Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

In the middle of May, I found a youth corps in Eugene, a professional company that hired kids from sixteen to nineteen years old to work in the woods as trail builders and tree planters. The crews packed up and drove to the wilderness one early morning and stayed out for six weeks. I called Amanda on a Monday afternoon after I'd talked to the corps office and had found out there was a spot left on one crew—the group of twelve kids and two leaders would leave for the Ochoco Mountains on Saturday. Could I get my daughter there, geared up and ready to go by then?

  "Can you get to Bend tomorrow night?" I asked her. "Do you know anybody who's going that way?"

  "I'll find a ride, Mom, don't worry," she said, breathless. "I'll be there."

  I didn't speak to Donna or Bill or the wilderness-therapy psychologist—I didn't even think to speak to them, or consider for a moment that their feelings about this change in the plan for Amanda mattered or counted. I had one goal only, and that was to get my daughter back onto my turf and off theirs.

  On the last Tuesday of her foster-home stay, while Donna was taking the boys to a doctor's appointment, Amanda left a note on the kitchen counter saying that she'd hitched a ride with her English teacher who was off to Bend on an errand and that she wouldn't be back. That evening she walked into the parking lot of the Buffalo Drive-In, where we'd planned to meet, and opened the front passenger door of our car. "Shotgun!" she called, just like she used to in the old days. Mary climbed into the back with only a little complaint, and Amanda slipped into the seat and buckled in. I opened my window to let the evening's cool air blow on my face and hair—I hadn't felt this much freedom in a long time. I turned the car out of the drive-in parking lot and we went home.

  Five months after Amanda left the ranchers' house, after she'd spent some good months with the youth corps far out in the Northwest wilderness, and not long after Stephanie returned to us from Montana, they were gone again. This time they went as far away as Stephanie's letters had promised they would. They went farther than Steve the ex-LA cop could look. They shed the wilderness treks like so much bad skin; the long separation from each other and from their sisters and from me proved to be useless.

  That summer, when both girls were home again and we were trying to start over as a family, I was fixed on my bond with Amanda, made in Burns. I figured that bond would hold for a long time. I relied on Amanda to convince Stephanie to give up the idea of running, even though Stephanie talked constantly of her aim to become a traveler, one of those street kids who wandered from town to town by freight train. She often egged Amanda on for an adventure with all the money earned from trail building, stream cleaning, tree planting. I dismissed these ridiculous threats of leaving; the thought of Stephanie jumping a train was outrageous, too audacious even for this audacious girl. I had to believe my daughters would get back into school and settle down. What couldn't happen was that things would get bad again, as bad as they were before. None of us could survive that.

  But it took only a week, maybe two, for Amanda to start staying out all night with her sister. She stumbled in with Stephanie after being gone for days, reeking of alcohol and cigarettes, a new tattoo on her arm, her hip, her belly, and a thick silver stud pierced through her tongue. They slept all day while I was at work, took off again before I got home, leaving filthy clothes and empty red packs of Pall Malls behind on their bedroom floor. The husband of one of my friends, a lawyer, called me with advice—it was time to put an end to this. He said I had the legal option of typing up a letter stating that they weren't allowed in the house any longer. I should post it on the front door. Change the locks. Then go to court and start emancipation proceedings. Cut my daughters away from the family before they once again cut away from us. But I couldn't go through with such a plan. I was desperate for Amanda and Stephanie to stay home and be the girls they'd been a few years before, or even the girls they'd been when Amanda was in Burns and Stephanie in Montana. Yet at the same time part of me wanted them to go away—as far as they could go—and leave their sisters and me alone.

  In other words, my daughters had to act, one way or another and fast, so I didn't have to.

  5

  One evening, not long before my daughters jumped a train that would take them to San Francisco and, later, down the coast and east to Tucson, Stephanie showed up at our house. Without my knowing it, my fourteen-year-old daughter, who hadn't been around for several days, slipped through the front door and made her way to the bedroom to gather clean underwear and T-shirts, cramming them into a bag while she whispered to Mary to wrap up some of the cookies—their smell gave them away—I'd just baked.

  A few minutes later, Mary sidled up next to me at the stove and whispered, "Mom," in such a way I knew one of my disappeared children was in our home.

  "What's she doing?" I asked Mary, who simply moved closer. I don't know why I asked. It was obviously Stephanie's turn to show up for restocking: her turn to dump dirty clothes in the middle of their floor and get clean ones; to grab whatever food she could and maybe a few things to sell on the street; to come and go as fast as possible.

  I walked down the hall to the bedroom with the barest flicker of hope that she'd come during the evening hours for a reason—that maybe she wanted to talk to me, wanted me to urge her to stay home.

  "What's going on?" I asked her as she hunched over to jam more stuff into the canvas bag. Instantly I knew this was another useless question in a string of useless questions aimed at these girls. I held a spatula in my right hand, held it like a flag, its flat rubber surface glistening. I was making pork chops for dinner, with apples fried in butter and cinnamon. This seemed the moment to remind her that she liked that meal, and also that she'd once been glad for my food and my comfort, happy to sit at the table like a normal child to eat the food on her plate and to talk about her day and, after dinner, to help with the dishes and get ready for school, to do her homework and straighten her room. Not this bullshit of showing up to take what she wanted, our house her loading dock. Our house and the people in it her department store.

  "I'm not getting into this with you," she said without looking up. "Amanda's waiting for me. I've got to go."

  "You have to do everything Amanda tells you?"

  Stephanie laughed at this, shaking her head as if I couldn't possibly understand her or them. "Amanda wouldn't let me down and I'm not going to let her down." She buckled the last strap of her pack and heaved it onto her back.

  She walked past me just as a drip of butter rolled down my arm. The smell of cigarettes and sour beer and dusty alleyways wafted from Stephanie's threadbare clothes, mixing with the scent of cooking coming from me. Her oily hair stuck to her head, flat on one side where she'd slept on it in some concrete corner of an abandoned building, some patch of grass under a grove of trees in the park. The dirt packed under her fingernails also ringed her cuticles. I followed her as she scuffed through the living room.

  Nearly gone now, her hand pulling on the doorknob and the wrapped cookies tucked under her arm, Stephanie turned back to look at me. That's when I blurted out what I'd been hesitant to say out loud: that my mother had called. She'd be in Portland on business that weekend and had invited us up to swim and go to dinner and stay the night at her hotel. "She wants to see you and Amanda," I said. "Can you do that? Can you go see your grandmother?"

  Stephanie's face froze. Her chewed-raw lips twitched and she looked out the open door. She shrugged and pulled herself in tight. "I don't know, Mom. I'll ask Amanda."

  She closed the door behind her. I stood in our dusk-washed front room for a few seconds with, I noticed, Mary a few feet from me, trying to decipher once again this position I was in with my daughters. I put up with their showing up and leaving because I didn't know what not putting up with it would look like. If I told Amanda and Stephanie they absolutely weren't allowed back in the house unless they came home to stay, I'd give up the last shred of contact with my own children. I wasn't about to do that.

  This was a quandary I couldn't qu
ite explain to my mother. When I'd spoken with her on the phone earlier that day, she'd said she wanted to see all four girls when she came to Oregon for the weekend—she hadn't been around them for quite a long time. I'd already told her Mary and Mollie and I would be up in time for a late dinner, but that there was no use bringing the older ones.

  "You wouldn't recognize them," I said.

  She was quiet for a second. "I thought things were better," she said. She was referring to the wilderness therapy and to the foster care, both of which were supposed to have straightened out my teenagers. "How bad could they be?"

  "Bad," I told her.

  But in the end my mother convinced me that it would do us good to get out of Eugene and into a place where civilized behavior was expected. Maybe if we got on the road, even a short trip, the girls would come around in ways they had refused to—or couldn't—at home.

  What I didn't tell my mom was that I had no idea where Amanda and Stephanie were staying at night or that days passed without my hearing a word from either of them. I didn't bother to describe the hopelessness that had found a permanent perch on the bony surface of my sternum. Nor did I talk about the chasm between my world and the one my daughters had chosen, the impossibility of a bridge spanning from them to me. I wanted my mom to believe that this was a teenage phase that would sort itself out any time. That the girls would soon enough return home to be cooperative, cheerful, loving, as they used to be when she took them to Disneyland, or to Washington, D.C., to see the sights; when she took them shopping for school clothes each fall. Or when she'd show off her polite and sparkling-clean granddaughters to her friends.

  Or did I have another motive when I said yes to Portland? Sure. Part of my desire was to pull my daughters off the street and into the car and up the hundred-mile stretch of road so someone else could witness the misery we'd fallen into, and for that someone else to please, please notice that I was down to my last inch of ability to cope. I dreamed about—I plotted and fantasized about—another person taking over. Someone who'd call the cops, deal with counselors, soothe Mary and Mollie, and face these girls who showed up for clothes and food when they felt like it. So far, no one had come around volunteering to pick up where I so very much wanted to leave off. Hillary Clinton was quoted again in the newspaper saying it took a village to raise a child, but so far my village seemed empty, doors locked and shutters sealed tight.

  Amanda called me, as promised, the night following Stephanie's drop-in. "I heard you wanted to talk to me," she said, her voice flat and distant.

  I told her about visiting my mother in Portland. "Can you manage that?"

  There was a long pause on the phone. "This better not be another trick," she said. "I'm not falling for any more of your tricks."

  "Amanda," I said, a little surprised that she'd believe I had the inclination or the energy or even the money to have them picked up and hauled off to the woods or anywhere else. I was tapped out, and everyone around me was tapped out too. "It's a visit with my mother. You want to call her and check it out?"

  Another silence. "I'm only coming if Riki comes."

  Riki. A squatty girl Amanda had hooked up with along the way; a girl who went about everywhere Amanda and Stephanie went, the three of them a triangle rarely parted. I didn't know much of Riki's story except that her parents had supposedly released her to a street life, telling her that she could come home if it didn't work out. Amanda loved to throw that one at me—how there were par ents who let their kids try what they needed to try, who were enlightened and understanding beyond anything I could dredge out of my miserly self. Riki. The last person I wanted in my car was this girl with her wool hat covering every bit of her SOS-pad hair, and her squinty little eyes darting around while she plunged her hands into the deep interior of her overstuffed coat.

  "What's Riki going to do? Nana's not going to want a strange kid around, she wants to see you."

  "Fine. We won't go then."

  "Okay, all right," I said before she could hang up. "She can go." I asked Amanda to be at our house on Friday by the time I got off work, and to bring Stephanie too.

  "We'll be there. And so will Riki," Amanda said. "And I'd better warn you: she has a knife."

  I laughed, one of those laughs with no joy in it. "What are you talking about? She has a knife. Why would you say something like that?"

  But Amanda had already hung up.

  The drive up I-5 was too quiet, Mary and Mollie uttering no more than a few soft-spoken words and avoiding sisters who'd become mean and strange. Estranged. The teenagers in the back seat reeked—their clothes, their feet, their hair. I rolled down the windows to let the odor out and fresh air in. I called to Mary to see if she was okay and she sent back one barely audible yes. Against my better judgment, to make room for Riki, I'd let Mary, who'd recently turned eleven, climb in the back of our station wagon with the luggage. She'd hunkered down in a nest she'd made with her blanket and pillow and slept most of the way to Portland, while Mollie sat beside me, staring ahead, sometimes holding my hand. The teenagers whispered and giggled to one another and took off their half-damp boots, upping the volume on the sweaty-feet, no-bath-for-a-month stench. Amanda spoke directly to me only once during the trip—she leaned between the two front seats to say she wanted to stop for a cigarette. When I didn't respond, thinking as I tended to then that it was better to say nothing instead of something, she muttered to Riki, "See what I mean?"

  Finally we stood in front of my mother, who'd changed out of her business suit and into an equally spotless outfit, a pale yellow pair of sweatpants and a matching zip-up top. Her hair was done, her makeup right. The look on her face the second she answered the hotel room door let me know that it—it being the shape my family was in—was worse than she'd let herself imagine. Up to this moment, my mother hadn't yet seen her granddaughters' full street regalia: ragged canvas pants, Doc Martens boots, black sweatshirts covered with patches, face piercings, the chopped and dyed hair. No one in my mother's Idaho looked quite like this, like neglected, motherless children.

  Though we'd talked on the phone about dinner downtown and a walk in the riverfront park, my mom suggested we stay at the hotel; when we got to the restaurant on the first floor, she asked for a table at the back, near the windows. The hostess did one better—she hurried the seven of us around the corner to the closed section and told us this way we'd have plenty of privacy. She reached across to hand out plastic menus and said someone would be along to set our table. Then, trying not to shift her eyes to stare at the girls but staring nonetheless, she rushed away.

  I lowered myself into a chair, heavy with a mix of emotion. Exhaustion, bitterness, embarrassment. But defensiveness too. A feeling that hadn't burned in my chest for a long time. No matter how they looked, these were my daughters, and still just kids. Not criminals, not deviants, just girls out there on some messy and confounding edge. Without expecting to, I resented the hostess for running off to the kitchen to gossip about the unsightly teenagers at the back table, even though I thought and even talked about my girls in those terms all the time.

  Putting the menu in front of my face, I searched for the cheapest glass of red wine, as I planned to have several. I'd plunked my daughters into the middle of my mother's world, which was unfair to her and unfair to them, and now I writhed under the results of that decision. My mom had told me on the phone that she could handle the kids no matter what, but I'd known she'd be uncomfortable once they were around her; I'd known this visit would prove disastrous. Yet I'd brought them anyway. And now that we were in the middle of our evening together, I didn't feel any more understood by my alarmed mother, who sat at the other end of the table asking Mary and Mollie about school, nor could this brief visit allow her to peer deep into the layers of mess we were in. And the three older girls, lined up opposite me, waving knives around and sucking the cream out of the small plastic containers, didn't seem to care what any of us thought of them. They were too invested in being punk and home
less, unpredictable, frightening, and rank.

  By ten o'clock I was in one bed with Mary, and my mom was in the other with Mollie. Amanda and Stephanie and Riki had spread their ripe sleeping bags on the floor. They'd taken off their boots but slept in rumpled clothes: old Carhartt's and thin cotton shirts, bought secondhand or rummaged from a free box. I listened to their soft breathing from the far side of the room and felt the warm bundle of heat that was Mary next to me. I lay awake, figuring my mother wasn't sleeping either. She was probably wondering how to help me with these girls who'd become alien. And like me, she was probably counting the hours until we would leave, until we could all go to our own homes and stop pretending that this wasn't a disaster.

  The next day we went downtown. As soon as I parked, Amanda and Stephanie were out and gone, Riki running after them. Scattered. I had no idea if they'd meet us at the car at the appointed time and in fact expected they wouldn't. Every corner here in Portland had its requisite allotment of street kids, begging for change, digging through garbage for five-cent returnable cans and bottles, sharing cigarettes that passed from one set of lips to another. Amanda and Stephanie would fit right in. Maybe I'd unwittingly—or willfully—given my kids a two-hour boost on their ultimate trip out of town, the one that had been long fomenting.

  "What are you going to do?" my mother asked once Mary and Mollie were far enough away not to hear her question, looking at clothes or music in a shop or just staying apart from what they knew would be a rag on their sisters. "You can't let this go on."

  I couldn't give her an answer then, nor could I give her an answer when she asked again at the airport later that afternoon. "What are you going to do?" I didn't know what I was going to do, except just drive home. All five girls were in the car, ready to head to Eugene, where the older ones would hit the streets and the younger ones would follow me into our house. I watched my mother pull her suitcases into the wide revolving airport door so a plane could take her back to her own life and I got back into my car and drove away.