Live Through This (25 page)

We crossed the crooked shadows to the other side of the street, toward the alley that led to the lot where my car was parked. On our way, we passed a couple sitting at a well-lit table on the sidewalk outside a closed café, their swaddled baby lying in a plastic infant seat. Tiny pink hands poked out of the blanket, knocking around the cold air. The man on one side of the table jumped up. He thrust out his arms toward us. "Ladies, ladies!" he called out. Amanda stopped, and I did too. My daughter turned to look at me, as if wondering what we should do, then looked back at him.

Teeth were missing from his mouth; he had no coat on, just a thin shirt that fluttered in the breeze. The woman, coatless too, stood up once she realized they had our attention, brown hair collapsed over her shoulders, her eyes dull and tired.

"Can you help us?" the man said.

Amanda and I were separated from this family by a waist-high retaining wall of red brick, which I was glad for. It would help us get away when we had the chance. I wanted only to return to the car, to have a few more minutes to talk to my daughter before we lost contact again. She would go to her house and I would go to mine and there was no telling what would bring us together again the next time. But right now I had to deal with this man shouting at me. I wasn't sure whether to respond to or ignore him—I glanced at Amanda to see what she wanted me to do. I wondered if it would please her for me to help these people by giving them a few dollars, perhaps even the sweaty twenty in my palm. I tried to read some sign in her, some indication of what would make her happy.

The man broke in again. "Do you have one of those cards?" he said, pointing to an ATM just beyond the sidewalk's edge. "No," I said quickly. Amanda knew I had one, and I waited for her to expose me to these strangers. But she didn't. The man went on as if he hadn't heard me. The baby's godfather had sent a check, he said,
pulling a rectangle of paper from his pocket and shaking it toward us. "We're not from here, nobody will cash it."

He wanted me to deposit the check in my account and then withdraw the same amount so he could have the cash.

"I'm sorry," I said, "I don't have a card."

"But we need the money. We need it for our baby," he said, rattling the check again, as if the sound alone would conjure up help and hope and comfort. The woman had already given up on us and sat back down, ignoring her child, who had started crying and whose cries were steadily getting louder.

I turned away as the man stuck the check back in his pocket. He mumbled at my back in frustration. That's when I noticed that Amanda had already gone on. I hadn't felt her leave, but she had. She was twenty or thirty feet away, her torso bent into the starless night under the streetlights. I watched her back get smaller as she moved deeper into the alley. I put my hands around my mouth to call to her—ask her to wait until I could catch up—but I couldn't make any sound. No noise would come out of me.

I dropped my hands and turned to look again at the road we'd crossed and at the way the streetlights made a strange web of cracks that still seemed real. For a moment, in the time it took to take a breath perhaps, I thought about following the jagged shadow lines on the road, letting them decide the end of this night for me. But my hands clenched the car keys in my coat pocket, and my body moved around and began to cut through the same air, the same path, as Amanda. I didn't hurry, though. She was already too far away.

I don't remember why I thought stopping in at a police station in downtown San Francisco was a good idea—the police in Oregon had already told me that a change in state law in the 1990s had decriminalized skipping school and running from home, which meant police would no longer search for missing kids. That is, if the kids went missing of their own accord; not stolen away by strangers but rather having slipped from home lives they didn't want or couldn't tolerate. But something in me hoped that California had different ideas about teenagers who left their families to hit the streets.

After an hour's wait in the dim room, surrounded by others who fidgeted nervously too, worrying about their own dealings with the cops, I found out that the law was basically the same here: as long as the kids didn't get caught committing crimes—big-deal crimes such as theft, drug dealing, assault, not just loitering or trespassing—they could squat in abandoned buildings or sleep on park benches or spend their days on street corners asking for spare change, and most of the time the police would look the other way. The blue-uniformed officer across the counter from me at the station rattled off the statistics, saying that dozens of kids streamed into the city every day; saying that nearly a thousand slept on the streets of San Francisco on any given night; saying that the strain on public dollars had shrunk the number of officers who walked a beat, so there was no way to keep an eye out for one girl. My girl, who wasn't unusual. She was part of a movement, a member
of a burgeoning subculture that—if the San Francisco street corners crowded with young panhandlers were any clue, he said—was growing beyond society's control by the hour.

I knew Stephanie had become part of some tribe made up of black-clothed, pierced, tattooed kids with necks seamed with dirt and armpits stuffed with snarled hair, but I hadn't thought all that much about the other children—who they were and where they came from and how many of them there were all together. I'd regarded the others as only strange and foreign and a source of trouble, and I wanted them to stay away from my daughters. Here in the police station I finally realized that Stephanie was, after all, just one among many. I got a glimpse of what she gained from being one among many: anonymity and some warped sense of group protection. I understood too that mine was a common quest and query—the officer informing me in short order that I was just another parent fresh in from some other place looking for a son or a daughter on the road. All he could do was add Stephanie's name to a national database of runaway children. That way she'd be in the computer if she did get arrested or hurt, or if she turned up dead, one of those who fell off the seedy margins of the street life and landed in a hospital or a morgue. As if this should be a comfort to me, her name on that long list.

The officer took my information, pecking it at a keyboard with his index fingers. But he declined to take one of the posters I'd brought along, a photograph and description of Stephanie copied at the Kinko's in downtown Eugene before I'd left and printed on clean, white eleven-by-fourteen paper,
HAVE YOU SEEN MY DAUGHTER
? its headline. He claimed that too many posters got left at the station and that he had nowhere to hang them. And then he stuck out his hand to shake mine—his indication that our exchange was over.

"I hate to tell you the truth," he said, frowning so that parallel creases appeared on his forehead like faint ski tracks, "but there's nothing we can do to help you find your daughter."

It was spring of 1997, and not even Amanda had seen or heard from Stephanie since the previous November. I'd come to San Fran
cisco thinking that maybe, if everything lined up and I got lucky, if I wasn't out of my mind believing that possibly Stephanie was here instead of in some other town in some other region of the country, I might locate her. I might track her down. I'd even let myself imagine once or twice that she would suddenly appear before me on Gary Street, on Powell, up at the Grace Cathedral Labyrinth, and that this bleak stretch of not knowing where she was and what condition she was in would be over. After talking to the cop, I realized I'd have to go about such a search without help, at least none from authorities who patrolled this city. Finding Stephanie meant looking for her by myself.

Not long after the ill-fated weekend in Portland with my mother, and after Amanda and Stephanie had jumped a train and disappeared, I'd taken a long drive with Barry through the rural parts of the Willamette Valley, just the two of us alone. It was a sunny afternoon in late September, Mary and Mollie off with friends for the day, and the air that streamed in Barry's truck windows and that blew my hair around smelled faintly of fall. Late September: the loveliest time to be in our half of Oregon—summer crops gathered, fields burned, apples ripe on the trees. Fall had always been my favorite season, with my kids freshly back from their dad's. By the first of most Septembers I could rest easy. My lonely summer had ended—I could stop writing daily postcards and letters to my girls in Arizona, and stop sitting through the long evenings in our empty house waiting for them to come home; I could stop listening to Amanda's seventh-grade choir's rendition of "Shenandoah" every time I drove in the car—and all of us could now fit back into the comforting-for-their-predictability schedules of school and work and dance classes and music lessons and evening homework and an hour of TV each night. All that was long ago, but my body still remembered the pleasure of regular life, those ordinary times, and I rode through the valleys of Oregon with Barry, who drove exactly five miles over the posted speed limit, while I fought off an ache that had nowhere to land.

When we got to the town of Woodburn, nearly to Portland,
Barry suggested we head up the hill to a Catholic monastery called Mount Angel. I'd seen the signs for this place dozens of times on the interstate but had never wondered much about its mysterious looming residents, the nuns and priests. When we reached the monastery grounds on a plateau that overlooked the valley and got out of the truck to walk around—the sun on the back of my neck, and my hand in Barry's warm one—we found an assortment of buildings and a courtyard with a perfectly groomed pond in the middle, koi popping the green surface with their round orange mouths. There were no people, so it was exquisitely quiet on the hill. We strolled in the breeze, the golden maple leaves on long branches over our heads rustling like bird wings, until we came to the brink of a cliff. Barry sat on a bench there, pointed in the direction of the vast view, and I settled on the cool ground in front of the bench for no other reason than it seemed like the right thing to do—to feel the damp from the grass seep into my jeans and to feel the hard earth under my bones. In front of us was a rolling, variegated aspect of farmland: in the center, one farmstead with a small, steep-roofed house that was painted white and surrounded by a line of trees and, past that windbreak, acres of plowed ground fresh with tractor stripes.

I looked over at the scene, as empty of humans as the monastery behind us, as if the afternoon had been preserved for Barry and me alone. This hilltop where we'd paused seemed to invite a Sunday-afternoon type of quiet rest, but rest had so long eluded me I didn't know how to accept the offer. I do remember being struck by that farm in the distance. Everything in that setting was in its place, or so it seemed to me: the home and garden, the chicken coops and the horse barn, even the straight lines of broken ground. The house was built mid-hill, as if the slope had been created just for this dwelling and for those who lived there.

What if I had given my daughters this kind of life once I was divorced from their father? It wouldn't have been impossible—I could have moved back to Idaho instead of Oregon and found a house with acreage near one relative or another. We could have had cows and chickens. The girls could have grown up as my
cousins had, rising before dawn to milk and feed, and returning home from school to do farm chores. The palms of their hands could have grown calloused from the pitchfork and the rake while their faces became wind-burned pink. The routines of getting by, day after day, would have muted any thoughts of taking off in anger—everyone would have work to do and would know to do it. At least that's how I thought of it for a moment, this split second, as I watched the farm across the valley. The simple life I'd not chosen for my girls.

I realize now that this vision of rural life held no clues for me or for us. All it did was stir a familiar bitterness over the what-ifs, bring on the same old self-berating: for so long I couldn't think of much I'd done right. It was too late to raise my daughters better than I had. It was too late to make up whatever I'd done wrong as a parent. The one thing I'd hoped to get right—being a good mother to my kids—had somewhere along the line gone terribly awry.

There on the monastery grounds, Barry leaned over to put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned away from the farmscape and toward him. He told me every day that I was a fine mom, a loving mom, and though I didn't believe him much at that time, I lapped up his praise, every word. He'd also waited with as much patience as a person on the periphery of a family could muster, concentrating on making a friendship with the younger girls and letting me talk out the million worries a day that cropped up over Amanda and Stephanie. He brought gallons of milk when he came over, and O-rings for the leaky bathroom faucet. He got the oil changed in my car when I forgot all about it. He told me he planned to stick around, to be the person I could most count on in the world.

"What are you thinking about?" he said now, running his other hand down his beard.

"What else," I said. "The girls."

He leaned back against the bench and crossed one leg over the other as if he were ready to listen, though I couldn't help but notice the flinch of the muscle in the leg I rested against—this old subject again, that dead horse we kept beating.

But I took a new tack, one he hadn't heard before. "I'm tired of
looking for my own kids," I said. "I can't keep hiring people to find them or signing them up for some treatment that might work or might not. I'm sick of it."

He stared at me for a long time, maybe wondering if this was a test or a trick—I'd not yet voiced such a strong desire to give up, even though I had many times felt that desire keenly. "Do you mean that?" he asked, leaning forward, the hand on my shoulder again.

"I think I do," I told him.

There was a long pause before he said anything else. "Then maybe it's time to let them go," he nearly whispered. His hand lifted from me and I felt suddenly lighter, unyoked, nearly free enough to float.