Live Through This (8 page)

Linda placed her bag under her tidy desk, a splotched banana sitting on the corner. She cleared her throat and riffled through papers, while I imagined her peeling the banana after the three of us had left, breaking off small chunks of gooey fruit and chewing on them until they were mush. She started talking then, getting my full attention when she said that the staff had put together notes from their interviews with each of us, including Amanda.

"We plan to make a decision about where she'll live in the next week or two," she said.

"Why can't you decide now?" I asked her. "I'm leaving day after tomorrow."

Tom interrupted me before I could argue that he'd try to sway things his way once I was gone and he had the staff to himself. "Amanda wants to be with us," he said, leaning forward in his chair and pointing his index finger at me. "You'd better learn to live with that."

I remember wondering—in one quick flash and no more—how things had become so vicious between us, especially since everyone, from doctors at the hospital to this stiff-backed counselor across the room, had urged us to get along for the good of our child. All of our children, in fact. Why couldn't we do that, get along? But the fleeting thought to do better by our daughters, to take on the mantle of this parental responsibility, was obliterated by my need to fight with the man I was sure had driven Amanda to despair. I'd be sorry for it later, but at that moment I could not rouse a spirit of cooperation when it came to Tom.

***

During our first winter in Oregon, two years before Amanda's Tylenol overdose, Tom had flown up for Thanksgiving weekend. We all six hiked in the wet, mossy woods, Mollie riding on her dad's shoulders, while the bird I'd stuffed that morning roasted in the oven at home. The path up Mount Pisgah was damp and muddy, and the girls slid over the slick Douglas fir tree roots that rose from the black ground like miniature whale backs. Mollie, who hung on tight to her dad's neck with one hand, picked strands of gray-green moss off the trees with the other to make a wig for Tom's head. She was, she called out to me, turning him into a troll; she stuck twigs behind his ears for horns. When I got around one corner, Amanda, Steph, and Mary ahead of us on the path, I turned to look at the man I was once married to, surprised in that instant that he was there and that I was tolerating the heft of him around us again—the sound of his voice, the weight of his footsteps, the way he'd left a scattering of his whiskers in the bathroom sink that morning as if planting seeds. He lowered Mollie to the ground, putting an end to the game. She scampered off toward her sisters while he shook off the long shreds of moss-hair, brushing his shoulders and the front of his jacket. He looked up and saw me watching; he smiled, showing those same brown squiggles on his front teeth, and pulled at a few last sprigs stuck in his short, graying hair. I whipped around fast, calling for the girls to slow up and wait for me, keeping a distance from the person behind me I'd now firmly relegated to the past.

After dinner and pie and cleanup that night, Tom and I got the girls to bed as we had in the old days—reading stories, watching over teeth-brushing—then sat in my living room to talk. The week before, my guts had churned every time I'd thought of him in my town and in my house, but things had gone okay the first night. He was leaving Saturday, so we only had one more full day to get through. My shoulders relaxed a little. I pitched off my slippers and tucked my stocking feet under my legs. I remembered the old days in a way I hadn't for a long time—the two of us as young parents with barely enough money, lying side by side on our living room carpet while Amanda and Stephanie galloped My Little
Ponies down our legs and across our chests, baby Mary napping between us. The train-hopping hard drinker from college had become someone else—a man trying to make an ordinary life, with a job and a house and a family. He'd get fed up with the tedium of that life and would quit his job or get a speeding ticket or empty our savings account for some insane purchase—or build another tree house or bonfire to terrify me—but in those early years, I had to admit now, he mostly tried to keep it together.

I drank a mug of tea on the sofa, nearly forgiving him for not becoming the man I'd wanted as a husband and almost forgiving myself for not being the right wife for him, realizing again that the marriage between us was simply a bad idea from the start, and I let down my guard. He began to tell me about a new woman in his life, Ellen. They'd met at work. She'd kept making excuses to come by his office and had scheduled meetings that included him. They started having lunch together. He met her kids. "She thinks I'm wonderful," he said, grinning into his own cup.

A weight I hadn't even known was strapped across my back lifted when he said that.
She thinks I'm wonderful.
The first sentence having to do with his emotional life or mine that wasn't some kind of ammunition.
My God,
I remember thinking,
we might actually be able to do this.
We might be able to be divorced and not hate each other.

Yet that moment of hope crumbled soon after his Thanksgiving visit as we fought endlessly on the phone about our differences and our objections over the raising of our daughters, and it was now utterly gone. In Linda's crowded office, I lifted my arm to block Tom's pointed finger. "Why would she want to be with you?" I said. "What she did means she can't wait to get away from you."

"What she did—" Tom began, leaning harder, nearly poking my chest. When he tipped in I noticed how much he'd aged since I'd last seen him. At thirty-eight, he was no longer the eternal boy, his family's Puck. His hair was gray and spiky, his square face dented with lines. I bent away, but he came in so that he was only an inch from me and said: "She did what she did because of the guilt you heap on her."

Tom turned to Linda and started to tell her a story that made me stand and put my hand on the doorknob. But Linda raised her flat palm in my direction to tell me to stop, and, reluctantly, I did. A few weeks earlier, Tom was saying, Amanda was making a cake in their kitchen and accidentally dropped the bowl and spilled the batter across the floor. Ellen walked in as the bowl fell and dough oozed out across the linoleum. Tom, glowering now at the counselor, went on about how Ellen was surprised when Amanda leaped back, cowering, sure she was in trouble.

"Amanda told us she couldn't believe it—that she wasn't getting yelled at, that she didn't have to be scared. She couldn't believe Ellen got down on the floor and helped her clean up," Tom said, getting up and stepping close to his wife, putting a hand on the back of her chair.

Ellen leaned against him and piped up before I could defend myself about this cake story—before I could admit that, sure, I'd snapped a time or two over a spill, but I could also recount dozens of other baking days when Amanda and I had made a cake or bread or muffins or cookies without harsh words or hurt feelings. I'd been stretched since we'd moved to Eugene, but not every minute, not every day; not, I had to believe, to the point that my children considered me the kind of tyrant Tom was creating in front of a counselor who was about to decide our daughter's fate.

Ellen spoke then, directing the words at me but mostly looking at Linda. "You're going to have to accept that Amanda thinks of me as her mother," she said, picking up the edge of her skirt and dropping it again.

Before I got myself far away from the room and from that clinic, I took two big steps over to Ellen, a strand of my hair stuck across my chin. "You can fuck yourself," I said.

That brought Tom around the chair and Linda to her feet. He grabbed my arm and spun me around. "Don't you talk to my wife like that," he yelled.

The counselor stepped between Tom and me, pushing us from each other while the shouting continued. "You know what?" Linda
said to the ceiling, her dark eyebrows knit together and her hands fisted. "If I was your daughter, I'd want to kill myself too."

Two weeks after I returned home, Linda called me late one evening to tell me that a decision had been reached. I happened to have a glass of wine in my hand and took a gulp as I waited for her news. She told me the unanimous vote of the team was that Tom and Ellen were the more stable parents. Amanda, after the last week of her treatment, would go back to their house.

I set down my glass and reached over to grab a cloth from the sink, wiping off the counters as Linda dribbled on, a few more comments I couldn't hear over the ringing in my ears. I scrubbed the circles of dried milk and swept up the toast crumbs I'd missed after dinner. I cleaned around the flour and sugar canisters and knelt down to get the fingerprint-smudged front of the stove. "What are you talking about?" I asked her, breathless. "Is this because of that day in your office? You didn't even let me explain about the cake—is this about the cake?"

"It wasn't anything Tom said," she told me. "It's just what we think is best for your daughter."

I hung up and flung the damp cloth across the room; it dangled from the sink's faucet. I stood still in the middle of the quiet of my house. I had to tell someone. I needed to find someone equally as disdainful of and furious over this misguided and wrong-headed decision made by people who hardly knew Amanda and who surely didn't know me. I wanted to bake ten cakes with my daughters, letting the girls spill egg yolk and flour all over without a single reaction from me and then send the cakes to smug Linda, but instead I hovered there in my kitchen, fed up, indignant, crushed.

Then I realized: the person I could spill my troubles to was Stephanie.

I stumbled to her room, the one she once shared with Amanda, an empty twin bed across from hers waiting for a sister's arrival that now wasn't going to happen. I ached for sympathy, a longing that let me convince myself that Stephanie would see things exactly as I saw them. I didn't stop to think how this news would
hit her, reshape her, pull her from me in yet more ways. I moved in greedily to be close to her. This second daughter's schedule, since I'd been back from Tucson, had become almost dangerously rote: up and dressed for school with little said between us. She caught her bus, went to her afterschool program, waited for me to pick her up after I'd retrieved the little girls. She rode home staring out the window, and she lived only for the nightly telephone call she was allowed with Amanda.

I sat on top of her covers and rested my hand on her narrow waist. She opened her eyes and looked over, but instead of reaching for me as I'd expected, she sat straight up, wagging her head from sleep. "Amanda," she said. "What happened? Where is she? Is she okay?"

I wrapped my arms around her. "She's fine," I said, hugging hard and waiting for the tension in Stephanie's body to fall away and for my daughter to give in to my need for comfort, and to give in to her own need for comfort from me. "But she's going to stay with your dad. They say she has to live with them."

Stephanie sank back, away from me, all angles and stiffness, and I saw a plan flit across her face that was unmistakable: She, too, would move to her father's house. She'd go where Amanda was. As soon as she could. I reached for her again, terrified now and planning to squeeze the desire to leave me from her skinny body, but she drew farther apart. She lifted her covers, forming a cloth barrier to keep me separate. She pulled the blankets and sheets up to her neck as she rolled to face the wall. I rubbed her back through the blankets until she cried herself to sleep, neither of us admitting to the other what was already set in motion, both of us frightened—she would not be without her sister, and I would not lose another child.

It was a rainy February night a few weeks after Linda's call, and I was making dinner for the girls. Mary and Mollie were in their room pitting the elephant family against the polar bear family. Stephanie was making a mix tape for Amanda of Madonna's most angst-ridden songs. The phone rang and I answered. The voice on
the other end was Linda's, which surprised me. Once I'd lost the competition for our daughter, I'd figured there wasn't much more she had to say to me. I certainly had nothing to say to her.

"Things didn't go as well as we hoped today," she told me, with a slight—was it?—tone of contrition.

I immediately began to gloat. I felt it in my arms and legs, in my chest, in the tingle of my scalp. "Did Tom do something?" I asked. Linda cleared her throat, and I knew he'd messed up. This was the day he was to take Amanda out of the clinic and to his home, and on his first chance to get things right for his daughter, he'd failed. This, I have to admit, made me very happy.

"What happened?" I asked her.

It was several days before I put the whole story together—Linda gave me only the skeletal version that night about why Amanda had been removed from her father's house and taken to a state group home for teenagers. What I got later from Amanda was that she and Tom had arrived home from the treatment center to find Ellen waiting in the house, ready to continue an argument they had apparently started the night before about which room was to be his daughter's—Ellen wanted her back in the outside cottage; Tom wanted her inside the house.

The fight was going full-bore a few minutes later, and Ellen threw the coffee from her mug into Tom's face. Tom went after her in the kitchen and that's when Amanda ran to the bathroom in the hallway and locked herself in. Ellen called the police. When they showed up, one arrested both Tom and Ellen for domestic violence, handcuffing them and loading them into the police cruiser. The other talked Amanda into opening the bathroom door—once she'd cracked it, the officer found the sink and counter covered with blood. Amanda had dug a razorblade out of the drawer and used it to make zigzag cuts down the inside of both arms, from wrist to the bend of her elbow. "Surface wounds," Linda called them.

"Where is she?" I asked, sitting in a dining room chair, my free hand half strangling my own neck, the self-satisfaction that had risen up a few seconds before gone, chased from the room and from the house.

"No one seems to know that right now," she told me. "The police took her to a state home, but I can't tell you which one or where. I don't know where she is. They said they'd call in the morning, once the paperwork is sorted out."