Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  "I hate to tell you the truth," he said, frowning so that parallel creases appeared on his forehead like faint ski tracks, "but there's nothing we can do to help you find your daughter."

  It was spring of 1997, and not even Amanda had seen or heard from Stephanie since the previous November. I'd come to San Fran cisco thinking that maybe, if everything lined up and I got lucky, if I wasn't out of my mind believing that possibly Stephanie was here instead of in some other town in some other region of the country, I might locate her. I might track her down. I'd even let myself imagine once or twice that she would suddenly appear before me on Gary Street, on Powell, up at the Grace Cathedral Labyrinth, and that this bleak stretch of not knowing where she was and what condition she was in would be over. After talking to the cop, I realized I'd have to go about such a search without help, at least none from authorities who patrolled this city. Finding Stephanie meant looking for her by myself.

  Not long after the ill-fated weekend in Portland with my mother, and after Amanda and Stephanie had jumped a train and disappeared, I'd taken a long drive with Barry through the rural parts of the Willamette Valley, just the two of us alone. It was a sunny afternoon in late September, Mary and Mollie off with friends for the day, and the air that streamed in Barry's truck windows and that blew my hair around smelled faintly of fall. Late September: the loveliest time to be in our half of Oregon—summer crops gathered, fields burned, apples ripe on the trees. Fall had always been my favorite season, with my kids freshly back from their dad's. By the first of most Septembers I could rest easy. My lonely summer had ended—I could stop writing daily postcards and letters to my girls in Arizona, and stop sitting through the long evenings in our empty house waiting for them to come home; I could stop listening to Amanda's seventh-grade choir's rendition of "Shenandoah" every time I drove in the car—and all of us could now fit back into the comforting-for-their-predictability schedules of school and work and dance classes and music lessons and evening homework and an hour of TV each night. All that was long ago, but my body still remembered the pleasure of regular life, those ordinary times, and I rode through the valleys of Oregon with Barry, who drove exactly five miles over the posted speed limit, while I fought off an ache that had nowhere to land.

  When we got to the town of Woodburn, nearly to Portland, Barry suggested we head up the hill to a Catholic monastery called Mount Angel. I'd seen the signs for this place dozens of times on the interstate but had never wondered much about its mysterious looming residents, the nuns and priests. When we reached the monastery grounds on a plateau that overlooked the valley and got out of the truck to walk around—the sun on the back of my neck, and my hand in Barry's warm one—we found an assortment of buildings and a courtyard with a perfectly groomed pond in the middle, koi popping the green surface with their round orange mouths. There were no people, so it was exquisitely quiet on the hill. We strolled in the breeze, the golden maple leaves on long branches over our heads rustling like bird wings, until we came to the brink of a cliff. Barry sat on a bench there, pointed in the direction of the vast view, and I settled on the cool ground in front of the bench for no other reason than it seemed like the right thing to do—to feel the damp from the grass seep into my jeans and to feel the hard earth under my bones. In front of us was a rolling, variegated aspect of farmland: in the center, one farmstead with a small, steep-roofed house that was painted white and surrounded by a line of trees and, past that windbreak, acres of plowed ground fresh with tractor stripes.

  I looked over at the scene, as empty of humans as the monastery behind us, as if the afternoon had been preserved for Barry and me alone. This hilltop where we'd paused seemed to invite a Sunday-afternoon type of quiet rest, but rest had so long eluded me I didn't know how to accept the offer. I do remember being struck by that farm in the distance. Everything in that setting was in its place, or so it seemed to me: the home and garden, the chicken coops and the horse barn, even the straight lines of broken ground. The house was built mid-hill, as if the slope had been created just for this dwelling and for those who lived there.

  What if I had given my daughters this kind of life once I was divorced from their father? It wouldn't have been impossible—I could have moved back to Idaho instead of Oregon and found a house with acreage near one relative or another. We could have had cows and chickens. The girls could have grown up as my cousins had, rising before dawn to milk and feed, and returning home from school to do farm chores. The palms of their hands could have grown calloused from the pitchfork and the rake while their faces became wind-burned pink. The routines of getting by, day after day, would have muted any thoughts of taking off in anger—everyone would have work to do and would know to do it. At least that's how I thought of it for a moment, this split second, as I watched the farm across the valley. The simple life I'd not chosen for my girls.

  I realize now that this vision of rural life held no clues for me or for us. All it did was stir a familiar bitterness over the what-ifs, bring on the same old self-berating: for so long I couldn't think of much I'd done right. It was too late to raise my daughters better than I had. It was too late to make up whatever I'd done wrong as a parent. The one thing I'd hoped to get right—being a good mother to my kids—had somewhere along the line gone terribly awry.

  There on the monastery grounds, Barry leaned over to put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned away from the farmscape and toward him. He told me every day that I was a fine mom, a loving mom, and though I didn't believe him much at that time, I lapped up his praise, every word. He'd also waited with as much patience as a person on the periphery of a family could muster, concentrating on making a friendship with the younger girls and letting me talk out the million worries a day that cropped up over Amanda and Stephanie. He brought gallons of milk when he came over, and O-rings for the leaky bathroom faucet. He got the oil changed in my car when I forgot all about it. He told me he planned to stick around, to be the person I could most count on in the world.

  "What are you thinking about?" he said now, running his other hand down his beard.

  "What else," I said. "The girls."

  He leaned back against the bench and crossed one leg over the other as if he were ready to listen, though I couldn't help but notice the flinch of the muscle in the leg I rested against—this old subject again, that dead horse we kept beating.

  But I took a new tack, one he hadn't heard before. "I'm tired of looking for my own kids," I said. "I can't keep hiring people to find them or signing them up for some treatment that might work or might not. I'm sick of it."

  He stared at me for a long time, maybe wondering if this was a test or a trick—I'd not yet voiced such a strong desire to give up, even though I had many times felt that desire keenly. "Do you mean that?" he asked, leaning forward, the hand on my shoulder again.

  "I think I do," I told him.

  There was a long pause before he said anything else. "Then maybe it's time to let them go," he nearly whispered. His hand lifted from me and I felt suddenly lighter, unyoked, nearly free enough to float.

  I twisted around to see once again the house on the hill and the expanse of farmland. "Maybe it is," I said.

  But nearly eight months after sitting on that hill with Barry, where I thought I'd reconfigured my heart to begin to accept my daughters' decision to leave me, I went to San Francisco to look for Stephanie. Doing nothing was going to eat me alive—with guilt, with remorse, with resentment. I'd chosen San Francisco for the search even though Amanda couldn't say for sure whether Stephanie had returned to the Tenderloin District. Maybe Stephanie had made her way back to their old hangout on the corner of Sixth and Market, sure. But she could as easily be in LA, New York, maybe New Orleans. She could be anywhere. Yet I'd convinced myself, for all kinds of reasons, that I should look in this big city on the bay.

  I arrived on a Friday evening with my friend Sherry, whom I'd talked into coming along to help me look; she was younger, and the girls considered her one
of the friendly adults around us. I figured Stephanie might talk to her even if she wouldn't talk to me. Soon after we checked into our hotel, we hit the streets, wanting to fit all the searching we could into our short time—we'd take a Sunday-afternoon plane home. Sherry and I headed from our hotel to the Larkin Street shelter, a place Amanda had said she and Stephanie had gone to now and then for food. As we walked past closed shops and bustling restaurants with a cold spring wind in our faces, it suddenly occurred to me that if Stephanie was in the city on this day and saw me, she'd have to choose to show herself, or I wouldn't see her. She'd have to step out from the gradations of gray and brown, the angles and shadows of downtown San Francisco, and flash her hair, turn her body, in such a way that I'd know without a doubt that it was she.

  But if she wanted to stay hidden, she could do that too.

  "Boy, could I use a glass of wine," Sherry said, pulling her scarf up to cover her pink chin, slowing down to glance into a busy restaurant where tables of patrons were pressed against the other side of the glass.

  "Me too," I said. I followed her look into the café, yearning to be one of these people who slung their jackets and purses on the backs of the chairs and scooped appetizers into their mouths and dangled glowing cigarettes from their lips. I imagined purple wine on their flat tongues and warm food in their bellies. They smiled and laughed as if every concern or worry could easily be set aside for the sake of the evening's good time. They could carry on with their party and not even think about the kids, some of whom were barely teenagers, who had made their way to San Francisco and who were camped now in the grimy recesses of city streets. Why should these people in the restaurant consider for one second the young strangers who'd laid claim to squalid city corners? These patrons could leave their cafés and bars and step over kids huddled against the cold in donated blankets, or over kids too stoned to roll out of the way; they could go home and not think of those children again.

  "What are you going to do if you find her?" Sherry said as we picked up the pace, once we'd agreed on getting a glass of wine or even a martini back at the hotel bar when we returned. She'd asked me the same question several times since we'd left home—and even before we'd left, when I'd first brought up the idea of her going with me to search for Stephanie. This time the strain in her voice made me think she was worried I was going to fall apart in front of her if we found my daughter here only to have her run off again.

  "I don't know," I said. "I really don't."

  And I didn't know. Force Stephanie onto an airplane? Sherry and I both knew that was nonsense; there'd be no forcing her to do anything. Besides, Stephanie would no doubt be surrounded by friends who'd be all about protecting her from me. They wouldn't let me take her away. I didn't have the authority to demand that she whip herself into shape and get her ass back to Oregon. Nor could I charm her with gentle words and nice promises. All I had to offer was our home, her family, school. Amanda. Amanda most of all. None of those things apparently mattered to her anymore, and they made up my entire stash, my whole ball of wax.

  So here's what I told myself: If I saw Stephanie for a few minutes, at least I'd know my daughter was still in the world, however distant that world was from mine. Maybe that knowledge, for now, would be enough.

  Amanda was back in Eugene, so why was Stephanie still on the road? That's what I couldn't figure out. When they'd first bolted—those early days of slipping off to some downtown haunt right there in our own town, before they'd thought to jump a train and go far away—I was convinced that Stephanie didn't want to be this bad. Not really. She didn't want this much of my disapproval or rebuke. Deep down, I thought, she longed to come home and reconcile with me and her little sisters, to do well in school and have nice friends and take art lessons and get ready for a good college—she was only on the streets with Amanda to be Amanda's companion, her protector, so that each girl would know that she had someone watching over her. But that no longer added up, not with Amanda home for months, raw and aching for some news of Stephanie. Ruined over the lack of any word from Stephanie.

  What was out there that allowed Stephanie to forget the rest of us? Especially to forget Amanda, her best friend, her sister, her accomplice, her other half ?

  Eventually, after a lot of talking around the subject, Amanda had told me that hours after her overdose in Tucson, after Stephanie's amateur resuscitation had restarted Amanda's heart—Stephanie the one, indeed, who'd bent over her sister, breathing into her mouth, thumping her chest, eventually dragging her into an apartment building to make a call and then waiting until the paramedics arrived—and after a shot had counteracted the heroin in Amanda's system, the girls had been hauled to a group home by a cop who'd told them they couldn't run away because he was "too fat and too slow" to catch them. Run away they did. The next morning, after another night sleeping on the streets, the girls were walking around downtown Tucson when, for some reason, they drew the attention of a street officer—maybe a business owner had complained of the girls' loitering; maybe the cop had spotted them trying to buy drugs. Whatever his reason, the officer sidled up to them and asked who they were. Stephanie rattled off the first fake name that came to her, but Amanda—to Stephanie's dismay and surprise—gave her real name. Just blurted it out. The cop radioed in her real identification, and—what? Put together the near death of the night before or found old charges against her? I had no idea, and Amanda wouldn't say. I barely got her to recite the last details: the officer shoving Amanda into the back seat of his car as Stephanie hurried down the sidewalk. "We'll be together soon," Stephanie called from yards away as the cop shut the door on Amanda. "I'll be with you soon."

  Since that day, eight months of silence.

  Here in San Francisco, in my secret heart, I simply wanted to spot Stephanie in this vast place so she'd know I'd come looking for her. Or maybe she didn't even need to see me, or I her. Maybe I was searching for her in a city that she'd probably left long ago so I could someday claim that I'd done what any good mother would do. I'd looked. I'd pursued. I'd pounded the pavement seeking my daughter. Even though she obviously didn't want to be found, I'd done my best to locate my lost child.

  Stephanie, who'd become an inhabitant of the streets and of the rail yards. Not someone I knew, someone probably even more war-torn than when she'd left. I imagined her, her hair grown out and larger ceramic plugs shoved into her earlobes; the ripped T-shirt and the black jeans with leather patches; the hoodie with cuffs that she stuck her thumbs through to make half-gloves; the stink of her body, the stink of her breath. Not the girl who'd once spent about an hour in the bathroom every morning making sure that the curl in her bangs was neither too tight nor too loose but the perfect soft loop resting against her flawless skin (Stephanie back then had used so much hairspray in the morning that six-year-old Mary once complained, "She's putting a hole in the bozo layer!"). This wasn't the daughter who'd written notebooks full of poetry about the dog that had died and the dad she'd left behind; it wasn't the girl who'd been invited to lunches at her teachers' homes on the weekends.

  I would have said she had become a stranger, but strangers have the gift of benign unfamiliarity, a barrier they can choose to break down or keep erect. Stephanie and I had only alienation.

  The Larkin Street center, on the northwest corner of the intersection, was unlit when Sherry and I got there, about nine o'clock at night. The windows were black, though a smear of light snuck out from a side door that had been propped open a couple of inches with a shoe. I pushed it open all the way and stepped inside, Sherry behind me.

  "Hello?" I called.

  "Excuse me?" Sherry shouted.

  There was no response, though I heard the soft clatter of friendly talk and dishes from a back room.

  "Hello?" I called again.

  I moved through the large, chilly area in which folding tables were lined end to end. The room seemed colder because of the empty metal chairs scattered this way and that, as if people had left the room suddenl
y, abandoning their messes on the long, flat surfaces. The tables were covered with paint kits, pictures cut from magazines, and butcher paper splashed with bold colors, muddied now by the dim light. The rug, avocado green and thin, scuffed up under my shoes.

  "Is anyone here?" Sherry shouted more loudly.

  Chairs in the next room, behind the wall, erupted in noise then, pulled back with scrapes and bumps, and before I could look in the doorway ahead, five or six men and women in their twenties emerged, rushing toward us. They wove together like a human fence and pushed forward. Sherry and I stepped back. I held up one hand.

  "Wait," I said.

  "What are you doing here?" one man demanded. He wore an earnest flannel shirt, jeans, and dusty, heavy boots. "Who let you in?"

  "I'm looking for my daughter," I said, lowering my hand to my side, yanking my purse strap higher on my shoulder. "Can you help me?"

  The man, who had a gangly, long frame and a jolt of cropped hair—and held his napkin still twisted in his hand—walked around Sherry and me to open wide the door we had just come through.

  "We'll call a counselor. Maybe she can talk to you," the man said. "But you can't be in here." He ushered us through the door.

  A woman behind me repeated it: "You can't come in here!" As if we'd broken into a secret house and spotted contraband.

  A few seconds later, the door snapped shut, the shoe having been kicked out of the way, leaving us standing on the street. A lock clicked as a last reminder of how unwelcome we were in there. We waited five minutes or ten, pacing up and down in front of the building, both of us a little nervous about the neighborhood and the hour, our arms wrapped across our chests against the wind.