Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  One night in November, after Stephanie had been living at home for eight weeks, living in that remodeled shed, I made my way across the dark patio behind our house and around the corner to the wet backyard, the last of the evening's rain dripping off the eaves, to peer in the window of her small place. The cottage sat smack in the middle of our backyard, just east of the garden and about ten feet south of the main house, a window on each of its three sides. I had to stand on a stepstool, which I'd pulled over from the patio, to see into her bright room. Stephanie had left on every lamp when she'd taken off to join her friends. The day before, maybe, or the day before that. Though irritated about what she was doing to my electricity bill, I was also glad for the light, because I needed to know two things: if the whining dog inside was suffering from hunger and thirst, and how much damage that dog was doing to a cottage for which I'd taken out a big, fat loan.

  Kaw-Liga was a gangly tan Lab mix, with a lolling spotted tongue and huge paws. I hadn't wanted him to live with us—adding a dog to the tricky mix of estranged daughter and wary family seemed too much—but Stephanie had bluntly informed me that where she went, the dog went. So I'd given in and here he was, scratching the new molding around the door to splinters, peeing on the rugs I'd bought from the carpet store's remnant pile, tearing the pillows off Stephanie's bed into clouds of floating feathers, and rolling on his back to moan in loneliness and boredom.

  Mary and Mollie had been pleading with me all evening to break the glass out of a locked window so one of them could slip a skinny body through the opening to release Kaw-Liga. Now, instead, I put my hands to the sides of my face, blinder-like, seeking some clue to the schedule of Stephanie's appearances and disappearances. After a few seconds, I made out the shimmer of water in one bowl and a meal's worth of fresh kibble in the other: a relief. Stephanie had been there in the past few hours to feed her dog and to play with him while I was at work and the little girls at school.

  Still. The dog was miserable. Mary, Mollie, and I had heard his barks and cries when we got home that evening, before we'd even opened the car doors. Mary ran to the backyard with Mollie on her heels to stand on the stepstool and try to see what shape he was in. As soon as Kaw-Liga spotted the girls in the window he went even wilder, yipping and leaping, believing release was near. I went in the house to retrieve messages off our machine, all of which were from neighbors asking me to please do something about the dog that never shut up.

  That night at dinnertime, as I'd been finishing up a pot of beans and rice, which we'd top with cheese and sour cream and eat with salad and cornbread, the phone had rung. It was someone from the county's youth services—"baby jail," as Stephanie called it. Stephanie had been arrested for drinking wine in the park, the woman on the other end of the line had told me. But not just underage drinking with her old friends and a new group of pals she'd found on Eugene's streets—for that mere transgression she might have been given a ticket and a ride home. Instead, she'd battled with the cops, calling them names, and she'd shoved one while trying to wriggle out of his grip. That made the charge assault and worth a trip to a holding cell.

  "Do you want to come get her?" the woman said.

  "What's my other choice?" I asked.

  "You could leave her here for the night and come get her tomorrow."

  "I'll see you tomorrow," I'd said, and hung up.

  With Stephanie locked up until morning, I had to do something about the dog. And so I was standing next to the cottage considering my choices when Mary came outside in her pajamas and robe, fresh from a shower. She stayed at the edge of the patio and out of the damp grass. "Are you going to do it, Mom?" she asked me.

  A couple of days earlier, the extra key to Stephanie's cottage, a room she had dubbed "the shack" on her first day home, had been in the top drawer in the kitchen. Now that key was gone, and so was Stephanie. If I wanted to get in, I'd have to do what the girls had suggested earlier: put a brick through one of the expensive Pella windows, bought to be extra-safe and extra-sturdy.

  I paused for a minute, Mary's still, small frame bundled in a furry pink robe a beacon from the patio. "I guess I have to," I finally said. I walked over to the side of the house to a small pile of bricks I stored there for garden use and picked one up, rough and cold and heavy in my hand. I hauled back and gave it a hurl.

  A few months before, in the middle of summer while Stephanie was still with her father, I'd had a couple of meetings at the local evening alternative school, whose population was about twenty-five near dropouts and a few harried teachers. Classes met at a suburban high school at night, hours after the regular students went home. At our second meeting, the head teacher told me there were no spaces left—Stephanie was out of luck for the fall semester. But by the time I'd left his office that day, she was in. When I'd mentioned what I did for a living, he'd said that some of the kids had been asking to start their own newspaper. I promised to teach a journalism class for free every Tuesday night if he'd find my daughter a slot, and he agreed.

  Stephanie quit attending that school after the third or fourth week. She didn't like it and I shouldn't have assumed she would, she told me. True enough: I had assumed. I couldn't imagine a better choice for her in our town if she wanted to finish high school. My problem now, once she'd ditched the plan for good, was that I'd made a deal with the head teacher. I couldn't see how I could drop out as my daughter had, so every Tuesday evening after work, Mary, Mollie, and I drove out to the school so I could repeat a few simple ideas about leads and nut graphs and sources to about ten kids and get them to write little spurts of stories for our version of an alternative school newspaper that we'd put together before Christmas break. My daughters sat in the back row doing their homework or reading—or staring at a boy clad in black and metal who typically fell asleep, snoring into his forearm. I saw Mary gaze at the clock now and then; I felt her wishing we could just go home.

  Home, where we rarely saw Stephanie, or even heard from her. Upon her arrival in Eugene, this daughter had needed only a couple of days to reconnect with kids on the street from past years and to get hooked up with new ones. At first when she stopped coming home at night, I was astonished—but why was I? My practical side couldn't make sense of this surprise and disappointment. Wasn't this exactly what I should have expected? The same old, same old. Nothing had changed since she'd last been with us, except that my heart was even harder toward her. We were simply starting again where we'd left off, one angry woman versus one angry teenager. I continued to pick fights with her because I'd grown oh-so-comfortable with that mode of communication and only that mode of communication when it came to Stephanie. She didn't get why I was so adamant about addressing matters she felt were finished, done with—school, curfews, drinking—and I couldn't begin to get her fury or her stubbornness toward me. It hadn't sunk in yet that Stephanie took the remodeled cottage not as an offer of private space and a gesture of forgiveness but as one more sign, along with my distance and silence in her presence, that she didn't quite belong in our family or in our house.

  The day after Stephanie's arrest, I took the morning off work to appear at the baby jail. It felt strange that, given all our teenager troubles, I hadn't been there for five years, not since the last session in front of the judge regarding Amanda's arson charge. Now I sat in a small bunkerlike room, the office of the youth services counselor, posters about not doing drugs and not having unprotected sex attached to the walls with wads of pale green adhesive that stuck out the sides like old chewing gum. After a few minutes, Stephanie was led in by a woman whose round face was already drooping even though it was not yet nine A.M.

  Stephanie plopped in an institutional chair across from mine, legs sprawled out in front of her as if she intended to take all the room available. Her clothes were wrinkled and her hair gritty and tousled. She reeked of dried sweat and stale alcohol. She crossed her arms over her chest and refused to look at me, probably know ing that I'd had the option of getting her the night before an
d had declined, though maybe she was just going to act—just going to be—furious no matter what. I was going to be angry no matter what too. Any sympathy or desire to start again with this daughter—which I'd weakly brought around in myself in the days before she came home—had been pounded out like dirt from a rug since her return.

  The youth services counselor brought out a pile of papers for both of us to sign, and also began to stack on the desk in front of me brochures about various county and state programs that Stephanie could enroll in. Drug rehab, alcohol rehab, or the free school for runaways. Et cetera. We'd tried most of them years before; we'd passed on others years before. The girls had long ago collected their shares of free blankets, pizza on the mall, warm chicken dinners in exchange for an AIDS prevention class at some downtown center. Without access to my bank records, this woman couldn't have tallied the thousands and thousands of dollars I'd doled out for counseling, was doling out even then to the new therapist who was seeing Stephanie when Stephanie bothered to show up. This youth services counselor couldn't have known what pros we were at this business, Stephanie and Amanda and I, how I could list the programs as easily as she did, and how I was so far beyond the solutions she'd laid out that I nearly bounced one hard laugh around her concrete block of an office, where our voices kept landing with a thud on the floor.

  Stephanie, who apparently agreed with my sense of futility, had her head cocked with an oh-this-old-crap-again expression on her face. We both knew the truth: no one could instruct us how to get to the other side of our own private sea of hurt and bitterness. We had to swim our way toward forgiveness ourselves, discover it ourselves, whatever that meant and however distant the possibility seemed that day at the juvenile center. Until then, this would be about two people making each other miserable.

  Ten minutes later in the car, with Stephanie in the passenger seat, I started toward the bridge that led to our home. I planned to stop first at the hardware store to pick up a pane of window glass and some putty and then get Stephanie to help me replace the window I'd broken the night before. I'd knocked out the shards, packed blankets around the jagged edges, and slid Mollie through so she could open the door and release bounding, happy Kaw-Liga into the yard. I couldn't stand that dog, who triggered the wrath that lived right under my surface, but I'd still let him sleep in Mary and Mollie's room. I woke in the morning to the smell of his musty damp fur and the clicketing sound of his toenails on our wood floors.

  Halfway to the hardware store, I suddenly couldn't bear it: going back to the cluttered house, the needy dog, the torn-up cottage. Our same old rhythms, the arrhythms, I should say, the thump-thumping along to the next catastrophe that would bring only distress to the younger girls and to Amanda.

  I was aware that a good number of the hours Stephanie spent away from our house were spent at Amanda's small rental house, which was shared with five or six others. Neither girl talked to me much about the other, but I could tell—even from a distance—that some dimension of cool remained between them, although they were trying to get back together, the way they used to be. They couldn't get over what had happened that last day on the streets, when Amanda gave her real name and Stephanie went on; they have been years getting over that day.

  Now, with Stephanie beside me in the car, I pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the engine. I was fed up enough that I hurt everywhere, as if I'd stood up fast and banged my head into the corner of a kitchen cupboard—in pain and pissed off deep into my back muscles and down my thighs, and so full of the need to scream that nothing could keep the sound in. I didn't yell, though, even though that outburst might have been better, might have released some of the heavy tension between us. I stared straight at my daughter and focused all the anger I could muster.

  "I'm done with this," I told her.

  "What do you mean?" she said, scowling at her faint reflection in the windshield.

  "I mean I'm done, finished. I give up. We can't live together any more." My hands held the steering wheel at ten and two exactly. "I am so fucking done with you."

  She didn't answer, but lifted up her own hands for a second and then dropped them in her lap. Her eyes straight ahead out the windshield, her lips a flat line even in profile.

  I'd had lunch earlier in the week with a woman I was interviewing for a story, and after the right quotes and facts were gathered and my notebook put away, we entered into the subject of our kids. I hadn't meant to, but I'd blurted out the worries drilling a hole in my brain—Stephanie. Stephanie home and as aimed for trouble as she'd ever been. I had no idea what to do next. The woman, Vicki, told me it so happened that her ex-husband ran a school in Colorado, a one-of-a-kind boarding school where bright but troubled kids who couldn't get along in public school lived and worked together. And, better yet, the school was funded entirely by an auto company, Honda. It was one of the company's philanthropic projects, and so there were no costs to the students' families other than their children's travel and medical expenses. I ate the last leaf of lettuce in my salad without believing such a place actually existed. I thought Vicki must have at least some of the story wrong, that a school couldn't be that accommodating. But I went home that evening and called Vicki's ex-husband, the school's headmaster, Robert, and he explained Eagle Rock in pretty much the same way. He also told me that parents couldn't send their kids there. The only way for a teenager to get in was to write her own application, her own essays about why she needed a different place and a different kind of education. It would be Stephanie's promise of commitment, not mine, that he'd need if he was going to consider her.

  There in the car I told Stephanie, just freed from baby jail, she had two choices: either apply to Eagle Rock School or move on to wherever. If she took the second option, I was done being her mother. Any bond left between her and me would be chopped apart. It's hard for me to remember myself as this shut down, this distant from a daughter who, in her own way, was still sending out a coded call for help I couldn't interpret. She needed me, and she needed me to break through whatever was keeping us parted. But all I could register then was that Stephanie spent most of her nights either on the floor at Amanda's or at a crusty dive called the Warehouse, an old storage building where a dozen or so kids like her holed up to do whatever holed-up kids do. Drinking and drugs; I figured she was back into both. If that was how she wanted it to go, so be it. I'd give her up to those people and to this way of grinding through her teenage days, with no education and no plan for one. I couldn't have her coming and going whenever she wanted from our house anymore. I couldn't let her do that to Mary and Mollie. And though I'd given her a variation of this ultimatum many times before, this time I meant it. And this time she heard me.

  Stephanie chose the school. She wrote and sent in pieces of the application, survived a tough series of elimination interviews, and then went with me to buy long johns and wool socks and sweaters and snow boots; three months after our talk in the car, I put my second daughter on a plane to Denver. She and I battled up to the moment of her departure, and I thought I couldn't wait until she was gone, yet once I was in that blue and gold waiting room at the same airport I'd been in dozens of times to send off and reclaim my children, I found no pleasure at her leaving. Not one bit of happiness. What settled in me was a deeper sense of defeat, the endless sorrow of irreplaceable loss.

  I knew that day that we'd not live together ever again. Stephanie was a little girl when she first hit the streets with Amanda, still a child. The ways we needed each other would never be fulfilled, or at least not in the manner that mothers and daughters usually borrow and collude and give and take from each other before they part for good. It was out of habit that Stephanie and I spent fury on each other in the weeks before she left for Colorado. We didn't know how to show each other joy or relief, and we'd forgotten how to be sad; we'd lost the ability to show the plain, aching sadness of separation. We flung anger at each other every hour because we couldn't remember how not to. We couldn't remember what t
o replace it with.

  10

  Eagle Rock School, tucked in the foothills of Rocky Mountain National Park just outside Estes Park, Colorado, is made up of a scatter of log buildings connected by meandering gravel paths. Most of the ground around the ten or so metal-roofed classrooms and dormitories is bare. A dash of pink and gold wild-flowers pop up in the spring, but otherwise growth is sparse between copses of stunted pine trees. In the winter, which lasts from about October to April, the place is buried under piles of drifting snow.

  This Colorado landscape was unfamiliar to me, beyond my imagination as a place to turn to during the conflagration that was my family's life. The night we finally heard from Stephanie after eight months of silence, and in the subsequent weeks and months of getting her home from Austin, it would never have occurred to me that a school in a Rocky Mountain town was the place she would finally flourish. But that's what happened.

  About eighty-five students from everywhere in the country board at Eagle Rock. They live in sturdy houses that have names like Piñon and Spruce and Lodgepole, and each house is designed to accommodate sixteen students, eight girls in one wing and eight boys in another. The two wings are separated by a common area, and students are watched over by two resident adults in each house. At six thirty A.M., fleece-bundled students show up in front of the main lodge for an hour of required exercise, which is led by Robert the headmaster. Most days that means running a three-mile loop at first light, down the hill to the gate and then back up the steep and winding blacktop drive in a communal cloud of frosty breath. By eight each morning, Robert is holding the daily gathering in front of the lodge's massive fireplace, tossing out paperback novels as door prizes of sorts to teenagers sprawled on the floor, a number of whom are braiding the hair of a boy or girl in front of them, most dressed in baggy sweatpants and sweatshirts. Robert makes announcements and sets forth the plan for the day and allows students far from home one brief free-for-all gripe session—Someone stole my stereo and I want it back; There was too much noise in the commons last night; I was the only one to show up for KP again. To me, when I visited, this was the sound of ordinary teenage banter—obnoxious and joyous at once—which happily included my daughter.