Live Through This by Debra Gwartney Page B

toenails glittered the color of adolescence. Her face, sunburned from Mexico, showed every line of the scowl set across her forehead. It was quiet for a few seconds between us; I sat with my hands around my book, while she moved a couple of
things around on my dresser, rocks I'd picked up on a hike, a photo of my grandmother. Then she turned toward me. "I need to go live with my dad," she said.
    I sat up taller in my bed. "Why would you need to do that?"
    "Mom," she said. She dropped her hands to her sides, grabbing up handfuls of T-shirt. "He's alone. He doesn't have anyone there and he can't stand it. One of us has to go."
    I got out of my covers and stood in front of her in my cotton nightgown and scrubbed face that suddenly felt dry and older than thirty-five, cheeks and lips tightening as I spoke, as if my skin itself were trying to keep me from saying too much—how he was remarried now, for example, as well as surrounded by his sisters and other family. "It's not your job to take care of your father," I said, resting my hands on her shoulders a little too heavily with a desperation I didn't want to recognize—my desperation for her to stay with me and not disturb the picture I had of my own new and improved family.
    "Yes it is," she answered, staring me down. "He needs me to take care of him."
    "Amanda," I began, but I stopped there. Anything else I said would be taken as criticism of her dad, would
be
criticism of her dad.
    "You don't care about him, but I do," she said, pushing my hands away.
    She whipped around to leave the room and I let her go. Back in bed with the covers to my chin and my book fallen to the floor, I thought about getting up again to follow her upstairs and talk until we hammered something out about her jumbled heart. I should have done that. But instead I let the urge wither—I didn't have the energy for soothing and solving; I wasn't sure I had energy enough even to climb the steps. Besides, she'd forget about the whole thing in a couple of days, wouldn't she? She'd get back to school, to dance lessons and art class, to the mission of finally making a couple of friends, and drop this fresh-from-daddy insistence.
    But I was wrong about that.
    ***
    The next afternoon I answered my office phone to hear from the middle school secretary that Amanda was being questioned by the police in the principal's office.
    "For what?" I said, reaching over to close my office door so my coworkers couldn't listen in.
    "No reason for alarm," she said, a statement that in fact alarmed me. "There's a group of girls waiting to talk to the officers and your daughter's one of them. Can you get over here?"
    At the school a half-hour later, I looked for the group of girls in the principal's office, but the square space was strangely empty, oddly silent—blank chairs and shut-down computers. The vice principal's door was open a crack and through it I saw Amanda sitting at a table, her hands flat on the surface in front of her. I pushed the door open. Two cops stood up, as did the vice principal. "Are you Amanda's mother?" that official asked me.
    I sat in the empty chair next to my daughter.
    "What is this?" I asked her, but she only shook her head, her hair hanging in her face.
    "There was a fire in the locker room," one cop said, "and we've charged your daughter with arson."
    "A fire?" I set my soft purse in my lap, squeezed it.
    While the vice principal told the story, Amanda kept her hands pressed against her eyes like a blindfold. He said that Amanda had skipped math class with another girl that afternoon. They'd hid out in the locker room behind the gym. The other girl had a lighter in her pocket, which she'd used to try to set fire to the loose laces on Amanda's Converse shoes. The shoelaces didn't catch, barely smoldered in fact, and that's when the girls really got going—determined to set something, anything, aflame. Amanda picked up a garbage can and dumped the contents on the ground. She took