmother's recipe for gooey cinnamon rolls, now slipped into the hot oven. But maybe I should have skipped every last one of the old traditions. Maybe I should have stunned Amanda and Stephanie by heading to the coast with the little girls and checking in to a hotel with sixty-three cable channels and the roaring ocean outside the door.