Live Through This (32 page)

We got out of the tub and went back to our room for sandwiches and television, the final announcements of coming-out girls following us down the path. Later that night, and for the first time since she was a toddler, we crawled into the same bed—a big bed that allowed us to keep our sleeping distance. I lay awake, thinking about the day—about the college that made her happy and the re
sort that made her miserable. I wanted to make sense of it all, but whatever lesson I was to take away from our brief stay in the posh hotel didn't fully come that night.

Maybe it's as simple as Amanda allowing me to mother her again, and me allowing myself to mother her. I've wondered too if that day marked the moment that she and I could finally be on the same side, protecting each other from whatever force was trying to humiliate us, or to make us feel small.

Amanda was mostly silent during the graduation days at Eagle Rock—wandering away by herself into the forested grounds or reading a book on Stephanie's top bunk. Staying clear of her dad and of me. I'd been concerned about her since we'd arrived and would stay concerned—though I wasn't thinking about Amanda the night Barry and I made our way to the room at the back of the administration building. At this moment, my mind was fully consumed with Stephanie. We sat down on folding chairs, and Robert soon started flashing photos on a wavy white screen, images of Steph mixed with hundreds of images of the other graduates. Stephanie playing intramural football. Stephanie in the lodge eating. Stephanie dressed up for one of the rare Eagle Rock dances. My daughter helping repair a bridge in the city's park; shoveling snow from the school's walks; standing in front of a class to give a paper. Interwoven with the life of the campus, this girl who'd finished growing up without her mom.

In the shadows of the room, with Robert and his own eleven-year-old daughter behind us running the show, I hunched in my chair and pulled my jacket tighter around me. Barry set his open hand on my thigh,
I'm here.
We laughed at the funny slides, the ones we were supposed to laugh at, but mostly I swam in a kind of grief the room couldn't contain, and I suddenly felt very far from my daughters who were just yards away on the other side of the school grounds. I grieved deeply for the time I'd missed with Stephanie. I was wrung out, too, over the post-Eagle Rock plan, a grief that I'd kept from poking at me until this moment. Amanda would return to Prescott, and Stephanie had decided to move to the Berk
shires in Massachusetts to do a yearlong internship at a magazine before she started college. Neither girl was coming home, or anywhere near home. This time they'd be settled, directed, more mature, and I could release myself from the day-to-day fussing about their safety. But none of us would be in the same town, making up for lost time. Whatever was going to happen among us would have to happen at a distance. I didn't much care for that.

In the months and years that followed, with no immediate crisis concerning my oldest daughters exploding in front of me, I spent a lot of time alone. Mary and Mollie went off with their own friends as they finished high school, dabbling in the most innocuous acts of rebellion (or so they seemed to me): getting caught with a beer at a party, skipping school to go sledding with friends, things like that. Then they, too, started taking college classes, getting apartments of their own, finding boyfriends with whom to spend most of their time. Home by myself many days, before Barry and I were married and living together, I often ground away at one question: where had we gone so wrong? I'd cast back to the past to try to sort out what had torn us up, the train wreck of their teenage years. I'd ask myself again, and again: What happened? And how do I ever get over what happened?

How do I forgive myself for what happened?

Not long ago, I visited Stephanie's house in the Berkshires, a small rented cottage on a large parcel of land where (in the spring) a garden grew and, beyond the barbed wire fence, cattle grazed. It was mid-January when I arrived this time, and fifteen degrees below zero. Everything—trees, roads, water pipes, windowpanes—was ice caked, encased in winter's stony glass. Stephanie had fixed up for me the tiny attic room that she usually used as an art studio, and she'd bought, on her meager budget, a small radiant heater to warm the room's scant square footage, which was just big enough for a bed, a desk, and a bookcase.

I woke up the morning after I'd arrived and crawled out from under the mound of blankets—
down comfortables,
Mollie called
them as a kid—and into my own thick robe. The room was still dim, the sun not yet high enough to provide full light through the one frosty window. Against the far wall, Stephanie's desk was precisely arranged. Neat, as they say, as a pin. Every pencil, paintbrush, roll of film in its place. A gray manual typewriter sat in the middle of the wood surface, and on the paper rolled into it was a half-finished poem.

I couldn't help but think she had left out these items for me to see. A pile of her photographs. The letter from her college telling her that she'd made the dean's list. I picked up a calligraphy pen, set it back down. I opened a sketchbook leaning against another wall to look at a drawing of one of the backyard cows. Everything in the room was a reintroduction to my daughter, to the young woman she'd become, and I shuddered with a bittersweet pleasure. Had she meant for me to do this, to touch and see everything that was hers? I held in my hand the things she'd held in her hands.

Stephanie called out to me. I pulled my robe tighter against the cold and, shutting the small bedroom door behind me so as not to spill the heat, started down the stairs. My daughter was waiting at the bottom, hip cocked in that way she has so that her lean body nearly takes on the shape of the first letter of her name, and she held two cups of coffee from which white steam waved and unfurled. The furnace had yet to warm up the drafty old house, which had grown cold through the long night—a sheen of ice formed on the inside as well as on the outside of the windows—and Steph saw me shiver.

"Come here, Mom," she said, handing me a cup and pulling me toward the living room. She yanked two wool blankets from the top shelf of her coat closet, and, setting our coffee on a table for a few seconds, we each wrapped up in an extra layer. I stood bundled and sipping hot coffee in the middle of the room while she walked over to switch on the radio. I recognized Garrison Keillor's voice filling the room from the speakers. This was his morning show about poetry. It wasn't broadcast in Eugene, but Stephanie had told me about it many times. She often wrote down the names of the poets and the titles of the verses and sent them to me. Now
she moved back so we could stand side by side and listen, our separate breaths puffing white into the still air of the room. We waited through the announcements of birthdays and the few historical occasions of this day, and then the host finally came to the program's daily poem.

I have many times since read over the last stanza of the poem Keillor recited that morning, his broadcast voice the same timbre as the rumble of the furnace that had kicked on by then, both voice and heater beginning to warm the air around my daughter and me. It's not that I believe the universe, or God, produced the perfect couplets for reconciliation. Robert Frost's lines didn't then or now offer the shape of what Stephanie and I needed if we were going to close the space that remained between us; these words weren't going to wash away the residue of our history. We'd have to find a way to do that ourselves during the days she returned to Eugene for visits and in the times I stayed with her over the summers and winters to follow. Stephanie and I walked the streets of her town, hiked in her woods, swam in her river, cooked in her kitchen, drank cold beer in her favorite cafés, and somehow we found our way back to each other without the explanations I once thought would be required. I've not asked why and she's not said why, and month after month, the why of our once-separation becomes less important.

But this day, in her cold-to-the-core house, the Robert Frost poem filled me with both sadness for the life not lived and with a glimmer of the peace that could come from repair between us. Before the last of the poem rose out of her radio, I looked over at Stephanie's face. Her cheeks the pink of spring's first camellia blossom, and her eyes clear and ready. She looked back at me and smiled, her hand emerging from under her blanket to take mine as Garrison Keillor read to us.

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig's having lashed it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:

I don't know where it's likely to go better.

***

Seven years after she and Stephanie ran off to live on the streets, Amanda gave birth to a son, just minutes after midnight on the sixth day of July. Earlier that night, I'd sat in a worn-out patio chair outside the small apartment nearby where Stephanie was staying, along with her boyfriend, who'd traveled with her from Massachusetts. They'd come for the baby. We all waited for the baby: she on the concrete porch smoking a cigarette and pressing the cell phone to her ear, me in a plastic lawn chair sipping a beer and watching stars glittering in a moonless sky. Amanda's water had broken at eight in the evening. At about ten thirty, the phone rang, and Stephanie answered it. I tried to listen in and tried not to listen in at the same time. Gabriel, the baby's father, had informed me earlier that Amanda didn't want me hovering around her through the early stages of her labor—they wanted to be alone for those hours. I'd be summoned, along with Steph, when Amanda could endure company; when birth seemed imminent.

Now in quick succession Stephanie shut off the phone, stood up, threw her cigarette to the ground, and reached for my hand. "He said to hurry," she said. But I stood slowly, suddenly clenched with an anxiety that was new to me.

I hadn't been keen on the idea of a home birth when Amanda had told me about their plan; on this sultry evening, weirdly silent after the Fourth of July fireworks and restless activity the evening before, I was even more worried about my daughter giving birth in her own bed, with candlelight, soft music, and one midwife. Once Stephanie and I were at their house just a mile or so down
the street, Gabriel seemed to read these doubts as if they were listed across my forehead. He gave me a hard look at the front door before I stepped in.

"She doesn't want any noise," he said, whispering. "And nobody can say one negative thing, so keep those opinions to yourself."

I pushed a little to get past him, staying as quiet as he'd asked but also letting some old claims of motherhood take hold: if I wanted to make noise, I'd make noise. Who was he to tell me not to make noise? With Stephanie behind me, I padded through the blackened house, through the quiet kitchen, and into the bedroom, lit only by dozens of scentless candles, already dripping wax down the sides of the bookshelves and the front of the dresser.

Amanda was nowhere.

"She won't come out," Gabe said, words that propelled Stephanie and me a few steps to the doorway of the bathroom in the corner of the master bedroom. As soon as we got close, Amanda's voice burst from the darkness. "Get away from me! Don't come in here!"

We scurried to the kitchen, and Gabe switched on the dim light over the sink. That's when I saw how scared he was. Steph noticed it too, and reached over to take my hand. He told us that she'd let him in the bathroom a few minutes earlier and that he'd had a good look. She was bleeding, a lot, and the contractions, one right after the other, were each lasting two minutes. The midwife was driving back from an appointment in Portland as fast as she dared but wouldn't arrive for at least half an hour.

"Did she tell you what to do?" I asked him.

"Find clean washcloths. Put some blankets in the oven on low. Boil water," he said.

Boil water? That was it?

"Let's get her to the hospital," I said. "She needs to be in the hospital."

Gabe intensified his stare about tenfold. "She wants to have the baby here," he said. "It's going to be fine."

To keep my hands away from the phone, to prevent myself from
taking over and punching 911, to stop myself from canceling this man and his anti-hospital birth plan, I opened the cupboard door to look for a pot.

Just when I'd set the water on the stove to simmer, Amanda called out for me. I hovered in the kitchen, wondering if I'd imagined hearing her say
Mom.
Then she said it again. I went back into the bedroom alone, this time dropping to my hands and knees and crawling the last few feet through darkness to the open bathroom door. I stayed on my side of the wood threshold, at least smart enough not to venture onto the towel-covered linoleum, where she had rolled herself into a tight ball. I glanced back toward the door and saw that Gabe was still in the kitchen talking with Steph. Perfect. Now I could insist to Amanda that we get her to a doctor and a hospital; now I could make her listen to me. I mumbled sounds, looking for words, then reached out to touch her damp hair. When she didn't jerk back or tell me to leave her alone, I moved my fingers through one long, loose strand.

"It hurts," she said as she leaned into my shoulder for just a second—the last time she would let me touch her that night. "It hurts so much worse than I thought it would."

I stayed quiet—my protest over this choice of a home birth suddenly swallowed by the ache in her, and also by the strength that poured from her naked body. Maybe it was in this moment that I figured out that I had to trust her—that I had to trust her and Gabe, as a couple—as impossible as that could feel from one moment to the next. Even if I thought I saw danger and doom ahead, I had to let them make their own choices about this baby and then live with those choices.