Live Through This (16 page)

The decomposing skin, the source of the odor of death, hung on the sickly baby like a bad toupee.

"Bill's going to give it another couple of days," Amanda said. "He's hoping the cow will still recognize the smell enough to take this one on as her own." She reached her hand out again, this time calling to the sick calf. He stayed in place, head low and a breathy, mucousy bawl coming from his open mouth, while the large cow next to him continued her chewing and tail swishing, her nonchalance. Amanda watched for a second, then put her foot up on the rail in a cowgirl stance I hadn't seen from her before.

"But I don't know," she said. "It doesn't look to me like it's working."

That afternoon I drove Amanda, with Mary and Mollie in the back seat, to the small shopping center in downtown Burns to buy her new socks and makeup and a couple of fashion magazines that she could put under her bed and keep for herself only. We walked from shop to shop nearly out of things to say, all of us beat. No one had brought up Stephanie's name, and I had a feeling if I did, the goodwill that quivered so tenuously between Amanda and me would be ended too soon. In the hour or so since we'd left Bill and Donna's, a new impatience over this foster-care plan had bubbled up in me. It seemed as if Amanda was at an end with it too. She'd tamped
down her anger for over three months, but I knew rage was still in her—if anything, her time in Burns had added to the heat. And if anger came blasting out of her one day, what would happen then?

My intolerance of the deal with the ranchers had kicked up when Donna pulled me aside before we left on our shopping trip to tell me she'd intercepted several "disturbing" letters from Stephanie. Some of Stephanie's notes proposed a getaway plan—she'd hitch a ride to some small town in Montana, she'd wait for Amanda to get there, and then the two of them would disappear where we couldn't find them.

"What?" I said to Donna. "May I see those letters?" Richard and Jane didn't read Stephanie's mail, coming or going—they found the idea ridiculous. Steph had been mostly happy in their family, sullen and difficult sometimes, but even during her bad times these friends treated her as if she were their own loved child rather than a ward or a prisoner. So Donna's claim confused me. Stephanie might have had no problem running from me, but I couldn't believe she'd run away from Richard and Jane. These were people she adored, and she had to know that they'd probably saved her from her own set of ranchers.

Donna shook her head, refusing my request to see the letters. She'd already sent them to the psychologist at the wilderness-therapy program. "I had to show him how serious this is. These girls aren't even close to getting over this thing," she said. Along with that packet of mail, Donna had penned a note of her own proposing to the psychologist that July was too soon—that she was going to need the summer at least to turn Amanda around.

"No," I said as she described this plan to extend Amanda's stay. "This is over in July."

Donna opened her mouth, as if she were about to tell me to mind my own business—that she and the experts had this figured out, and I was only getting in the way. But I stared her down and she didn't say another word.

Now, as I watched my daughter pick through baskets of on-sale lipsticks and try on cheaply made earrings—the only junk available
in these junky stores—I wondered how much of Stephanie's plan for escape, if it was true, Amanda was in on despite the intercepted mail and the monitored phone calls. How had I let myself become so blind, and so dumb? I got it now: Stephanie wasn't waiting patiently in Montana for the day she could rejoin her happy family. She was champing at the bit to go, to vanish, and she was going to make sure Amanda was with her.

By the time we got back to the car, I'd made up my mind. Amanda couldn't be a foster child any longer. I wouldn't let her. This experiment with a remedy had gone on too long and had divided us too much, and I wanted Amanda home and settled and happy and unified with me before Stephanie saw her again. My oldest daughter needed to fit somewhere, to make friends and find companionship, to do some kind of work that satisfied and fulfilled her. As soon as I could, I was getting Amanda out of Burns.

In the middle of May, I found a youth corps in Eugene, a professional company that hired kids from sixteen to nineteen years old to work in the woods as trail builders and tree planters. The crews packed up and drove to the wilderness one early morning and stayed out for six weeks. I called Amanda on a Monday afternoon after I'd talked to the corps office and had found out there was a spot left on one crew—the group of twelve kids and two leaders would leave for the Ochoco Mountains on Saturday. Could I get my daughter there, geared up and ready to go by then?

"Can you get to Bend tomorrow night?" I asked her. "Do you know anybody who's going that way?"

"I'll find a ride, Mom, don't worry," she said, breathless. "I'll be there."

I didn't speak to Donna or Bill or the wilderness-therapy psychologist—I didn't even think to speak to them, or consider for a moment that their feelings about this change in the plan for Amanda mattered or counted. I had one goal only, and that was to get my daughter back onto my turf and off theirs.

On the last Tuesday of her foster-home stay, while Donna was taking the boys to a doctor's appointment, Amanda left a note on the kitchen counter saying that she'd hitched a ride with her
English teacher who was off to Bend on an errand and that she wouldn't be back. That evening she walked into the parking lot of the Buffalo Drive-In, where we'd planned to meet, and opened the front passenger door of our car. "Shotgun!" she called, just like she used to in the old days. Mary climbed into the back with only a little complaint, and Amanda slipped into the seat and buckled in. I opened my window to let the evening's cool air blow on my face and hair—I hadn't felt this much freedom in a long time. I turned the car out of the drive-in parking lot and we went home.

Five months after Amanda left the ranchers' house, after she'd spent some good months with the youth corps far out in the Northwest wilderness, and not long after Stephanie returned to us from Montana, they were gone again. This time they went as far away as Stephanie's letters had promised they would. They went farther than Steve the ex-LA cop could look. They shed the wilderness treks like so much bad skin; the long separation from each other and from their sisters and from me proved to be useless.

That summer, when both girls were home again and we were trying to start over as a family, I was fixed on my bond with Amanda, made in Burns. I figured that bond would hold for a long time. I relied on Amanda to convince Stephanie to give up the idea of running, even though Stephanie talked constantly of her aim to become a traveler, one of those street kids who wandered from town to town by freight train. She often egged Amanda on for an adventure with all the money earned from trail building, stream cleaning, tree planting. I dismissed these ridiculous threats of leaving; the thought of Stephanie jumping a train was outrageous, too audacious even for this audacious girl. I had to believe my daughters would get back into school and settle down. What couldn't happen was that things would get bad again, as bad as they were before. None of us could survive that.

But it took only a week, maybe two, for Amanda to start staying out all night with her sister. She stumbled in with Stephanie after being gone for days, reeking of alcohol and cigarettes, a new tattoo on her arm, her hip, her belly, and a thick silver stud pierced
through her tongue. They slept all day while I was at work, took off again before I got home, leaving filthy clothes and empty red packs of Pall Malls behind on their bedroom floor. The husband of one of my friends, a lawyer, called me with advice—it was time to put an end to this. He said I had the legal option of typing up a letter stating that they weren't allowed in the house any longer. I should post it on the front door. Change the locks. Then go to court and start emancipation proceedings. Cut my daughters away from the family before they once again cut away from us. But I couldn't go through with such a plan. I was desperate for Amanda and Stephanie to stay home and be the girls they'd been a few years before, or even the girls they'd been when Amanda was in Burns and Stephanie in Montana. Yet at the same time part of me wanted them to go away—as far as they could go—and leave their sisters and me alone.

In other words, my daughters had to act, one way or another and fast, so I didn't have to.

One evening, not long before my daughters jumped a train that would take them to San Francisco and, later, down the coast and east to Tucson, Stephanie showed up at our house. Without my knowing it, my fourteen-year-old daughter, who hadn't been around for several days, slipped through the front door and made her way to the bedroom to gather clean underwear and T-shirts, cramming them into a bag while she whispered to Mary to wrap up some of the cookies—their smell gave them away—I'd just baked.

A few minutes later, Mary sidled up next to me at the stove and whispered, "Mom," in such a way I knew one of my disappeared children was in our home.

"What's she doing?" I asked Mary, who simply moved closer. I don't know why I asked. It was obviously Stephanie's turn to show up for restocking: her turn to dump dirty clothes in the middle of their floor and get clean ones; to grab whatever food she could and maybe a few things to sell on the street; to come and go as fast as possible.

I walked down the hall to the bedroom with the barest flicker of hope that she'd come during the evening hours for a reason—that maybe she wanted to talk to me, wanted me to urge her to stay home.

"What's going on?" I asked her as she hunched over to jam more stuff into the canvas bag. Instantly I knew this was another useless question in a string of useless questions aimed at these girls. I held
a spatula in my right hand, held it like a flag, its flat rubber surface glistening. I was making pork chops for dinner, with apples fried in butter and cinnamon. This seemed the moment to remind her that she liked that meal, and also that she'd once been glad for my food and my comfort, happy to sit at the table like a normal child to eat the food on her plate and to talk about her day and, after dinner, to help with the dishes and get ready for school, to do her homework and straighten her room. Not this bullshit of showing up to take what she wanted, our house her loading dock. Our house and the people in it her department store.

"I'm not getting into this with you," she said without looking up. "Amanda's waiting for me. I've got to go."

"You have to do everything Amanda tells you?"

Stephanie laughed at this, shaking her head as if I couldn't possibly understand her or them. "Amanda wouldn't let me down and I'm not going to let her down." She buckled the last strap of her pack and heaved it onto her back.

She walked past me just as a drip of butter rolled down my arm. The smell of cigarettes and sour beer and dusty alleyways wafted from Stephanie's threadbare clothes, mixing with the scent of cooking coming from me. Her oily hair stuck to her head, flat on one side where she'd slept on it in some concrete corner of an abandoned building, some patch of grass under a grove of trees in the park. The dirt packed under her fingernails also ringed her cuticles. I followed her as she scuffed through the living room.

Nearly gone now, her hand pulling on the doorknob and the wrapped cookies tucked under her arm, Stephanie turned back to look at me. That's when I blurted out what I'd been hesitant to say out loud: that my mother had called. She'd be in Portland on business that weekend and had invited us up to swim and go to dinner and stay the night at her hotel. "She wants to see you and Amanda," I said. "Can you do that? Can you go see your grandmother?"

Stephanie's face froze. Her chewed-raw lips twitched and she looked out the open door. She shrugged and pulled herself in tight. "I don't know, Mom. I'll ask Amanda."

She closed the door behind her. I stood in our dusk-washed
front room for a few seconds with, I noticed, Mary a few feet from me, trying to decipher once again this position I was in with my daughters. I put up with their showing up and leaving because I didn't know what not putting up with it would look like. If I told Amanda and Stephanie they absolutely weren't allowed back in the house unless they came home to stay, I'd give up the last shred of contact with my own children. I wasn't about to do that.

This was a quandary I couldn't quite explain to my mother. When I'd spoken with her on the phone earlier that day, she'd said she wanted to see all four girls when she came to Oregon for the weekend—she hadn't been around them for quite a long time. I'd already told her Mary and Mollie and I would be up in time for a late dinner, but that there was no use bringing the older ones.

"You wouldn't recognize them," I said.

She was quiet for a second. "I thought things were better," she said. She was referring to the wilderness therapy and to the foster care, both of which were supposed to have straightened out my teenagers. "How bad could they be?"

"Bad," I told her.

But in the end my mother convinced me that it would do us good to get out of Eugene and into a place where civilized behavior was expected. Maybe if we got on the road, even a short trip, the girls would come around in ways they had refused to—or couldn't—at home.

What I didn't tell my mom was that I had no idea where Amanda and Stephanie were staying at night or that days passed without my hearing a word from either of them. I didn't bother to describe the hopelessness that had found a permanent perch on the bony surface of my sternum. Nor did I talk about the chasm between my world and the one my daughters had chosen, the impossibility of a bridge spanning from them to me. I wanted my mom to believe that this was a teenage phase that would sort itself out any time. That the girls would soon enough return home to be cooperative, cheerful, loving, as they used to be when she took them to Disneyland, or to Washington, D.C., to see the sights; when she took them
shopping for school clothes each fall. Or when she'd show off her polite and sparkling-clean granddaughters to her friends.