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missing.
    Stephanie looked up at me with black-lined eyes, ghoulish eyes, while Amanda hurried to roll down her pants as she tossed the paper clip in the grass. "What are you doing?" I said.
    "Nothing," Amanda said, pulling herself deeper into her hood, into her sweatshirt, and into the shaded back of the bench.
    I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe it was nothing. I would have liked to keep thinking it was no big deal when I spotted long, scabby lines on the inside of her forearm a few days later. I wanted to convince myself that this slicing of skin wasn't a sign of danger even after I'd dragged her to a therapist to talk about why she cut and cut and kept cutting. I sat in the tiny waiting room and fake-read
Architectural Digest,
stewing about what Amanda was saying to the middle-aged woman with expensive shoes and gleaming teeth. Complaining about me, that I had hardly any time for her, that I was often impatient? Or worse: saying she wanted to live with her father? I couldn't stand for her to want that.
    After nearly an hour, the counselor called me in and had Amanda wait this time with the pile of tedious magazines. "It's not dangerous," the woman told me, her soft hand flitting through the air between us. "It's just something girls do when life feels too painful and something has to be released. Think of it like that, a release."
    I might have eased into this line of reasoning, assuring myself that a little bit of cutting was getting the devil out of my angry daughter, but it didn't make sense. Amanda was getting more sullen the more she sliced her own skin and spilled her own blood, becoming a faint and frightening presence in our household—dark and sultry as a storm just over the mountain. I knew the cutting was more than a release. And yet I didn't seek out another ther
apist, another expert, who might give me a different opinion or offer a solution. I simply told myself that my daughter would get past this soon. Then it was too late.

    The questions that crowded my mind: Why was Amanda so angry? What had pushed her into a black corner that she couldn't or wouldn't emerge from? And why had Stephanie become her constant sidekick, her doppelgänger, giving up her own friends and perfect report cards and the gushing praise of her teachers to join her sister's budding rebellion?
    Part of my daughters' fury and consternation stemmed from my divorce from their father, Tom, who'd remained in Arizona when the rest of us moved to Oregon. On the phone and, during the girls' visits to his house, in person, he often reminded them that
I'd
left
him,
that he'd wanted to work things out, keep the family together, but that the mother of the family had smashed the family apart. I could see on Amanda's and Stephanie's faces how hard it was: they loved their mom but at the same time hated me for hurting their dad. A quandary they couldn't work out. Easier to back away, get isolated, stay isolated.
    Again, the accounting. Another nail of self-recrimination pounded in as I scramble for do-overs, the way I used to when I was a kid playing Horse in the driveway with my brother, who was the far better shot. I comb through what I could have done differently: this path instead of that path; these words instead of those words. How could I have moved away so soon, away from their father and to a town where I had not a single acquaintance? I shouldn't have taken a second job after we arrived in Eugene. I should have been less proud about asking for help. And yet what I did, I did. Worried myself sleepless trying to prove I could manage without their father and plowed ahead without measuring or assessing the damage behind us. During these first months, years, after the divorce, the strain across my face and in my voice and the weariness in my body must have upset all four of my children. Other parents have a way, it seems, of conveying that
This stress
you see in me has nothing to do with you.
But in the early days after my