Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  A few months earlier—in January, I think, or maybe February—two middle-aged couples in one car were heading down the McKenzie River Highway toward the hospital in downtown Eugene. Their children, one couple's son, the other couple's daughter, were having a baby. The daughter had gone into labor that morning, and the two sets of grandparents-to-be, who lived on the other side of the Cascades in Bend, had decided to make the trip to the hospital together.

  Except they'd never arrived. They'd crossed over the often-slippery Santiam Pass and had only a handful of miles still to travel along the river into town when they got to the Rennie boat launch. For some reason, the driver—the maternal grandfather of the yet-unborn child—aimed the sedan down the short, steep incline and straight into the swift water. The car was found the next day mid-channel with the two women still belted into the back seat, one woman clutching her purse. The men's bodies were discovered floating in downstream eddies.

  I couldn't get them out of my mind. Why hadn't the driver realized he'd gone off the road in time to stop? Why hadn't he slammed on the brakes? The police found no skid marks. Something, who knows what, had pulled them to the middle of the frigid current.

  After the accident, I thought about the two couples every time I drove the last stretch toward Barry's house. I remembered them in a cloud of sentiment, believing again that life was a cheat and that all of those people, down to the baby, had been cheated. I was tired of feeling cheated. Tired of being afraid. Whatever lurked in those waters might recognize how done in I was, and how defeated, and would soon enough call me into the river.

  This May night, as I turned to the wet road again, I felt especially weak, especially alone, as if the water already lapped at my feet. Then the last Rennie sign was behind me, and I was okay. One second, then two, then thirty, then sixty, and I breathed again. A few minutes after that, dry and safe and calmer now, I was in Barry's driveway and out of my car, standing under a starless wet sky and under the canopy of Douglas firs that arched over his house.

  I'd left Mary and Mollie alone for the evening—promising to be home before bedtime—because I had to make the hour's drive to where Barry lived. I had to speak to him, face to face.

  He'd been standing in the doorway when I pulled in, and he waited for me to take a couple long breaths of the cool country air before he said hello and urged me to come out of the rain. Usually when I drove up I brought a pot of soup or a sack of warm cookies, but this time I had nothing. I didn't need to stay long and I didn't have much to say. But I had to do this thing on this night and only here, in the still woods and to the man I most trusted, with the sound of the river rushing past in the distance.

  I followed Barry to the living room, where he had a fire in the wood stove, popping and crackling and emanating waves of heat. He sat down in his favorite blue chair and I stretched out on the Persian rug that lay over the slats of oak flooring. The warmth soaked through my jeans and sweater to my skin. My hair got warm, and the edges of my left ear, the one closest to the fire, turned hot and pink.

  "What's on your mind?" Barry finally said with a strain of nervousness. I'd called earlier in the afternoon, while I was still at work, to ask if I could come up and talk something out with him. I hadn't yet mentioned that soon after my return from searching for Stephanie in San Francisco, I'd had an appointment with the therapist who'd been helping me out for several years. I told that counselor about the futile weekend, about having no other ideas about how to find my missing daughter. After a few minutes of us talking it over, he said it was time for me to plan what I was going to do if Stephanie was dead.

  "Dead?" I said to the solemn-faced man. "She's not dead." I got up, gathered my coat and my purse. "Why would you say she's dead?"

  But he got me to sit back down and hear him out. "I didn't say she's dead," he told me in his rational, soft voice. "I said it would be good to have a plan in case she is."

  Mary and Mollie were about to finish a school year on a fairly good note, both doing fine in classes and practicing for their spring band recitals and dance performances. Amanda had taken a job caring for elementary-school children before and after school. She'd been wobbly at times, but she'd made this job work—her self-repair was well under way, the focus of her days now. She arrived at the darkened school building at six thirty A.M. and helped little kids move out of the last memories of sleep and into the day. She poured juice, got their schoolwork together with them, held the smallest ones on her lap while they adjusted to another morning. She was sober in every sense of the word, and had grown into a quiet and serious young woman who hardly ever smiled, but who hardly ever got angry anymore either.

  Our lives were starting to feel the slightest bit normal again—even with the endless hole of Stephanie-still-missing in the middle. If Stephanie was gone forever, if she was dead, it would be up to me to keep my other three children from sliding off the edge. That's what the therapist told me. I could only do that if I wasn't clinging to the edge myself. "Get a list together. Who you'd call first. What would need to be taken care of, and who could take care of it," he said.

  I shook my head. I wasn't going to do any of that. I thought he was unnecessarily pushy, or anyway, cruel.

  I left his office with a million sad and swirling thoughts clogging my head. Two days later I came to realize that if I had to prepare myself, as he'd said, the first step for me was to say the words out loud to the person who'd gather me up if I needed him to. So I drove to Barry's house and sat up on his rug, woven reds and purples and blues. I turned my body so that my back was against the fire and I was facing him, and I said what I'd come to say. "I think Stephanie might be dead."

  The previously unthinkable ending to this trouble with my daughters—that one of them would not make it out alive—was in the room now, and it would in the days ahead gush through my dreams and my waking thoughts. Ever since the therapist had brought up the possibility, I'd been turning it over and over and over again. It couldn't be true, but maybe it was. Why else would this silence have stretched on so endlessly? Why else would Stephanie let so much time pass without contacting us, without contacting Amanda? Too many months had gone by for this absence to make any kind of sense. And pretty soon I was convinced: the worst news could arrive, a black package on my doorstep, and I would have to open it.

  Barry didn't say anything once my sentence was out. He waited for me to go on. I muttered a few more words, but they didn't mean much. Making the one statement was all I'd come for. Getting it out of my mouth and hearing my own voice in my own ears.

  I curled on the rug again, rolled sideways toward the warmth of the fire. Barry stood up to add more wood and to poke the embers that had already burned down to near ash, then he knelt beside me to put his hand on my back. I closed my eyes and let the heat cover me like a blanket.

  A little more than a week later, while I was cooking dinner, the phone rang. The voice on the other end was Stephanie's. I moved down the hallway, away from Mary and Mollie, who were doing homework at the dining room table, and into my bedroom. I closed the door.

  "Where are you?" I said, my voice quaking. My hands quaking, my legs quaking.

  She sounded far away, a tinny strain to her voice. "It doesn't matter," she said.

  "It does matter," I told her. "Where are you?"

  But she wouldn't say. She had called to ask me for money. She'd adopted a dog, a puppy from a box outside a grocery store, and had named it Kaw-Liga, after a Hank Williams song. Now the dog was dying of the parvovirus and Stephanie wanted five hundred dollars to pay the vet to try to save him.

  I didn't have five hundred dollars or anything close to that in my account, but even if I had, I wasn't going to send money to her for a sick dog, and I told her so.

  Wait, were we really talking about money? Were we actually discussing a dog? Stephanie and I were embroiled in an argument this fast? This was not the phone call from her that I had banked on for months. That phone call, the one I'd hoped for and planned on,
had her asking for my forgiveness, begging to come home. And it had me opening my heart to her and letting her back in, just like that. With Stephanie's hard voice in my harder ear, that's not the way our first talk in eight months' time was going. Where was the cry of relief from either of us? Where were words of reconciliation or apology? The conversation was brief, tense, and difficult. The most difficult conversation of my entire life: how could that be?

  I realize now that her voice couldn't pierce me. All I could acknowledge was the deflation, the frustration and grief between us during our few-minute talk. I couldn't, or wouldn't, hear Stephanie's need; I couldn't let in that she was scared out of her wits at the other end of the phone. She wanted—or at least some part of her wanted—for me, her mother the adult, to fix this, to make it better. To provide the opening, the possibility of hope. But I was too shut down to do that for her.

  Stephanie's words were rushed, trailing off. She didn't know what she wanted exactly, but she needed to get her dog cared for and she'd talked to her father, who'd told her to get the money from me. I owed her at least five hundred dollars from the child support I'd accepted while she was gone, she told me. I'd better send it to her, she said, because it belonged to her and she was going to use it for her dog.

  I couldn't respond. I couldn't say a single word. I searched in myself again for some sense of relief. I wanted it; I ached for it and can only imagine that she ached for it too. For one second, I thought I detected the skeleton of relief pressed up against my ribs—Stephanie was alive and that was cause for the dead part of me to come to life again too—but there was no bursting, all-consuming glory of reconnection.

  I had no idea what to do next.

  "Are you sending me the money?" Stephanie pressed.

  "No," I said, leaning against my bed, hearing Mary call me from the other side of the house, saying that the soup on the stove was boiling over. "But I'll send you a plane ticket to come home."

  That's when I heard a click and a dial tone. She had hung up.

  9

  After Stephanie hung up on me on that Sunday evening in May 1997, the first thing I did was push the zero on my phone until a human voice came on. I wanted to know where my daughter had called from, and after a ten-minute runaround from the phone company, I got someone to tell me: Stephanie was in Austin. I dialed Barry to let him know she was alive. After that brief conversation, I called Amanda, who by then had a telephone in her house and who had to get up early the next morning for her job at the elementary school, but who most likely wouldn't sleep a wink after this news.

  "Austin," I said.

  "I know," she replied.

  It turned out that Stephanie had contacted her before she'd called me—and that Stephanie had called her father before she'd phoned either of us. I'd been the last on her list, a fact that settled too heavy on me even while I tried to shake off what I took as a slight, already letting myself slide into the old pattern of competition with Tom.

  "Did she say she wants to come home?" I asked Amanda. I'd slumped to the floor, my back resting against the closet door, and I'd crossed my legs so they'd started to throb. I heard Mary and Mollie out in the dining room asking each other where I'd gone. What was going on with the overcooked dinner? How come the laundry was left half folded on the sofa? "Mom!" Mary called out. "Where are you?"

  "Not really," Amanda said on the phone, her voice subdued, sad. "She said she has a job and a place to live and that her dog is sick and she needs money." If Stephanie had given Amanda a telephone number or an address in Austin, Amanda was keeping that knowledge from me. Actually, I didn't think she had. Stephanie had made a peep of a noise in our direction and now we were reeling, each in her own way, from what that might mean. She was alive, she was okay. Now what?

  The next day at work—a Monday morning in late spring—I called the three youth shelters I'd found listed in Austin. I'm not sure why I started that way because I was already aware of the answer: they existed for the kids, not for the parents, and could offer me nothing. Maybe I wanted the rejection—maybe it was taking me a while to warm to the idea of finding my missing child, and the old pattern of no help to parents was right if only for its familiarity. I didn't bother with the police. Instead, in the middle of the day, done now with the shelters, I was struck by the idea of one institution I had yet to turn to—the church. I called directory services and asked for a handful of Austin, Texas, church numbers, and then I started dialing. Each time I asked to speak to the youth pastor. Even if there was indeed such a minister to talk to, my request was inevitably turned down. "I have choir practice in an hour," one man told me. "That's lousy," another said, pausing for a small throat-clear of sympathy before he added, "but not something I can help with."

  I'd asked the few pastors who'd heard me out to please look for my daughter—take a couple of hours one day to see if she was findable, figure out where she was living and if she was safe and fed. Stephanie had mentioned to Amanda that she was working at a pizza restaurant near campus. That was a pretty good clue, wasn't it? How many pizza shops could be harboring a fifteen-year-old runaway? Mostly, I realize now, I wanted these representatives of God to discover some way to ask my daughter to come home so I wouldn't have to.

  But they said no, one minister after the other. "Do we know you?" one man asked me. "I don't understand why you've called here."

  Which leads to the obvious question: why didn't I go myself? Why didn't I find a babysitter and hop on a plane that night to do my own digging through college cafés in search of my child, instead of asking strangers to do that for me? No doubt I could find her—the chances of coming upon her in Austin were a thousand times better than those of my lost weekend in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. What was keeping me in my chair at work, so afraid to trust this recontact with Stephanie that all I could do was curse the unhelpful reverends?

  That night at home I phoned Richard and Jane in Montana—their having taken Stephanie into their home and family for half a year giving them claim, I thought, to hear even sketchy news of my daughter's whereabouts. Maybe I tried to explain my state of mind: stunned. My state of inaction. I don't remember. Whatever I said, a few days later Richard was on a plane to Austin, doing what I wasn't ready to do. He walked around the streets near the university, scouring the restaurants until he ran right into Stephanie at a Pizza Hut. She'd lied about her age and was waitressing full-time, bustling around the tables, arms loaded with trays of hot sausage and cheese pies.

  She was, Richard said when he called me from his Austin hotel room, nonplussed at seeing him standing in the doorway of her workplace. She stared and stammered. Her boss let her off early, and Stephanie took Richard to meet her friends, casting sidelong glances his way as they walked along the street as if trying to decipher his sudden appearance in Texas. One friend turned out to be a theater student who'd allowed Stephanie to crash at her apartment until she could start paying part of the rent. "It's filthy," Richard said of that crowded place. "They're squatting in filth. Stephanie's teeth are brown."

  The visit was short and sometimes tense, though Richard got Stephanie talking about what she was going to do next. By the end of Richard's stay, my daughter had agreed it was probably about time to return to Eugene. But not yet. In the weeks to come, my brother Ron would appear at her door to take her to dinner. My mother, in Texas on business, would see Stephanie too and would do her best to persuade my daughter to come home. But I stayed away, only later realizing why. After two years of going after my child, reeling her back home again and again, this time I wanted her to choose to return to me.

  By early summer, I'd talked to Stephanie several times on the telephone and had begun to understand her tentative plans: she wanted to go first to Tucson to see her father, then I would buy her—and the dog—a ticket to fly to Eugene. We could start to put small parts of this into motion, though much was not yet firm. Ours was a standoff that would be weeks in breaking, either toward some sense of reconciliation or t
oward more alienation, who knew.

  While Amanda worked on college applications and found a job at a daycare camp that summer, and with Mary and Mollie off for the annual visit with their father, I prepared for Stephanie to finally come home. I borrowed five thousand dollars against my mortgage, an unheard-of move for me. I convinced a contractor friend to give me a good deal on remodeling our backyard storage shed into a small cottage for my returning child. I'd forgotten, I suppose, how outraged I was when Tom and Ellen stuck Amanda in a made-over outbuilding in their own backyard when she'd gone to live with them all those years ago. In my mind, this backyard construction project of mine made perfect sense: Stephanie had been gone too long and had seen and done too much to simply move back into her old room and take up a ninth-grader's life. That was my justification, anyway—though there was another part to it. I wanted to have her a good distance from my bedroom in the rear of the house so I wouldn't have to notice her comings and goings, which were sure to get under my skin like some itchy rash.

  By the end of August, the little house was finished, its walls painted periwinkle blue and filled with garage-sale furniture—bed, chest of drawers, dressing table with mirror, and a big overstuffed chair in the corner. An extra bathroom was beyond my means, so she'd have to share the one in the house with Mary, Mollie, and me. But everything else felt as right as it could feel for this once-lost daughter's return home.