Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  I re-smoothed the paper with Stephanie's name written across the top. I wrote it again, Stephanie, the second name beneath the first, remembering the day she was born—blasting into the world, screaming and red faced. I recalled again how adults had always loved her quirks, which I could guarantee went mostly untolerated in their own kids—the way she wore the same dress every single day of kindergarten along with a floppy straw hat and a pair of pink jelly shoes; the way she would drink milk only if it was food-color-dyed a deep-sea blue. And from the time she was a toddler, that part of her that wanted to hide, wanted to run.

  One night when Stephanie was not quite three, Amanda found me in the produce aisle of the grocery store. "I can't find Stephy," she said.

  "Doesn't Daddy have her?" I looked toward the magazine rack. Tom was leaning against the end, engrossed in the latest issue of Omni.

  "She went somewhere," Amanda said.

  I hurried toward my husband, my basketball belly bouncing against my thighs—Mary was a month away from being born. "Where's Stephanie?" I asked him.

  He looked up from the magazine. "I don't know. Didn't she go with you?"

  I walked the length of the store, calling Stephanie's name up and down each aisle, Amanda next to me and calling too. We met Tom in the middle and started over again. After the second search of the store, legs prickling and jaw clenched, I went to find the store manager and stood beside him as he made the announcement over the loudspeaker. Two-and-a-half-year-old girl. Blue pants, cats on her shirt, hot pink parka. Sneakers on her feet. "Her parents are pretty scared up here," he said. "Can everyone stop and have a look around?"

  I walked to the front door of the grocery and watched the automatic doors slide open every time someone put weight on the black rubber mat. If we didn't find Stephanie within a few minutes, we'd have to search outside, call the police, get crowds of people involved, and real confusion would start. The parking lot was huge, slick, and dark. If she had wandered out there, no one was going to see her past the narrow light cones of the high fluorescent lamps.

  What was it going to mean if Stephanie was gone? I felt myself start to die at the thought of it until the baby inside me kicked, an elbow or knee stuck out in a lump under my rib, advocating life. I pressed my hands against the chilled store window as cars went in and out of this lot without a thought or a care.

  "Here she is!" A woman's voice. I ran toward the sound, following Tom who now had Amanda in his arms. Turning the corner I saw Stephanie bathed in the grocery-store-blue light, holding the stranger's hand, smiling when she spotted us. "She was behind the toilet paper," the woman said, trembling a little over her discovery. I reached in to gather up my daughter, who laid her head on my shoulder, who nuzzled her mouth into my neck and fluttered her soft eyelashes against my skin.

  I could have written in my letter about the times, the dozens of times, we had to stop everything to search for Stephanie. The afternoons she claimed she was going to live forever on the strip of grass in the middle of our boulevard. The clothes-shopping trips where she'd plant herself in the middle of a circular rack and refuse to come out. What would she care about those memories? Now she was gone. Now there was no coaxing her back. I held the paper flat, the pen poised. I wrote simply, Please stop this, not even knowing what exactly I meant by that—if she stopped, then what would we do next? How would I get her home, keep her home?—and signed it Mom.

  My letter finished and folded, I gathered Mary's and Mollie's and waited for the last one.

  A few minutes later I peeked into the dining room where Amanda was still writing, her head down on one folded arm, stubby black hair on white skin. I went to the living room, pulled Mollie onto my lap. Mary stretched out at the other end of the sofa. When Amanda stepped through the opening between rooms, maybe a quarter of an hour later, I was wondering what we should do with the letters. She was holding hers in one hand and had a stock pan in the other, as if she'd read my mind.

  "Let's burn them," she said.

  Mary, Mollie, and I followed her outside to our concrete patio. A misty rain fell on our bare heads and our shoulders—none of us had grabbed a coat. We tore our letters to bits and let the flakes fall into the pan, the four of us huddled together so the rain wouldn't soak our fuel. Amanda knelt to light the jagged pieces on the top, blowing with pursed lips until orange flame licked at the metal rim. The paper burned fast—within a minute or two it was smoldering at the bottom of the pan, our letters turned to ash while we looked on. Amanda picked up a wet stick from the patio and stirred the orange glow, and a few tiny firebugs danced around until the rain snuffed them out. Soaked and shivering, I tugged on Mary and Mollie, and the three of us dashed inside. The girls hurried to their rooms to change into dry pajamas while I watched Amanda through the window.

  The flames in the pan were extinguished but a trail of smoke drifted through the damp air and over our fence toward the road. Amanda sat with her back against the cedar slats, wet and alone, moving only her hand up to her mouth to puff on a cigarette. I lingered at the window, keeping an eye on her while she waited. For what, I wasn't sure. But waiting. She didn't want me to comfort her or talk to her, and I knew it. She'd never believe that what she feared most was what I feared most. So we stayed in our places, each of us, until every bit of smoke disappeared.

  7

  After the holidays, after the Christmas Eve letters to Stephanie were burned, and the gritty ash released to who-knows-where, and after I'd scrubbed the char from the bottom of the pan and placed it back on the shelf, I checked Amanda into a women's group-home clinic that was supposed to make her better by ridding her of the desire for a dark drug. But one February morning, a Saturday and less than two months after she'd arrived back in Eugene, I was on my way to move her out of that concrete shell of a building pitched on a barren stretch of ground. She couldn't wait to get away from the group sessions and the twelve-step cheerleaders, to break apart from the other women who'd bet their last chance to stay clean, or at least to stay out of jail, on this state facility. She couldn't wait for me to arrive and to set her free.

  Seven weeks she'd stuck it out. A whole seven weeks. Only seven weeks. I couldn't weigh out this choice of hers to quit. Had anything sunk in? Would she make her way downtown that very night to buy a needle and drugs on some seedy street corner from some sleazy guy? Would she jump on a train to some distant city to try to reconnect with, to find, her sister? I hadn't the slightest idea what was ahead, and yet I kept driving toward Amanda as if a positive future for her were a sure thing, as easy to put together as a Lincoln Log house, this slot snapped into that slot and done. I couldn't let myself indulge in the doubts I felt about whatever was going to happen next.

  The only thing I was sure of was how pleased Amanda would be to leave the institution I'd stuck her in. I felt a small stir of triumph over saving her from a place she despised, even while the truth twisted in the bottom of my gut—here was our old, familiar pattern revisited, the one I ruefully kept alive: she got in trouble and I rescued her (since there was no possibility of rescuing Stephanie from whatever was happening to her wherever she was, what a comfort it was now to leap to Amanda's defense). Amanda needed me. She needed me, and that was the last thin reed I could hold on to.

  She'd no doubt risen early to pack her small piles of clothes into her duffle, to strip the worn white sheets off the twin bed with its plastic-covered mattress, and to sweep the pale linoleum floor between her dresser and the one next to it. She'd probably skipped breakfast in the cafeteria—food as bland as every wall and floor and wan face in the place—and was waiting for me in the chair next to the locked front door, bag in her lap and knitted cap pulled down to her eyes, and glibly satisfied that she'd once again talked me into getting her out of a situation she couldn't abide.

  Amanda had proclaimed the treatment center a waste, and she told me a hundred times that being there only made her want to die ("If you force me to stay here I'll kill myself"). Peggy, the center's head
counselor, insisted during our clipped hallway conversations that Amanda still needed a lot more time to reach a breakthrough. I shrugged; my eyes glazed over. If there was a clear line between right and wrong, between what helped Amanda and what hurt her, between what ultimately would succeed and what surely would not, I'd long ago lost sight of it. These days, I worried only about the putting of one foot in front of the other, no longer believing in anything but managing to live through this until it was over. Stephanie was gone and Amanda was locked in a place that made my blood freeze every time I went in—every time I met with bleached blond, overly skinny Peggy, who'd try again to get me to admit that I was equally addicted to drugs or booze, just hiding it better. "Your daughter can't come clean about her history until you come clean about yours," she'd say, her tobacco-laden breath in my face. I'd never admitted to her that, yes, I often had a beer or glass of wine in the evening—I didn't even think to mention it—and instead fumed about her assumption that I was somehow the one who'd taught Amanda to stick a needle in her arm.

  It didn't matter what I thought about Peggy or the center or Amanda in it, anyway. The institution wasn't a lockup, Amanda couldn't be kept there against her will even at age seventeen, and, with or without my blessing, she was finished. She planned to move in with a boy she'd met before she'd last left Eugene—an arrangement that terrified me, that nearly buried me with the possibility of more chaos—and she promised to find a job and stay off the drugs. She announced these plans during our last meeting with Peggy, and she said that no one was going to stop her from carrying them out. Not me, not her dad, and not the staff at the center. Amanda, a high-school dropout whose only real job had been building trails in the temptation-free wilderness, thought she had everything solved.

  It had been five and a half months since Amanda and Stephanie left Eugene together—since they'd done what I'd dreaded and jumped on a freight train. Five months, and we still hadn't heard from Stephanie. Her January birthday had gone by with barely a mention from Mary and Mollie. The whole house—everything in it, the cats, the furniture, the paintings on the walls, the unwatered plants—seemed an unsettling combination of dull and tense that day, too dead and yet too alive. The day Stephanie turned one decade plus five. When I called Amanda at the center to see how she was faring on a birthday we'd celebrated in past years with homemade pesto and fresh-tomato pizza, Stephanie's favorite meal, and a lit-up white cake with butter-cream frosting, she declined to speak to me. All I heard was the emptiness of the hollow hallway on the other end of the receiver until the receptionist came back to say that my daughter would call some other time, when she wasn't so busy.

  While Amanda was a resident of this clinic where I saw women wandering the halls with their heads down as if the worries crammed in were too much to bear, I convinced the director to let me take my daughter out once a week. I planned outings to poetry readings, to ballets, to new Vietnamese restaurants, and to coffee shops. Amanda tolerated the meals and shows every Thursday without saying much of anything, not ungrateful but not all that interested either. She told me about the high-school GED lessons she'd been taking, how she finished the worksheets a minute or two after they'd been set on her desk and then sat bored and impatient while the rest of the girls worked through their own problems and quizzes. Amanda was nearly as bored on her nights out with me. It started to get obvious that she might have loved the art, the performances, the food—but each week's event became tedious for her because I was the only one doing the choosing, where we should go, what we should see. She wasn't discovering what she wanted to do because no one was letting her try, not even me, the one pushing her to figure things out. I'd drive her back to the center by ten P.M., our curfew, and watch her walk through the door, troubled by the wind-bent shape of her, so forlorn, so lost.

  On this Saturday moving-out day, as I pulled into the treatment center's parking lot for the last time and spotted Amanda through the window, I was still trying to sort out what I should do from this point on. Should I step away, let her determine the what-next by herself ?

  It would have been best to let her wriggle out of her own dead skin the way bees somehow slip from constricting exoskeletons and leave paper-thin ghosts of themselves behind on some porch railing or tree branch. But come on. I was too stuck on the idea that Amanda couldn't possibly transform without me. And some part of me believed that if I had Amanda to fuss over, I wouldn't fall into even more despair about Stephanie. During this time when my second daughter was still missing, there was no keeping me from the center of Amanda's business: I wanted to plan where she should live, what she should do with her time, what kind of food she should eat, and where she might work. I decided I should be charged with her future, or at least I should hand out heavy doses of advice. Back then, I couldn't understand why my goodwill, my insistence, so often made her furious.

  And then there was the problem of Amanda without Stephanie. During these months, I'd picked up on something bitter and maybe even irreparable that had happened between the girls during their last days on the road together. One had ditched the other. One had made a choice that the other, finally, couldn't stand. Amanda hadn't told me the particulars of what had occurred, but it was an obvious source of pain in her. The source of pain. Whatever the split between them, the deep resentment of it lived in Amanda's body and darkened her face every time Stephanie's name was mentioned. Why hadn't Stephanie called her? I know that was the burning question on Amanda's mind every day. For a long time, Amanda had existed at the center of only one life—her sister's—and had a bond of safety with only one person—Stephanie. It was a horrible break. The most horrible break.

  As I climbed out of the car and walked toward the clinic's front door, Amanda saw me and waved with a slight movement of a hand that quickly became a closed, tight fist, which she used to knock on the glass door until the receptionist released the electronic lock. This time the stern woman at the desk wasn't buzzing me in. She was buzzing Amanda out for good.

  My daughter stepped into the cool, cloudy day, her bag swinging from one hand. We met on the sidewalk without touching, the roar of the river behind us, and the wind off that rushing water working its way under our jackets.

  "Is that everything?" I asked her, pointing to her duffle.

  "Yes," she said with a smile. A rare smile. "I've got it all."

  Several weeks after Amanda left the treatment center at the edge of the river and moved in with a boy named Billy, he all gangly limbs, narrow teeth, and scraggly hair, I went to the tiny apartment they shared and knocked on the door. I'd come by earlier that day—a Saturday—but no one had answered. Now, grocery shopping done and errands finished, I'd stopped by again. They didn't have a telephone; sometimes Amanda walked down to use one on the corner to check in with me, but I hadn't heard from her for days. That worried me, especially after her supervisor from work phoned to say Amanda hadn't shown up for a few shifts. The nag inside me wouldn't ease up—I had to find out what was wrong. That meant going to an apartment that, by its mere existence, left me feeling soiled and defeated.

  I knocked on the warped door, once white but now chipped and grimy. I tried to look through the front window, but the curtains were pulled shut. I went back to the door and knocked again. My rap wasn't angry or loud but it was insistent. I stopped when I heard noises inside, and maybe a minute later the door opened a crack, Amanda's shadowed face appearing in the airy gap behind the drooping links of a security chain.

  "What?" she said.

  "Can you come out here?" I asked. "I want to talk to you." The one-room place was dark, but I could see a few shapes in the background—the brown swoop of beer bottles covering the counter-tops and a lump in the bed. Billy, I assumed.

  "About what?" she said.

  "Amanda, please," I said.

  Amanda rubbed her barely open eyes and then pushed a hand through her puffball of hair. "Mom, I'm still sleeping," she said. "We had a late night."

  "It's two thirty in the after
noon," I told her, as if this would matter, as if her mood allowed her to comprehend time or assign any significance to the numbers on the clock face.

  "I'll call you later, when I'm awake," she said, and shut the door.

  I went home long enough to put the groceries away and to take Mary and Mollie to a store for art supplies and wrapping paper and then on to a slumber party for a school friend's birthday. I wouldn't have to pick them up until the next morning. By four that afternoon, I'd returned to Amanda's door. I knocked sharply, my fist tight enough that the skin stretched thin and white over my knuckles, and kept it up until she opened the door.

  "Come on," I said to her bleary face, which was as pale and droopy, as yanked into consciousness, as it had been earlier. "We need to talk."

  She sighed and dropped her shoulders in one dramatic slump. She unhooked the chain from the door, reaching backward to grab her pack of cigarettes off a table before making her way outside. In the light of day, even this last golden light, my daughter looked like hell. She still couldn't open her fat pillowed lids all the way and her lips were parched and bluish. She wore wrinkled brown cords and an even more wrinkled long-sleeved cotton shirt ripped open across the back, a stained T-shirt underneath (the kind she called a wife beater). Bare feet. When she lifted her hands—one to hold a cigarette, the other to light it—the sleeves of the shirt sagged down her arms, and her wrists popped out, looking like chewed corncobs.

  Her right arm and the cuff of that sleeve were covered with splotches of dried blood.