Live Through This Read Free

gymnastics practice and watch her balance on the beam; stew about my empty bank account; beg the electric company to keep my power on for another few days. I'd get up at first light to make lunches; work eight hours at my job; go to bed after staring out the
living room window for an hour, for two hours or three, hoping this might be the night Amanda and Stephanie would come home. Not knowing the hour-to-hour habits of my own children, or how to locate them anytime I wanted to, was beyond what I could comprehend. I was mad at them and mad at me, angrier every time a grocery clerk overcharged me for an avocado or some distracted guy cut me off in traffic. I plodded through the mundane, hung on to my little corner of home, and kept pretending with Mary and Mollie that this would be over soon and we'd be us again.
    During this time I grew fond of cuddling with the cold stone in my bed—the boulder I'd conjured that let me feel wronged and betrayed by my own daughters. They had hurt me. They had damaged us. That's what I got to believe as long as they were gone. I couldn't learn to love these girls differently or admit to my own role in our problems if they wouldn't talk to me, if they wouldn't come home. So I remained hard. And they remained hard.
    Yet during the months Amanda and Stephanie weren't anywhere around, I also tried to hold my daughters in suspension, the same ploy I use to stay awake on an airplane, afraid the plane will fall if, even for a second, I quit willing it to stay in the air. I hung my daughters somewhere like billowy clothes on a line. Safe, untouched, and clean. Sometimes Amanda (though never Stephanie) called me, and my mind allowed this daughter to exist in a phone booth for the minutes it took her to say "We're okay." And then "Nowhere" to my "Where are you?" And "No, Mom" to my "Please come home." The second she hung up the phone, I put Amanda in that suspended state again. With Stephanie. Up where they couldn't get hit or sliced or stabbed or raped or killed. Up in the heavens, in the air, in the heavy autumn mist that fell over our valley. Someplace my daughters could stay whole.

1
    Amanda was cutting herself.
    The five of us at a picnic at the riverfront park in Eugene on a Sunday afternoon when Amanda was fourteen and Stephanie twelve, the younger girls nine and seven, three years after my marriage to their father had ended. Mollie was showing me how many times she could cross the monkey bars without resting—without the briefest stop at either end to ease any strain on her arms. She went back and forth, her hands a bright pink, her too-long bangs hung up in her eyelashes, her lips a straight, determined line. I followed her, sidestepping over layers of prickly tree bark put down to cushion falls, keeping my arms scooped under my youngest daughter, sure that her muscled shoulders would give out and that her fingers would slip. But they didn't. She powered along, jutting her hips and kicking her legs to help her grab one bar after the other.
    Mary was on a nearby swing, pumping hard, toes aimed toward some perfect weekend clouds. After Mollie jumped down, satisfied by her display of monkey-bar prowess, she ran to the swing next to Mary's and was in an instant competition to see who could go higher. I walked across the sandpit, over the remnants of our chicken and potato salad meal on a blanket laid out on the grass, and toward the bench where my two oldest daughters sat glued together, the hoods of their black sweatshirts pulled up, hiding their faces. Concentrated as they were on a patch of skin above Aman
da's kneecap, which she'd exposed by rolling up her canvas pants, they didn't notice me coming. A few steps away, I caught a glint of what Amanda had in her hand—an unbent paper clip, which she was using to carve into her leg, deep enough that beads of blood bobbed on the surface of her skin.
    "What the hell?" I said, swooping in to grab the thin piece of metal but