Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  Amanda linked her arm with Stephanie's. They waited to see what would happen next.

  "They'll be cold," the woman went on. "You don't want this to be more intolerable, do you? They need their things."

  Get lost were the words that formed in my throat. Leave me alone and stop handing out food and money and understanding to my kids, and those damned blankets tied to their satchels. That's what I wanted to say, but I only watched her pull her raincoat tighter while she gave me time to answer. And even though I didn't think I would, even up to the second of doing it, I opened my fingers and let go of the packs. They slumped to the ground. The woman took the straps into her own hands.

  "I'm sure they love you," she said. "I'm just sure they do. And I'm going to pray for all of you."

  A few hours later, at home, after our medium pizza was ordered and on its way, I sat at the kitchen table, numb. I'd given the skeletal version of my family's troubles to the ex-LA cop. He'd read off an address and told me to meet him there at the mysterious hour of midnight.

  Mollie came into the kitchen and pulled my arms apart, wedging herself onto my lap. "What are we going to do tonight?" she asked me.

  "I don't know," I said. Whatever we did, they had to be asleep by twelve so I could leave—leave my house and my daughters—to meet a stranger and ask him for help. "What do you want to do?"

  Mary walked in then, carrying the box from Christmas. "Let's put up the tent," she said.

  I stood up, moving Mollie off my lap, and took the box from Mary. "Why do you want to do that?" I said. "We'll get it out next summer."

  My little girls stood in front of me, still and quiet. Mary's pants were too tight and too short, her long legs poking out the bottom, and Mollie's hair was in big need of a trim. Neither one of them had asked for anything for weeks, for months maybe, just kept skidding around as best they could on the ice rink we were living on in those days.

  "Okay." I shrugged. "Let's put up the tent."

  We shoved furniture to the edges of the room, and Mol-lie brought me a paring knife to slice open the box. I pulled out the folded canvas and handed it to Mary; it sent out a scent both chemical and earthy as we opened it wider and wider again. Mol-lie dumped poles and metal stakes from the bag; they clattered and rolled. Mary linked the rods, and we pushed them into loops, and a few minutes later, the three of us watched the structure rise to the ceiling like a hot-air balloon.

  The pizza guy came to the door and I paid him, giving him a tip for not commenting on the camping gear in our living room. While the girls got plates and napkins and sodas, I went to the storage closet for three sleeping bags. I laid them out inside the tent and moved the TV in too, setting it on a small table. I zipped up the flap, and Mary sat down on her bag with Mollie next to her, teetering pizza-filled plates on their laps. My girls watched Friday-night sitcoms, and I watched them. The rain beat against the roof of our house so hard it sounded as if it were falling right on our tent—waterproof, sturdy, roomy enough to sleep five.

  At quarter to twelve, I put Mary's arm inside her covers and tucked her in tight. I moved Mollie's head back onto her pillow and gathered up the soda cans and the last of the dirty napkins and carried the garbage into the glaring light of the kitchen. I slipped out the front door, locked it behind me, and backed the car out of our driveway.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a Carl's Jr. a few blocks away. The grill had stopped cooking, and the place smelled like cooling grease, like bread left too long under a warming light. My stomach flipped, queasy and shrunken. Sitting at the first orange table was a burly man with neat brown hair, cut short. He wore a white dress shirt, every single crease in place.

  "Steve?" I said. He nodded.

  I sat down and handed him Amanda's and Stephanie's school pictures, no dyed hair yet, no piercings in their faces, no hard lines around their eyes. I gave him a map drawn with Mary's marking pens of the girls' hangouts: the punk-music Icky's Teahouse, the IHOP that stayed open all night. I gave him two hundred dollars from my savings, which covered only the first day of searching.

  When we walked outside, Steve took my hand in his, squeezing my fingers together. "I'll find your daughters," he said. I noticed then how his ears stuck out from the sides of his head. His neck was too thick to let him button the top of his shirt. Behind him, through his truck's windshield, I saw an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror in the shape of naked woman, her bare breasts in a high salute. Before I could change my mind about what I'd set in motion here, he got in that truck and drove away, splashing puddles over the asphalt.

  I watched the truck disappear toward the center of town and I let the rain run through my hair and down my neck. It soaked my coat and my sweater and wet my skin. It filled my shoes. I thought if I stood there long enough the rain would melt me into a different woman. The rain would shape me into a different mother. Maybe it would pound into me which of my choices had been wrong, which turns were misdirected. Maybe the rain would tell me how this had all gone so bad. Maybe, if I got cold enough and wet enough, I'd finally have a reason to go home.

  4

  By the spring of 1995—a few months after ex-LA cop Steve had snatched my daughters off a street in downtown Eugene—I was in the habit of driving 250 miles across the state of Oregon every other weekend to visit Amanda. Stephanie lived with friends in the deepest part of Montana now, in a remote forested valley not far below Glacier National Park—a long way from me, too far (this distance my oft-repeated excuse) for regular visits. But the five hours it took, exactly, from my own doorstep to the doorstep of the eastern Oregon ranch house where Amanda was staying was manageable. On alternate Fridays after work, Mary, Mollie, and I packed our things—pillows and blankets and animal families and juice boxes and apples and Disney tapes to sing along to and paper and markers to draw with—and headed through the shadowed Santiam Pass to wind over the Cascade Mountains. Past Hoodoo, around Sisters, and into the ski-resort town of Bend. After a quick dinner there, we drove through the last curve before entering the long, dark strip of asphalt—U.S. 20. Nothing but sagebrush and tumbleweeds and scavenging red-tailed hawks sitting on old fence posts on either side, a road that led through the dry and overgrazed part of our state to our destination of Burns, Oregon.

  Burns. That's where Amanda lived now, with a bony rancher and his arthritic wife and their two cowboy-hatted boys. That's where I'd go to see my daughter who'd been given a title I couldn't bring myself to say aloud: foster child.

  ***

  Earlier that year, I'd taken on a new job. I was editor of our town's alternative newspaper—alternative in that it came out weekly and was meant to dig up stories about subcultures in which the daily paper had little interest. Nearly every day I'd talk on the phone in my office with somebody pitching a story about the homeless, or I'd get a pile of pamphlets about legalizing marijuana, or I'd hear about how some cop had abused a kid at a Nike protest. I sat down with the paper's lone reporter to go over his latest story on the anarchists who'd become a fixture in our town—some of whom lived in trees, others of whom squatted in abandoned houses or on the streets, and all of whom dressed and talked and acted like Amanda and Stephanie. I couldn't quite make sense of the fact that in my job I was supposed to recognize the plight of the downtrodden while in my personal life I was doing everything I could to keep my daughters apart from these same people, who I believed had pretty much ruined my family.

  The disingenuousness of the job occurs to me now—to write a story deploring the lack of programs for high-school dropouts, for instance, while forcing my own kids to stay in school. I sat at the paper's ratty conference table listening to punked-out protesters complain about arrests while suspecting these were the same guys who'd given my daughters drugs and booze and a place to sleep at night, and hating them for it. The separation between editor and mother was nearly impossible for me to maintain, but I showed up at work every morning to play the journalist. I went home at night to take care of Mary and Mollie,
the three of us alone in our house—they hardly ever invited friends over or got invited to their friends' homes, and I kept almost entirely to myself as well. And twice a month, I appeared with my younger daughters at the Burns home of people I called, uncharitably, Rancher Bill and Rancher Wife Donna. Ready to defend my position as Amanda's mother.

  After he left me at the restaurant, Steve the ex-cop had gone to his hotel to pick up his clone of a son, who would help him search for my daughters. They found the girls the next morning. An easy catch.

  Amanda and Stephanie were sitting on the curb in downtown Eugene, feet planted in the wet and grimy leaf-clogged gutter. Steve walked up behind them; his son approached from the front. Amanda looked up, her hand straight over her brow to block out the sun. "Do I know you?" she said to the boy.

  "You're Stephanie, right?" he asked her.

  "No," she said.

  "You're Amanda," he said, pointing to Stephanie.

  The girls got up, glancing around for a quick escape, and then felt Steve sidle up behind. He clamped a hand on each of their shoulders. "I work for your mother," he said.

  Steve told them that the police had called our house to inform me that a warrant had been issued for my daughters' arrests. "She doesn't want you to go to jail, so she asked me to hide you for a few days until she can sort this out with the cops."

  Stephanie shook his hand off. "Leave me alone," she said. "We don't want her help."

  "Can't we talk this over?" Steve said, getting even closer. "Come on, let my boy and me take you to breakfast."

  "No way," Stephanie said, pulling on Amanda's arm. "Let's go."

  But Amanda hesitated. For a reason she's never been able to explain, she decided she'd go with them to a restaurant; she chose to hear about the plan I'd supposedly made for them, and she coaxed Stephanie into coming along.

  A few minutes after they were in the back seat of Steve's truck, the girls knew they'd been duped. Stephanie tried to open her door and jump, but Steve had set the childproof lock. Amanda started shouting, calling this man and his son every foul name she could pull out of herself, and continued to blast profanities the one hundred or so miles to Steve's house, located in a small and touristy mountain town called Sisters, Stephanie joining in the verbal battering of Steve and his sidekick. As if volatile and earsplitting words could break them loose, could put them back on their own road. The boy turned around halfway through their trip, when the girls had momentarily quieted down, spent and furious. Joan Osborne had come on the radio: "What If God Was One of Us." They ought to listen to the message in these lyrics, the buzzcut son said. "It's a really good song," he instructed in what Stephanie later called a soft preacher's tone. "It could help you." The girls huddled into each other, slouched in the narrow back seat, and tried to think of any means of escape.

  When they arrived at the house in Sisters, Steve's wife stripped them, lathered their bodies and flea-packed hair with Lava soap, and hid their clothes. That night, Amanda and Stephanie sat at a picnic table set up in the living room—a glorious view of the mountain peaks of the Three Sisters glowing in the pink sunset out the window—with four other girls in the same lot, all of them barefoot in sweatpants and T-shirts. Amanda asked how she might get hold of a cigarette. "Yeah, good luck," one girl said. Steve's wife brought out hamburgers and cottage cheese. Stephanie told her she was a vegan—no meat, no cheese, no dairy products at all. So she got a bowl of corn flakes, without milk. For the next twelve days, she ate cereal, dry toast, white rice, and canned vegetables cooked into mush.

  A week and more than a thousand dollars to Steve and his wife later, I'd settled on the next thing for my kids. Next was to be a wilderness-therapy program that hauled teenagers like mine deep into the Oregon woods for three weeks of counseling and hiking and bushwhacking and fire building and bone-tiredness and forgiveness and redemption. I wasn't sure where the money for this nature cure was going to come from—insurance would pay for part but a hefty balance would remain. I had to count on my father's pitching in. I also called Tom with the plan, telling him that the family therapist we three were seeing thought the trek was nearly the only choice left, short of lockup. To get into a state lockup, a kid had to be a major criminal or a heroin addict, and that, at least, wasn't our daughters' plight. I talked fast, trying to convince Tom to go along with this treatment even when I wasn't so sure about the whole wilderness thing myself—the better part of a month in the outdoors in the middle of winter? I wanted to believe it was going to bring about a cure, a new beginning, but I wasn't confident. Still, at least the trek would get them off the streets.

  First it would cost a lot of money.

  "Maybe they could come down here and live with us for a while," Tom said when I gave him the figure. "Maybe they just need their dad."

  "You can keep them from running?" I said, picturing their two-bedroom home with their new baby, Ellen's two kids from her earlier marriage, and the thirty seconds or less it would take the household to explode when willful teenagers moved in. As tempting as it was to make them his problem instead of mine, I wasn't falling for it. Within days or maybe weeks the girls would be on my doorstep and I'd be in charge once again of figuring out how to manage. "What are you going to do when they're back on the streets?" I asked Tom. "What are you going to do if Amanda tries to hurt herself ?"

  I heard him put down the phone and mumble something to Ellen. Then he got back on, agreeing to pay his half and also agreeing to appear at the final family gatherings in the woods, three and then four weeks hence, when each girl came out of her separate frosty wilderness.

  The Sunday following the phone call to Tom, I drove to Albany, Oregon, and down the cold empty streets of that small downtown, finally locating the headquarters of the wilderness-therapy program—a tall and narrow building between a bank and a coffee shop, both closed. Mary and Mollie were with me; the three of us climbed the stairs to the main office's door. A big man answered—a huge man—his beard full of golden doughnut crumbs, and a styrofoam cup of coffee looking dainty in his mittlike hands. He told us to help ourselves to the food on the table and then to take a seat. I walked to the far side of the circle of metal chairs and lowered myself into one of them—rigid and chilled, just like metal chairs are supposed to be—with Mary and Mollie on either side. The girls had picked out their own doughnuts. Mollie had one covered with whiskery sprinkles, and Mary had one covered with chocolate; the pastries sat on their laps, barely picked at. I counted seven other sets of parents in the room, all of whom had arrived before us, and was surprised that I seemed to be the only single mom. Married couples had this kind of trouble too? It hadn't occurred to me that such a thing was possible—I had so long placed the blame for our misery on the divorce and, in part, on the fact that I had no other adult in the house to back me up.

  The other parents had their teenagers with them, each one hemmed in between the mom and the dad. The kids—about to be launched on a grueling trek together, they knew by now—were so different from one another, or so it seemed to me, that they could have been randomly snatched from suburban high-school cafeterias from one end of the country to the other. The New York preppy girl with straight blond hair wearing a bright red miniskirt and expensive boots, who I'd later find out was addicted to her mother's sleeping pills and other prescription drugs and who'd run her parents' credit cards to their big fat limits; the sullen skater boy, a day-and-night marijuana user, who was flunking high school and had wrecked his dad's car; the child of migrant farm workers who'd been sent to the program by the juvenile court after one too many arrests. His parents spoke only a little English and mostly looked confused and lost about why their boy was bound for jail if he didn't make this work.

  I was confused and lost too. What was I doing here? At that moment I couldn't believe that my beautiful, bright daughters belonged with these other kids. These children were beaten down, common even in how they made trouble or rebelled against their parents. Amanda and Stephanie were never going
to be ordinary, and I was never going to accept that this was our real life. I expected my daughters to peek around the corner, to jump in the middle of the room saying never mind, this was all a big joke, or at least offering a contrite plea to go home and start over. I almost stood up and started laughing myself: no way could this be happening to us. I hadn't yet realized that sending my daughters out to the snowy woods was supposed to startle me awake too—that nothing was going to get better until I stopped pretending that we weren't in terrible trouble or that it was all going to end nicely, neatly, in a cheerful reconciliation that took not a scratch from my hide.

  I scanned the room. What had these trek people done with Amanda? I knew the ex-LA cop Steve had driven her to Albany the night before—he'd called to tell me she'd been "safely delivered." The following Sunday he'd do the same with Stephanie, transport her here for the wilderness folks to deal with until I arrived and we all sent her out to the cold mountains. The psychologist who ran the program had told me he was opposed to the girls going on a trek together. He'd ship them out a week apart and would make sure their groups were separated in the woods. "One of the main goals," he'd told me on the phone, "is to get Amanda and Stephanie to see themselves as individuals instead of extensions of each other."

  That seemed to be a theme with counselors lately: my oldest daughters had become two halves of the same person.

  "Where's Amanda?" Mary asked me, pieces of her pastry breaking off and falling to the floor, chocolate pieces scattered around her feet.

  "I don't know," I said, although just as I whispered the response, there she was at the door, my oldest child. I stood up partway to see her: clean, faintly pink, wearing new jeans and sweatshirt, and on her feet a new pair of leather hiking boots I'd sent money for; they covered her ankles and would endure weeks of snowpack without rotting her toes. Her back was straight, her shoulders square.