Live Through This (20 page)

"She doesn't want to come to the phone," the woman said.
Thank God,
I muttered under my breath. "She gave us your number but doesn't want to talk."

I didn't want to talk either. To anyone. I only wanted my life and the girls' lives to rewind two years so I'd get a second chance to stop all of this. But it wouldn't be stopped, so I turned my focus to making a plan, to bringing the gumption and fortitude of motherhood to bear—as if I had even one clue how to do that. I wasn't sure
anymore what it even meant to be a mother. A real mother would know what to do next. A real mother would never have let this happen in the first place. A real mother would be thinking about her daughter as the police dispatcher went on and on about the condition that child was in. But my mind, seized and scared, was full of one ricocheting thought after another as I groped for any story other than the one coming from this phone.

What I thought about was the dark space under Mary's bed and the mouse we once found there.

The girls and I—five of us together, no dog collars or tattoos or pink hair yet; no
Sid and Nancy
weekend marathons; no bad acid trips in the field behind the too-expensive private high school where Amanda had lasted maybe two weeks; no threats to run away; no running away—didn't know it was dead or that it was a mouse until it started to reek. A decomposition stench that kept us from that end of the fixer-upper house I'd bought, with Mary and Mol-lie sleeping in my room once the stink got bad. One evening after work, I convinced Amanda and Stephanie to help me move the bed from the wall. When we exposed that area of the floor, we found a brown mass about the size of one of Mollie's socks splayed out, maggots throbbing from its mouth and squirming on its pointy teeth. I leaped back while Amanda and Stephanie screamed at the perfect pitch of adolescence, squealing and hopping from one foot to the other as if the mouse was about to jump up alive and skitter up their pants legs. In the hallway, Mary and Mollie started shouting too, all four of them running in a football huddle to the living room. Over the din, I called to Amanda to bring me a broom and the dustpan. She thrust those at me a few seconds later, making me walk to the bedroom door because she refused to come in again. I returned to the mouse and held my breath, squinting so I had to see only a blurry apparition of death, its little legs stuck out like dry twigs. With one sweep, I got most of it on the pan, though it took a couple more flicks of the broom to dislodge the last gooey chunks. I held the dustpan as far from me as I could and dashed down the hallway, out the door, and straight to the back fence with my four chattering daughters trailing behind. I tossed
the mess into the strip of city-owned bushes. Gone that fast, peace reclaimed that quickly.

Now I opened the door of Mary and Mollie's room and let a thin line of yellow light penetrate the dusky interior where I stood. I watched the three at the table sticking triangles of pizza in their mouths. Barry looked over at me and held his hands palms up as if to ask what the heck was going on, his face a knot of confusion. I could tell he was concerned at my long time away, at being left out of the news, whatever it was, of this phone call. He wanted to help. I could see that. I could have gestured at him to come in, but I shut the door instead. I couldn't take anyone else's questions at that moment; I couldn't begin to explain what was going on. The woman was talking and talking, telling me that she'd called Amanda's father before she'd phoned me because Tom lived only a few miles from the youth center where our daughter was being held.

"He said it wasn't a good time for him, that things were difficult with his wife right now," she said. "So what do you want to do?"

Crawl into bed, stick cotton in my ears, fill my gut with a sleeping potion, pretend none of this was real. "I'll get her a plane ticket tomorrow," I managed to say, knowing I'd do just that but already scared about what it meant—of course, what it meant was that Amanda was coming home. A return that now terrified me, wished for though it was. "I'm sure her dad will put her on the plane to get her here."

Before she hung up, the question I'd been holding, too afraid too ask, had to make its way out. "What about Amanda's sister?" I asked the woman. "Is she there?"

"What's her name?"

"Stephanie."

Fourteen years old, disappeared with Amanda, the two of them deciding they'd rather hop on a freight train in the middle of the night and live on the streets than be with me.

I heard the sound of shuffling papers. "No Stephanie," she said after a few seconds. "There's nothing here about a sister."

***

The therapist who crammed us into her little office once a week had suggested that Mary, Mollie, and I talk about the gone-away girls—how it felt to have been left by the gone-away daughters. We didn't go home and practice as she'd instructed, however. To speak about the way they had left us again made it too real, too in-our-faces. So I'd closed the door of Amanda and Stephanie's bedroom and let dust build in the darkness. In the rest of the house, Mary, Mollie, and I fell into distractions; or I should say, I encouraged distractions, because I liked thinking that being distracted was healthier than sitting around fretting about where they were and when they'd be back.

The weekend after Amanda and Stephanie had left, Mary, Mollie, and I packed up our swimsuits and towels and snacks and bottles of water for a day at our favorite swimming hole. We went without the girls who loved the small tributary deep in private timberland, called Mosby Creek, even more than the rest of us. It would have been easy to stay home and stare out the window wondering how we'd come to this and wishing they'd show up to squirrel themselves away in their room and turn their music up to blaring levels and paint new anarchist A's on the walls and complain about how they were misunderstood, slogging out to the backyard to sneak a smoke and to chip the black polish off their fingernails. But I took my youngest girls to Mosby Creek because I thought it worthwhile to prove to myself, and to them, that Amanda and Stephanie's absence wasn't going to rule every minute of our days.

The three of us crunched our flip-flops over the gravel road that led to the swimming hole, heat waves rising from the bed of crushed rock laden with the stink of oil and tire rubber, and at least a dozen times I glanced behind us, still waiting for—hoping for—my scowling teenagers. Two miles into the hike, I scrambled down a hill behind Mary, tossing her our basket of food before I slid down the hard slope. The girls hopped over round chunks of granite and upthrust tree roots until they reached the creek's bank. When I got there, I spread out a towel at the edge of the slate blue water and pulled a novel from my bag, which I would finish in that one warm afternoon, a distraction, while Mollie ran to the highest
point on the rock cliff and took her first long leap into the creek. She landed in a dark pool that my kids, summer after summer, had yet to find the bottom of. Mary followed her a second later, hooting as she jettisoned off the rock, scissoring her legs and flapping her arms. I stayed at the shallow end of the hole, wandering into the water until I was in waist deep and nearly numb from the cold. I watched, rather than felt, little trout nibble at my toes while I buried myself in the book, the sun hot on my shoulders and the top of my head. From my middle down, I felt practically nothing. A strange and comforting sensation, that half-aliveness. I listened to my squealing daughters in the background, the ripples of water over downstream rocks, and a screaming hawk overhead and didn't let myself remember a single thing in my life that had gone wrong. I couldn't bear to start adding up the mistakes I'd made as my daughters' mother—the wrong turns that had somehow led to this incomprehensible end.

When I think back on that woman in the creek, I see how I was equal parts wounded and defensive by then. When Amanda and Stephanie had come home from wilderness therapy and foster families, my efforts to heal us—that period when they went in and out of our home at will, gone for days then back for food, sleep, and another fight with me—I'd been re-contorted by my spun-out daughters. I was depleted by girls who'd long refused to do what I demanded, what I couldn't stop demanding: Go to school, come home. Stay home. At least when they were gone I could turn my full attention to Mary and Mollie, making sure the younger girls were being fed right and getting to their dance and music lessons and paying attention to schoolwork. But wait; could I so easily forget that two of the people I loved most in the world were nowhere I could find them? Each of the thousand times a day Amanda and Stephanie rose in my mind was another hole drilled through my sense of what was right—of what was wrong.

I wonder what that woman in the creek—what I—wanted. I hardly remember now any specific desires, any specific goals. For my children to return, to gather around me like the towheaded ducklings they were when they were little? Maybe. But I must have
realized that if they'd returned, Amanda and Stephanie wouldn't suddenly have clean clothes and smooth hair or become girls who went to class and helped with the dishes after dinner. It would take them about five minutes to get back into the scene that made me crazy and kept me breathless—the booze, the drugs, the piercings and tattoos, the boys who offered endless adventure and pleasure. Days and days and too many nights without hearing from them. Absolutely I wanted them to come back—or did I? Returning to the same old crap, the same old tired patterns, would do us all in.

Best to stay in Mosby Creek, book up against my face, and let the cold sap me of all feeling.

When it became more obvious every day that Amanda and Stephanie were gone, gone, and not coming back anytime soon, Mary started listening to her tall collection of Billy Joel tapes for hours after dinner every night, wrapped in the pink quilt with her big cat curled devotedly in her lap. Mollie lost herself in skipping rope—pounding her way down the hallway and back up again until I thought the floor would fall through to the damp crawlspace below, where possums sometimes holed up for the winter and scratched away at our blankets of insulation. In their small room at the back of the house, the girls played with their families of plastic animals. They watched TV in the living room, memorizing nearly every line of every Adam Sandler movie we could rent, bantering back and forth with their favorite quips from
Saturday Night Live,
a show I let them stay up for once a week while I dozed on the couch. We ate dinner and talked about how our days had gone. We coped. We got by. We waited. And at night, just before bed, we fell into reading other people's stories—one more distraction before sleep to keep us from talking about the sisters who weren't there anymore.

On an evening a few weeks before our Montana Thanksgiving trip, Mary and Mollie settled on either side of Barry on our couch. He'd started to come by the house often, and though I had trouble trusting that such a person could happen to me, I slowly gave in to him and let myself notice that he was there when I needed him, and even when I hadn't realized I needed him. He didn't push
ideas of parenting, of how I might deal with or solve this particular parenting crisis of mine, but he listened while I complained about social service agencies that hung up on me or a school counselor's threat to have me charged with negligence because my kids hadn't shown up to classes for months. He let me show him photo albums of Amanda and Stephanie as babies. Even better, he teased Mary and Mollie—he got them to be light, to laugh and play, when so much else felt ponderous. This night, Barry set his boots atop our scratched coffee table, his wire-rimmed reading glasses halfway down his nose. Mollie tipped in toward him, her head against his shoulder, while more cautious Mary stayed curled up at the other end of the couch. Taking over our custom of reading a few chapters of a novel before bed, he opened a worn copy of
Water-ship Down
at the place I'd marked the night before, picking up the action near the ultimate battle between Hazel and Woundwort. Though I headed back into the kitchen to finish the dishes, I tuned in to his voice. It was hard not to let him go on forever, so melodious was that voice, but I needed Barry to stop before the book's climax. At just the right point, I handed him foil-wrapped leftovers and walked with him out to his truck, sliding in close to get a kiss; I watched him drive up the road toward his own home, where he felt safe. I'd wait for his call in the late hours of night, when the girls were asleep and I could talk to him from the soft warmth of my bed, where I felt safe, the phone sunk into my pillow and my ear sunk into the phone.

Barry left, and the last pages of the book were saved for the three of us alone.

As they had at the end of
Where the Red Fern Grows, The Old Man and the Sea, To Kill a Mockingbird, Island of the Blue Dolphins,
and
Rascal,
Mary and Mollie climbed on my bed in their soft nightgowns and we promptly choked up. This time, it was over the rabbits' close calls and their deaths and their cruelties and friendship. I propped my head on a stack of pillows while Mollie scrunched up under one of my arms, her bare toes digging into the side of my leg. Mary sat on the other side, Misty in her lap. At the right moment she ran to the bathroom to get toilet paper, handing out
strips for the toughest passages. I began reading again when she got back, Mollie's shoulder quaking against mine, and I told myself that I was, after all, finding a way to let my girls cry.

Other nights when Barry was at his own house or gone on his long weeks of travel for his work as a writer, I came home to sit motionless on our juice- and jam-stained couch and stared at the television, too beat to get up and change the channel or turn it off, the remote long ago misplaced. The fat husband kidding the skinny beautiful wife, while their just-this-side-of-rotten-but-ultimately-redeemable kids tried to get away with something. Mary's low voice drifted in from her bedroom, where she and Mol-lie made islands out of brown and green towels and populated these lands with dozens of animals: elephants and wolves, hippos and polar bears. On their door hung a piece of typing paper listing their latest requests for birthday or Christmas presents: a baby walrus, a mother turtle, a father grizzly.