Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  I grabbed her hand and pulled it toward me. "What's this? What happened?"

  She shook me off and cradled the arm across her chest. "Nothing," she said. "Forget it."

  "Get in the car," I said, walking toward my station wagon. For some reason she didn't fight me and she didn't argue. She made her way around the car and climbed in the front seat and slammed the door shut. In the close quarters, windows up, I got my first whiff of her. Amanda—if odor was telling the truth—was rotting.

  An hour later, at home, she'd had a shower and put on some of my old sweatpants and a soft blue sweater. She'd brushed the rats' nests out of her hair, and now her shoulder-length strands—dyed a Mad Dog 20/20 shade of purple—hung around her face like wet curtains. Amanda had hopped on the counter while I made coffee, and up there, more relaxed than she'd been for a long time, she let me draw close enough to have a look at her arm. What I found under the rolled-up sweater sleeve was a jagged line running down the inside of her forearm from the wrist to the bend of her elbow, red and oozing, with a Frankenstein set of stitches holding the two raw sides together. I looked up at her, my mouth gaping, and Amanda quickly told a story about a fight the night before and how Billy had locked her out of the apartment. She was drunk enough, she said, that she'd thrown a hunk of rock at the side window, shatter ing it into a hundred pieces. "I tried to climb through but stopped when I realized I was getting cut," she said, lifting her wound for me to see again. "I just started screaming until he came out and took me to the hospital."

  The story was bullshit and we both knew it. But was I ready to talk about what she'd really done and the state she was really in? She'd picked up a knife—a paring knife, a butcher knife, an X-Acto knife, something close by—and sliced open her arm. In pain or frustration or drunkenness, or hit by a combination of every dark force bombarding her, she'd splayed open her flesh and watched herself bleed.

  This episode, which Amanda and I couldn't speak of frankly—or even hint at the truth of—had to be her low point, her scrape of the barrel's bottom. It couldn't get worse than this, could it? I wondered if she suspected the same, felt it in her guts and her slashed-up limbs: either turn back for the surface or die. While these wounds on her arm healed with fresh cells and newly knitted skin, she was consciously going to have to pull herself out of this dark hole.

  That change would occur, but I had no hope of it—not yet—and so it was with utter despair that there, in my kitchen, I rolled her sleeve down and turned to pour coffee into two mugs. I didn't ask the obvious questions about her version of what had happened—she'd climbed in the window arm-first? Nothing else got cut, her face, her neck? Instead, I handed her a hot cup laced with half-and-half, which she sipped gratefully. "Ow," she said, blowing on the surface.

  I considered calling her old therapist, or even calling the treatment center she'd checked out of too soon. I'd likely have to eat a couple of big crows in front of Peggy—who'd remind me again how wrong I was not to force Amanda to stay in the square concrete room of the sprawling concrete building until a new resolve came upon her—and I'd have to plead with Peggy to give Amanda another chance. That is, if Amanda would consider going near the place.

  I couldn't see how or why to try. My daughter wouldn't let me transport her to within a mile of the treatment center, nor would counseling do any good if she refused to go to the appointments I made and had to pay for whether she showed up for them or not. The thing to do here was to get professional help—one more type of aid that I'd add to the endless string of possible solutions tried over these years. Except none of it, it seemed to me, all these dollars and hours later, had made much of a difference. Despite counseling session after counseling session, Amanda was a little kid riding a screaming sled aiming for a tree; a stunned driver in a car headed for a cliff; a woman on the top floor of a burning building about to jump. My daughter embodied the cliché of out-of-control.

  That day, I took the coward's way out. Instead of suggesting even more therapy or another hospital or new drugs for her depression, I suggested dinner. Not at my house, where there was too much history, and where I might say too much about how she was living now or about how she was in danger of losing a job she'd just gotten or about a boyfriend too much in the thick of drugging and boozing with her. We drove to a restaurant. A Chinese restaurant near the University of Oregon campus, a place as benign as the blunt, blond-wood chopsticks that soon wagged in our fingers. I ordered chicken, and Amanda ordered shrimp. Her dish arrived glistening with color, green peppers and pea pods, yellow bamboo shoots and baby corn, the hues shining in startling contrast to her pasty face. Sitting across from me at the narrow table, Amanda shoved her fingers and dirty fingernails into the food to load it on the chopsticks. I asked her not to, unable to hold back my mother talk. She dug her fingers in deeper.

  Since she'd been living in the apartment, I'd tried to drop by every few days—although I hardly ever let her know I was around. Sometimes I left a small sack of groceries or a bag of secondhand sweaters and socks. If I had to speak to her, I preferred to talk to this daughter on the phone. A little distance—a little facade of accommodation. If I had her voice only to deal with, I could sometimes pretend that things weren't as awful as they clearly were.

  I'd also tried to pretend over that same period of weeks that Stephanie's seven-month absence hadn't wormed its way into me. But the piling on of days and weeks without a word from her had begun to eat at the marrow of my bones. I ached in a deep place in my body that I'd not known existed. An old problem of sleeplessness was now firmly entrenched; I ate only when I felt like my body was going to give out on me; I rarely kept myself from exploding when a store clerk annoyed me or when I was left too long on hold by the phone company. Or when I sat on the other side of a desk to stare down Mary's teacher or Mollie's while she explained to me again that whichever daughter under discussion had grown distracted and tearful and that her grades were suffering. Of course the girls were distracted; of course they were suffering. There were many ways Mary and Mollie might have reacted to this situation, and none of them were good. One of them could get sick—really sick. They could run away too, like their sisters. They could do scary things that I'd have to react to. If my younger daughters were merely distracted, I told the teachers, then that was a relief. The possibility of a C in math (which never happened) was the least of my concerns. Other signs in them were more disturbing: once again I'd been called to the elementary school because the playground attendant on fourth-grade recess duty found Mollie crossing the concrete bridge, the one built to get children safely over the busy roadway. She'd been halfway across, head down and blue coat buttoned tight, when the attendant caught up with her. Mol-lie cried as she was being carted back to the school building, saying that she had to set out to find her sister as soon as possible. Stephanie had to be found.

  The problem was, Stephanie wasn't going to be found until she wanted to be. The cops wouldn't watch for her, and the youth shelters that dotted the country either ignored or returned my packet of posters—they weren't in business to help the parents, their notes told me, their job was to take in and take care of the homeless kids. I could have hired another seeker of runaways, another ex-cop to search the entire country. But there was no money for such an endeavor. So I went nowhere, looked nowhere, and waited for Stephanie to decide it was time to contact one of us.

  This night in the Chinese restaurant, as Amanda ate, I tried to find subjects that didn't include her sister. I couldn't open up both of us to bereavement after months of nothing from Stephanie. Though I didn't want to—didn't want to inquire so I wouldn't have to be disappointed—I asked Amanda about school. Didn't she want to finish high school? Might she want to take classes at the community college? Could I set up a meeting with a counselor? I asked if I could help her make a plan, but she looked away. "I'm not like you," she said. "I'm not a planner."

  What she wanted, she said, was to be free. I assumed at the time that she meant she wanted
to be free of me, and released from family life. She wanted to be able to drink if she felt like it. To do drugs if she wanted. To leave town any time she got the hankering, nothing holding her down. And certainly without my looking over her shoulder, scolding. These years later, though, I'm not so sure that's what she meant. Freedom could have been finding her own way through her own confusion without me there, implementing the Plan for Amanda's Future.

  That night at the restaurant, I hoped that this food, and this neutral setting one story above the city street, would allow the hidden Amanda, the calmer girl who'd started to peek out in our kitchen an hour earlier, to emerge even more. But the longer we were together, exchanging sharp, tense sentences, the more apparent the lack of resolution between us. Finally, we stopped talking and concentrated on our food. Pearls of rice stuck to my teeth while the earthy saltiness of soy sauce coated the back of my throat. I could hardly swallow. I couldn't imagine pushing on. The turning point—giving up on my daughter—was in the room with us. I felt it. The very moment I would give up was right there, breathing down my neck, even while I had no idea what truly resigning might look like, how it would change my days or my life.

  The plates emptied of their colors, leaving only smears on white ceramic. The teapot was dry. I got up to pay the bill, and Amanda said she'd meet me on the sidewalk. She wanted to go for a smoke.

  I stepped to the counter and took out my credit card. Inside my wallet was a twenty-dollar bill I'd been thinking about giv ing her. Once she disappeared down the stairs and left me alone at the counter, I drew out the bill and held it. I folded it in half and half again and closed my palm around it, the sharp edges biting my skin, still not sure whether to hand it over. If I did, the money could be transformed into beer and cigarettes within a couple of hours. Or, worse, drugs. But maybe there was a chance she'd save some for a good breakfast. I didn't know; I couldn't know. Maybe it was best to give her no money but instead invite her to our house more often for meals, but she probably wouldn't agree to come. I was lost about how to help.

  A few minutes later, down the stairs myself and into the chilly, starless night, I looked around for Amanda. She wasn't waiting in front of the restaurant or down the block. I didn't see her anywhere. Had she left? Had she gone without telling me, found a ride home, or made her way to a pay phone to call Billy to come retrieve her? I couldn't stand to think that she'd done that—had just taken off—so I stared at the surface of the road, which, for some reason, was spider-cracked from one end to the other. Long cracks splayed into short cracks, from this corner to that corner. I'd never seen a street fractured like that, a forked and reforked jag of lines trailing off into the darkness. I walked a few feet onto the asphalt and leaned down to get a closer look, to touch the breaks in the road. But before my fingers brushed the blacktop I felt Amanda behind me. I stood up and pointed out the shattered pavement.

  "No," she said. "Look." She waved her hands under the branch of a bare tree just behind us, and I watched as the cracks on the road disappeared. Of course. It was only shadows. I waved my own hand between the beam of the streetlight and the tree limbs to break the illusion. I was embarrassed at how easily I'd been fooled, and I stepped back onto the sidewalk to sweep the dirt off my pants legs.

  "Can you drop me off at my house?" Amanda said then, thwarting my moment to suggest she come back to my house for the night, for maybe a couple of days, while I sorted out what to do about her most recent damage to herself; until I could reinvigorate my resolve to stick it out with her; until she was ready to deal with unhappiness in some other way than with pills or drinks or a knife. I shrugged, tacitly agreeing to take her where I didn't want her to go.

  We crossed the crooked shadows to the other side of the street, toward the alley that led to the lot where my car was parked. On our way, we passed a couple sitting at a well-lit table on the sidewalk outside a closed café, their swaddled baby lying in a plastic infant seat. Tiny pink hands poked out of the blanket, knocking around the cold air. The man on one side of the table jumped up. He thrust out his arms toward us. "Ladies, ladies!" he called out. Amanda stopped, and I did too. My daughter turned to look at me, as if wondering what we should do, then looked back at him.

  Teeth were missing from his mouth; he had no coat on, just a thin shirt that fluttered in the breeze. The woman, coatless too, stood up once she realized they had our attention, brown hair collapsed over her shoulders, her eyes dull and tired.

  "Can you help us?" the man said.

  Amanda and I were separated from this family by a waist-high retaining wall of red brick, which I was glad for. It would help us get away when we had the chance. I wanted only to return to the car, to have a few more minutes to talk to my daughter before we lost contact again. She would go to her house and I would go to mine and there was no telling what would bring us together again the next time. But right now I had to deal with this man shouting at me. I wasn't sure whether to respond to or ignore him—I glanced at Amanda to see what she wanted me to do. I wondered if it would please her for me to help these people by giving them a few dollars, perhaps even the sweaty twenty in my palm. I tried to read some sign in her, some indication of what would make her happy.

  The man broke in again. "Do you have one of those cards?" he said, pointing to an ATM just beyond the sidewalk's edge. "No," I said quickly. Amanda knew I had one, and I waited for her to expose me to these strangers. But she didn't. The man went on as if he hadn't heard me. The baby's godfather had sent a check, he said, pulling a rectangle of paper from his pocket and shaking it toward us. "We're not from here, nobody will cash it."

  He wanted me to deposit the check in my account and then withdraw the same amount so he could have the cash.

  "I'm sorry," I said, "I don't have a card."

  "But we need the money. We need it for our baby," he said, rattling the check again, as if the sound alone would conjure up help and hope and comfort. The woman had already given up on us and sat back down, ignoring her child, who had started crying and whose cries were steadily getting louder.

  I turned away as the man stuck the check back in his pocket. He mumbled at my back in frustration. That's when I noticed that Amanda had already gone on. I hadn't felt her leave, but she had. She was twenty or thirty feet away, her torso bent into the starless night under the streetlights. I watched her back get smaller as she moved deeper into the alley. I put my hands around my mouth to call to her—ask her to wait until I could catch up—but I couldn't make any sound. No noise would come out of me.

  I dropped my hands and turned to look again at the road we'd crossed and at the way the streetlights made a strange web of cracks that still seemed real. For a moment, in the time it took to take a breath perhaps, I thought about following the jagged shadow lines on the road, letting them decide the end of this night for me. But my hands clenched the car keys in my coat pocket, and my body moved around and began to cut through the same air, the same path, as Amanda. I didn't hurry, though. She was already too far away.

  8

  I don't remember why I thought stopping in at a police station in downtown San Francisco was a good idea—the police in Oregon had already told me that a change in state law in the 1990s had decriminalized skipping school and running from home, which meant police would no longer search for missing kids. That is, if the kids went missing of their own accord; not stolen away by strangers but rather having slipped from home lives they didn't want or couldn't tolerate. But something in me hoped that California had different ideas about teenagers who left their families to hit the streets.

  After an hour's wait in the dim room, surrounded by others who fidgeted nervously too, worrying about their own dealings with the cops, I found out that the law was basically the same here: as long as the kids didn't get caught committing crimes—big-deal crimes such as theft, drug dealing, assault, not just loitering or trespassing—they could squat in abandoned buildings or sleep on park benches or spend their days on street corners asking for sp
are change, and most of the time the police would look the other way. The blue-uniformed officer across the counter from me at the station rattled off the statistics, saying that dozens of kids streamed into the city every day; saying that nearly a thousand slept on the streets of San Francisco on any given night; saying that the strain on public dollars had shrunk the number of officers who walked a beat, so there was no way to keep an eye out for one girl. My girl, who wasn't unusual. She was part of a movement, a member of a burgeoning subculture that—if the San Francisco street corners crowded with young panhandlers were any clue, he said—was growing beyond society's control by the hour.

  I knew Stephanie had become part of some tribe made up of black-clothed, pierced, tattooed kids with necks seamed with dirt and armpits stuffed with snarled hair, but I hadn't thought all that much about the other children—who they were and where they came from and how many of them there were all together. I'd regarded the others as only strange and foreign and a source of trouble, and I wanted them to stay away from my daughters. Here in the police station I finally realized that Stephanie was, after all, just one among many. I got a glimpse of what she gained from being one among many: anonymity and some warped sense of group protection. I understood too that mine was a common quest and query—the officer informing me in short order that I was just another parent fresh in from some other place looking for a son or a daughter on the road. All he could do was add Stephanie's name to a national database of runaway children. That way she'd be in the computer if she did get arrested or hurt, or if she turned up dead, one of those who fell off the seedy margins of the street life and landed in a hospital or a morgue. As if this should be a comfort to me, her name on that long list.

  The officer took my information, pecking it at a keyboard with his index fingers. But he declined to take one of the posters I'd brought along, a photograph and description of Stephanie copied at the Kinko's in downtown Eugene before I'd left and printed on clean, white eleven-by-fourteen paper, HAVE YOU SEEN MY DAUGHTER? its headline. He claimed that too many posters got left at the station and that he had nowhere to hang them. And then he stuck out his hand to shake mine—his indication that our exchange was over.