Live Through This (17 page)

Or did I have another motive when I said yes to Portland? Sure. Part of my desire was to pull my daughters off the street and into the car and up the hundred-mile stretch of road so someone else could witness the misery we'd fallen into, and for that someone else to please, please notice that I was down to my last inch of ability to cope. I dreamed about—I plotted and fantasized about—another person taking over. Someone who'd call the cops, deal with counselors, soothe Mary and Mollie, and face these girls who showed up for clothes and food when they felt like it. So far, no one had come around volunteering to pick up where I so very much wanted to leave off. Hillary Clinton was quoted again in the newspaper saying it took a village to raise a child, but so far my village seemed empty, doors locked and shutters sealed tight.

Amanda called me, as promised, the night following Stephanie's drop-in. "I heard you wanted to talk to me," she said, her voice flat and distant.

I told her about visiting my mother in Portland. "Can you manage that?"

There was a long pause on the phone. "This better not be another trick," she said. "I'm not falling for any more of your tricks."

"Amanda," I said, a little surprised that she'd believe I had the inclination or the energy or even the money to have them picked up and hauled off to the woods or anywhere else. I was tapped out, and everyone around me was tapped out too. "It's a visit with my mother. You want to call her and check it out?"

Another silence. "I'm only coming if Riki comes."

Riki. A squatty girl Amanda had hooked up with along the way; a girl who went about everywhere Amanda and Stephanie went, the three of them a triangle rarely parted. I didn't know much of Riki's story except that her parents had supposedly released her to a street life, telling her that she could come home if it didn't work out. Amanda loved to throw that one at me—how there were par
ents who let their kids try what they needed to try, who were enlightened and understanding beyond anything I could dredge out of my miserly self. Riki. The last person I wanted in my car was this girl with her wool hat covering every bit of her SOS-pad hair, and her squinty little eyes darting around while she plunged her hands into the deep interior of her overstuffed coat.

"What's Riki going to do? Nana's not going to want a strange kid around, she wants to see you."

"Fine. We won't go then."

"Okay, all right," I said before she could hang up. "She can go." I asked Amanda to be at our house on Friday by the time I got off work, and to bring Stephanie too.

"We'll be there. And so will Riki," Amanda said. "And I'd better warn you: she has a knife."

I laughed, one of those laughs with no joy in it. "What are you talking about? She has a knife. Why would you say something like that?"

But Amanda had already hung up.

The drive up I-5 was too quiet, Mary and Mollie uttering no more than a few soft-spoken words and avoiding sisters who'd become mean and strange. Estranged. The teenagers in the back seat reeked—their clothes, their feet, their hair. I rolled down the windows to let the odor out and fresh air in. I called to Mary to see if she was okay and she sent back one barely audible
yes.
Against my better judgment, to make room for Riki, I'd let Mary, who'd recently turned eleven, climb in the back of our station wagon with the luggage. She'd hunkered down in a nest she'd made with her blanket and pillow and slept most of the way to Portland, while Mollie sat beside me, staring ahead, sometimes holding my hand. The teenagers whispered and giggled to one another and took off their half-damp boots, upping the volume on the sweaty-feet, no-bath-for-a-month stench. Amanda spoke directly to me only once during the trip—she leaned between the two front seats to say she wanted to stop for a cigarette. When I didn't respond, thinking as I tended
to then that it was better to say nothing instead of something, she muttered to Riki, "See what I mean?"

Finally we stood in front of my mother, who'd changed out of her business suit and into an equally spotless outfit, a pale yellow pair of sweatpants and a matching zip-up top. Her hair was done, her makeup right. The look on her face the second she answered the hotel room door let me know that it—
it
being the shape my family was in—was worse than she'd let herself imagine. Up to this moment, my mother hadn't yet seen her granddaughters' full street regalia: ragged canvas pants, Doc Martens boots, black sweatshirts covered with patches, face piercings, the chopped and dyed hair. No one in my mother's Idaho looked quite like this, like neglected, motherless children.

Though we'd talked on the phone about dinner downtown and a walk in the riverfront park, my mom suggested we stay at the hotel; when we got to the restaurant on the first floor, she asked for a table at the back, near the windows. The hostess did one better—she hurried the seven of us around the corner to the closed section and told us this way we'd have plenty of privacy. She reached across to hand out plastic menus and said someone would be along to set our table. Then, trying not to shift her eyes to stare at the girls but staring nonetheless, she rushed away.

I lowered myself into a chair, heavy with a mix of emotion. Exhaustion, bitterness, embarrassment. But defensiveness too. A feeling that hadn't burned in my chest for a long time. No matter how they looked, these were my daughters, and still just kids. Not criminals, not deviants, just girls out there on some messy and confounding edge. Without expecting to, I resented the hostess for running off to the kitchen to gossip about the unsightly teenagers at the back table, even though I thought and even talked about my girls in those terms all the time.

Putting the menu in front of my face, I searched for the cheapest glass of red wine, as I planned to have several. I'd plunked my daughters into the middle of my mother's world, which was unfair to her and unfair to them, and now I writhed under the results of
that decision. My mom had told me on the phone that she could handle the kids no matter what, but I'd known she'd be uncomfortable once they were around her; I'd known this visit would prove disastrous. Yet I'd brought them anyway. And now that we were in the middle of our evening together, I didn't feel any more understood by my alarmed mother, who sat at the other end of the table asking Mary and Mollie about school, nor could this brief visit allow her to peer deep into the layers of mess we were in. And the three older girls, lined up opposite me, waving knives around and sucking the cream out of the small plastic containers, didn't seem to care what any of us thought of them. They were too invested in being punk and homeless, unpredictable, frightening, and rank.

By ten o'clock I was in one bed with Mary, and my mom was in the other with Mollie. Amanda and Stephanie and Riki had spread their ripe sleeping bags on the floor. They'd taken off their boots but slept in rumpled clothes: old Carhartt's and thin cotton shirts, bought secondhand or rummaged from a free box. I listened to their soft breathing from the far side of the room and felt the warm bundle of heat that was Mary next to me. I lay awake, figuring my mother wasn't sleeping either. She was probably wondering how to help me with these girls who'd become alien. And like me, she was probably counting the hours until we would leave, until we could all go to our own homes and stop pretending that this wasn't a disaster.

The next day we went downtown. As soon as I parked, Amanda and Stephanie were out and gone, Riki running after them. Scattered. I had no idea if they'd meet us at the car at the appointed time and in fact expected they wouldn't. Every corner here in Portland had its requisite allotment of street kids, begging for change, digging through garbage for five-cent returnable cans and bottles, sharing cigarettes that passed from one set of lips to another. Amanda and Stephanie would fit right in. Maybe I'd unwittingly—or willfully—given my kids a two-hour boost on their ultimate trip out of town, the one that had been long fomenting.

"What are you going to do?" my mother asked once Mary and Mollie were far enough away not to hear her question, looking at
clothes or music in a shop or just staying apart from what they knew would be a rag on their sisters. "You can't let this go on."

I couldn't give her an answer then, nor could I give her an answer when she asked again at the airport later that afternoon. "What are you going to do?" I didn't know what I was going to do, except just drive home. All five girls were in the car, ready to head to Eugene, where the older ones would hit the streets and the younger ones would follow me into our house. I watched my mother pull her suitcases into the wide revolving airport door so a plane could take her back to her own life and I got back into my car and drove away.

Mary was in front this time, Mollie tucked in between our bags in the back. Another reason to hate Riki, and I did hate her, aiming my wrath at her small, squat body and unable to admit how over-easy it was to use her as this day's central target. I'd made no effort to get to know her, instead behaving like the closed-down, hyper-judgmental woman that I'm sure my kids had portrayed me to be. I twisted to glare in Riki's direction just because I could.

It had started to rain. Pour, in fact, the streaking water keeping me from seeing the green highway signs over our heads. I was searching for the first exit to a populated area where I could find gas. I'd hoped I wouldn't have to fill up, stretched as my finances had become that weekend, even though my mother had paid for about everything—I wanted to think I could sputter the hundred miles to Eugene on the last few gallons, but we'd been on E for too long, and now I was worried.

"What's that one say, Mary?" I asked her.

The wiper dashed the rain out of her line of sight for just a second. "Stafford," she called out.

"Stafford," I repeated. I didn't know if it was a place with gas stations or one of those exits that led to wide acres of farmland, but I couldn't take a chance: the arrow on my fuel gauge had sunk even deeper below empty. I turned off on the exit. Within five minutes I realized I'd blown it—we were driving away from buildings and people and toward wet emptiness. There were no turnoffs, no opportunities to flip around on this highway. And there were no gas
stations. The engine faltered, the last of the fuel gone, the car jerking and coughing before it died.

I turned the wheel toward the shoulder and rolled as far as I could onto the gravel-and-weed bed and then shut off the ignition. I laid my face in my hands.

"What the fuck?" Amanda said.

What the fuck was right. What the fuck was I doing in this car with three girls I could hardly tolerate—one of whom I trusted not at all. What the fuck was I doing one hundred miles from my house—the only place I felt even the slightest bit safe anymore. What the fuck was I going to do to get us out of this.

Though the rain wasn't letting up, we still had three hours of daylight left, and that was a good thing. But not a single car had passed us on the highway. I told Amanda she had to stay with the little girls; Stephanie and I would go over the berm to see if we could find help.

"No way," Stephanie said, glaring at Amanda as if waiting for her big sister to bail her out of this one. But Amanda was worried about herself.

"You're not leaving me here," she said, sticking her head between the seats so her breath mingled with mine. "Forget it."

"What do you suggest?" I said. "Do you have a better plan?"

I knew it was a stupid question the second I asked it—of course she had a better plan: the three of them would get out of the car, thrust out their thumbs, and be on their way. But she didn't say that. She shrugged instead. "Just hurry up," she muttered.

Stephanie, sighing, climbed out of the car and up the steep roadside hill with me behind her, both of us clawing at the soaked ground to stay on our feet and pulling on the vegetation for leverage. Most of those bushes were blackberry vines, loaded with thorns that tore into my hands and raked my arms. Halfway up the incline, Stephanie shouted at me that she was stuck—tangled—and I rushed over to work the thorny vines from her short crop of hair, but not before the stickers had split red lines across her cheeks and forehead. She wiped the blood away and kept climbing until we
reached the top—muddy, scratched, wet. Dogs barked at us from a yard not too far in the distance, and I saw a man come out the sliding door to see what the ruckus was about. "Hey!" I shouted, making my voice loud enough to compete with the pounding rain. "Can you help us?" He slammed the door shut and turned out his lights.

"What's wrong with him?" Stephanie asked as she slipped and slid across the muddy ground to the fence. "Hey, mister! Come back out here!" She turned to me. "Mom, make him help us!"

I looked at her through the rain and let myself believe, for the first time since we'd left the car, that Stephanie might be in this with me. That we were going to do what we had to do together. That feeling alone, slightly warm and almost delicious, pushed me on up the hill.

For an hour or so, we wandered across farmland and through thickets of wild brush until we finally came out on a small rural road. I dreaded the moment Stephanie would ask if we were lost, because we were. If I'd absolutely had to get back from here to my daughters left in the car, I wouldn't be able to. What if Amanda had grown sick of waiting? What if she was getting high in front of her sisters? What if she and Riki had jumped out and waved down a passing car, leaving her little sisters?

"She has a knife." That's the line that wouldn't leave me alone. "I'd better warn you, Riki has a knife."

Stephanie and I walked along the side of the road in silence, both of us shielding our eyes from the rain so we could catch any hint of an approaching car in the late-afternoon light. Finally, we did see one. A station wagon came right at us—a shiny Volvo, its wipers sweeping rain from the windshield. I waved my arms and shouted while Stephanie stayed back on the lower part of the road's shoulder. "Please stop!" she yelled from there. "Please help us!"

The car slowed, then pulled over, and I ran around to the driver-side window, my heart leaping at the first chance of getting out of this. The woman at the wheel rolled down her window a couple of inches, peering at my drowned-rat face and hair, while I explained
that my car had broken down on a highway back there somewhere, and that I'd left children alone over an hour earlier. "Could you get us to a gas station?" I asked.