Live Through This (12 page)

"Mommy!" Mollie called, but I didn't turn around. She called me again, but I went on to the car. I wasn't sure why. Because I'd be a bad mother if I didn't at least try? Because I'd be a terrible mother if I didn't at least pretend to want my daughters to come back? I pulled out of our driveway and onto our street, scanning the sidewalks for a glimpse of my kids dressed in black, hoping to catch up with them but dreading what would happen if I did.

After about fifteen minutes of looking, I stopped at a pay phone to call home. I told Mary to make sure the doors were locked. "Brush your teeth and get in my bed with some books," I told her. It was only about seven in the evening. They hadn't had dinner, they hadn't watched the hour of television they were allowed, they hadn't practiced their times tables or cut current-events stories from the newspaper. But my bed was the safest place I could think of and where I wanted them to wait.

"Okay," Mary said.

Then I drove. Up and down the streets of downtown, checking at cafés and convenience stores. The bus station, the train. After a couple of hours, not willing to leave the little girls alone any longer, I quit.

The next morning I went to the police station to report my daughters missing. The officer I talked to stayed behind the Plexiglas window and spoke into a tiny microphone. I couldn't find a microphone on my side so I shouted my questions. I had to get to work and had only a few minutes on the meter outside, but I wasn't going to leave until I knew the police would start looking for Amanda and Stephanie that morning, that day.

But the cop told me it wasn't against the law in Oregon to run away from home. It wasn't against the law to skip school. My daughters couldn't be stopped or held unless they'd committed a
crime. If they'd stolen from someone, which I knew they wouldn't do. If they'd sold or bought drugs, which I prayed they wouldn't do. Got in a fight, or broke the windows of a building to climb in out of the rain. Any of those things, the officer told me, would be cause to arrest them. But if they were picked up for any of those serious transgressions, they'd be turned over to child protective services, not to me.

"I have to go," I said then.

"One more thing," this officer said, slipping me a piece of paper. I picked up the note and unfolded it and saw that he'd scrawled a phone number there. "He used to be a cop in LA," he said with some measure of awe. "If you want him to, he'll find your kids."

I kept myself from wadding up the paper and throwing it at his face behind the plastic, to make sure he knew this wasn't my life. I stuck the note in my purse and turned to leave.

Eight days later, the Friday night I'd come home with Mary and Mollie to order a pizza and wait some more, I called the ex-LA cop. The seeker of runaways, the finder of bad girls. I didn't know what he did to get kids off the streets and I didn't want to know. All week I'd told myself I didn't need him, that we were minutes from seeing Amanda and Stephanie walk up the sidewalk that led to our little house. They'd start laughing and tell me it was all a charade, a scam, or say that they'd come to their senses and of course wanted to be home with me, with us, and go to school and take a bath and just be normal kids.

Except earlier that afternoon, a friend had called to say that he'd seen them going into a Taco Time across from his office. A few minutes later, I went into that restaurant too. There they were, my own two children, sitting side by side at a back table. Their clothes dull, their grimy hair sticking out from their heads, the pink not so pink anymore, the black more like gray. Amanda had on wool gloves with the fingers cut off, and Stephanie had a bandanna around her neck. Tiny cups of salsa were lined up between their plates of burritos and Mexi-fries, and resting on the bench across from them were their fat water-stained backpacks with plastic mugs twined to the sides and rolled gray blankets attached to the tops. I'd never
seen those blankets. Where'd they get those blankets? Who was giving them blankets?

Amanda looked up at me heading toward them. She yanked Stephanie's arm, and before I got any closer they were up and gone, squealing to each other,
Go! Go!,
as if this were some game of tag and I was It. They jumped in the women's room across the aisle from their table, and one of them threw the dead bolt on the main door. I leaned my back against that solid door and scanned the restaurant—5:15 in the evening and only a few people eating, the smell of grease and tortillas benignly drifting to this airless corner where I waited. Waited for what, I didn't know.

I rattled the doorknob. Stephanie squealed and Amanda giggled. I walked back to the table and picked up the backpacks. They were too heavy to lift easily, so I dragged them out the door, a filthy musk odor rising from the damp canvas as they scratched across the linoleum, and my work shoes clicking with that sound of an official, professional grownup.

It was raining outside and it was dark and I was standing in the dark rain with the packs at my feet when Amanda and Stephanie came out to huddle beneath the striped awning.

"Give us our stuff," Amanda said.

I scooted the packs behind me and hung tight to the straps. "We're going home," I said. "Come on."

"You want us to freeze?" Stephanie shouted, leaning out toward me. A few people at the public fountain behind us turned to look over the scene. "Give us our shit."

A woman stepped into the light cast by the street lamp. Her blond hair, done up in a neat beehive, shed delicate beads of water, and her face, held in a kind of practiced serenity, was hardly moist. I smeared the rain out of my own eyes while she started telling me about how she and some other women from her church often came down on the weekends to feed kids who had no other food and nowhere to turn. She'd brought sandwiches, she said, gesturing toward a box. Did we need sandwiches?

"No," I told her. I wanted to add that my daughters were not
among those who had nobody to turn to and nowhere to go. My daughters had a home and people who wanted them in that home, but I only silently willed her to go away.

She didn't, though. She kept looking at me, boring in.

"Do you need help?" she asked.

"These are my daughters," I said. "And they're coming with me."

"Mom, get it through your head," Amanda shouted, "we are not going with you."

The woman moved in so she and I stood side by side, as if we were going to face these kids together. I felt the heat from her body, but I didn't know what I wanted from her. A year or two before, Amanda and Stephanie and I would have had a laugh over her self-righteousness, her certainty that she could provide easy answers with her Bible and her version of God. Now I would have given about anything for an easy answer. If I'd believed one was possible, I would have asked this stranger to bring it forth, to lay it on the street like a shining fish or sparkling wine so I could claim it.

"Let's get out of here," Stephanie said. She and Amanda started walking toward the corner of the building, toward the broad streets beyond.

"Hold on a minute," the woman called. The girls slowed down, stared back. The churchwoman put her hand on my wet shoulder. "Why don't you give them the packs?" she said.

Amanda linked her arm with Stephanie's. They waited to see what would happen next.

"They'll be cold," the woman went on. "You don't want this to be more intolerable, do you? They need their things."

Get lost
were the words that formed in my throat.
Leave me alone and stop handing out food and money and understanding to my kids, and those damned blankets tied to their satchels.
That's what I wanted to say, but I only watched her pull her raincoat tighter while she gave me time to answer. And even though I didn't think I would, even up to the second of doing it, I opened my fingers and let go of the packs. They slumped to the ground. The woman took the straps into her own hands.

"I'm sure they love you," she said. "I'm just sure they do. And I'm going to pray for all of you."

A few hours later, at home, after our medium pizza was ordered and on its way, I sat at the kitchen table, numb. I'd given the skeletal version of my family's troubles to the ex-LA cop. He'd read off an address and told me to meet him there at the mysterious hour of midnight.

Mollie came into the kitchen and pulled my arms apart, wedging herself onto my lap. "What are we going to do tonight?" she asked me.

"I don't know," I said. Whatever we did, they had to be asleep by twelve so I could leave—leave my house and my daughters—to meet a stranger and ask him for help. "What do you want to do?"

Mary walked in then, carrying the box from Christmas. "Let's put up the tent," she said.

I stood up, moving Mollie off my lap, and took the box from Mary. "Why do you want to do that?" I said. "We'll get it out next summer."

My little girls stood in front of me, still and quiet. Mary's pants were too tight and too short, her long legs poking out the bottom, and Mollie's hair was in big need of a trim. Neither one of them had asked for anything for weeks, for months maybe, just kept skidding around as best they could on the ice rink we were living on in those days.

"Okay." I shrugged. "Let's put up the tent."

We shoved furniture to the edges of the room, and Mol-lie brought me a paring knife to slice open the box. I pulled out the folded canvas and handed it to Mary; it sent out a scent both chemical and earthy as we opened it wider and wider again. Mol-lie dumped poles and metal stakes from the bag; they clattered and rolled. Mary linked the rods, and we pushed them into loops, and a few minutes later, the three of us watched the structure rise to the ceiling like a hot-air balloon.

The pizza guy came to the door and I paid him, giving him a tip for not commenting on the camping gear in our living room.
While the girls got plates and napkins and sodas, I went to the storage closet for three sleeping bags. I laid them out inside the tent and moved the TV in too, setting it on a small table. I zipped up the flap, and Mary sat down on her bag with Mollie next to her, teetering pizza-filled plates on their laps. My girls watched Friday-night sitcoms, and I watched them. The rain beat against the roof of our house so hard it sounded as if it were falling right on our tent—waterproof, sturdy, roomy enough to sleep five.

At quarter to twelve, I put Mary's arm inside her covers and tucked her in tight. I moved Mollie's head back onto her pillow and gathered up the soda cans and the last of the dirty napkins and carried the garbage into the glaring light of the kitchen. I slipped out the front door, locked it behind me, and backed the car out of our driveway.

I pulled into the parking lot of a Carl's Jr. a few blocks away. The grill had stopped cooking, and the place smelled like cooling grease, like bread left too long under a warming light. My stomach flipped, queasy and shrunken. Sitting at the first orange table was a burly man with neat brown hair, cut short. He wore a white dress shirt, every single crease in place.

"Steve?" I said. He nodded.

I sat down and handed him Amanda's and Stephanie's school pictures, no dyed hair yet, no piercings in their faces, no hard lines around their eyes. I gave him a map drawn with Mary's marking pens of the girls' hangouts: the punk-music Icky's Teahouse, the IHOP that stayed open all night. I gave him two hundred dollars from my savings, which covered only the first day of searching.

When we walked outside, Steve took my hand in his, squeezing my fingers together. "I'll find your daughters," he said. I noticed then how his ears stuck out from the sides of his head. His neck was too thick to let him button the top of his shirt. Behind him, through his truck's windshield, I saw an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror in the shape of naked woman, her bare breasts in a high salute. Before I could change my mind about what I'd set in motion here, he got in that truck and drove away, splashing puddles over the asphalt.

I watched the truck disappear toward the center of town and I let the rain run through my hair and down my neck. It soaked my coat and my sweater and wet my skin. It filled my shoes. I thought if I stood there long enough the rain would melt me into a different woman. The rain would shape me into a different mother. Maybe it would pound into me which of my choices had been wrong, which turns were misdirected. Maybe the rain would tell me how this had all gone so bad. Maybe, if I got cold enough and wet enough, I'd finally have a reason to go home.

By the spring of 1995—a few months after ex-LA cop Steve had snatched my daughters off a street in downtown Eugene—I was in the habit of driving 250 miles across the state of Oregon every other weekend to visit Amanda. Stephanie lived with friends in the deepest part of Montana now, in a remote forested valley not far below Glacier National Park—a long way from me, too far (this distance my oft-repeated excuse) for regular visits. But the five hours it took, exactly, from my own doorstep to the doorstep of the eastern Oregon ranch house where Amanda was staying was manageable. On alternate Fridays after work, Mary, Mollie, and I packed our things—pillows and blankets and animal families and juice boxes and apples and Disney tapes to sing along to and paper and markers to draw with—and headed through the shadowed Santiam Pass to wind over the Cascade Mountains. Past Hoodoo, around Sisters, and into the ski-resort town of Bend. After a quick dinner there, we drove through the last curve before entering the long, dark strip of asphalt—U.S. 20. Nothing but sagebrush and tumbleweeds and scavenging red-tailed hawks sitting on old fence posts on either side, a road that led through the dry and overgrazed part of our state to our destination of Burns, Oregon.

Burns. That's where Amanda lived now, with a bony rancher and his arthritic wife and their two cowboy-hatted boys. That's where I'd go to see my daughter who'd been given a title I couldn't bring myself to say aloud: foster child.

***

Earlier that year, I'd taken on a new job. I was editor of our town's alternative newspaper—
alternative
in that it came out weekly and was meant to dig up stories about subcultures in which the daily paper had little interest. Nearly every day I'd talk on the phone in my office with somebody pitching a story about the homeless, or I'd get a pile of pamphlets about legalizing marijuana, or I'd hear about how some cop had abused a kid at a Nike protest. I sat down with the paper's lone reporter to go over his latest story on the anarchists who'd become a fixture in our town—some of whom lived in trees, others of whom squatted in abandoned houses or on the streets, and all of whom dressed and talked and acted like Amanda and Stephanie. I couldn't quite make sense of the fact that in my job I was supposed to recognize the plight of the downtrodden while in my personal life I was doing everything I could to keep my daughters apart from these same people, who I believed had pretty much ruined my family.