Live Through This (30 page)

Stephanie, who apparently agreed with my sense of futility, had her head cocked with an oh-this-old-crap-again expression on her face. We both knew the truth: no one could instruct us how to get to the other side of our own private sea of hurt and bitterness. We had to swim our way toward forgiveness ourselves, discover it ourselves, whatever that meant and however distant the possibility seemed that day at the juvenile center. Until then, this would be about two people making each other miserable.

Ten minutes later in the car, with Stephanie in the passenger seat, I started toward the bridge that led to our home. I planned to stop first at the hardware store to pick up a pane of window
glass and some putty and then get Stephanie to help me replace the window I'd broken the night before. I'd knocked out the shards, packed blankets around the jagged edges, and slid Mollie through so she could open the door and release bounding, happy Kaw-Liga into the yard. I couldn't stand that dog, who triggered the wrath that lived right under my surface, but I'd still let him sleep in Mary and Mollie's room. I woke in the morning to the smell of his musty damp fur and the clicketing sound of his toenails on our wood floors.

Halfway to the hardware store, I suddenly couldn't bear it: going back to the cluttered house, the needy dog, the torn-up cottage. Our same old rhythms, the arrhythms, I should say, the
thump-thumping
along to the next catastrophe that would bring only distress to the younger girls and to Amanda.

I was aware that a good number of the hours Stephanie spent away from our house were spent at Amanda's small rental house, which was shared with five or six others. Neither girl talked to me much about the other, but I could tell—even from a distance—that some dimension of cool remained between them, although they were trying to get back together, the way they used to be. They couldn't get over what had happened that last day on the streets, when Amanda gave her real name and Stephanie went on; they have been years getting over that day.

Now, with Stephanie beside me in the car, I pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the engine. I was fed up enough that I hurt everywhere, as if I'd stood up fast and banged my head into the corner of a kitchen cupboard—in pain and pissed off deep into my back muscles and down my thighs, and so full of the need to scream that nothing could keep the sound in. I didn't yell, though, even though that outburst might have been better, might have released some of the heavy tension between us. I stared straight at my daughter and focused all the anger I could muster.

"I'm done with this," I told her.

"What do you mean?" she said, scowling at her faint reflection in the windshield.

"I mean I'm done, finished. I give up. We can't live together any
more." My hands held the steering wheel at ten and two exactly. "I am so fucking done with you."

She didn't answer, but lifted up her own hands for a second and then dropped them in her lap. Her eyes straight ahead out the windshield, her lips a flat line even in profile.

I'd had lunch earlier in the week with a woman I was interviewing for a story, and after the right quotes and facts were gathered and my notebook put away, we entered into the subject of our kids. I hadn't meant to, but I'd blurted out the worries drilling a hole in my brain—Stephanie. Stephanie home and as aimed for trouble as she'd ever been. I had no idea what to do next. The woman, Vicki, told me it so happened that her ex-husband ran a school in Colorado, a one-of-a-kind boarding school where bright but troubled kids who couldn't get along in public school lived and worked together. And, better yet, the school was funded entirely by an auto company, Honda. It was one of the company's philanthropic projects, and so there were no costs to the students' families other than their children's travel and medical expenses. I ate the last leaf of lettuce in my salad without believing such a place actually existed. I thought Vicki must have at least some of the story wrong, that a school couldn't be that accommodating. But I went home that evening and called Vicki's ex-husband, the school's headmaster, Robert, and he explained Eagle Rock in pretty much the same way. He also told me that parents couldn't send their kids there. The only way for a teenager to get in was to write her own application, her own essays about why she needed a different place and a different kind of education. It would be Stephanie's promise of commitment, not mine, that he'd need if he was going to consider her.

There in the car I told Stephanie, just freed from baby jail, she had two choices: either apply to Eagle Rock School or move on to wherever. If she took the second option, I was done being her mother. Any bond left between her and me would be chopped apart. It's hard for me to remember myself as this shut down, this distant from a daughter who, in her own way, was still sending out a coded call for help I couldn't interpret. She needed me, and she needed me to break through whatever was keeping us parted. But
all I could register then was that Stephanie spent most of her nights either on the floor at Amanda's or at a crusty dive called the Warehouse, an old storage building where a dozen or so kids like her holed up to do whatever holed-up kids do. Drinking and drugs; I figured she was back into both. If that was how she wanted it to go, so be it. I'd give her up to those people and to this way of grinding through her teenage days, with no education and no plan for one. I couldn't have her coming and going whenever she wanted from our house anymore. I couldn't let her do that to Mary and Mollie. And though I'd given her a variation of this ultimatum many times before, this time I meant it. And this time she heard me.

Stephanie chose the school. She wrote and sent in pieces of the application, survived a tough series of elimination interviews, and then went with me to buy long johns and wool socks and sweaters and snow boots; three months after our talk in the car, I put my second daughter on a plane to Denver. She and I battled up to the moment of her departure, and I thought I couldn't wait until she was gone, yet once I was in that blue and gold waiting room at the same airport I'd been in dozens of times to send off and reclaim my children, I found no pleasure at her leaving. Not one bit of happiness. What settled in me was a deeper sense of defeat, the endless sorrow of irreplaceable loss.

I knew that day that we'd not live together ever again. Stephanie was a little girl when she first hit the streets with Amanda, still a child. The ways we needed each other would never be fulfilled, or at least not in the manner that mothers and daughters usually borrow and collude and give and take from each other before they part for good. It was out of habit that Stephanie and I spent fury on each other in the weeks before she left for Colorado. We didn't know how to show each other joy or relief, and we'd forgotten how to be sad; we'd lost the ability to show the plain, aching sadness of separation. We flung anger at each other every hour because we couldn't remember how not to. We couldn't remember what to replace it with.

Eagle Rock School, tucked in the foothills of Rocky Mountain National Park just outside Estes Park, Colorado, is made up of a scatter of log buildings connected by meandering gravel paths. Most of the ground around the ten or so metal-roofed classrooms and dormitories is bare. A dash of pink and gold wild-flowers pop up in the spring, but otherwise growth is sparse between copses of stunted pine trees. In the winter, which lasts from about October to April, the place is buried under piles of drifting snow.

This Colorado landscape was unfamiliar to me, beyond my imagination as a place to turn to during the conflagration that was my family's life. The night we finally heard from Stephanie after eight months of silence, and in the subsequent weeks and months of getting her home from Austin, it would never have occurred to me that a school in a Rocky Mountain town was the place she would finally flourish. But that's what happened.

About eighty-five students from everywhere in the country board at Eagle Rock. They live in sturdy houses that have names like Piñon and Spruce and Lodgepole, and each house is designed to accommodate sixteen students, eight girls in one wing and eight boys in another. The two wings are separated by a common area, and students are watched over by two resident adults in each house. At six thirty
A.M.
, fleece-bundled students show up in front of the main lodge for an hour of required exercise, which is led by Robert the headmaster. Most days that means running a three-mile loop
at first light, down the hill to the gate and then back up the steep and winding blacktop drive in a communal cloud of frosty breath. By eight each morning, Robert is holding the daily gathering in front of the lodge's massive fireplace, tossing out paperback novels as door prizes of sorts to teenagers sprawled on the floor, a number of whom are braiding the hair of a boy or girl in front of them, most dressed in baggy sweatpants and sweatshirts. Robert makes announcements and sets forth the plan for the day and allows students far from home one brief free-for-all gripe session—
Someone stole my stereo and I want it back; There was too much noise in the commons last night; I was the only one to show up for KP again.
To me, when I visited, this was the sound of ordinary teenage banter—obnoxious and joyous at once—which happily included my daughter.

Until the summer after her nineteenth birthday, a nearly three-year period, Stephanie was a student at Eagle Rock. Each of the five or six times Barry and I drove over from Oregon to visit her, the tires of our car squealed through the hairpin turns leading to the ten-thousand-foot-elevation compound, and my head got dizzy as my heart beat harder. My mouth became sticky and dry, the moisture in my body wicked away by an altitudinal wind.

In August 2001, Barry and I were at the school for the last time—we'd made a final trip to watch Stephanie graduate. Nine students would receive diplomas, making my daughter's graduating class the second largest in the school's history. A small group—yet I still wanted Steph to feel like the day was as big a deal as the graduations at schools that paraded five or six hundred students across the stage. I'd ordered announcements off the Internet, bundles of small cards with Stephanie's name printed on them in formal script, just like those from regular high schools. Before I mailed them, I tucked a picture of her, taken during her last visit home, into each envelope. Stephanie seemed happy enough about the graduation extras, the announcements and ad hoc senior photos, but maybe they didn't matter as much to her as they did to me. Maybe she went along with the trappings because she knew how attached I was to the unspoken message that went with them:
See
how normal we are after all? See how much she's over being a bad girl on a bad road?

During her years at Eagle Rock, Stephanie threatened to quit at least a dozen times—plenty of nights I'd lie awake in my bed at home convinced that she wasn't going to finish, but instead to toss herself again into the raw tumble of the streets. But she didn't quit. And in the end, the final stretch of months before she graduated, she was among the students chosen for a weeklong class in politics in Washington, D.C., and for trips with teachers to national conventions where she spoke as one of the turned-toward-a-brighter-future kids. She was the Eagle Rock student selected by the staff to get the Rotary Club funds that allowed her to live in Thailand for a summer and teach kindergarten in a small village called Pha Lariet. She put in her required eight hundred hours of community service, cleaning and repairing forest service cabins, shoveling the snow from elderly folks' driveways, picking up garbage in the city's park. Stephanie had squeaked by in math and science classes, and she'd excelled in every art class she could get into. She'd finished glass-blowing workshops with enough glistening bowls and vases to line a bookcase, and she'd learned how to develop her own distinctively grainy photographs in the school darkroom. She wrote poetry and made books with artfully sewn bindings. She taught herself to play the accordion so she could pump out Tom Waits's "Closing Time," among other songs of his, and in the school's bulletin she dedicated her graduation not to me or her father but to her favorite singer, "the man who's gotten me through the worst of times."

Stephanie did these things, made these changes, a thousand miles away from me. It was Robert and the other teachers at the school who got to look on at this young woman who'd come to charm them (who was once again the girl who adults loved to love). They saw her shed the Sno-Cone-colored hair and the dirty clothes and the plugs in her earlobes. The snarl on her face, the one she'd come back from Austin with, faded. Her skin settled into its former translucent glow. The anger and the need to run once molded to her skin—like a waxy rind on cheese—fell away during
these Eagle Rock years. All those many miles from the rest of us, with adults other than me guiding her, she put an end to her time on the streets.

Graduation weekend. We were all there—the three other girls, their father, my mother, Barry, and I—sitting in metal seats on a Friday afternoon while the girl wearing a silky spaghetti-strapped peach dress and a shine of pink on her lips gave her final senior presentation in the Eagle Rock gymnasium. After her last words and a squeaky sendoff from the school band, which consisted of about eight kids and Robert (on trombone), Barry and I wandered out to the grounds outside the gym. I stood in the afternoon air looking at the grayish mountains, still trying to adjust to the altitude's pinch across my forehead and waiting for Stephanie to come out and find us. She'd been surrounded by her sisters and by Tom—and teachers and friends—right after her talk, so Barry and I thought it best to step away. Robert, tall and ruddy-cheeked, with a spry patch of sand-colored hair on his head, came out the main doors with trombone case in hand and walked over—he knew Barry had to leave at dawn the next day, hours before the actual cap-and-gown ceremony took place, to catch a plane to an East Coast appointment. Robert quietly asked us now if we'd like to have a private showing of the slides he'd collected since these nine kids had arrived at Eagle Rock. Each teenager had been some version of war-torn and lost back at the beginning; many had been like Stephanie when she landed on the school's doorstep: still itching for a fight, daring the Eagle Rock adults to throw her out. She'd been exploding out of corners for so long by then, she didn't understand for years how to do anything but explode.