Live Through This (29 page)

I'd asked the few pastors who'd heard me out to please look for my daughter—take a couple of hours one day to see if she was findable, figure out where she was living and if she was safe and fed. Stephanie had mentioned to Amanda that she was working at a pizza restaurant near campus. That was a pretty good clue, wasn't it? How many pizza shops could be harboring a fifteen-year-old runaway? Mostly, I realize now, I wanted these representatives of God to discover some way to ask my daughter to come home so I wouldn't have to.

But they said no, one minister after the other. "Do we know
you?" one man asked me. "I don't understand why you've called here."

Which leads to the obvious question: why didn't I go myself? Why didn't I find a babysitter and hop on a plane that night to do my own digging through college cafés in search of my child, instead of asking strangers to do that for me? No doubt I could find her—the chances of coming upon her in Austin were a thousand times better than those of my lost weekend in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. What was keeping me in my chair at work, so afraid to trust this recontact with Stephanie that all I could do was curse the unhelpful reverends?

That night at home I phoned Richard and Jane in Montana—their having taken Stephanie into their home and family for half a year giving them claim, I thought, to hear even sketchy news of my daughter's whereabouts. Maybe I tried to explain my state of mind: stunned. My state of inaction. I don't remember. Whatever I said, a few days later Richard was on a plane to Austin, doing what I wasn't ready to do. He walked around the streets near the university, scouring the restaurants until he ran right into Stephanie at a Pizza Hut. She'd lied about her age and was waitressing full-time, bustling around the tables, arms loaded with trays of hot sausage and cheese pies.

She was, Richard said when he called me from his Austin hotel room, nonplussed at seeing him standing in the doorway of her workplace. She stared and stammered. Her boss let her off early, and Stephanie took Richard to meet her friends, casting sidelong glances his way as they walked along the street as if trying to decipher his sudden appearance in Texas. One friend turned out to be a theater student who'd allowed Stephanie to crash at her apartment until she could start paying part of the rent. "It's filthy," Richard said of that crowded place. "They're squatting in filth. Stephanie's teeth are brown."

The visit was short and sometimes tense, though Richard got Stephanie talking about what she was going to do next. By the end of Richard's stay, my daughter had agreed it was probably about
time to return to Eugene. But not yet. In the weeks to come, my brother Ron would appear at her door to take her to dinner. My mother, in Texas on business, would see Stephanie too and would do her best to persuade my daughter to come home. But I stayed away, only later realizing why. After two years of going after my child, reeling her back home again and again, this time I wanted her to choose to return to me.

By early summer, I'd talked to Stephanie several times on the telephone and had begun to understand her tentative plans: she wanted to go first to Tucson to see her father, then I would buy her—and the dog—a ticket to fly to Eugene. We could start to put small parts of this into motion, though much was not yet firm. Ours was a standoff that would be weeks in breaking, either toward some sense of reconciliation or toward more alienation, who knew.

While Amanda worked on college applications and found a job at a daycare camp that summer, and with Mary and Mollie off for the annual visit with their father, I prepared for Stephanie to finally come home. I borrowed five thousand dollars against my mortgage, an unheard-of move for me. I convinced a contractor friend to give me a good deal on remodeling our backyard storage shed into a small cottage for my returning child. I'd forgotten, I suppose, how outraged I was when Tom and Ellen stuck Amanda in a made-over outbuilding in their own backyard when she'd gone to live with them all those years ago. In my mind, this backyard construction project of mine made perfect sense: Stephanie had been gone too long and had seen and done too much to simply move back into her old room and take up a ninth-grader's life. That was my justification, anyway—though there was another part to it. I wanted to have her a good distance from my bedroom in the rear of the house so I wouldn't have to notice her comings and goings, which were sure to get under my skin like some itchy rash.

By the end of August, the little house was finished, its walls painted periwinkle blue and filled with garage-sale furniture—bed, chest of drawers, dressing table with mirror, and a big overstuffed chair in the corner. An extra bathroom was beyond my means, so she'd have to share the one in the house with Mary, Mollie, and me.
But everything else felt as right as it could feel for this once-lost daughter's return home.

One night in November, after Stephanie had been living at home for eight weeks, living in that remodeled shed, I made my way across the dark patio behind our house and around the corner to the wet backyard, the last of the evening's rain dripping off the eaves, to peer in the window of her small place. The cottage sat smack in the middle of our backyard, just east of the garden and about ten feet south of the main house, a window on each of its three sides. I had to stand on a stepstool, which I'd pulled over from the patio, to see into her bright room. Stephanie had left on every lamp when she'd taken off to join her friends. The day before, maybe, or the day before that. Though irritated about what she was doing to my electricity bill, I was also glad for the light, because I needed to know two things: if the whining dog inside was suffering from hunger and thirst, and how much damage that dog was doing to a cottage for which I'd taken out a big, fat loan.

Kaw-Liga was a gangly tan Lab mix, with a lolling spotted tongue and huge paws. I hadn't wanted him to live with us—adding a dog to the tricky mix of estranged daughter and wary family seemed too much—but Stephanie had bluntly informed me that where she went, the dog went. So I'd given in and here he was, scratching the new molding around the door to splinters, peeing on the rugs I'd bought from the carpet store's remnant pile, tearing the pillows off Stephanie's bed into clouds of floating feathers, and rolling on his back to moan in loneliness and boredom.

Mary and Mollie had been pleading with me all evening to break the glass out of a locked window so one of them could slip a skinny body through the opening to release Kaw-Liga. Now, instead, I put my hands to the sides of my face, blinder-like, seeking some clue to the schedule of Stephanie's appearances and disappearances. After a few seconds, I made out the shimmer of water in one bowl and a meal's worth of fresh kibble in the other: a relief. Stephanie had been there in the past few hours to feed her dog and to play with him while I was at work and the little girls at school.

Still. The dog was miserable. Mary, Mollie, and I had heard his barks and cries when we got home that evening, before we'd even opened the car doors. Mary ran to the backyard with Mollie on her heels to stand on the stepstool and try to see what shape he was in. As soon as Kaw-Liga spotted the girls in the window he went even wilder, yipping and leaping, believing release was near. I went in the house to retrieve messages off our machine, all of which were from neighbors asking me to please do something about the dog that never shut up.

That night at dinnertime, as I'd been finishing up a pot of beans and rice, which we'd top with cheese and sour cream and eat with salad and cornbread, the phone had rung. It was someone from the county's youth services—"baby jail," as Stephanie called it. Stephanie had been arrested for drinking wine in the park, the woman on the other end of the line had told me. But not just underage drinking with her old friends and a new group of pals she'd found on Eugene's streets—for that mere transgression she might have been given a ticket and a ride home. Instead, she'd battled with the cops, calling them names, and she'd shoved one while trying to wriggle out of his grip. That made the charge assault and worth a trip to a holding cell.

"Do you want to come get her?" the woman said.

"What's my other choice?" I asked.

"You could leave her here for the night and come get her tomorrow."

"I'll see you tomorrow," I'd said, and hung up.

With Stephanie locked up until morning, I had to do something about the dog. And so I was standing next to the cottage considering my choices when Mary came outside in her pajamas and robe, fresh from a shower. She stayed at the edge of the patio and out of the damp grass. "Are you going to do it, Mom?" she asked me.

A couple of days earlier, the extra key to Stephanie's cottage, a room she had dubbed "the shack" on her first day home, had been in the top drawer in the kitchen. Now that key was gone, and so was Stephanie. If I wanted to get in, I'd have to do what the girls
had suggested earlier: put a brick through one of the expensive Pella windows, bought to be extra-safe and extra-sturdy.

I paused for a minute, Mary's still, small frame bundled in a furry pink robe a beacon from the patio. "I guess I have to," I finally said. I walked over to the side of the house to a small pile of bricks I stored there for garden use and picked one up, rough and cold and heavy in my hand. I hauled back and gave it a hurl.

A few months before, in the middle of summer while Stephanie was still with her father, I'd had a couple of meetings at the local evening alternative school, whose population was about twenty-five near dropouts and a few harried teachers. Classes met at a suburban high school at night, hours after the regular students went home. At our second meeting, the head teacher told me there were no spaces left—Stephanie was out of luck for the fall semester. But by the time I'd left his office that day, she was in. When I'd mentioned what I did for a living, he'd said that some of the kids had been asking to start their own newspaper. I promised to teach a journalism class for free every Tuesday night if he'd find my daughter a slot, and he agreed.

Stephanie quit attending that school after the third or fourth week. She didn't like it and I shouldn't have assumed she would, she told me. True enough: I had assumed. I couldn't imagine a better choice for her in our town if she wanted to finish high school. My problem now, once she'd ditched the plan for good, was that I'd made a deal with the head teacher. I couldn't see how I could drop out as my daughter had, so every Tuesday evening after work, Mary, Mollie, and I drove out to the school so I could repeat a few simple ideas about leads and nut graphs and sources to about ten kids and get them to write little spurts of stories for our version of an alternative school newspaper that we'd put together before Christmas break. My daughters sat in the back row doing their homework or reading—or staring at a boy clad in black and metal who typically fell asleep, snoring into his forearm. I saw Mary gaze at the clock now and then; I felt her wishing we could just go home.

Home, where we rarely saw Stephanie, or even heard from her. Upon her arrival in Eugene, this daughter had needed only a couple of days to reconnect with kids on the street from past years and to get hooked up with new ones. At first when she stopped coming home at night, I was astonished—but why was I? My practical side couldn't make sense of this surprise and disappointment. Wasn't this exactly what I should have expected? The same old, same old. Nothing had changed since she'd last been with us, except that my heart was even harder toward her. We were simply starting again where we'd left off, one angry woman versus one angry teenager. I continued to pick fights with her because I'd grown oh-so-comfortable with that mode of communication and only that mode of communication when it came to Stephanie. She didn't get why I was so adamant about addressing matters she felt were finished, done with—school, curfews, drinking—and I couldn't begin to get her fury or her stubbornness toward me. It hadn't sunk in yet that Stephanie took the remodeled cottage not as an offer of private space and a gesture of forgiveness but as one more sign, along with my distance and silence in her presence, that she didn't quite belong in our family or in our house.

The day after Stephanie's arrest, I took the morning off work to appear at the baby jail. It felt strange that, given all our teenager troubles, I hadn't been there for five years, not since the last session in front of the judge regarding Amanda's arson charge. Now I sat in a small bunkerlike room, the office of the youth services counselor, posters about not doing drugs and not having unprotected sex attached to the walls with wads of pale green adhesive that stuck out the sides like old chewing gum. After a few minutes, Stephanie was led in by a woman whose round face was already drooping even though it was not yet nine
A.M.

Stephanie plopped in an institutional chair across from mine, legs sprawled out in front of her as if she intended to take all the room available. Her clothes were wrinkled and her hair gritty and tousled. She reeked of dried sweat and stale alcohol. She crossed her arms over her chest and refused to look at me, probably know
ing that I'd had the option of getting her the night before and had declined, though maybe she was just going to act—just going to be—furious no matter what. I was going to be angry no matter what too. Any sympathy or desire to start again with this daughter—which I'd weakly brought around in myself in the days before she came home—had been pounded out like dirt from a rug since her return.

The youth services counselor brought out a pile of papers for both of us to sign, and also began to stack on the desk in front of me brochures about various county and state programs that Stephanie could enroll in. Drug rehab, alcohol rehab, or the free school for runaways. Et cetera. We'd tried most of them years before; we'd passed on others years before. The girls had long ago collected their shares of free blankets, pizza on the mall, warm chicken dinners in exchange for an AIDS prevention class at some downtown center. Without access to my bank records, this woman couldn't have tallied the thousands and thousands of dollars I'd doled out for counseling, was doling out even then to the new therapist who was seeing Stephanie when Stephanie bothered to show up. This youth services counselor couldn't have known what pros we were at this business, Stephanie and Amanda and I, how I could list the programs as easily as she did, and how I was so far beyond the solutions she'd laid out that I nearly bounced one hard laugh around her concrete block of an office, where our voices kept landing with a thud on the floor.