Live Through This (13 page)

The disingenuousness of the job occurs to me now—to write a story deploring the lack of programs for high-school dropouts, for instance, while forcing my own kids to stay in school. I sat at the paper's ratty conference table listening to punked-out protesters complain about arrests while suspecting these were the same guys who'd given my daughters drugs and booze and a place to sleep at night, and hating them for it. The separation between editor and mother was nearly impossible for me to maintain, but I showed up at work every morning to play the journalist. I went home at night to take care of Mary and Mollie, the three of us alone in our house—they hardly ever invited friends over or got invited to their friends' homes, and I kept almost entirely to myself as well. And twice a month, I appeared with my younger daughters at the Burns home of people I called, uncharitably, Rancher Bill and Rancher Wife Donna. Ready to defend my position as Amanda's mother.

After he left me at the restaurant, Steve the ex-cop had gone to his hotel to pick up his clone of a son, who would help him search for my daughters. They found the girls the next morning. An easy catch.

Amanda and Stephanie were sitting on the curb in downtown Eugene, feet planted in the wet and grimy leaf-clogged gutter. Steve walked up behind them; his son approached from the front. Amanda looked up, her hand straight over her brow to block out the sun. "Do I know you?" she said to the boy.

"You're Stephanie, right?" he asked her.

"No," she said.

"You're Amanda," he said, pointing to Stephanie.

The girls got up, glancing around for a quick escape, and then felt Steve sidle up behind. He clamped a hand on each of their shoulders. "I work for your mother," he said.

Steve told them that the police had called our house to inform me that a warrant had been issued for my daughters' arrests. "She doesn't want you to go to jail, so she asked me to hide you for a few days until she can sort this out with the cops."

Stephanie shook his hand off. "Leave me alone," she said. "We don't want her help."

"Can't we talk this over?" Steve said, getting even closer. "Come on, let my boy and me take you to breakfast."

"No way," Stephanie said, pulling on Amanda's arm. "Let's go."

But Amanda hesitated. For a reason she's never been able to explain, she decided she'd go with them to a restaurant; she chose to hear about the plan I'd supposedly made for them, and she coaxed Stephanie into coming along.

A few minutes after they were in the back seat of Steve's truck, the girls knew they'd been duped. Stephanie tried to open her door and jump, but Steve had set the childproof lock. Amanda started shouting, calling this man and his son every foul name she could pull out of herself, and continued to blast profanities the one hundred or so miles to Steve's house, located in a small and touristy mountain town called Sisters, Stephanie joining in the verbal battering of Steve and his sidekick. As if volatile and earsplitting words could break them loose, could put them back on their own road. The boy turned around halfway through their trip, when the girls had momentarily quieted down, spent and furious. Joan Osborne had come on the radio: "What If God Was One of Us." They ought
to listen to the message in these lyrics, the buzzcut son said. "It's a really good song," he instructed in what Stephanie later called a soft preacher's tone. "It could help you." The girls huddled into each other, slouched in the narrow back seat, and tried to think of any means of escape.

When they arrived at the house in Sisters, Steve's wife stripped them, lathered their bodies and flea-packed hair with Lava soap, and hid their clothes. That night, Amanda and Stephanie sat at a picnic table set up in the living room—a glorious view of the mountain peaks of the Three Sisters glowing in the pink sunset out the window—with four other girls in the same lot, all of them barefoot in sweatpants and T-shirts. Amanda asked how she might get hold of a cigarette. "Yeah, good luck," one girl said. Steve's wife brought out hamburgers and cottage cheese. Stephanie told her she was a vegan—no meat, no cheese, no dairy products at all. So she got a bowl of corn flakes, without milk. For the next twelve days, she ate cereal, dry toast, white rice, and canned vegetables cooked into mush.

A week and more than a thousand dollars to Steve and his wife later, I'd settled on the next thing for my kids. Next was to be a wilderness-therapy program that hauled teenagers like mine deep into the Oregon woods for three weeks of counseling and hiking and bushwhacking and fire building and bone-tiredness and forgiveness and redemption. I wasn't sure where the money for this nature cure was going to come from—insurance would pay for part but a hefty balance would remain. I had to count on my father's pitching in. I also called Tom with the plan, telling him that the family therapist we three were seeing thought the trek was nearly the only choice left, short of lockup. To get into a state lockup, a kid had to be a major criminal or a heroin addict, and that, at least, wasn't our daughters' plight. I talked fast, trying to convince Tom to go along with this treatment even when I wasn't so sure about the whole wilderness thing myself—the better part of a month in the outdoors in the middle of winter? I wanted to believe it was going to bring about a cure, a new beginning, but I wasn't confident. Still, at least the trek would get them off the streets.

First it would cost a lot of money.

"Maybe they could come down here and live with us for a while," Tom said when I gave him the figure. "Maybe they just need their dad."

"You can keep them from running?" I said, picturing their two-bedroom home with their new baby, Ellen's two kids from her earlier marriage, and the thirty seconds or less it would take the household to explode when willful teenagers moved in. As tempting as it was to make them his problem instead of mine, I wasn't falling for it. Within days or maybe weeks the girls would be on my doorstep and I'd be in charge once again of figuring out how to manage. "What are you going to do when they're back on the streets?" I asked Tom. "What are you going to do if Amanda tries to hurt herself ?"

I heard him put down the phone and mumble something to Ellen. Then he got back on, agreeing to pay his half and also agreeing to appear at the final family gatherings in the woods, three and then four weeks hence, when each girl came out of her separate frosty wilderness.

The Sunday following the phone call to Tom, I drove to Albany, Oregon, and down the cold empty streets of that small downtown, finally locating the headquarters of the wilderness-therapy program—a tall and narrow building between a bank and a coffee shop, both closed. Mary and Mollie were with me; the three of us climbed the stairs to the main office's door. A big man answered—a huge man—his beard full of golden doughnut crumbs, and a styrofoam cup of coffee looking dainty in his mittlike hands. He told us to help ourselves to the food on the table and then to take a seat. I walked to the far side of the circle of metal chairs and lowered myself into one of them—rigid and chilled, just like metal chairs are supposed to be—with Mary and Mollie on either side. The girls had picked out their own doughnuts. Mollie had one covered with whiskery sprinkles, and Mary had one covered with chocolate; the pastries sat on their laps, barely picked at. I counted seven other sets of parents in the room, all of whom had arrived before us, and
was surprised that I seemed to be the only single mom. Married couples had this kind of trouble too? It hadn't occurred to me that such a thing was possible—I had so long placed the blame for our misery on the divorce and, in part, on the fact that I had no other adult in the house to back me up.

The other parents had their teenagers with them, each one hemmed in between the mom and the dad. The kids—about to be launched on a grueling trek together, they knew by now—were so different from one another, or so it seemed to me, that they could have been randomly snatched from suburban high-school cafeterias from one end of the country to the other. The New York preppy girl with straight blond hair wearing a bright red miniskirt and expensive boots, who I'd later find out was addicted to her mother's sleeping pills and other prescription drugs and who'd run her parents' credit cards to their big fat limits; the sullen skater boy, a day-and-night marijuana user, who was flunking high school and had wrecked his dad's car; the child of migrant farm workers who'd been sent to the program by the juvenile court after one too many arrests. His parents spoke only a little English and mostly looked confused and lost about why their boy was bound for jail if he didn't make this work.

I was confused and lost too. What was I doing here? At that moment I couldn't believe that my beautiful, bright daughters belonged with these other kids. These children were beaten down, common even in how they made trouble or rebelled against their parents. Amanda and Stephanie were never going to be ordinary, and I was never going to accept that this was our real life. I expected my daughters to peek around the corner, to jump in the middle of the room saying never mind, this was all a big joke, or at least offering a contrite plea to go home and start over. I almost stood up and started laughing myself: no way could this be happening to us. I hadn't yet realized that sending my daughters out to the snowy woods was supposed to startle me awake too—that nothing was going to get better until I stopped pretending that we weren't in terrible trouble or that it was all going to end nicely,
neatly, in a cheerful reconciliation that took not a scratch from my hide.

I scanned the room. What had these trek people done with Amanda? I knew the ex-LA cop Steve had driven her to Albany the night before—he'd called to tell me she'd been "safely delivered." The following Sunday he'd do the same with Stephanie, transport her here for the wilderness folks to deal with until I arrived and we all sent her out to the cold mountains. The psychologist who ran the program had told me he was opposed to the girls going on a trek together. He'd ship them out a week apart and would make sure their groups were separated in the woods. "One of the main goals," he'd told me on the phone, "is to get Amanda and Stephanie to see themselves as individuals instead of extensions of each other."

That seemed to be a theme with counselors lately: my oldest daughters had become two halves of the same person.

"Where's Amanda?" Mary asked me, pieces of her pastry breaking off and falling to the floor, chocolate pieces scattered around her feet.

"I don't know," I said, although just as I whispered the response, there she was at the door, my oldest child. I stood up partway to see her: clean, faintly pink, wearing new jeans and sweatshirt, and on her feet a new pair of leather hiking boots I'd sent money for; they covered her ankles and would endure weeks of snowpack without rotting her toes. Her back was straight, her shoulders square.

"Amanda!" Mollie cried out, throwing her arms, her open hands, out toward her sister. Amanda turned in our direction. I waited for a sign of happiness, one tiny indication of pleasure at having us there, but her look was solid ice. The man who had his hand around the top of my daughter's arm—another huge person whose flannel shirt stretched nearly to the splitting point across his shoulders—led her to me and asked Mary to shift over one chair. He wanted Amanda to sit next to me.

For the hour that followed, Amanda did everything she could to avoid touching me, or even looking at me. Each of the parents was
asked to describe what had brought the family here—one broken-down story after the other. Each child was asked if he or she was ready to turn things around—one version of
you can fuck yourself
after another.

During the hour of the meeting, I couldn't grasp what I'd gotten us into. My daughter's rage burned next to me bright as one of those flares shot into a night sky after a fisherman falls out of his boat, and the intensity of this so-called wilderness repair made my head hurt. Couldn't we just go home and be normal? I couldn't remember why I was dumping my kids into the frozen mountains. For what? What could be fixed out there that a good and dedicated and stern mother couldn't fix herself?

Before I could forge any kind of peace with this decision to send Amanda away, to woods where she'd be alone and lonely and cold and probably in pain a lot of the time, I was standing on the sidewalk watching her get loaded into a big green van. Mollie held one of my hands and Mary stood in front of us waving, waving goodbye to her big sister.

During the meeting, we'd been told there'd be eleven or twelve feet of snow for the kids to hike through and camp in during the next twenty-one days. "Nature is the best teacher," the lead psychologist told us. Burly men and a couple of equally muscular women stood at every doorway, making sure that no one left the room. The teenagers didn't stop thinking about getting away, though. Their eyes darted around for a way out—seeking any chance to dash down the street and get back to a predictable life, a drug life, a life of thieving or lying that each one had negotiated quite well until he or she got caught. "Let nature do its work and issue its consequences," the psychologist told us. The kids would do all their own cooking—lentils and beans—on fires they would build themselves, sparked with flint and steel instead of matches. If they wanted a bowl, they'd have to carve one. If they wanted a spoon, they'd whittle one from a tree branch. If they wanted a shelter to sleep in, they'd have to build one out of snow. "This is bullshit," Amanda said under her breath. I agreed. It was bullshit, though I didn't lean over to admit to her just how crazy it felt. Just how from-some
other-planet. I closed my eyes and hoped that by agreeing to this outrageous therapy, by convincing Tom and my father to pay big portions of the cost, I hadn't screwed everything up beyond repair.

Once she was in the van and about to leave, I tried to catch my daughter's eye. She glanced out the window, moving her hand slightly in response to Mary's wave, but Amanda refused to turn toward me. The bus started up, its diesel engine rumbling against the still air, and the driver pulled out onto the empty street. I'd been promised a phone call from one of the counselors in one week—the following Sunday. The same day Mary and Mollie and I would return to this building, to the room upstairs, to the same pastries, fake orange juice, and weeping mothers, to send Stephanie off to the same woods with different leaders. Amanda's bus was gone now and this wilderness plan set in unstoppable motion. I stared into the last of my hot coffee, waiting for an answer—any answer—to come rising out of the steam.