Live Through This (21 page)

On one of those evenings, credits ran on the small screen across the room from me, and I felt full of quick-dry cement. It pinned my thighs to the cushions. I had to get up or I'd be sunk there forever. I moaned, bent my legs, and stood.

"What's wrong, Mom?" Mary called. In recent weeks, the least strain in my voice caught her attention.

"Nothing," I said. "Time for homework."

"No, not yet!" Mollie said.

But within minutes, Mary sat at the dining room table surrounded by sharpened pencils and open textbooks, her long white-blond hair twisted down her back. "Which states border Colorado?" she asked.

"I'll bet you can figure that out," I said from the kitchen. "You go to one every summer and I miss you when you're gone."

She flinched at that comment, as if trying to figure out how she was supposed to both spend time with Tom and make me feel okay about it. She got up, her way of escaping the subject, and carried the map into the kitchen, holding it in front of me as I moved bricks of frozen hamburger and bags of corn around in my freezer, searching for my last bag of blueberries from the summer. "What's this
river?" she asked me, pointing to a squiggly line that ran through the square that was New Mexico.

"Look that state up in your book and read me the names of rivers," I said. "We'll sort it out."

I locked the beaters into the mixer while Mary went back to the table to shuffle through pages. Mollie tossed her jump rope into the hallway. Temporarily. In the middle of dinner, I knew, she'd stand up and grab the plastic handles into her calloused palms, still chewing a hunk of bread or a leaf of lettuce, as if she couldn't sit still another second. She'd swing the rope over her head and start jumping again, our plates and glasses and silverware shuddering each time her stocking feet hit the floor.

Now she climbed onto the blue chair and began to unwrap the butter I'd set next to the stainless steel bowl. Her arm above the mixer, Mollie let the cube fall of the paper in a heavy glob. I gave her a plastic cup filled to the lip with white sugar; we both watched as she tipped her wrist and the grains cascaded in, smoothing the butter to creamy ridges.

"Rio Grande, Pecos, San Juan, Gila?" Mary said from the table.

"You're getting close," I said without turning toward her. "Keep going."

I watched Mollie crack eggs, sprinkle in vanilla. I poured in the flour, baking powder, salt, and crackling fruit. Mary was behind me now, asking for the beater, homework abandoned on the table. "If she gets the beater, I get the bowl," Mollie said in the growly voice she'd been born with, reaching down to give her sister a push.

"Mom!" Mary shouted, tugging at my shirt to make sure I'd noticed.

I spooned purplish dough into rattling paper cups, relaxed for the first time that day. Even the girls' bickering proved we were doing it: faking a normal life. Getting through whatever this was with Amanda and Stephanie, this inexplicable thing they'd entered that had left Mary and Mollie raw and fearful and me wondering if the muscles in my neck would ever again unclench. Tonight a few items in my kitchen had come together into a sweet, warm whole, soothing the helplessness I felt most of the time and muting the remorse
that lived in the shallow caves under my shoulder blades. For a few minutes anyway. When the muffins were out of the oven, I focused only on the way steam rose when I broke one in half, and the way the soft insides soaked up a dab of butter until every crumb was yellow and glistening. The softness in my mouth and in my daughters' mouths. The sweet softness.

What I didn't think about was how to live with the fact that other daughters were gone. Or how to get past my fortress of defensiveness over their leaving. How to live with being a failure. How to live with the whiffs of relief that would sometimes come upon me about their absence. Or how I missed them with a ferocity that was turning me inside out.

Amanda has a wrinkled scar across the apex of her left shoulder. When she was thirteen months old she'd yanked the crock pot's electric cord, which was dangling off our kitchen counter, tipping the container on its side and spilling broth and chicken and vegetables that had been simmering all afternoon. I was only a few feet away when I saw it happen. I jumped to reach her, soup splashing my shirt, the yellow hot greasiness of it trapped against me—I knew then the scalding temperature of the liquid that had just hit my child, and that scared me—but more terrifying was Amanda washed in it, her trunk and neck and the side of her face. A dead flesh and chicken odor steamed from her skin. I scooped her up and peered down at her bleached-white face.

At first I couldn't say more than her name, "Amanda, Amanda." As I slid her into the kitchen sink, I realized she'd hardly breathed since the soup had covered her. I nudged the spigot with my elbows, unclipped the hooks on her overalls, whispering, "Breathe, breathe, please breathe." She stared at me and sucked in air, then she howled—her hands slapping at my face and yanking my hair. She battered her socked feet against the metal edge of the sink, clubbing me with her fists. She stared at me as if she couldn't understand why I kept hurting her, why I wasn't taking the hurt away. My fingers slid over globules of fat on her skin, chicken broth congealed by the cold water that drenched her body and my arms; I
unsnapped the neck of her red and white cotton shirt, pulled it over her head, the skin peeling from her body and sticking in white patches to the fabric of her clothes, as if I'd drawn plastic wrap off pudding. Her exposed shoulder was a hunk of raw meat.

We had only one car then, which Tom took to work. I called him to come get us, the phone stuck between my chin and shoulder as I garbled out what had happened and rocked Amanda at the same time. By then, I'd wrapped her in a towel grabbed from the laundry basket into which I'd packed ice cubes cracked from a tin tray. Amanda was sleepy now, sobbing lightly, her breath flickering in the back of her throat. I hung up the phone and sat down in our old orange chair and pulled up my shirt, moving my sticky and heavy breast to her mouth. She fell into a frantic nursing while I stared out the window, adding up all the ways I was unfit to be a mother. I did little all day but keep my eyes on this child; the one moment I'd looked away, she'd been hurt. In my own kitchen. Hurt. I soon enough realized that the accident, Amanda's burn—and the scar she'd carry on her shoulder for the rest of her life—was evidence that I'd failed to do what I desperately wanted: keep my daughter from harm.

When it was time to get Amanda at the Portland airport, I went alone. It had been a little over two weeks since I received the call from the woman at the Tucson police station. The following morning, I'd screwed up the nerve to phone Tom. He spoke in a low voice, as if he'd slunk off to the far recesses of his house for our discussion. "It's not a good time here for this," he said, repeating what the policewoman had already told me he'd said. When would be a good time to find out your child is using heroin and has nearly died from it? That's what I wanted to ask, but didn't, afraid that once I got insulting with him the nastiness wouldn't stop. Besides, I didn't feel any different: it wasn't a good time for me either. Definitely not a good time.

Tom obviously wanted to hurry off the phone. He laid out his ideas in a few words, and there was no recrimination from either side for once: his insurance would cover at least some days
in a recovery unit in Tucson, that same one Amanda had been in two years before, at fifteen, when she'd swallowed all that Tylenol, a time only vaguely remembered for its relative innocence. He'd check her in there again, he told me, so she could get off these new drugs, these street drugs. Then he'd put her on a plane home.

That's what he did: picked her up at the police station and then signed her in at the clinic for a two-week stay. Now her time there was over, and she was on her way to me. After Christmas, maybe after New Year's, she'd move to an Oregon State drug treatment center for women, which I had yet to tell her about, where she would live until someone in charge deemed her improved—or at least able to get on with whatever her future was going to be.

In the airport waiting room—all dark furniture and garish light—I leaned against the row of vinyl chairs in front of the jet-way as passengers stumbled out, one by one. Mary and Mollie had asked me to let them come; they wanted to see Amanda, to figure out what had become of her in these months away. But I'd left them with a friend. The last time Mary had seen her sisters, months before, it was by mistake—she was home with a sore throat one September day not long after Amanda and Stephanie had taken off. I'd loaded her with juice and lozenges and a couple of movies and, in the afternoon, had gone to work for a couple of hours. I should have stayed home, but missing even one paycheck would have jeopardized everything, and I'd become overcautious after taking so many hours and days off work because of my children. I couldn't give anyone an excuse to call me a less-than-devoted employee: a frazzled anxiety that had propelled me to the office.

Mary was dozing in front of our small TV—I'd put in the movie she most liked to watch when she was sick,
Big
(a movie she loathed for its sappiness when she wasn't ill). She heard broken glass—later she told me how she slunk out of her bed and tiptoed down the dim hallway to peek. Shadows shot past the crack under the laundry room door. She heard voices and hid in a dark space in the hall until she realized those voices belonged to her sisters. Mary remembered what they were wearing when they came around the corner. Stephanie: black jeans with patches, torn and dirty hoodie
that she'd sewn back together with dental floss, leather bracelet with silver studs, chain-mail necklace. Amanda: torn jeans and a
Clockwork Orange
T-shirt from which she'd cut the collar band and the sleeves, her hair dyed black, and a green devil tattoo glaring from her forearm.

When I got home with Mollie that day I found Mary curled in her bed, silent, her quilt tight around her like a pink cocoon, and Misty curved around the top of her head. Having chased the cat away, I laid my hand on her damp forehead. "What is it?" I said. "Are you worse?" Mollie went off for water, and Mary unpinched her body enough so that I could at least see her blank face.

It took her a long time to say it—that Amanda and Stephanie had broken a window to get into our house. (As soon as she mentioned broken glass I felt cold air that shouldn't have been there.) They had rifled through drawers for money, packed up canned food, and taken sleeping bags and camping dishes from our stash in the storage closet. Mary had followed them through the house begging them to stop, until Stephanie led her back to her room and said, "Get back in bed. You're sick," and closed the door. Mary stayed put, listening to the sounds of her sisters, who, minutes later, left for the train yard and for the train that would take them out of town.

As passengers from Amanda's flight began to appear in the room, I did my best to keep my expression flat, holding back the heat building inside me, my internal daughter-related furnace turned to High. I was both relieved beyond measure that she was alive and full of dread at having her in my house again. That day in the airport, I was also stuck fast on the idea that my daughters had done me wrong, and many of my thoughts were centered on that particular nugget of pain.
What had I done to deserve this?
How could my children walk away from me, from what we had together? The daughter soon to step out of the airplane was broken—broken by rage, by drugs, by rebellion gone terribly wrong. Every time I asked her why, her answer was the same:
This isn't about you, Mom.
It felt like it was about me. And looking for reasons why things kept get
ting worse between us was like crawling down a dark cistern looking for fresh water and finding only mud.

I recognized Amanda as soon as she stepped from the doorway, but it took me a few seconds to accept that we were in the same state, the same town, the same room. I hadn't seen her for nearly four months. Her head was shaved except for a patch of straggle on top, jet-black. She had on new black jeans and black Doc Martens, bought by her father. A black long-sleeved cotton shirt and no coat. She carried nothing. Not a book or a bag. Her arms hung straight beside her lanky body. I didn't call out. I waited for her to spot me across the room; when she did, she walked toward me without a gesture of greeting or even a shift in her straight, chapped lips. The winter light cast across her pale face made her even more pale: the color of old soap left in the cupboard under the sink; the color of the fog we'd drive through on our way home. I didn't move until she was in front of me, until I could see the edge of her shoulder scar peeking from the neckline of her T-shirt. I pulled my daughter toward me. Her arms stayed at her sides. Her jutted shoulders, once a sign of about-to-erupt anger, had become permanent points. She was, I guessed, about fifteen pounds lighter than when she'd left. Five feet eight and maybe a hundred pounds, a wisp of a girl. She smelled salty, earthy, like the faint rot of old compost. When she stepped back from my hug I touched one of the furious red bumps on her neck and she said her first word: "Scabies." I pulled away fast, and a small grin flashed over her mouth. "Don't worry," she said, "they're not contagious anymore."

She had a screw in one earlobe. A zipper pull in the other.

Downstairs, Amanda moved to the edge of the rubber track that rumbled by carrying strangers' luggage. She pressed her knees against the metal frame and scanned the suitcases for her one bag. I wanted to walk up behind her so she'd feel me against her back, but I stood apart from her and waited, trying to imagine how to bring up Stephanie's name, how to find a way to plot with Amanda—whose every signal was for me to keep my distance—how to get her sister home. I had to believe Amanda had some clue as to
where Stephanie was and why she hadn't called. I needed to believe Stephanie was safe.

Her suitcase in one hand, Amanda headed for the revolving door; I followed. The door dumped us outside. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket and, with a pinch of finger and thumb, slid one Pall Mall from the middle. She flipped it to her lips, lit it, took a long drag, and blew out strings of gray from between her teeth. "This is hard," she said, picking a fleck of tobacco off her tongue.