Read Online Live Through This by Debra Gwartney - Free Book Online Page B

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