"Maybe we should come back tomorrow," Sherry said, and I shrugged. She was probably right. Waiting on this sidewalk made no sense. But I couldn't stand the thought of a fruitless first night in the city—hadn't we come here to endure the hardships and challenges of the hunt? Still, Sherry's suggestion was correct: it was getting late and I was hungry and tired, and I knew she was too.
I was about to concede and head back to the hotel when the main door opened and a middle-aged woman beckoned to us. Sherry took a long look at her and whispered that this time she'd stay outside, but could I hurry? I nodded yes and went inside the dingy office, a small brown sofa under a blind-covered window, desk in the center of the room, large chalkboard on the wall scrawled white with names: Justin, Amy, Steven, Kim.
"How can I help you?" the woman said. Before I could respond, the phone clipped to her belt burred and she held one finger up to me as a Be Patient sign and answered it. When she returned the phone to its slot a few minutes later, I had a poster I'd brought along unrolled on the desk.
"This is my daughter," I said. "Is she here? Have you seen her?"
The counselor looked over Stephanie's picture—one from the first day of ninth grade, her satchel on her back filled with lunch and notebooks and new pencils. She patted the image as if assuring me that, oh yes, my child was pretty and sweet and worth looking for. Then she told me she couldn't tell me if Stephanie was at this shelter. Even if she'd just seen Stephanie, even if Stephanie was in the next room eating pizza with the other street teenagers and the young-adult human fence who'd volunteered their evenings to help out with the "homeless youth," even if she was sick, addicted, arrested, I couldn't be told.
"I hope you understand, it's our mission to protect the kids," she said, lowering herself into the chair behind her desk.
"If my daughter is here, I want to see her," I said, shaking now, sick to death of this same answer. Suddenly I despised this woman and her position that the best way to protect a fifteen-year-old girl was to keep her from her mother.
"I know," she said, patting the poster again in a way that made me pull it from under her palm and rolled it into a tight tube. "We get dozens of parents in here every month and every one of them tells me the same thing," she went on, scowling, worn thin by me and my touchiness. "They want their children back. But that's not my job. My job is to make a safe place for kids who'd otherwise be on the street."
I opened my mouth but shut it without saying anything. I could see by the look on her face and the way she flipped a pen between her fingers that she was going to hold rigidly to the position granted her. The nonprofit-sanctioned permission to assume she could do better for lost and wandering teenagers than any parent standing before her. She was already done with me—sure that she could provide better for Stephanie, if indeed Stephanie was in her building, than I could.
I had no defense since what she believed was, at least in part, true. It was impossible for me to provide for Stephanie at that moment—Stephanie didn't want me to provide for her—so perhaps, by default, this stranger behind this cheap desk in this unfriendly building was the only provider Stephanie could have right now. If my daughter was even around this city and not traveled on to some distant place that none of us could name: suddenly the country seemed very big and very foreboding.
I slid the poster back into the roll of them I had stashed in my bag and turned for the door.
"Wait a minute," she said, her tone less dismissive. I stopped and watched as she opened the top drawer of her desk. She pulled out a map of the city and drew a circle around one section. "This is Haight-Ashbury," she said. "If your daughter is hanging out on the streets, she's probably around this area."
I took the map but explained that my older daughter was sure Stephanie would be in the Tenderloin District, probably panhandling on the corner of Sixth and Market, if she was in San Francisco at all.
"Oh, I don't think so," the counselor said, standing up again to make sure that this time I made it to the door. "The Tenderloin is full of prostitution and drugs and longtime street people. It's hard core. We don't see runaways from Oregon in the Tenderloin."
She gestured toward the exit as her phone rang again. "Believe me," she said as she pulled the cell out of its holder and punched it on, "drive in Haight-Ashbury, on Pine Street. If there's a chance of spotting your daughter, it'll be there."
I hurried back to the hotel to call Amanda, frantic about this woman's description of the hardest and meanest part of town. Surely Stephanie wouldn't choose such a place on purpose. If she had to run away, if she had to be in San Francisco alone, then she'd find a safe corner to squat in, right? I reached Amanda at our house; she'd come to spend the night with Mary and Mollie and the college student I'd hired to stay with them for the weekend, waiting for word from me. I told her about the woman at the shelter and about her suggestion to look in Haight-Ashbury.
"No way," Amanda said. "Haight-Ashbury is for poseurs. Stephanie would never go there. If she's in San Francisco and she needs money, she'll be in the Tenderloin."
So adamant was my daughter's tone that my heart sank—not only did she insist that Stephanie had purposely aimed for the seediest and most dangerous corner the city had to offer, but Amanda obviously admired this in her sister, and perhaps yearned for it herself. I pinched my eyes shut, refusing to listen to that bravado. I had to believe Amanda was over a need for the streets and for what the streets had to offer. I could only search for Stephanie if I felt sure that Amanda was contained and that she intended to stay put and get better—she had seemed so committed to doing that over the past weeks, the drinking and fighting with her boyfriend ended, her skin shining again. A self-rehabilitation that was becoming more obvious and more sure every day: things had been so good, so hopeful. Amanda was steadier now, and if I did find Stephanie, and if Stephanie would consent to coming home and being done with roaming the country by freight train, we might finally turn a corner on this thing that had been like an animal at our throats for too long. Or was that just one more self-deluding fantasy?
Saturday, Sherry and I went through the Tenderloin, a part of the city I could only describe as gray. Gray sidewalks, littered with flyers for strip shows and free pregnancy and HIV tests, and dingy gray buildings whose windows were streaked with dust and smoke. People were huddled asleep in many of the front alcoves of those buildings, gray cardboard beneath them, smelling of yesterday's beer and someone else's used clothes. Sherry and I wandered past those small encampments and up and down the long lines outside a place called Hospitality House, which Amanda had told us about, searching for Stephanie's familiar face to appear from out of the crowd. Her narrow chin, the almond-shaped eyes, the perfect nose—and the sprinkle of moles across her cheek like a constellation.
On Saturday afternoon, during my wasted trip to the police station, Sherry combed through the shops. I handed out posters while Sherry showed Stephanie's picture to those on the street who looked like they might know her—the ones who weren't too scary or too out of it to talk to.
Then the two of us split up—Sherry went in one direction and I went in another with no firm plan of what to do or exactly who to speak to. Mostly by now we were engaged in abject wandering, and we both knew it. We persevered under sunny skies and against a cold wind as if some sign of a child who wanted nothing to do with me would soon rise up in front of one of us. Of all the cities in all the country I'd chosen this one—and what was it exactly that I believed this one might deliver into my arms?
After parting with Sherry, I made my way to a public square—in front of the library, if I remember right. I sat on the edge of a marble bench and surveyed the scene in the open space. People huddled in blankets and torn sleeping bags, asleep on benches and beneath the eaves of buildings. In a small grassy area not far from me, someone had dumped a pile of clothes—three or four feet high, a tangle of pants, shirts, sweaters, jackets; an unsortable cacophony of color and fabric that were sure to get moldy and thick the first
time it rained. A woman walked by and picked at the mass. She held a blue sweatshirt between her finger and thumb, keeping it apart from her as if it were loathsome. She dropped it again.
About then an expensive steel blue SUV pulled into the square and parked next to a concrete abutment under a large NO PARKING sign. Five or six teenagers hopped out of the doors, as did a fortyish woman, mother to one of these kids, who'd done the driv ing. She opened the hatchback, and the teenagers, jockeying, giggling, pulled out a couple of cardboard boxes and, using the tailgate as a table, began to stack packages of sandwiches and bottles of juice. A roadside cart, a way station for the hungry.
I stood up and walked closer, scanning for some hint of where they were from and what they were doing—community service for their school or some kind of outreach for their church? The need to know their mission was strong in me, though I didn't know why. Maybe for this group it was simply a Saturday afternoon excursion to feed the drug- and booze-addled population of the Tenderloin, nothing more than that. For me, it was a big, fat reminder of the sordid parameters of my life.
Once the meals were stacked and ready, the kids stood around in a circle to talk to and tease one another. The girls had long, straight, shining hair and wore coats from Tommy Hilfiger and J. Crew. The boys' jeans were new, and their shoes were clean and expensive. From my vantage point midsquare, I took in every detail. After a few minutes, the mother noticed me. She looked over and smiled, though warily. What did I want?
What I wanted was a child like hers. I wanted one who feeds, not one who is fed. This was how I'd tried to raise my own daughters—to help those who had nothing and no one. What a bust.
By now, my younger-woman illusions about motherhood were gone. It was true that early on my four daughters had wanted nothing more than to be near me, to hear my voice, to curl in my lap. A caress, a kiss. Now that time between us was a lie. Or maybe this time at the gritty seams of San Francisco looking for a child who'd left me was the lie. I couldn't tell. Nor could I measure where guilt stopped and resentment began—the two emotions had found a perfect lock with each other inside my body, as deep as my bones, where the sensation no longer came and went but stuck like an implanted rod.
I felt, keenly, both emotions at this moment. Guilt and resentment. Guilt for not creating a life where my daughters handed out sandwiches to the needy, and resentment that this mother on the other side of the square, glancing back at me now and then as if worried about what I might do, would never know how bad it felt to be me.
I broke eye contact with the woman and made my way around the group bunched up at the SUV and past the people who'd emerged from blanket or sleeping-bag shelters to go after the free sandwiches and the bright yellow containers of juice. The roll of posters was under my arm—I'd dropped some off at youth shelters, at the cafés willing to take them, and even at an Urban Outfitters store, where the young clerk had given me a long, quizzical look. Why in the world would a girl who'd run away from her middle-class mother venture into a middle-class store like his? And if she did come in with her dirty fingernails and matted hair, smelling like the devil himself, she'd be chased out. He took the poster anyway. He told me he'd hang it in the employees' room, "just in case."
On Sunday morning, Sherry and I were back in the Tenderloin. We walked the litter-ridden sidewalks of Market Street, circled the neighborhood, and—when we were brave enough—lifted the thin hems of blanket tents to look inside them. I stepped close to the sleeping bags on the library steps and on the steel park benches, hoping to see a wisp of hair, the side of a face, an arm hanging loose from the fabric's folds. But after several hours, neither of us had spotted anyone who looked like Stephanie. Droves of teenagers and even more adults stumbled and slumped down the streets around us. The air wrinkled with the smell of stale urine and sticky dust. The downtown traffic, quieter on a Sunday but still there, honked and thumped along with insistence and impatience. A few tattered people stepped out of shadowed alcoves to ask me for money; each time I declined. Kids on street corners smoked cigarettes with their backs up against brick buildings, their knees pulled up to their chests; long lines of the barely conscious formed in front of soup kitchens as morning deepened into afternoon. One man helped another shoot up on a sidewalk bench out in the middle of everything. But I'd seen no one with my daughter's sharp shoulders and elbows. I hadn't recognized her narrow hips or the slope of her long legs under any of the many pairs of sagging, soiled pants. I hadn't found a sign of her anywhere.
And now, two days and some hours after searching San Francisco, we'd reached the hour of going home. We barely had time to get back to the hotel to retrieve our stored bags, catch the shuttle to the airport, and make the plane to Eugene, where Barry would be waiting to pick us up, eager to hear every detail of this last day's fruitless search. Sherry insisted that we get on our way.
"One more look?" I said.
She lifted her hands then dropped them again, giving in. So I stood alone on the corner of Sixth and Market, the very spot Amanda had suggested, keeping watch in the failing afternoon light for any new panhandlers. Sherry headed for the McDonald's behind me—one last time around the tables and through the bathroom.
A few minutes after my friend left, the crowd on the sidewalk cleared enough that I noticed a girl sitting on a concrete bench a few feet from me. Her wool-hat-covered head hung between her parted legs, strands of dirty blond hair sticking out and falling toward the pavement. It was warm that day, the sky was once again blue and bright, but she was shivering so violently that the fabric of her jacket trembled. A boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen, had his left arm around her hunched body. He held a sandwich near her face and he was whispering in her ear. Although I couldn't hear him, I knew he was encouraging her to eat. Both of them wore cargo pants and black sweatshirts, clothing piled on more clothing, bulky, rumpled, falling apart.
I stepped closer, and closer again. Neither of them noticed me, or if they did, they didn't acknowledge it. Her damp hair stuck to her cheeks like a feathered veil. She moaned and told him in a husky voice to leave her alone. I had no hope from where I stood of getting her eyes in front of my eyes. I moved around them to look from the other direction. That's when—downwind of the couple now—I smelled them, or at least her. Sour, rancid. Not even the rush of traffic and the breeze from Market Street could dissipate the stench of illness. The boy pushed triangles of white bread toward the girl but her head only sank lower and strands of saliva webbed from her mouth and dripped to the ground. She was barely holding on to the bench. I waited for her to fall and wondered if I should try to catch her if she did.
I could have told him that if he kept forcing her to smell food or if he kept talking about eating they'd both soon be covered in vomit. I could have asked him if he knew of a place where she could lie still, warm and safe for a little while. I didn't speak to them. I watched him hold her tighter, reach in to lift her chin, and beg her to take a bite.
Sherry called my name as I took the last step forward. I was inches away from the bent girl. Even though it must have looked ridiculous for me to do so, I held on to a lamppost and squatted low enough that I could peer up at her. The girl's eyes were unfocused, blurred by tears, closing and opening with tremendous effort. Within a second or two, I stood again, because now I knew she wasn't my daughter. She wasn't Stephanie. I stepped to the side; I backed away. Was it sorrow that swelled in my chest or relief ? Before I could sort it out, Sherry had reached for me, pulled on my arm until I was next to her. And then I heard her say, "We have to go, we have to hurry," and that's when I realized that I had reached the culmination of this weekend. Now I understood, as I'd not understood before, that Stephanie was gone and that I might not in this lifetime see her again.
Sherry and I went up the street; my friend linked her arm with mine. We moved away from the girl and from the boy helping her, and I began to let my vision take in everything around me. I once again noticed the gr
ay and brown avenues snarled with cars and with people, the streets where some lived like wisps of smoke, seen only if they wanted to be seen. The girl and the boy were far off now, merged with memory, merged with people heading home for Sunday dinner and with others on the street who had nowhere to go. And here was Sherry looking at her watch, urging me to walk faster up the hill, into a bus, onto an airplane, and into the air that would lift and pull us north up the coast.
I was flying already. Gone from the Tenderloin, far above the city. My feet moved ahead but my arms stayed still at my sides, my fingers stretched open. And then hope—a last smidgen of it—vanished as fast as this day.
A few weeks after that weekend in San Francisco, I drove the narrow road next to the McKenzie River. A few miles before the turnoff to Barry's house, I passed the Rennie boat launch on my right. A steep road, maybe twenty yards long, descended from the shoulder of the highway to a paved and U-shaped patch of land just large enough for one or two trucks and their trailers. From the edge of the launch, a ramp stuck out a few feet into the tumbling, splashing river. The idea was to back a trailer down the sloping blacktop until its rear wheels were under water, unlatch the white-water raft or kayak (now tied to the ramp) from the trailer, and then drive out again.
I'd passed the Rennie launch dozens of times on the way to Barry's. Most days it was empty, unoccupied, a few fast-food cups and old leaves blowing across the bare asphalt. In the summer, though, it hummed busily as people in bathing suits and shorts scurried about to get their rafts and coolers and paddles and kids in the water in anticipation of the ride over the white-water rapids ahead.
Now as I drove by the launch it was mid-May, too early yet—too much rain and wind—to put in a raft for a day's float. The water was too cold. No one would last more than a few minutes in it. This evening's dusk had settled over the slate-colored river and the small dock. I didn't want to glance down to the water's edge—keep your eyes on the road—but I did, which caused a short burst of fire in my chest and up into my throat as I'd expected, as I'd felt before. If it wanted to, that sinister force in the river could come and get me—it could catch me even in the matter of seconds it took to drive by.