Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  "Amanda!" Mollie cried out, throwing her arms, her open hands, out toward her sister. Amanda turned in our direction. I waited for a sign of happiness, one tiny indication of pleasure at having us there, but her look was solid ice. The man who had his hand around the top of my daughter's arm—another huge person whose flannel shirt stretched nearly to the splitting point across his shoulders—led her to me and asked Mary to shift over one chair. He wanted Amanda to sit next to me.

  For the hour that followed, Amanda did everything she could to avoid touching me, or even looking at me. Each of the parents was asked to describe what had brought the family here—one broken-down story after the other. Each child was asked if he or she was ready to turn things around—one version of you can fuck yourself after another.

  During the hour of the meeting, I couldn't grasp what I'd gotten us into. My daughter's rage burned next to me bright as one of those flares shot into a night sky after a fisherman falls out of his boat, and the intensity of this so-called wilderness repair made my head hurt. Couldn't we just go home and be normal? I couldn't remember why I was dumping my kids into the frozen mountains. For what? What could be fixed out there that a good and dedicated and stern mother couldn't fix herself?

  Before I could forge any kind of peace with this decision to send Amanda away, to woods where she'd be alone and lonely and cold and probably in pain a lot of the time, I was standing on the sidewalk watching her get loaded into a big green van. Mollie held one of my hands and Mary stood in front of us waving, waving goodbye to her big sister.

  During the meeting, we'd been told there'd be eleven or twelve feet of snow for the kids to hike through and camp in during the next twenty-one days. "Nature is the best teacher," the lead psychologist told us. Burly men and a couple of equally muscular women stood at every doorway, making sure that no one left the room. The teenagers didn't stop thinking about getting away, though. Their eyes darted around for a way out—seeking any chance to dash down the street and get back to a predictable life, a drug life, a life of thieving or lying that each one had negotiated quite well until he or she got caught. "Let nature do its work and issue its consequences," the psychologist told us. The kids would do all their own cooking—lentils and beans—on fires they would build themselves, sparked with flint and steel instead of matches. If they wanted a bowl, they'd have to carve one. If they wanted a spoon, they'd whittle one from a tree branch. If they wanted a shelter to sleep in, they'd have to build one out of snow. "This is bullshit," Amanda said under her breath. I agreed. It was bullshit, though I didn't lean over to admit to her just how crazy it felt. Just how from-some other-planet. I closed my eyes and hoped that by agreeing to this outrageous therapy, by convincing Tom and my father to pay big portions of the cost, I hadn't screwed everything up beyond repair.

  Once she was in the van and about to leave, I tried to catch my daughter's eye. She glanced out the window, moving her hand slightly in response to Mary's wave, but Amanda refused to turn toward me. The bus started up, its diesel engine rumbling against the still air, and the driver pulled out onto the empty street. I'd been promised a phone call from one of the counselors in one week—the following Sunday. The same day Mary and Mollie and I would return to this building, to the room upstairs, to the same pastries, fake orange juice, and weeping mothers, to send Stephanie off to the same woods with different leaders. Amanda's bus was gone now and this wilderness plan set in unstoppable motion. I stared into the last of my hot coffee, waiting for an answer—any answer—to come rising out of the steam.

  When I'd asked my father, who lived in Idaho, if he'd do it—pay a share of the treks—he'd said that this woodsy therapy was the most overinflated, self-satisfied, New Age thing he'd heard of yet. "I'll kick their asses for a few weeks. It won't cost you a penny." These were smart girls who knew the difference between right and wrong, he went on. They knew their way home—right? And they knew the rules for enjoying the privileges of a house to live in and food to eat. If they didn't want what I offered, my dad told me, to hell with them. Yet a few days later he sent the check, while also stirring a profound concern in me that my being afraid to say no, afraid to be tough with my children, was the very source of our disaster.

  The bill was paid in full, and the girls were gone—Stephanie's family meeting and her departure in the same green van as full of despair and confusion as Amanda's—and I had to figure out how we'd start over as a family in less than a month. But instead of mapping out our future, instead of forcing myself to account for the ways in which I'd failed myself and my daughters, I lived for Sundays. For that one day, the counselor hiked to a satellite phone area to report in. The calls were mostly about how each girl was "opening up," "coming clean," "facing her issues." I knocked away the therapy talk since none of it applied to our real lives, our days in the same house that were coming up frighteningly fast. One counselor told me that although the idea was that the girls would never run into each other, they had—their two groups had been called into the same large wall tent when a ferocious snowstorm hit, and Stephanie, realizing her sister had to be nearby, began singing Blondie songs at the tiptop of her voice with a Deborah Harry squeak until Amanda heard her. They each pitched a fit until they were allowed fifteen minutes together. Fifteen fleeting minutes: What did they talk about? How to run again? Where to go next? The counselor couldn't tell me—the girls had been left alone. Nor could he tell me if Amanda and Stephanie still thought of themselves as my daughters, or if they wanted to rejoin this family, their family. I needed to know if they were ready to get back to school; to step into our household again with whatever version of ease we could manage; to let me figure out how to know them, care for them. To remember how much I loved them. "Does she miss me?" I asked the counselor on the other end of the phone one Sunday afternoon.

  "Yeah, sure," he said. "She talks about you. I think she wants to come home." But he gave me not one clue as to how to make that work.

  Near the end of Amanda's three weeks, the psychologist called to say he'd gone out to visit the girls' encampments, had interviewed both daughters, and had decided that neither one was ready to live in Eugene. He predicted it would take six months to cure them of the street, to rid them of the high of sleeping in abandoned buildings and spare-changing on street corners, of drifting off at night in a blur of some drug I'd never heard of. It would take half a year at least, he thought, to get them to let go of each other.

  What came over me like a warm burst of wind as he said these things was unexpected relief. Sitting there at my kitchen table, I could finally admit how much I didn't want to be in charge of my own children again. To be the house police again, the enforcer. I was afraid of my daughters—and I'll bet they were afraid too. The trek was entirely about changing them, altering them, and nothing about changing me. The original plan of wilderness therapy was for them to come home caked with three weeks of dirt and sweat, carrying a new resolve, embracing the same house with the same rules and entrenched patterns they'd left. Now, the trek's head psychologist told me on the phone, they wouldn't do that. Neither of my daughters was going to return to me. And I could blame the decision to keep them apart from each other, and from me, at least for a while longer, on the experts.

  But where would they go? Our friends in Montana, who'd loved the girls since they were little, had already offered to let Stephanie live with them if that would ever help. I called Richard and Jane and took them up on it. But I couldn't think of any family or other friends who lived in an area remote enough to keep Amanda from running. The psychologist suggested a family in Burns, fourth-generation ranchers, who needed someone to help cook for the hired hands and to pitch in on household duties for Donna, the arthritic ranch wife, whose fingers had curled like talons and whose knobbed knees wouldn't allow her to stand quite straight. Their house sat at the top of a sheer cliff with a face as wide and pale as a drive-in movie screen. Getting to the road from the house required hardscrabble travel; even if Amanda managed to make i
t that far, no locals would pick up this waif of a girl obviously out of place. And so it happened. At the end of her wilderness trek, and without a chance to say goodbye to Stephanie, who'd be shipped to Montana a week later within hours of emerging from the woods, Amanda was driven to Burns.

  They didn't see each other again for half a year. And for that, they would not forgive me.

  Donna and Bill had long been in their beds (they'd gotten up before dawn) when I drove the car across the dark parking space behind their house. It was late April. A shadow flitted beside my window: Amanda. She'd been waiting under the eaves even though the clear night was biting cold. I slowed down so she could open the passenger door and climb in. Without a word she sighed and reached for my hand.

  "You're freezing," I said, squeezing her long, thin fingers. She laughed and looked back at her sleeping sisters in the rear seat.

  "I'm glad you're here, Mom," she said, pressing my fingers in return.

  I pulled in at the guest cottage, a remodeled outbuilding at the edge of the pasture, that Donna called her bed-and-breakfast nook and for which she charged me sixty-five dollars a night. This on top of the thousand dollars a month we paid—Tom's mother contributing the majority—for Amanda to live there and help her with ranch duties. Most of the time the nook was rented to the just-married-and-just-graduated from Burns High School, young couples who didn't have money enough even to get to Bend for a night's honeymoon and who couldn't leave the chores at their ranches for that long anyway. The morning after they stayed, the newly-weds would join Donna and Bill and the boys for bacon, eggs, and French toast with whipped cream and frozen strawberries before getting back to their lifetimes of togetherness.

  Under the twinkling stars of eastern Oregon's big sky, Amanda helped me unload the bags from the back of the car. We carried them into the cottage as quickly and quietly as we could; neither of us wanted Donna to appear on the house's front porch and start up a chatty conversation.

  Though I barely knew this woman who'd taken in my daughter, I'd already let myself form an intense dislike toward her. Everything from Donna's living room decorated with Hummel figurines and elk antlers to her folksy syntax gave me more reason to hold her in disdain. She didn't think much of me, either. I'd caught her giving me the once-over enough that I figured she was gathering goods for the following week's gossip—my worn jeans and sweatshirts and my long, straight, undone hair; how I was divorced and full of ideas about books and writing and social causes; and how I'd tromped my daughters straight into the lower regions of hell.

  It was hard to justify despising someone for taking over my role as Amanda's mother, especially when I'd asked her to do it, even more especially since I was secretly relieved to hand over my troubled child to someone else, but I did despise her. Once Amanda landed in Burns, the thought of another woman holding sway over my child drove me to madness—I stewed over it endlessly when I was back home. Jealousy was part of it, no doubt. Some of what I longed for was embodied in what Donna and Bill and their kids seemed to come by so easily: loyalty to one another. No matter what, I could tell every time I was there, the four of them were going to stick it out as a family.

  Amanda and I got Mary and Mollie roused enough to move from car to bed. Once we were all inside, I dead-bolted the cottage door. For at least this night, Donna would have nothing to do with us, and I'd have nothing to do with her.

  I changed into my nightgown and got onto the folded-out couch. Amanda stretched out next to me on top of the covers. She was still dressed but shoeless. She started talking to me about things she wouldn't have if we'd been home, if Stephanie had been anywhere near and they could have sneaked off to meet their friends on a dark street. Amanda told me she'd written an essay on A Separate Peace, and the teacher said it was the best paper she'd ever read at Burns High School. She told me about some boys who'd caught her outside one day during lunch and dunked her head in a bucket of muddy water and how the principal said it was just one of those things boys do. There were the girls in the bathroom who called her a slut and told her to keep her slutty hands off their boyfriends, who Amanda wouldn't have gone near anyway; the ranchers' wives who came up to visit Donna but didn't want this girl, with her tattooed arms and frizzed hair, in the same room with their kids. Donna and Bill's sons had been hard on her too. They ignored her most of the time and convinced their dad to assign her the worst jobs—shoveling cow shit or cleaning the hen house. The boys had given Amanda a feral kitten when she first arrived, but they neglected to tell her not to let it outside. Coyotes got it on her third day there.

  She rolled closer to me on the bed and put her head on the edge of my pillow. With her warm breath against my face, she begged me to take her home. It would be different now, she said. She'd mind my rules. She'd go to school. "I want to go to school. I like school," she said. She swore: no more drugs, no more running off for days, no wild boys or booze or hair dye or cigarettes. No cutting open her arms and legs with paper clips or her Swiss army knife. "I promise, Mom. Really, I promise."

  I sighed and pulled her closer—closer to me than she'd been for many years, since she'd left, an angry and confused girl, to go live with her father in Tucson. I didn't say anything—every bit of me wanted to accept her promises and whisk her on home, but I was too frightened of what that might break open. More I couldn't handle. We teetered there on a moment too fragile for words. It felt like all the reconciliation in the world was available if we'd just reach out and snatch it from the air—but wasn't that too simple? Yes, it was too simple. Both of us knew we were ignoring the one glaring part of this that hadn't been sorted out: Stephanie. Amanda hadn't mentioned Stephanie, not once, nor had I. Stephanie was in Montana, two states away, inaccessible, separate, while Amanda and I were right there with each other, pretending we were on the very cusp of change.

  I hadn't seen Stephanie since January. I didn't phone her often enough and I knew it. I meant to call—like, I suppose, all those times Tom had meant to call the girls on their birthdays or after band concerts at school—but didn't. I'd wake up first thing on the Saturdays we weren't in Burns promising myself to have a long conversation with Stephanie over the weekend, a resolve that would nag at me until Sunday night and it was too late. I had a lot to do—the laundry, groceries, bill paying, catching up on work tasks, getting Mary and Mollie to lessons and activities—things that distracted me from the telephone. That was the excuse. That was my justification for not doing what needed to be done for my daughter.

  When I did call, Stephanie and I talked for a couple of minutes—too cool and often monosyllabic—then I'd ask her to put Jane on. Jane was the one who gave me the real news on how my child was faring, how she spent most afternoons sitting under an apple tree at the far end of their meadow writing Amanda letters that were dozens of pages long. Letters that would be read first—and censored—by Amanda's ranchers, who picked up the mail every day and who'd been given permission by the trek's leaders to "scan for trouble."

  Richard, Jane's husband, sent me copies of the book reports he'd urged Stephanie to write, and she sent me postcards from the cities he took her to on his travels around the country—Mama, those small notes would begin, or, once, Mi Madre. I left the cards on the counter, stared at them as if they'd arrived at the wrong address, mail from a stranger to a stranger. At the time I didn't consider myself to be neglectful of her—I can't remember quite how I saw it then, though I recall my indignant burn and surprise when Richard called me at work one day to ask what was I doing by not checking in with Stephanie more often. "Don't you know how much she needs to hear from you? She's going crazy without Amanda. We can only help so much. She needs you."

  Was that right? Did she need me? Or was she counting on me to be the one who'd eventually spring her from her cage, nice as that cage was? I couldn't tell. I felt dead on my feet every day, and I wanted that to be enough of an excuse to justify being withdrawn from this one daughter. I wanted someone to give me permission to stay clear of on
e powder keg of problems until I'd rested up again. I created shallow reason after shallow reason for my step back from Stephanie. She wrote postcards and letters with simple sentences about going here, doing that, learning how to cook from Jane, spotting a mountain lion in the hills while hiking with Richard, reading to their baby, who'd just started to walk. I wrote her back about a play Mary and Mollie had put on in the backyard and about the endless rain of winter. Stephanie reached out to me in small, calculated ways—and I reached out to her in small, calculated ways. But I couldn't find enough strength in myself to make something big or important happen between us. Amanda was closer, and, stuck as she was with the ranchers, I was convinced she needed me more than her sister did—an opt-out that would haunt me for years.

  Every day Stephanie waited for me to make things right with her was another day I let her down.

  "Mom, please," Amanda said in that Burns cottage as she pressed herself under my arm. "Get me out of this place."

  It didn't matter if I believed all of Amanda's promises to change—I had a fueled desire to head into the house the next morning and be her champion. I'd tell Donna that Amanda's bags were packed and that she was going home, where she could read poetry in her room if she wanted, or the Sunday New York Times piled on the coffee table. At home, she could speak certain names aloud—Bill Clinton and, worse, Hillary—without getting lectured and scolded. In Eugene, she could argue that cattle shouldn't have the run of public lands and streams without becoming the town's pariah. And when Stephanie did return to us in Eugene, that daughter would see that Amanda and I were on the same side, and then she would soon fall into place too.

  I imagined how Donna introduced Amanda to the people at church, and at their weekly 4-H meetings, and at the Sears where she went to buy jeans and shoes and her plain cotton blouses. "This is Amanda, our foster child." It was that word foster that stirred up judgment and pity in strangers, and I loathed both sentiments. Every day at home I was consumed with an the urge to drive to Burns and demand my daughter back, but I couldn't. I'd made a deal with the psychologist to see it through until July. Amanda's compulsion to return to the streets and to drugs wouldn't be broken in her otherwise, he was sure of it. The minute she and Stephanie saw each other they'd be back with their friends, and maybe even do what they'd long threatened: jump on a freight train to another town, where I'd never find them. Even without Stephanie, Amanda could be drawn out by old pals—substance ones and human ones—and I'd be the enemy again. And wasn't that one reason to keep her in Burns as long as possible? The ranchers got the isolated Amanda, polite and mostly obedient but not alive the way a girl should be alive, and I got to sweep in every fourteen days to be cherished. I could hardly stand what Donna and Bill and their sons, as well as everyone in town, assumed about Amanda's bad home life. So what. I'd weather it all. I'd swallow Donna's tsk-tsk-ing about my lax and liberal ways if I got the other part of the deal: right now, my daughter adored me.