Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  I could have snuck through our back-fence neighbor's hedges and hopped the canal and appeared out on the boy's road, but instead I made my way to the front of our house, hunching under my parents' window so they wouldn't spot my shadow, and started down the long, moonglowed sidewalk. Tiny pebbles got embedded in the balls of my feet and I had to stop and brush them off, the wind lifting the hair from my neck in a way that kept me stiff and scared. I didn't know what I was doing out here, but I kept padding down our block and then up the next street until I stood in the side yard of the boy who'd owned the territory of my thoughts over the past weeks. I'd guessed—without a single shred of evidence—that his bedroom was on this side of the house. I waited for a couple of minutes, sure that he'd hear my heart beating drum-loud and come to the window to see me longing for him. He didn't, and then it occurred to me to be afraid of getting caught—my father's wrath, my mother's disappointment—and I turned to go home through the mysterious dark, past houses that, familiar as my own hands in the daytime, now loomed like prescient forces that sensed before I did my desire for freedom.

  On the verge of Stephanie's thirteenth birthday and just after Amanda's fifteenth, my daughters' own bids for freedom were gaining terrible force. They had no qualms about doing anything—trying everything—they wanted. Two sisters united in risk and adventure. The drugs they were using, the boys they were involved with: I had only vague notions about these things, strictly not spoken of in my presence. I don't think it occurred to them to be afraid of me, as I'd been afraid of disobeying my mother and father; or to be concerned that they wouldn't be allowed back in our house, as I'd been concerned that I wouldn't be allowed back in mine. My threats were empty and the girls' sense of themselves was as invincible, daring. I'd realized by then too that one daughter's allegiance to me ended where the other's rebellion against me began.

  Stephanie's loyalty to her sister hit me on the September day I stopped by the middle school to pick her up for a dentist appointment and was sent to the counselor, who told me my daughter was gone. She'd crawled out a back window in the middle of math class. The girl who'd been a straight-A student until that semester, the girl who'd been whisked off to the gifted-and-talented classes the year before and who was invited to the popular girls' slumber parties. The other kids watched that girl, my daughter, slip through the open window while the teacher was at the board explaining how to get x from one side of the equation to the other. Stephanie, the counselor told me, had run across the long green lawn to meet her sister, waiting on the other side.

  "Oh," I said, sitting down on the spongy couch he kept in his office for kids who needed to talk out their troubles while missing science classes. He finished the tale of Stephanie's latest transgression, the most serious yet, and looked at me with a kind of pity I wanted to wipe off his face. I didn't need pity, I needed solutions about what to do here, for it was in this moment I realized that Stephanie had slipped away from me as well. From that day forward, Amanda and Stephanie would do what they wanted, go where they wanted.

  "Who's going to stop us?" Amanda had said one night around this time when I told her she and her sister couldn't go downtown for a show by a group called the Detonators, a late-night concert where I pictured acid and ecstasy being handed out like candy.

  "You?"

  I refused to ask for Tom's help. I'd not yet bothered to make the kinds of friends in Oregon who might round up the girls and get them to behave, as if there were any way to do that. So I dragged my girls to family counseling, where they sat with arms crossed, refusing to say a word; and I tried to find boarding schools I could afford (impossible); and mostly I yelled at my daughters with vacant threats of locking them out, of sending them away—and watched as they walked right by me to go where they wanted to go, to do what they wanted to do.

  ***

  When I opened our front door to come inside one January night, I stumbled over the tent I still hadn't put away since we'd opened it on Christmas morning. It belonged with the lanterns and the sleeping bags and our old rusty Dutch oven in the back storage area, but this evening it was shoved in a corner of our front alcove. I shook the rain off my coat and so did Mary and Mollie behind me. I waited for them to run off to their room to start a game of rubber giraffes against rubber polar bears, wolves against pandas, like most every night, but they stuck close. They followed me to the kitchen, where I tossed the mail on the counter, picked up the power bill with URGENT stamped on the front, and set it down again.

  When I leaned against the cupboard, Mary backed into me. She took my hands and crossed my arms over her chest, a big X. Across the room, Mollie opened the fridge and I smelled something—tuna, maybe, or cottage cheese—that should have been thrown out days before. "What's for dinner?" she said.

  We were down to some canned vegetables, pasta, a few tubs of soup in the freezer, and whatever was stinking in the back of the refrigerator. Laundry was heaped in front of the washing machine, and I hadn't asked Mary and Mollie about their homework for a couple of days, which probably relieved and scared them at the same time.

  I let go of Mary and reached for the phone to order a medium pizza for the three of us. Three of us, not five of us. For over a week, Amanda and Stephanie hadn't come home. It was raining the night they left and it had rained every day since they'd been gone, harder and wetter, it seemed to me, after darkness set in. For eight days, I'd picked up the little girls after work and come straight home, certain my gone-away daughters would get cold enough, tired enough, lonely and hungry enough to call me to get them off the streets of Eugene.

  Eight days earlier, the attendance officer at the high school had phoned me at work to say that Amanda hadn't come back after winter break. Neither had Stephanie, I found out from the middle school. They'd completely stopped going to classes and it had taken this long for anyone to say so out loud. Every morning, I dropped Stephanie at the front door of her school and Amanda at the front door of the high school and watched them walk in. I drove to my office pretending they weren't meeting each other five minutes after my car disappeared; weren't buying coffee at the drive-through hut on the corner and heading downtown to be with their punked-out friends, those homeless youth anguished over in the newspaper, those disaffected and disenfranchised young people dressed in black and metal.

  Now the pretending was over, and I had no choice but to go home and confront my children.

  Music throbbed through the walls of our house when I got inside, a bass beat pounding down the narrow hallway. It was Bikini Kill; I recognized the voice and the badass lyrics of Stephanie's new favorite, Kat Hanna. This was a CD Amanda and Stephanie had bought for themselves, tuned in as they now were to grrl bands and only grrl bands, their old Madonna albums tossed aside with embarrassed disdain. I was the one who'd bought them Hole's Live Through This a year or so earlier, along with Nirvana's Nevermind. I remember the puffed-up pleasure of being a with-it mother who carted the albums home and let her daughters hang a giant poster of a mascara-stained beauty queen on the wall of their bedroom. A few months later, I was blaming that same music for making my kids angrier than they already were and for leading my girls to this scene, this thing, that they apparently couldn't come back from. I hated Courtney Love and her pale, dead husband, hated the bands spawned from them and from which they were spawned, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Pixies, the Dead Kennedys. Hated the thudding beat that ate its way toward me now down the dim back hall of our house.

  I stopped at the open bathroom door, where the volume of the boom box balanced on the sink was loud enough to shake the light fixture and to tremble every pink and black droplet covering the porcelain. Amanda's hair was cut into chunks above her shoulders and dyed jet-black. Her ears and neck were black too, from the dye spread everywhere, on towels, floor, the shower curtain, and on her sister's hands. Stephanie's hair was halfway to becoming the color of cherry Kool-Aid. Both girls had makeup scrawled on their faces: black around their eyes, red on their lips.


  Amanda saw me and nudged Stephanie, who lifted her head out of the sink. Amanda caught the back of the door with her foot and pushed it closed. I turned the knob and opened the door again. "You're not leaving the house," I said. There'd be no discussion of missed school and failing grades that night.

  "Sure, Mom," Amanda said. She slammed the door again, and this time she clicked the lock.

  I got Mary and Mollie out of their coats and sent them off to their room, then I went to the kitchen to call the police. The non-emergency number—I wanted help, not mayhem. I told the woman who answered that my daughters were trying to leave and that I couldn't stop them. She paused before answering. "What do you want us to do, ma'am? Have your daughters hurt you?"

  I hung up and went to the front door. I made my body wide. My arms out, my feet spread. I waited there, a joke. If they wanted to go, they'd go. A part of me believed it might even be better just to get it over with and let them be gone. Except this night felt different than the other times they'd left. This time it seemed that what I'd stitched together in our little house was about to follow them out the door as a long, unraveled thread.

  Amanda and Stephanie emerged from the bathroom and went into their bedroom next door. A few minutes later they were out again, their backs bent under the weight of loaded army packs, and their wet necks dribbling Manic Panic.

  "Get out of the way, Mom," Amanda said. I reached past her and grabbed for Stephanie's skinny arm—that daughter wriggled away, and I pawed the air for a purchase on either of them, but then I stumbled over a chair that was heaped with Mary's and Mollie's schoolbooks and jackets, their wadded lunch bags and art projects. The chair and the stuff on the chair fell sideways and I fell with them, my hip smacking the floor with a thud. Amanda yanked open the door and she and Stephanie whirled into the night.

  The younger girls held on to each other on the far side of the living room. I got off the floor and told them to sit on the sofa. "Stay right there," I said when they'd perched themselves on the couch and stared at me with big eyes. "I'll be right back."

  "Mommy!" Mollie called, but I didn't turn around. She called me again, but I went on to the car. I wasn't sure why. Because I'd be a bad mother if I didn't at least try? Because I'd be a terrible mother if I didn't at least pretend to want my daughters to come back? I pulled out of our driveway and onto our street, scanning the sidewalks for a glimpse of my kids dressed in black, hoping to catch up with them but dreading what would happen if I did.

  After about fifteen minutes of looking, I stopped at a pay phone to call home. I told Mary to make sure the doors were locked. "Brush your teeth and get in my bed with some books," I told her. It was only about seven in the evening. They hadn't had dinner, they hadn't watched the hour of television they were allowed, they hadn't practiced their times tables or cut current-events stories from the newspaper. But my bed was the safest place I could think of and where I wanted them to wait.

  "Okay," Mary said.

  Then I drove. Up and down the streets of downtown, checking at cafés and convenience stores. The bus station, the train. After a couple of hours, not willing to leave the little girls alone any longer, I quit.

  The next morning I went to the police station to report my daughters missing. The officer I talked to stayed behind the Plexiglas window and spoke into a tiny microphone. I couldn't find a microphone on my side so I shouted my questions. I had to get to work and had only a few minutes on the meter outside, but I wasn't going to leave until I knew the police would start looking for Amanda and Stephanie that morning, that day.

  But the cop told me it wasn't against the law in Oregon to run away from home. It wasn't against the law to skip school. My daughters couldn't be stopped or held unless they'd committed a crime. If they'd stolen from someone, which I knew they wouldn't do. If they'd sold or bought drugs, which I prayed they wouldn't do. Got in a fight, or broke the windows of a building to climb in out of the rain. Any of those things, the officer told me, would be cause to arrest them. But if they were picked up for any of those serious transgressions, they'd be turned over to child protective services, not to me.

  "I have to go," I said then.

  "One more thing," this officer said, slipping me a piece of paper. I picked up the note and unfolded it and saw that he'd scrawled a phone number there. "He used to be a cop in LA," he said with some measure of awe. "If you want him to, he'll find your kids."

  I kept myself from wadding up the paper and throwing it at his face behind the plastic, to make sure he knew this wasn't my life. I stuck the note in my purse and turned to leave.

  Eight days later, the Friday night I'd come home with Mary and Mollie to order a pizza and wait some more, I called the ex-LA cop. The seeker of runaways, the finder of bad girls. I didn't know what he did to get kids off the streets and I didn't want to know. All week I'd told myself I didn't need him, that we were minutes from seeing Amanda and Stephanie walk up the sidewalk that led to our little house. They'd start laughing and tell me it was all a charade, a scam, or say that they'd come to their senses and of course wanted to be home with me, with us, and go to school and take a bath and just be normal kids.

  Except earlier that afternoon, a friend had called to say that he'd seen them going into a Taco Time across from his office. A few minutes later, I went into that restaurant too. There they were, my own two children, sitting side by side at a back table. Their clothes dull, their grimy hair sticking out from their heads, the pink not so pink anymore, the black more like gray. Amanda had on wool gloves with the fingers cut off, and Stephanie had a bandanna around her neck. Tiny cups of salsa were lined up between their plates of burritos and Mexi-fries, and resting on the bench across from them were their fat water-stained backpacks with plastic mugs twined to the sides and rolled gray blankets attached to the tops. I'd never seen those blankets. Where'd they get those blankets? Who was giving them blankets?

  Amanda looked up at me heading toward them. She yanked Stephanie's arm, and before I got any closer they were up and gone, squealing to each other, Go! Go!, as if this were some game of tag and I was It. They jumped in the women's room across the aisle from their table, and one of them threw the dead bolt on the main door. I leaned my back against that solid door and scanned the restaurant—5:15 in the evening and only a few people eating, the smell of grease and tortillas benignly drifting to this airless corner where I waited. Waited for what, I didn't know.

  I rattled the doorknob. Stephanie squealed and Amanda giggled. I walked back to the table and picked up the backpacks. They were too heavy to lift easily, so I dragged them out the door, a filthy musk odor rising from the damp canvas as they scratched across the linoleum, and my work shoes clicking with that sound of an official, professional grownup.

  It was raining outside and it was dark and I was standing in the dark rain with the packs at my feet when Amanda and Stephanie came out to huddle beneath the striped awning.

  "Give us our stuff," Amanda said.

  I scooted the packs behind me and hung tight to the straps. "We're going home," I said. "Come on."

  "You want us to freeze?" Stephanie shouted, leaning out toward me. A few people at the public fountain behind us turned to look over the scene. "Give us our shit."

  A woman stepped into the light cast by the street lamp. Her blond hair, done up in a neat beehive, shed delicate beads of water, and her face, held in a kind of practiced serenity, was hardly moist. I smeared the rain out of my own eyes while she started telling me about how she and some other women from her church often came down on the weekends to feed kids who had no other food and nowhere to turn. She'd brought sandwiches, she said, gesturing toward a box. Did we need sandwiches?

  "No," I told her. I wanted to add that my daughters were not among those who had nobody to turn to and nowhere to go. My daughters had a home and people who wanted them in that home, but I only silently willed her to go away.

  She didn't, though. She kept looking at me, boring in.

 
"Do you need help?" she asked.

  "These are my daughters," I said. "And they're coming with me."

  "Mom, get it through your head," Amanda shouted, "we are not going with you."

  The woman moved in so she and I stood side by side, as if we were going to face these kids together. I felt the heat from her body, but I didn't know what I wanted from her. A year or two before, Amanda and Stephanie and I would have had a laugh over her self-righteousness, her certainty that she could provide easy answers with her Bible and her version of God. Now I would have given about anything for an easy answer. If I'd believed one was possible, I would have asked this stranger to bring it forth, to lay it on the street like a shining fish or sparkling wine so I could claim it.

  "Let's get out of here," Stephanie said. She and Amanda started walking toward the corner of the building, toward the broad streets beyond.

  "Hold on a minute," the woman called. The girls slowed down, stared back. The churchwoman put her hand on my wet shoulder. "Why don't you give them the packs?" she said.