"He said it wasn't a good time for him, that things were difficult with his wife right now," she said. "So what do you want to do?"
Crawl into bed, stick cotton in my ears, fill my gut with a sleeping potion, pretend none of this was real. "I'll get her a plane ticket tomorrow," I managed to say, knowing I'd do just that but already scared about what it meant—of course, what it meant was that Amanda was coming home. A return that now terrified me, wished for though it was. "I'm sure her dad will put her on the plane to get her here."
Before she hung up, the question I'd been holding, too afraid too ask, had to make its way out. "What about Amanda's sister?" I asked the woman. "Is she there?"
"What's her name?"
"Stephanie."
Fourteen years old, disappeared with Amanda, the two of them deciding they'd rather hop on a freight train in the middle of the night and live on the streets than be with me.
I heard the sound of shuffling papers. "No Stephanie," she said after a few seconds. "There's nothing here about a sister."
***
The therapist who crammed us into her little office once a week had suggested that Mary, Mollie, and I talk about the gone-away girls—how it felt to have been left by the gone-away daughters. We didn't go home and practice as she'd instructed, however. To speak about the way they had left us again made it too real, too in-our-faces. So I'd closed the door of Amanda and Stephanie's bedroom and let dust build in the darkness. In the rest of the house, Mary, Mollie, and I fell into distractions; or I should say, I encouraged distractions, because I liked thinking that being distracted was healthier than sitting around fretting about where they were and when they'd be back.
The weekend after Amanda and Stephanie had left, Mary, Mollie, and I packed up our swimsuits and towels and snacks and bottles of water for a day at our favorite swimming hole. We went without the girls who loved the small tributary deep in private timberland, called Mosby Creek, even more than the rest of us. It would have been easy to stay home and stare out the window wondering how we'd come to this and wishing they'd show up to squirrel themselves away in their room and turn their music up to blaring levels and paint new anarchist A's on the walls and complain about how they were misunderstood, slogging out to the backyard to sneak a smoke and to chip the black polish off their fingernails. But I took my youngest girls to Mosby Creek because I thought it worthwhile to prove to myself, and to them, that Amanda and Stephanie's absence wasn't going to rule every minute of our days.
The three of us crunched our flip-flops over the gravel road that led to the swimming hole, heat waves rising from the bed of crushed rock laden with the stink of oil and tire rubber, and at least a dozen times I glanced behind us, still waiting for—hoping for—my scowling teenagers. Two miles into the hike, I scrambled down a hill behind Mary, tossing her our basket of food before I slid down the hard slope. The girls hopped over round chunks of granite and upthrust tree roots until they reached the creek's bank. When I got there, I spread out a towel at the edge of the slate blue water and pulled a novel from my bag, which I would finish in that one warm afternoon, a distraction, while Mollie ran to the highest point on the rock cliff and took her first long leap into the creek. She landed in a dark pool that my kids, summer after summer, had yet to find the bottom of. Mary followed her a second later, hooting as she jettisoned off the rock, scissoring her legs and flapping her arms. I stayed at the shallow end of the hole, wandering into the water until I was in waist deep and nearly numb from the cold. I watched, rather than felt, little trout nibble at my toes while I buried myself in the book, the sun hot on my shoulders and the top of my head. From my middle down, I felt practically nothing. A strange and comforting sensation, that half-aliveness. I listened to my squealing daughters in the background, the ripples of water over downstream rocks, and a screaming hawk overhead and didn't let myself remember a single thing in my life that had gone wrong. I couldn't bear to start adding up the mistakes I'd made as my daughters' mother—the wrong turns that had somehow led to this incomprehensible end.
When I think back on that woman in the creek, I see how I was equal parts wounded and defensive by then. When Amanda and Stephanie had come home from wilderness therapy and foster families, my efforts to heal us—that period when they went in and out of our home at will, gone for days then back for food, sleep, and another fight with me—I'd been re-contorted by my spun-out daughters. I was depleted by girls who'd long refused to do what I demanded, what I couldn't stop demanding: Go to school, come home. Stay home. At least when they were gone I could turn my full attention to Mary and Mollie, making sure the younger girls were being fed right and getting to their dance and music lessons and paying attention to schoolwork. But wait; could I so easily forget that two of the people I loved most in the world were nowhere I could find them? Each of the thousand times a day Amanda and Stephanie rose in my mind was another hole drilled through my sense of what was right—of what was wrong.
I wonder what that woman in the creek—what I—wanted. I hardly remember now any specific desires, any specific goals. For my children to return, to gather around me like the towheaded ducklings they were when they were little? Maybe. But I must have realized that if they'd returned, Amanda and Stephanie wouldn't suddenly have clean clothes and smooth hair or become girls who went to class and helped with the dishes after dinner. It would take them about five minutes to get back into the scene that made me crazy and kept me breathless—the booze, the drugs, the piercings and tattoos, the boys who offered endless adventure and pleasure. Days and days and too many nights without hearing from them. Absolutely I wanted them to come back—or did I? Returning to the same old crap, the same old tired patterns, would do us all in.
Best to stay in Mosby Creek, book up against my face, and let the cold sap me of all feeling.
When it became more obvious every day that Amanda and Stephanie were gone, gone, and not coming back anytime soon, Mary started listening to her tall collection of Billy Joel tapes for hours after dinner every night, wrapped in the pink quilt with her big cat curled devotedly in her lap. Mollie lost herself in skipping rope—pounding her way down the hallway and back up again until I thought the floor would fall through to the damp crawlspace below, where possums sometimes holed up for the winter and scratched away at our blankets of insulation. In their small room at the back of the house, the girls played with their families of plastic animals. They watched TV in the living room, memorizing nearly every line of every Adam Sandler movie we could rent, bantering back and forth with their favorite quips from Saturday Night Live, a show I let them stay up for once a week while I dozed on the couch. We ate dinner and talked about how our days had gone. We coped. We got by. We waited. And at night, just before bed, we fell into reading other people's stories—one more distraction before sleep to keep us from talking about the sisters who weren't there anymore.
On an evening a few weeks before our Montana Thanksgiving trip, Mary and Mollie settled on either side of Barry on our couch. He'd started to come by the house often, and though I had trouble trusting that such a person could happen to me, I slowly gave in to him and let myself notice that he was there when I needed him, and even when I hadn't realized I needed him. He didn't push ideas of parenting, of how I might deal with or solve this particular parenting crisis of mine, but he listened while I complained about social service agencies that hung up on me or a school counselor's threat to have me charged with negligence because my kids hadn't shown up to classes for months. He let me show him photo albums of Amanda and Stephanie as babies. Even better, he teased Mary and Mollie—he got them to be light, to laugh and play, when so much else felt ponderous. This night, Barry set his boots atop our scratched coffee table, his wire-rimmed reading glasses halfway down his nose. Mollie tipped in toward him, her head against his shoulder, while more cautious Mary stayed curled up at the other end of the couch. Taking over our custom of reading a few chapters of a novel before bed, he opened a worn copy of Water-sh
ip Down at the place I'd marked the night before, picking up the action near the ultimate battle between Hazel and Woundwort. Though I headed back into the kitchen to finish the dishes, I tuned in to his voice. It was hard not to let him go on forever, so melodious was that voice, but I needed Barry to stop before the book's climax. At just the right point, I handed him foil-wrapped leftovers and walked with him out to his truck, sliding in close to get a kiss; I watched him drive up the road toward his own home, where he felt safe. I'd wait for his call in the late hours of night, when the girls were asleep and I could talk to him from the soft warmth of my bed, where I felt safe, the phone sunk into my pillow and my ear sunk into the phone.
Barry left, and the last pages of the book were saved for the three of us alone.
As they had at the end of Where the Red Fern Grows, The Old Man and the Sea, To Kill a Mockingbird, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Rascal, Mary and Mollie climbed on my bed in their soft nightgowns and we promptly choked up. This time, it was over the rabbits' close calls and their deaths and their cruelties and friendship. I propped my head on a stack of pillows while Mollie scrunched up under one of my arms, her bare toes digging into the side of my leg. Mary sat on the other side, Misty in her lap. At the right moment she ran to the bathroom to get toilet paper, handing out strips for the toughest passages. I began reading again when she got back, Mollie's shoulder quaking against mine, and I told myself that I was, after all, finding a way to let my girls cry.
Other nights when Barry was at his own house or gone on his long weeks of travel for his work as a writer, I came home to sit motionless on our juice- and jam-stained couch and stared at the television, too beat to get up and change the channel or turn it off, the remote long ago misplaced. The fat husband kidding the skinny beautiful wife, while their just-this-side-of-rotten-but-ultimately-redeemable kids tried to get away with something. Mary's low voice drifted in from her bedroom, where she and Mol-lie made islands out of brown and green towels and populated these lands with dozens of animals: elephants and wolves, hippos and polar bears. On their door hung a piece of typing paper listing their latest requests for birthday or Christmas presents: a baby walrus, a mother turtle, a father grizzly.
On one of those evenings, credits ran on the small screen across the room from me, and I felt full of quick-dry cement. It pinned my thighs to the cushions. I had to get up or I'd be sunk there forever. I moaned, bent my legs, and stood.
"What's wrong, Mom?" Mary called. In recent weeks, the least strain in my voice caught her attention.
"Nothing," I said. "Time for homework."
"No, not yet!" Mollie said.
But within minutes, Mary sat at the dining room table surrounded by sharpened pencils and open textbooks, her long white-blond hair twisted down her back. "Which states border Colorado?" she asked.
"I'll bet you can figure that out," I said from the kitchen. "You go to one every summer and I miss you when you're gone."
She flinched at that comment, as if trying to figure out how she was supposed to both spend time with Tom and make me feel okay about it. She got up, her way of escaping the subject, and carried the map into the kitchen, holding it in front of me as I moved bricks of frozen hamburger and bags of corn around in my freezer, searching for my last bag of blueberries from the summer. "What's this river?" she asked me, pointing to a squiggly line that ran through the square that was New Mexico.
"Look that state up in your book and read me the names of rivers," I said. "We'll sort it out."
I locked the beaters into the mixer while Mary went back to the table to shuffle through pages. Mollie tossed her jump rope into the hallway. Temporarily. In the middle of dinner, I knew, she'd stand up and grab the plastic handles into her calloused palms, still chewing a hunk of bread or a leaf of lettuce, as if she couldn't sit still another second. She'd swing the rope over her head and start jumping again, our plates and glasses and silverware shuddering each time her stocking feet hit the floor.
Now she climbed onto the blue chair and began to unwrap the butter I'd set next to the stainless steel bowl. Her arm above the mixer, Mollie let the cube fall of the paper in a heavy glob. I gave her a plastic cup filled to the lip with white sugar; we both watched as she tipped her wrist and the grains cascaded in, smoothing the butter to creamy ridges.
"Rio Grande, Pecos, San Juan, Gila?" Mary said from the table.
"You're getting close," I said without turning toward her. "Keep going."
I watched Mollie crack eggs, sprinkle in vanilla. I poured in the flour, baking powder, salt, and crackling fruit. Mary was behind me now, asking for the beater, homework abandoned on the table. "If she gets the beater, I get the bowl," Mollie said in the growly voice she'd been born with, reaching down to give her sister a push.
"Mom!" Mary shouted, tugging at my shirt to make sure I'd noticed.
I spooned purplish dough into rattling paper cups, relaxed for the first time that day. Even the girls' bickering proved we were doing it: faking a normal life. Getting through whatever this was with Amanda and Stephanie, this inexplicable thing they'd entered that had left Mary and Mollie raw and fearful and me wondering if the muscles in my neck would ever again unclench. Tonight a few items in my kitchen had come together into a sweet, warm whole, soothing the helplessness I felt most of the time and muting the remorse that lived in the shallow caves under my shoulder blades. For a few minutes anyway. When the muffins were out of the oven, I focused only on the way steam rose when I broke one in half, and the way the soft insides soaked up a dab of butter until every crumb was yellow and glistening. The softness in my mouth and in my daughters' mouths. The sweet softness.
What I didn't think about was how to live with the fact that other daughters were gone. Or how to get past my fortress of defensiveness over their leaving. How to live with being a failure. How to live with the whiffs of relief that would sometimes come upon me about their absence. Or how I missed them with a ferocity that was turning me inside out.
Amanda has a wrinkled scar across the apex of her left shoulder. When she was thirteen months old she'd yanked the crock pot's electric cord, which was dangling off our kitchen counter, tipping the container on its side and spilling broth and chicken and vegetables that had been simmering all afternoon. I was only a few feet away when I saw it happen. I jumped to reach her, soup splashing my shirt, the yellow hot greasiness of it trapped against me—I knew then the scalding temperature of the liquid that had just hit my child, and that scared me—but more terrifying was Amanda washed in it, her trunk and neck and the side of her face. A dead flesh and chicken odor steamed from her skin. I scooped her up and peered down at her bleached-white face.
At first I couldn't say more than her name, "Amanda, Amanda." As I slid her into the kitchen sink, I realized she'd hardly breathed since the soup had covered her. I nudged the spigot with my elbows, unclipped the hooks on her overalls, whispering, "Breathe, breathe, please breathe." She stared at me and sucked in air, then she howled—her hands slapping at my face and yanking my hair. She battered her socked feet against the metal edge of the sink, clubbing me with her fists. She stared at me as if she couldn't understand why I kept hurting her, why I wasn't taking the hurt away. My fingers slid over globules of fat on her skin, chicken broth congealed by the cold water that drenched her body and my arms; I unsnapped the neck of her red and white cotton shirt, pulled it over her head, the skin peeling from her body and sticking in white patches to the fabric of her clothes, as if I'd drawn plastic wrap off pudding. Her exposed shoulder was a hunk of raw meat.
We had only one car then, which Tom took to work. I called him to come get us, the phone stuck between my chin and shoulder as I garbled out what had happened and rocked Amanda at the same time. By then, I'd wrapped her in a towel grabbed from the laundry basket into which I'd packed ice cubes cracked from a tin tray. Amanda was sleepy now, sobbing lightly, her breath flickering in the back of her throat. I hung up the phone and sat down in our old orange chair a
nd pulled up my shirt, moving my sticky and heavy breast to her mouth. She fell into a frantic nursing while I stared out the window, adding up all the ways I was unfit to be a mother. I did little all day but keep my eyes on this child; the one moment I'd looked away, she'd been hurt. In my own kitchen. Hurt. I soon enough realized that the accident, Amanda's burn—and the scar she'd carry on her shoulder for the rest of her life—was evidence that I'd failed to do what I desperately wanted: keep my daughter from harm.
When it was time to get Amanda at the Portland airport, I went alone. It had been a little over two weeks since I received the call from the woman at the Tucson police station. The following morning, I'd screwed up the nerve to phone Tom. He spoke in a low voice, as if he'd slunk off to the far recesses of his house for our discussion. "It's not a good time here for this," he said, repeating what the policewoman had already told me he'd said. When would be a good time to find out your child is using heroin and has nearly died from it? That's what I wanted to ask, but didn't, afraid that once I got insulting with him the nastiness wouldn't stop. Besides, I didn't feel any different: it wasn't a good time for me either. Definitely not a good time.
Tom obviously wanted to hurry off the phone. He laid out his ideas in a few words, and there was no recrimination from either side for once: his insurance would cover at least some days in a recovery unit in Tucson, that same one Amanda had been in two years before, at fifteen, when she'd swallowed all that Tylenol, a time only vaguely remembered for its relative innocence. He'd check her in there again, he told me, so she could get off these new drugs, these street drugs. Then he'd put her on a plane home.
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