Live Through This (7 page)

I wasn't even certain what it meant for a fourteen-year-old to be arrested for a felony. The cops handed me paperwork telling me whom to call, where to appear. Amanda wouldn't be taken into juvenile custody that night but she was suspended from school for two weeks and would be prevented from attending any student activity deemed enjoyable for the rest of the year. We'd meet with a court counselor the following day and schedule a hearing in front of a judge. The judge would decide her sentence.
Her sentence.
The permanence of that rang in my head.

I took the papers and folded them into my purse, refusing to believe what was going on in this room. This was something that happened to other people. To people with bad kids, not to parents with kids like Amanda, a tender and sweet girl who wanted to help and who wanted to please.

Once a week or so Mary and Mollie and I dragged in tired after work and daycare and found the two older girls, who'd walked home from school, all decked out in the old thrift-store prom dresses I'd bought them for Halloween, one mint green, one sea blue. Stephanie, who had a gift for coming up with colorful adjectives and for drawing fleur-de-lis, had written and decorated menus, which she handed to me, and the delighted little girls as soon as we got our coats off and seated ourselves at the din
ing room table.
Creamed peanuts on crispy toast wedges,
$1;
Melted cheese on crackers,
$1
.
50;
Tea with cream and sugar, free with any purchase.
The ink bled down the edges of the paper in long strands of yellow, blue, orange.

Amanda held a tray spread with tiny sandwiches and barely brewed tea. The ripped seam of her dress's waistline tore open another few inches as she walked toward us, her milk-white belly skin peeking through the separated fabric as she balanced the rose-covered china cups I'd inherited from a great-great-aunt. Amanda hurried back into the kitchen for plates and napkins and silverware, which were supposed to have come out first, while Stephanie turned on the Bach Concertos. I smiled at my oldest daughters, tamping down the impatience I tried desperately not to show—I had laundry to do, bills to pay, I smelled cat pee somewhere in the living room, and now there was fine if chipped china to wash by hand. I had no idea what to cook for dinner or how much homework stretched out in front of us before I could finally collapse on the couch and prepare myself for the next day's early rise. I didn't have time to stop everything to sip Earl Grey laden with sweet milk and chew on half a peanut butter sandwich, and yet it was ridiculous to be anything but thrilled, silly to be anything but relaxed—Amanda did this and Stephanie did this because they wanted our everyday life to include some possibility of elegance, or at least to offer a good dose of ease among us.

Now here I was, a few months after the last tea party, surrounded by three men who wanted me to believe that my oldest daughter was a criminal. That she deserved to be punished by the state. That she had to be slapped with a sentence. "I'm sure she wasn't trying to burn the school down," I said, finally finding a few wits with which to defend her, mild as that defense was. I couldn't tell if Amanda had heard what I'd said. She'd sat up again, her face blank.

The cops stared at me. The vice principal cleared his throat. "Give me a call in a few days and let me know what's happened," he said, nodding to us, releasing us from his office, leaving us to sort out our own disaster.

***

In late August, five months after Amanda's arson arrest, I waited again at the end of a passenger tunnel that led from plane to terminal. Post-divorce, I realized how often I'd find myself in this very spot, ready to catch my daughters as they swung from one life to the other and not knowing what to expect. This time I was even more nervous than the others. This time Amanda had threatened not to come back from her father's house.

"You can't just decide to ignore the custody agreement," I'd told Tom the night before, our last talk before the girls left Tucson. I still believed, despite his often-expressed opinion that all rules were made to be broken and that he was the right guy to do the breaking, that the expensive divorce documents bore some weight.

"It's ignored," he said. "She wants to stay with me and she's going to."

Still, standing there at the airport, I had to think he wouldn't go through with it. I couldn't believe he'd actually keep her from me. How would he wedge Amanda into his new family? Besides, she'd done her community-service hours, paid the fine, attended droning fire-prevention and anger-management classes, caught up on her schoolwork, and, worst of all, sat in a cold empty room at the middle school while the rest of the eighth-graders went off to a graduation celebration from which she was banned. The only thing she would prove by not returning was that she'd been chased away—that was my argument when I spoke to her, that she needed to walk back into the school, head lifted high. What I couldn't think too much about was the panic that stirred in me every time I contemplated living without one of my children. I certainly didn't consider for a moment that Tom could ever feel the same terror. It was sharp and mean and unrelenting.

"You can live with your dad when you like your school again, not when you hate it," I'd told Amanda the night before, after her dad had handed her the phone. This was my last plea.

"Do you know how crazy you sound?" she said.

Now at the airport, I could tell by the slump of Stephanie's shoulders when she came out of the tunnel that her big sister wasn't with
them. Steph wandered into the waiting room, Mary and Mollie behind her. I studied the face of every passenger, but there was no Amanda.

"That's it?" I said when the three came over to me. Mollie wrapped herself around my leg, held on. "She isn't here?"

Mollie started to whimper and I picked her up. Mary took my hand. Stephanie was crying too, but with no sound. The bright red rims around her eyes and the sag and tremble of her bottom lip gave her away. She slung her orange-flowered bag across her shoulder and took off in front of the rest of us, heading toward the baggage claim, her ponytail slapping her back. Stephanie's gloom wouldn't ease, I'd realize soon enough, until she was with her sister again.

In December, Amanda came home to Eugene for Christmas. She was subdued but glad to be at our house—to my delight, she said so many times. Then she and the other girls flew to Tucson for the rest of their winter break. Stephanie, Mary, and Mollie arrived back in Oregon on the second day of January to start school.

On January 3, after her first day back at Tucson High, Amanda rode her bike home as usual. Over the coming weeks and months I pieced together the details of that day's story, until the scene became as vivid as if I'd been there, unable to stop what she'd set out to do. This is how the reel runs in my mind: No one else in the house. It's about three thirty in the afternoon; Tom and his wife, Ellen, will get home after five. Amanda has watched television for a while and has eaten a microwaved corn dog. Now she goes into the bathroom and dumps a bottle of Tylenol on the counter. She pushes the bright pink capsules into the palm of her hand. Thirty-two pills. She fills a glass of water and swallows them.

Later that evening, Stephanie handed me the phone and said she'd called the Tucson house to talk to her sister and had been told by one of Ellen's children that Amanda was in the hospital. They didn't know which hospital. I dialed until I found the one that had admitted Amanda several hours earlier.

I spoke to the doctor. He told me that Tom had discovered
Amanda unconscious when he went out to her room—a shed in the back that they'd turned into a spare bedroom, which I'd complained to Tom was exactly wrong for a child who needed less isolation, not more—to get her for dinner. At the emergency room, her stomach was pumped and she drank a charcoal solution to decrease the effect of the Tylenol, but the drug had likely already damaged her liver. "We won't know for a day or two what shape she's in," the doctor said.

I spent the rest of the evening arranging for people to watch my three girls. The next morning, Stephanie shouting at me from the front door that she had to go too, that I couldn't possibly leave her behind, I left to fly alone to Tucson.

One thing I wasn't ready to face during those days at the treatment center, where Amanda had been transferred after the doctors decided that her liver was compromised but would continue to do its job, was that good parents don't stretch a daughter so tight between them that she has no recourse but to unscrew a medicine bottle cap and dump the contents into her belly. Though I did notice that from the moment I walked in, when the woman at the reception desk glanced over my file, lifted her gaze slowly, arched her eyebrows in disapproval, and tapped her pen smartly against the page, I had felt nothing but scorn from the center's staff. A hidden-away part of me welcomed their disappointment—the part that desired the castigation and punishment a bad mother deserves. The bigger part of me, though, wanted to blame what had happened entirely on Tom.

Over the week I was there, I spent much of my time adding up the ways he was at fault, while he and Ellen spent much of their time adding up the ways I was at fault. We were each allowed two hours a day to visit Amanda, no more. Other chunks of the day, I filled counselors and nurses and doctors in on Tom's neglect and irresponsibility, portraying myself as the real parent to Amanda and her sisters. I'd bought a house, and, in need of repair though it was, it gave my daughters a stable place to live. I had a job and health insurance. I'd found daycare, took them to music lessons,
bought many gallons of milk a week, cooked every meal at home, served dinner at the table and not in front of the TV, met with their teachers, drove them to friends' houses. I laid it all out to the professional counselors: didn't this prove I'd done the job of mother?

Not once did I suggest to the teams of doctors and nurses and therapists trying to put Amanda back together that I was willing to deal with my ex-husband in taking care of our daughter. Nor did I address the ways I could have helped her love her dad without inflicting stabs of guilt. In fact, by the Friday morning of my stay—I would fly home on Sunday—I'd told anyone at the clinic who would listen how right I was and how wrong he was in regard to our children.
This
child, Amanda, the one he'd talked into moving to Tucson, who'd become miserable and lonely enough to want to kill herself. Hadn't I said it to Tom a hundred times? The girls couldn't be parted from one another, nor could they be parted from me.

During that week in Tucson, I'd calculated Tom's visiting schedule down to the minute so I could avoid having to see even the faint hint of his shadow down the hallway. Or his wife's. And they did what they could to avoid me. Linda, Amanda's main counselor, had already told me that because of my "inability to communicate" with Tom, and his inability to communicate with me, she and the others would decide where Amanda would live after the month-long treatment. That suited me. I had no doubt that they'd send her home to Oregon. I'd already told Stephanie that Amanda would soon be with us, at our house, going to the right school, belonging to the right family.

My last Friday morning there, I went past the nurses' station and down a narrow hallway painted with aqua-greens and blues of a seascape most of these kids would probably never see in real life—dancing dolphins, smiling lobsters, breaching orca whales—and spotted Amanda in the unit's common area. A pungent mix of sweaty feet and Lysol drifted from the doorway of the institutional space posing as a living room, with a few soft chairs and worn sofas and untouched jigsaw puzzles on round tables. I stood
there and took her in. Amanda was curled at the end of one of the couches wearing the clothes she'd been issued by the clinic: white cotton pants with no belt or drawstring, long-sleeved T-shirt, flat slippers, no socks. Her hair was in a tight ponytail, and with fluid gestures of her hands, she spoke with a like-dressed girl on the other end of the couch.

They both fell silent when I came in, which made me sad. They'd seemed like such normal teenagers before they were aware of me. The other girl hurried away, leaving Amanda and me alone. I sank into a battered cushion next to her and put a volume of Gary Snyder poetry, which she'd asked for, in her lap. She reached over to hug me, her bony hands resting lightly on my shoulders, and her chin burrowing under mine. When she'd nuzzled her face deep in my neck—an embrace that would last only a second, I knew—I told her I loved her, a statement that, as it had all week, made her recoil. She pushed herself into the far corner of the sofa, away from me. My arms and hands cooled, suddenly emptied of my daughter. She yanked pillows in front of herself and huddled in the corner.

"Why can't I say that?" I said, reaching over to push a strand of hair behind her ear. "Why can't I say I love you? Don't you know how many people love you?"

Knees to her chest, she lowered her head then raised it again. "That makes it worse," she said, "not better."

We talked, a little, in between silences I'd almost grown used to. Then, five minutes before my visit was to end, I kissed her goodbye and slipped into the dim hall, sure that if I hurried I'd miss Tom and Ellen, whose appointment to see Amanda began at noon. But heading straight toward me was Amanda's counselor Linda, tightlipped as usual, with Tom and his wife walking right behind her. Ellen's cantaloupe breasts bounced under her skimpy tank top, her peasant skirt flowing from generous hips. I had on a pair of cords, a long-sleeved T-shirt, sandals, my usual getup. No matter how I tried to talk myself out of it, Ellen made me feel like a pencil-shaped little kid.

I slowed down, wondering if I could turn around and walk off in the other direction. Stopped dead and heart pounding, my hands
in midair as if trying to decide how to react, I remembered a bathroom a few doors away I could slip into before they reached me. But then Linda called my name.

"Can we step in my office for a minute?" she said.

My throat was too constricted to answer. I couldn't stand the idea of being in her small, cramped space with Tom and Ellen, but it seemed impossible to get out of it. Once there, I paused, then lowered myself into the metal chair closest to the exit, right foot angled toward the door, determined to slip away as soon as I could.