The guy sighed. "I'll do what I can," he said. "Be downstairs in ten minutes."
Ten minutes later, we were in a taxi, Amanda and I. She rested her hot face against my shoulder, and the cabdriver, a shock of red hair and a face full of freckles, chatted long strings of words. I ignored his banter and watched the meter click ahead, dollar to dollar to another dollar, while pretending the physical tenderness between my daughter and me—her head bouncing against my shoulder, my arm around her, squeezing her toward me—was part of our normal way of being with each other. The driver took us to a hospital on the outskirts of Portland, the closest emergency room, and agreed to wait until we were finished. "I won't get any calls," he said, stretching his arms. "I'll just take a nap."
Alone in the emergency room, we were ushered by a silent nurse into a cubicle. Chilled, too bright, jammed with medical equipment. Amanda sat at the edge of the examination table, revived halfway, her eyes pried open and drool glistening on her cheeks. I stood next to the table, holding her still while the tired doctor listened to her lungs and looked in her ears. He didn't mention her filthy clothes, her smell, the crust of dirt on her neck, and for that I was grateful—if he'd said something, I'd have had to try to explain or to defend myself as her mother, and I was incapable of doing that.
"That's a doozy," he said with a whistle when he put an eye against the scope he'd pressed into her right ear. "No wonder you passed out."
Her temperature was 104 degrees. She had walking pneumonia, and both ears were infected. One of the eardrums had burst, causing the pain and the blackout. When the doctor asked me how long she'd been sick, I couldn't tell him because I had no idea.
While I signed the insurance papers, a nurse packed Amanda's pockets with samples of antibiotics and prescription painkillers, and then she sent us on our way. It was nearly two in the morning. In another few hours the repairman at the station would come on duty and I'd plead with him to fix our car so we could all go home.
In the taxi, riding back to the motel where Stephanie and Riki were probably asleep on the floor, Mary and Mollie in the bed, I popped three pills from the cellophane package and laid them in my palm. Amanda took them, one at a time, dropping each on her tongue and swallowing it with a sip of the water I'd bought with my last quarters on the way out of the hospital. She handed me the bottle, then laid her head on my lap. She curled next to me like a kitten. I put my hand on her caked hair and searched in myself for a sense of possibility. But no matter how I tried to create a swell of hope, I couldn't. The past twenty-four hours outweighed the last two. The months and years of struggle outpaced and overcame any glimpse of reconciliation. The drive back to the hotel with Amanda didn't feel like the beginning of anything. The air between my daughter and me smelled and tasted and felt like goodbye.
The next day, a Sunday, they left for good. We'd been home only an hour or so when my oldest daughters came out on the patio with army packs stuffed full and tied to their backs.
I stood up from the flower bed, where I'd been pulling weeds and dead Shasta daisies, to face them. Amanda, remarkably improved after a day of antibiotics and ten hours of sleep, said they were going out for coffee. A pair of dirty Chuck Taylors dangled from the strap of her pack. "You need an extra pair of shoes for coffee?" I said. Amanda, a hand-rolled cigarette between her lips, turned and walked through the gate, Stephanie following. I went out the gate too, but waited on the sidewalk as I watched my children move far down the street. I didn't do anything to stop them. I didn't run ahead, jump in the car, call out their names as I had before. I didn't phone the police, who'd have ignored me anyway; I didn't say a word. I didn't tell them they could come home if things got too tough or that I'd love them always, no matter what. I didn't speak and I didn't move. This time, I let my daughters go.
6
When Amanda was a toddler, she pretty much skipped baby talk, the usual burblings that meant blanket and dog and juice and cookie. The first words she spoke after mommy and daddy made a clean and clear sentence: "Stay out of the street." Of all that I'd said to her since she was born, this is what stuck. On warm afternoons, I'd sit on the front porch—soon into Amanda's second year I was swollen and pregnant with Stephanie—while my little girl puttered around the yard. Lumbering on legs that had just figured out walking, Amanda went after a ball or squatted to pick up a stray leaf from the grass. Don't go far, I'd call to her from a few feet away. Stay right where I can see you.
And stay out of the street.
In November 1996, the month Amanda turned seventeen, I'd gone three months without seeing her. Without putting my eyes on either her or on Stephanie. This marker in time came at the end of Thanksgiving break, after the two little girls and I had returned to Eugene from a long weekend that was supposed to get us away from it all. Mary, Mollie, and I had flown to Spokane, where we rented a car and drove through the snow to north Idaho. We turned east into Montana and made our way nearly to the Canadian border before stopping in a little town where we cooked up a holiday feast with Richard and Jane in their log cabin, all in an effort to blur what had been going on in our house, in our family. Except it hadn't helped: I'd come back as limp as the girls' jackets soaked with Oregon rain, which now hung over our dining room chairs and dripped puddles on the oak floor.
This time my oldest daughters were truly gone; this time they were among the missing—but was that the right word? The missing depart without their own volition. Amanda and Stephanie, especially with the boldness of this last departure—leaving no single clue as to where they were—had disappeared because they wanted to. They'd planned to go where they couldn't be located by me or by anyone I might hire to find them. The girls had swung their army packs onto their backs that early September afternoon when they should have been chatting on the phone with friends or worrying about a math test, when Amanda should have been in bed sipping hot chicken soup, curled up next to a heating pad with Stephanie beside her, both of them flopped on the bed to watch The Princess Bride for about the hundredth time. But instead, they'd sauntered down the street and didn't turn back. I've heard people say that the absence of a loved one is like living without an arm or a leg, but that description doesn't quite cut it for me. This time, with no sense of where my daughters were or when they'd be home again, I felt like I was being cleaned out one thin layer at a time, like the edge of spoon scraping away against the insides of a pumpkin. Like those late October evenings when I'd help my girls make a Halloween jack-o'-lantern, pulling away the seeds and the stringy guts and gouging at the orange meat until I was biting way too close to the skin, or until the skin was split.
Now, having been gone for a long weekend without checking the machine, I set down the pizza I'd picked up coming in from the airport and hurried to the phone to listen to voice mail, just in case. But the tape was blank. There was nothing, no word, no message, from my oldest daughters.
Mollie, cranky and yawning from hours of travel, moved the pizza box to the lip of the table to peek under the lid while Mary went off in search of the cat—under a bed, in the linen closet, or curled next to the water heater. I walked into the dark hallway, near the older girls' bedroom door, which we kept shut, to switch on the furnace I'd turned down for the trip. I stood over the same vent Mollie huddled on every winter morning to tent her nightgown and warm up her legs and tummy until breakfast was ready. The air streaming through the grill now was bitter, freezing, and I was restless—itchy almost—as if I knew bad news was coming. As if I knew that in a few minutes I'd once again be forced to wrap my mind around the unthinkable concerning my two oldest children.
The front door opened, and Barry, along with a bite of winter and more of its rain, pushed into the house. This man I'd become close to had driven in from his place in the country, nearly fifty miles away, to retrieve us at the airport. The girls and I had walked out of the terminal, and Barry, fairly new in their lives and not so long in mine, had stacked our luggage on top of the shovels, chains, handsaws, and axes that h
e kept in the back of his dirt-encrusted truck while we squeezed into seats that smelled like the fir trees near his house and something like the river he lived by. He'd brought us home through the rain, and now he moved back and forth from his truck, hauling suitcases and plastic bags, pillows and blankets, into the chilly living room.
During the past summer, when Mary and Mollie were gone for a two-month visit with their father, while Stephanie was still in Montana and Amanda working with the youth corps, I'd ventured into what would soon become the most stable adult relationship in my life. But at first it was new, and it was tentative: Barry and I made trips to the coast and had late-night dinners and swims in the river in July and in August, but over the fall months and with this new crop of trouble, I'd been waiting for him to fade away and wouldn't have blamed him if he had. Even that afternoon at the airport, I'd half expected to find a taxi driver holding a placard with our names on it and then handing me a note from Barry saying he'd had the Thanksgiving weekend to think about all this family complication and couldn't do it anymore. But here he was, steady as always and once again belying my fears, dropping a suitcase next to a pile of rumpled pants and muddy boots and plastic bags of bones and Montana moss. "One more load," he told me, water dripping from the square shoulders of his coat, beading on the edges of his trimmed and graying beard.
When I turned the corner into the kitchen again, Mollie reached out to pluck the edge of my sweater. "Can we eat?" she said, tugging. I looked down at her face. Of course I wanted her to eat, but I was slow to pull a stack of plates from the cupboard, hoping for I didn't know what—maybe some elusive homecoming relief. But calm didn't wash over me no matter how much I wanted it to. My body remained as tense and irritated as it had been at a bumpy thirty thousand feet in the airplane. On the ground, in my own kitchen, the knots should have loosened, but they didn't. Wrapped in my own hurt those days, I was pretty much blind to everyone else's—even Mary's and Mollie's sometimes. I got easily fed up when anyone or anything failed to tend to my pain. Even my old, frozen house.
With Misty stretched in the scoop of her arms, Mary sat down at the table. Barry came in with the last load, winter wind whooshing as he shut the door against the night. I put my hand on Mollie's head, smoothing bumps of sand-colored hair, sticky from several days of playing in the woods and no bath. She leaned in to clasp her arms around my waist and to press her face into my chest. I soaked up my youngest daughter, her wood-smoke smell and her warmth, even as I realized it wasn't good to need a child this much, to paw at her for comfort as often as I did. Barry moved past me, rolling his knuckles across my back, and I tried to believe it was possible to give in to this night and finally be home.
"Grab the napkins," I said to Mollie, releasing her from my hug. I moved things off the table, the small deer skull and the rocks the kids had hauled back, my own satchel of unread New Yorkers. Barry opened the refrigerator door, looking for drinks. "Milk for the girls," I said, peering past his shoulder for the icy ale on the bottom shelf. I'd saved it for this first night home. I planned to let it run down my throat and swirl into my arms, the muscles of my shoulders unclenching with each swallow. A ten-minute escape from everything.
After pouring glasses of milk and delivering them to the table for the others, I'd just opened that beer and sent the cap skittering across the counter when the phone rang. The voice at the other end made me still, my hand clammy on the receiver. I heard a woman repeat my name and was sure this was someone I didn't want to speak to.
"That's me," I said anyway.
"We have your daughter in custody," she said. The woman explained that she worked for the police in Tucson. She said an officer from her station had arrested Amanda the day before.
"Wait," I said, "wait a second." I shot Barry a look—please keep the girls busy—and then slipped into their room, painted the shade of a ripe tomato, a color Mary and Mollie had taken weeks to settle on. My knees were already jelly as I lowered myself to the end of Mary's twin bed. Her pink quilt wasn't warm, but I picked up the edge and wrapped it around my thighs, as if my child's comforter could stave off the worst of the woman's statements. I held the phone to my ear with one hand while the fingers of my other hand twisted the blanket in my lap. I heard Barry finish setting the table; I heard Mollie ask where I'd gone.
The woman said drugs and then she said heroin, and my mind stopped working, like a cassette tape stuck in a player, whirring and screeching but going neither forward nor back. "Are you all right?" she asked me when I didn't respond. Before I could answer, she repeated what she'd apparently already said: Amanda had been found on the streets a day earlier, on her seventeenth birthday, overdosed. She was lying on a sidewalk when the paramedics reached her and strapped her to a stretcher. The EMT gave her a shot that shocked her heart back to a normal rhythm—the kids around her, this woman said to me, told the paramedics that Amanda's heart had stopped twice in the hour before help arrived; one of them had breathed into her mouth and pumped on her chest.
My mother will want to come over to help and she'll see how dirty my refrigerator is, I was already thinking. I let any meandering thought keep away the news being delivered by this indifferent stranger. I wasn't going to let myself imagine Amanda nearly dead on the street or wonder yet about these "other kids" the woman referred to and whether Stephanie was one of them. I only pulled the quilt to my neck and pressed the phone to my pulsing ear while I let my mind go where it wanted. Mary and Mollie won't want to go to school tomorrow. Barry will think he should stay the night, but maybe I need to be by myself. My father's going to ask why he sends money to help these kids if none of it does any good.
I stood up, pacing the room, realizing I hadn't turned on the light. The stuffed animals on Mollie's bed, a javelina her father had sent her from Arizona and a soft-antlered moose from Barry, stared at me with black marble eyes. I studied their gray outlines for a second and wondered why the dark made stuffed animals look so mean. I did everything I could not to think about the heart in Amanda's chest. How unprotected it was now, and how unpredictable.
"Where is she? Can I talk to her?" I finally blurted out, though when I said the words aloud I surprised myself. They didn't sound tender. They sounded reluctant, hesitant. I was strangely apart from what I'd just requested, not sure I wanted to speak to my own daughter. What would I say to her? That even though I'd been furious at her and at Stephanie and about out of my mind with concern over their safety, I'd whisk her back into our home, all forgiven? I wasn't ready to go that far. I couldn't release the fear and the fervor that had built in me for months, for years, just like that. And what would Amanda say to me? That running away and living on the streets and shoving heroin into her veins was no big deal and that she was over it this fast? I doubted we were going there either.
"She doesn't want to come to the phone," the woman said. Thank God, I muttered under my breath. "She gave us your number but doesn't want to talk."
I didn't want to talk either. To anyone. I only wanted my life and the girls' lives to rewind two years so I'd get a second chance to stop all of this. But it wouldn't be stopped, so I turned my focus to making a plan, to bringing the gumption and fortitude of motherhood to bear—as if I had even one clue how to do that. I wasn't sure anymore what it even meant to be a mother. A real mother would know what to do next. A real mother would never have let this happen in the first place. A real mother would be thinking about her daughter as the police dispatcher went on and on about the condition that child was in. But my mind, seized and scared, was full of one ricocheting thought after another as I groped for any story other than the one coming from this phone.
What I thought about was the dark space under Mary's bed and the mouse we once found there.
The girls and I—five of us together, no dog collars or tattoos or pink hair yet; no Sid and Nancy weekend marathons; no bad acid trips in the field behind the too-expensive private high school where Amanda had lasted maybe two weeks; no threats to run away; no run
ning away—didn't know it was dead or that it was a mouse until it started to reek. A decomposition stench that kept us from that end of the fixer-upper house I'd bought, with Mary and Mol-lie sleeping in my room once the stink got bad. One evening after work, I convinced Amanda and Stephanie to help me move the bed from the wall. When we exposed that area of the floor, we found a brown mass about the size of one of Mollie's socks splayed out, maggots throbbing from its mouth and squirming on its pointy teeth. I leaped back while Amanda and Stephanie screamed at the perfect pitch of adolescence, squealing and hopping from one foot to the other as if the mouse was about to jump up alive and skitter up their pants legs. In the hallway, Mary and Mollie started shouting too, all four of them running in a football huddle to the living room. Over the din, I called to Amanda to bring me a broom and the dustpan. She thrust those at me a few seconds later, making me walk to the bedroom door because she refused to come in again. I returned to the mouse and held my breath, squinting so I had to see only a blurry apparition of death, its little legs stuck out like dry twigs. With one sweep, I got most of it on the pan, though it took a couple more flicks of the broom to dislodge the last gooey chunks. I held the dustpan as far from me as I could and dashed down the hallway, out the door, and straight to the back fence with my four chattering daughters trailing behind. I tossed the mess into the strip of city-owned bushes. Gone that fast, peace reclaimed that quickly.
Now I opened the door of Mary and Mollie's room and let a thin line of yellow light penetrate the dusky interior where I stood. I watched the three at the table sticking triangles of pizza in their mouths. Barry looked over at me and held his hands palms up as if to ask what the heck was going on, his face a knot of confusion. I could tell he was concerned at my long time away, at being left out of the news, whatever it was, of this phone call. He wanted to help. I could see that. I could have gestured at him to come in, but I shut the door instead. I couldn't take anyone else's questions at that moment; I couldn't begin to explain what was going on. The woman was talking and talking, telling me that she'd called Amanda's father before she'd phoned me because Tom lived only a few miles from the youth center where our daughter was being held.
Live Through This Page 15