Live Through This (26 page)

I twisted around to see once again the house on the hill and the expanse of farmland. "Maybe it is," I said.

But nearly eight months after sitting on that hill with Barry, where I thought I'd reconfigured my heart to begin to accept my daughters' decision to leave me, I went to San Francisco to look for Stephanie. Doing nothing was going to eat me alive—with guilt, with remorse, with resentment. I'd chosen San Francisco for the search even though Amanda couldn't say for sure whether Stephanie had returned to the Tenderloin District. Maybe Stephanie had made her way back to their old hangout on the corner of Sixth and Market, sure. But she could as easily be in LA, New York, maybe New Orleans. She could be anywhere. Yet I'd convinced myself, for all kinds of reasons, that I should look in this big city on the bay.

I arrived on a Friday evening with my friend Sherry, whom I'd talked into coming along to help me look; she was younger, and the girls considered her one of the friendly adults around us. I figured Stephanie might talk to her even if she wouldn't talk to me. Soon after we checked into our hotel, we hit the streets, wanting to fit all the searching we could into our short time—we'd take a Sunday-afternoon plane home. Sherry and I headed from our hotel to the Larkin Street shelter, a place Amanda had said she and Stephanie had gone to now and then for food. As we walked past
closed shops and bustling restaurants with a cold spring wind in our faces, it suddenly occurred to me that if Stephanie was in the city on this day and saw me, she'd have to choose to show herself, or I wouldn't see her. She'd have to step out from the gradations of gray and brown, the angles and shadows of downtown San Francisco, and flash her hair, turn her body, in such a way that I'd know without a doubt that it was she.

But if she wanted to stay hidden, she could do that too.

"Boy, could I use a glass of wine," Sherry said, pulling her scarf up to cover her pink chin, slowing down to glance into a busy restaurant where tables of patrons were pressed against the other side of the glass.

"Me too," I said. I followed her look into the café, yearning to be one of these people who slung their jackets and purses on the backs of the chairs and scooped appetizers into their mouths and dangled glowing cigarettes from their lips. I imagined purple wine on their flat tongues and warm food in their bellies. They smiled and laughed as if every concern or worry could easily be set aside for the sake of the evening's good time. They could carry on with their party and not even think about the kids, some of whom were barely teenagers, who had made their way to San Francisco and who were camped now in the grimy recesses of city streets. Why should these people in the restaurant consider for one second the young strangers who'd laid claim to squalid city corners? These patrons could leave their cafés and bars and step over kids huddled against the cold in donated blankets, or over kids too stoned to roll out of the way; they could go home and not think of those children again.

"What are you going to do if you find her?" Sherry said as we picked up the pace, once we'd agreed on getting a glass of wine or even a martini back at the hotel bar when we returned. She'd asked me the same question several times since we'd left home—and even before we'd left, when I'd first brought up the idea of her going with me to search for Stephanie. This time the strain in her voice made me think she was worried I was going to fall apart in
front of her if we found my daughter here only to have her run off again.

"I don't know," I said. "I really don't."

And I didn't know. Force Stephanie onto an airplane? Sherry and I both knew that was nonsense; there'd be no forcing her to do anything. Besides, Stephanie would no doubt be surrounded by friends who'd be all about protecting her from me. They wouldn't let me take her away. I didn't have the authority to demand that she whip herself into shape and get her ass back to Oregon. Nor could I charm her with gentle words and nice promises. All I had to offer was our home, her family, school. Amanda. Amanda most of all. None of those things apparently mattered to her anymore, and they made up my entire stash, my whole ball of wax.

So here's what I told myself: If I saw Stephanie for a few minutes, at least I'd know my daughter was still in the world, however distant that world was from mine. Maybe that knowledge, for now, would be enough.

Amanda was back in Eugene, so why was Stephanie still on the road? That's what I couldn't figure out. When they'd first bolted—those early days of slipping off to some downtown haunt right there in our own town, before they'd thought to jump a train and go far away—I was convinced that Stephanie didn't want to be this bad. Not really. She didn't want this much of my disapproval or rebuke. Deep down, I thought, she longed to come home and reconcile with me and her little sisters, to do well in school and have nice friends and take art lessons and get ready for a good college—she was only on the streets with Amanda to be Amanda's companion, her protector, so that each girl would know that she had someone watching over her. But that no longer added up, not with Amanda home for months, raw and aching for some news of Stephanie. Ruined over the lack of any word from Stephanie.

What was out there that allowed Stephanie to forget the rest of us? Especially to forget Amanda, her best friend, her sister, her accomplice, her other half ?

Eventually, after a lot of talking around the subject, Amanda had told me that hours after her overdose in Tucson, after Stephanie's amateur resuscitation had restarted Amanda's heart—Stephanie the one, indeed, who'd bent over her sister, breathing into her mouth, thumping her chest, eventually dragging her into an apartment building to make a call and then waiting until the paramedics arrived—and after a shot had counteracted the heroin in Amanda's system, the girls had been hauled to a group home by a cop who'd told them they couldn't run away because he was "too fat and too slow" to catch them. Run away they did. The next morning, after another night sleeping on the streets, the girls were walking around downtown Tucson when, for some reason, they drew the attention of a street officer—maybe a business owner had complained of the girls' loitering; maybe the cop had spotted them trying to buy drugs. Whatever his reason, the officer sidled up to them and asked who they were. Stephanie rattled off the first fake name that came to her, but Amanda—to Stephanie's dismay and surprise—gave her real name. Just blurted it out. The cop radioed in her real identification, and—what? Put together the near death of the night before or found old charges against her? I had no idea, and Amanda wouldn't say. I barely got her to recite the last details: the officer shoving Amanda into the back seat of his car as Stephanie hurried down the sidewalk. "We'll be together soon," Stephanie called from yards away as the cop shut the door on Amanda. "I'll be with you soon."

Since that day, eight months of silence.

Here in San Francisco, in my secret heart, I simply wanted to spot Stephanie in this vast place so she'd know I'd come looking for her. Or maybe she didn't even need to see me, or I her. Maybe I was searching for her in a city that she'd probably left long ago so I could someday claim that I'd done what any good mother would do. I'd looked. I'd pursued. I'd pounded the pavement seeking my daughter. Even though she obviously didn't want to be found, I'd done my best to locate my lost child.

Stephanie, who'd become an inhabitant of the streets and of
the rail yards. Not someone I knew, someone probably even more war-torn than when she'd left. I imagined her, her hair grown out and larger ceramic plugs shoved into her earlobes; the ripped T-shirt and the black jeans with leather patches; the hoodie with cuffs that she stuck her thumbs through to make half-gloves; the stink of her body, the stink of her breath. Not the girl who'd once spent about an hour in the bathroom every morning making sure that the curl in her bangs was neither too tight nor too loose but the perfect soft loop resting against her flawless skin (Stephanie back then had used so much hairspray in the morning that six-year-old Mary once complained, "She's putting a hole in the bozo layer!"). This wasn't the daughter who'd written notebooks full of poetry about the dog that had died and the dad she'd left behind; it wasn't the girl who'd been invited to lunches at her teachers' homes on the weekends.

I would have said she had become a stranger, but strangers have the gift of benign unfamiliarity, a barrier they can choose to break down or keep erect. Stephanie and I had only alienation.

The Larkin Street center, on the northwest corner of the intersection, was unlit when Sherry and I got there, about nine o'clock at night. The windows were black, though a smear of light snuck out from a side door that had been propped open a couple of inches with a shoe. I pushed it open all the way and stepped inside, Sherry behind me.

"Hello?" I called.

"Excuse me?" Sherry shouted.

There was no response, though I heard the soft clatter of friendly talk and dishes from a back room.

"Hello?" I called again.

I moved through the large, chilly area in which folding tables were lined end to end. The room seemed colder because of the empty metal chairs scattered this way and that, as if people had left the room suddenly, abandoning their messes on the long, flat surfaces. The tables were covered with paint kits, pictures cut from
magazines, and butcher paper splashed with bold colors, muddied now by the dim light. The rug, avocado green and thin, scuffed up under my shoes.

"Is anyone here?" Sherry shouted more loudly.

Chairs in the next room, behind the wall, erupted in noise then, pulled back with scrapes and bumps, and before I could look in the doorway ahead, five or six men and women in their twenties emerged, rushing toward us. They wove together like a human fence and pushed forward. Sherry and I stepped back. I held up one hand.

"Wait," I said.

"What are you doing here?" one man demanded. He wore an earnest flannel shirt, jeans, and dusty, heavy boots. "Who let you in?"

"I'm looking for my daughter," I said, lowering my hand to my side, yanking my purse strap higher on my shoulder. "Can you help me?"

The man, who had a gangly, long frame and a jolt of cropped hair—and held his napkin still twisted in his hand—walked around Sherry and me to open wide the door we had just come through.

"We'll call a counselor. Maybe she can talk to you," the man said. "But you can't be in here." He ushered us through the door.

A woman behind me repeated it: "You can't come in here!" As if we'd broken into a secret house and spotted contraband.

A few seconds later, the door snapped shut, the shoe having been kicked out of the way, leaving us standing on the street. A lock clicked as a last reminder of how unwelcome we were in there. We waited five minutes or ten, pacing up and down in front of the building, both of us a little nervous about the neighborhood and the hour, our arms wrapped across our chests against the wind.

"Maybe we should come back tomorrow," Sherry said, and I shrugged. She was probably right. Waiting on this sidewalk made no sense. But I couldn't stand the thought of a fruitless first night in the city—hadn't we come here to endure the hardships and challenges of the hunt? Still, Sherry's suggestion was correct: it was getting late and I was hungry and tired, and I knew she was too.

I was about to concede and head back to the hotel when the main door opened and a middle-aged woman beckoned to us. Sherry took a long look at her and whispered that this time she'd stay outside, but could I hurry? I nodded yes and went inside the dingy office, a small brown sofa under a blind-covered window, desk in the center of the room, large chalkboard on the wall scrawled white with names:
Justin, Amy, Steven, Kim.

"How can I help you?" the woman said. Before I could respond, the phone clipped to her belt burred and she held one finger up to me as a Be Patient sign and answered it. When she returned the phone to its slot a few minutes later, I had a poster I'd brought along unrolled on the desk.

"This is my daughter," I said. "Is she here? Have you seen her?"

The counselor looked over Stephanie's picture—one from the first day of ninth grade, her satchel on her back filled with lunch and notebooks and new pencils. She patted the image as if assuring me that, oh yes, my child was pretty and sweet and worth looking for. Then she told me she couldn't tell me if Stephanie was at this shelter. Even if she'd just seen Stephanie, even if Stephanie was in the next room eating pizza with the other street teenagers and the young-adult human fence who'd volunteered their evenings to help out with the "homeless youth," even if she was sick, addicted, arrested, I couldn't be told.

"I hope you understand, it's our mission to protect the kids," she said, lowering herself into the chair behind her desk.

"If my daughter is here, I want to see her," I said, shaking now, sick to death of this same answer. Suddenly I despised this woman and her position that the best way to protect a fifteen-year-old girl was to keep her from her mother.

"I know," she said, patting the poster again in a way that made me pull it from under her palm and rolled it into a tight tube. "We get dozens of parents in here every month and every one of them tells me the same thing," she went on, scowling, worn thin by me and my touchiness. "They want their children back. But that's not my job. My job is to make a safe place for kids who'd otherwise be on the street."

I opened my mouth but shut it without saying anything. I could see by the look on her face and the way she flipped a pen between her fingers that she was going to hold rigidly to the position granted her. The nonprofit-sanctioned permission to assume she could do better for lost and wandering teenagers than any parent standing before her. She was already done with me—sure that she could provide better for Stephanie, if indeed Stephanie was in her building, than I could.

I had no defense since what she believed was, at least in part, true. It was impossible for me to provide for Stephanie at that moment—Stephanie didn't want me to provide for her—so perhaps, by default, this stranger behind this cheap desk in this unfriendly building was the only provider Stephanie could have right now. If my daughter was even around this city and not traveled on to some distant place that none of us could name: suddenly the country seemed very big and very foreboding.