Excerpt: 'Then There Was No Mountain'

Jan. 19, 2004 -- Then There Was No Mountain by Sam and Ellie Waterston is the gripping story of a mother who comes to terms with her daughter's drug addiction. Sam Waterston, Ellie's brother, is a longtime star on Law & Order.

Here is an excerpt.

ONE: Poplars

I was folding laundry with the phone cupped between my ear and shoulder.A cattle truck driver had called needing directions to our feedlot. Sophie,three, sat playing near me on the kitchen floor. Her brother, Nick, and sister,Isabelle, were at the one-room schoolhouse twelve miles down the road.Theirfather? No idea. At this point he was never where he said he was. And Ididn't care. Every minute he was out of the house was a gift. It meant noyelling, no insults. Sophie pushed her way out the screen door. I heard it slamand saw her toddle around the corner of the house past the kitchen window,headed in the direction of the sandbox. She managed to keep her balance despitethe friendly nudgings of our dogs.

"The highway number out of Biggs? Just one second." I put down thephone to search for the road atlas. "It's Highway 30. 6:00 tonight? See youthen."

"Sophie?" I called, walking outside, expecting an instant response to giveme a reading on her location. No answer. "Sophie!" I scanned the yard-nosign of her. I ran all the way around the house, and then back inside, throughevery room, despite knowing she had gone out, despite my certainty shewasn't in the house at all. Searching under the beds, behind the doors helpedme postpone dealing with the possibility that loomed larger and larger: the irrigationditch.The thought paralyzed me with fear. "Sophie!" I screamed, finally running back outside, my hand holding my heart inside my chest.Thedogs joined in, ran along with me, as though it were a game. I kicked at themout of rage and fear. I looked to the left and then to the right down the ditchthat ran along the row of tall poplars that shadowed our house."SOPHIE!"I finally got enough of a grip on myself to walk slowly along the narrowcanal, looking for her in her floral sun suit, white sandals, and floating facedown, her blond curls riding the gentle drift of the ditch water. "Mam!"That was what she called me."Here me am!" I looked aroundto see her sitting in water up to her chest inside the large, round metal culvertthat guided the irrigation water under the dirt driveway. By some miracle thecurrent hadn't toppled her over or swept her into the deeper section on theother side of the culvert. I sprinted to her, scrambling through the mud,snatching her up. She protested. She wanted to play in the water. She had noidea the danger she was in.

What I was looking for when I searched Sophie's room before decidingto send her to Trek West I am not sure. I think I wanted tofind something that would tell me my worst suspicions and fearswere not true, like a notice that she got a part in the play, center forwardon the team, showed great skill and thoroughness on her historyreport. Instead I found cigarettes, small mirrors, pipes and bowls,detention notices, tweezers with smoke-stained tips, beer bottle caps,eye drops. I turned up a stack of photographs taken two years beforeat the middle school eighth grade graduation or "moving up" as itwas called. Sophie had won the school art award and had been recognizedfor her work as a peer counselor in the school's NaturalHelpers Program. At the punch and cookies reception in the cafeteriathat followed she hammed it up for the camera with her friends.She posed for photographs with some of her favorite teachers. Shewas wearing a floral spring dress. Her beauty hinted at a blossomingmaturity. She directed her gaze boldly at the camera, her blond hairframing her face. She and I stood under an arch of plastic flowers setup for more formal portraits. It had the school name and the date incut-out letters across the top. I had made two sets of the prints-onefor her to share with her friends, another for the family photo album.Lucky I did, for what I found in her drawer was her set ofthose photographs, her face painstakingly cut out of each one. It wasabout that time, I later learned, her father told her she, like him,wouldn't amount to much.

Driving home from my office that afternoon the obsessivethoughts resumed. I hadn't seen Sophie in days. How many was itthis time? Three? Was she all right? Was she going to school? Wherewas she? Three days, an eternity to me. I wanted to see her, hold her,be a mother to her. Ahead of me a car recklessly took the corner,the tires squealing on the pavement.Wasn't that Sophie in the backseat? It was! I stepped on the gas. I'd catch up with them. I'd pull upalongside and say:"Hey! Hi. How are you? I miss you.When are youcoming home?" Anything. A simple exchange. I was desperate formy daughter. I accelerated to match their speed. I could see Sophiebetween two others in the back seat. Maybe she'd be glad to see me.Maybe she would wave. Instead, she looked wildly, savagely back atme, then leaned against the driver's seat, inclining her torso forwardthe way she did as a young girl to urge her ranch pony into a lope,her tiny legs kicking against his fat girth. I saw her gesture franticallyat the driver with her right arm to go faster, faster, like she waswielding a riding crop.The girl next to the driver leaned out the carwindow and yelled obscenities at me, her hair blowing straight outfrom her face like she was hung upside down.The two on either sideof Sophie turned and kneeled on the back seat, giving me the fingerthrough the back window, framing Sophie's head with their gesture.Their car raced by the houses neatly lined up along the streets. Itightened my grasp on the steering wheel. Now what I wanted wasto catch them, grab Sophie, seize her, wrestle her out of that car, takeher home, and keep her there, keep her there until she stopped allthis. My tire struck the curb. My car swerved abruptly, narrowlymissing a parked car. What in God's name was I doing? Sophieturned back to look at me again, back at the enemy, the one onwhom she pinned all the fear and hate she felt about anything, abouteverything. I let them pull away.

We'd been off the ranch, living in town about nine years at thispoint. I had been divorced and single parenting the same length oftime. Looking back on it, I'd say by the fall of her sophomore year inhigh school Sophie had tasted most every drug imaginable. Marijuanaand alcohol were her constant companions. She had experimentedwith speed and mushrooms and crank. She had been arrestedas a minor in possession. It's a litany any parent of a childinvolved in drugs recognizes. To escape my efforts to bring her toher senses, she began "couch surfing" that fall. By November she wasliving in her car. Each evening I called the parents of her friends toask if they had seen her. Sometimes they would tell me. Other timesthey would let her spend the night and not tell me, having, I suppose,decided their approach to raising my daughter was superior towhat they perceived of mine. I made every effort to be calm and reasonable,eager to maintain the little communication these parentswould permit. I hated them for aiding and abetting my child'sdownfall, for turning a blind eye to their children's, for cutting meout, for "dissing" me, for ignoring my existence, my right to exercisemy authority over my child. By way of flimsy consolation I told myselfSophie had moved out but had not run away.We did, after all,make contact from time to time. It was a thin distinction that providedlittle warmth in my frozen condition.

Not knowing where Sophie was night after night reconjured arecurring nightmare I had as a single parent. I am far away frommy children. A dreadful holocaust of some kind takes place. I can'tget to them. I want to be with them, to hold them. In real time, Ireacted by trying to put my children in safe containers — schools,programs — so I knew where they were and, I believed, wheresomeone, who knew what they were doing, controlled what theywere experiencing.

One such container was the school I sent Sophie to her freshmanyear in high school, a college preparatory school in theWillamette Valley, three hours' drive over the Cascade Mountainsfrom where we lived in Eastern Oregon. I had pushed hard for herto go there. Private education was the norm where I grew up inNew England. After brief forays into independent schools, my twoolder children had each returned to the public system. This disappointed me. I wanted them to have the best possible education. I alsowanted them far removed from contact with their father for as muchof the year as possible. Since our exodus from the ranch he hadthrown himself into the arms of his addictions and into the arms ofyoung, desperate, strung-out women scarcely older than Sophie, withtheir hollow-eyed children in tow. So I was thrilled when Sophieagreed, at my urging, to apply to a number of boarding schools-some back East, and one in Oregon.

She decided on the Oregon school, to be closer to home. I wentirresponsibly into debt to pay for this supposed superior educationand to create the distance from her father I thought necessary. Hewas also in Eastern Oregon, an hour away. He continued to live onwhat had been our ranch, letting slip between his smoke-stained fingersthe now empty pastures tucked beneath the sheer rimrock cliffs,the untilled farm ground now crazy with weeds, the now emptyrows of feedlot pens that hop-scotched along the gravel bench abovethe river, and the neglected house with him shut inside, too checkedout to venture out.The trick, I believed, was to engage the childrenin enough other activities so they wouldn't want to see him and riskbeing lured into his darkness. With school out after her freshman year at the prep school, Sophiereturned home in June. Despite the activities I had arranged, Ilater learned the highlight of her summer was not four weeks atcamp in the San Juan Islands hiking and sailing, but the VolcanicRock festival, a three-day event held in the lava fields at the foot ofthe Cascade Mountains. Sheriffs' white patrol cars lurched over thesolidified molten-black flows, scanning the throngs of teens for beerand drugs. But the concert-goers, Sophie among them, were wayahead of the law.They had buried their stash and kegs in the woodsweeks before. She drank and danced and smoked and snorted herselfinto oblivion, and liked it. I knew this because she indiscreetly describedthe details of her weekend to her friends over the phone, sittingat the head of the stairs. She must have wanted me to hear.Life had rewarded Sophie for going to the edge.To the appreciativeshouts and cheers of those more timid, she was famous forjumping, without hesitation, off a cliff into the Deschutes Rivertwenty feet below. She nailed her Bach sonata recital with minimalpractice. She repeatedly won cross-country ski races on sheer guts.This dauntless quality was evident even when she was small. I wouldpack lunches for the children and we would explore parts of theranch, afterward naming the trails. There was Bambi's Trail, becausewe had spotted deer; Jessica's Rump for Isabelle's friend who took atumble while we hiked; Skipping Stones where we picnicked alongthe river that snaked through our land on a beach of pebbles perfectfor slicing across the flat, gray water. The Haunted Homestead hikeled to an abandoned cabin with two poplar trees standing sentinelon either side of the collapsed front porch. Poplars are the telltaleand lasting signature of homesteaders, marking the spot they choseto try to make a go of it, planting the fast-growing trees as a windbreak,for protection, for reassurance. More often than not on thesewalks, Sophie would let go of my hand and run ahead, her short legspropelling her precipitously close to the edge of the rimrock, to bethe first to spot a falcon in its nest, or up the rickety stairs of theabandoned house to fearlessly roust out the ghosts we had conjured.Now, at sixteen, she brought her taste for the edge to experimentingwith drugs and alcohol. Did she have poplars to mark the spot, soshe could eventually return to herself?

In August, Sophie announced that she would not go back to thepreparatory school and begged to attend the local high school. Inexchange she promised the moon-piano lessons, athletics, an afterschooljob-all the things we had established as indicators of beingengaged in life-external litmuses of health.We drew up and bothsigned a written contract-the first of many. But, as the ranchwomen used to say, they turned out to be "pie crust promises, easilymade and easily broken."

It all felt hauntingly familiar. I had gone down the same torturedtrail with my son who, during his sophomore and junior years inhigh school, modeled the exact behavior Sophie now aspired to-using and lying about it, letting down those who cared most. Shebegan the year on track, then started to miss classes. She dropped outof all extracurricular activities. She got a job and lost it. I pulled thereins in tighter and tighter. Curfews. Counseling. Revised and rerevisedcontracts.The high school advisor told me to be tough, to setfirm boundaries, not to keep lowering the bar of my expectations.Consequences.Terms and conditions. Grade point. She finally playedwhat she felt was her trump card-abruptly packing all her thingsand moving the sixty miles to her father's. His was by now an environmentof disintegration. His addictions knew no bounds. All thatwas left of our ranch we had lived and worked on together was aneviction notice.

Despite her deteriorated state, Sophie couldn't tolerate thenightmarish quality of her father's for long. Too proud to returnhome, it was then that she resorted to couch surfing, staying wherevershe could find floor space, or sleeping in the car her father had,against my wishes, given her. Late one night in November I headedupstairs, the same, relentless questions rattling in my head.Where wasSophie? Was she alive? "Am I the only one who cares?" I whimperedout loud."How could this happen? How could this happen to me?"There it was.The subtle strain of arrogance, of me-ness, of victimizationin response to hardship. It works well, I would learn, to postponeseeing a situation for what it is and taking the appropriate action.What an extraordinary notion-that certain of us are somehowprotected from bad things, don't deserve them, are too good forthem, that surely some sort of magic would happen and make themgo away, that bad things only happen to bad people. An indulgedchildhood, growing up like a hot-house plant in the protective embraceof white Anglo Saxon New England, had somehow propagatedthis misguided point of view in me. Who did I think I was?Thanks to Sophie, I was about to find out. Car headlights glanced across the front of the house. I parted thecurtain and saw a car pull up. A teenage girl got out and walked tothe passenger side, opened the door, and, placing Sophie's arm overher shoulder, struggled to help her out of the car. Sophie leaned unsteadilyinto her friend's body, both nearly toppling on to the frozenground.

I came back downstairs and stood in the doorway, my armsfolded in protection against the cold and the truth. Sophie vomitedon the doorstep in a careless, detached way and staggered toward me."Didn't seem like she could have made it home," the unidentifiedyoung woman said. "Is she still living here?" The question stung. Istruggled to support Sophie into the house and help her to herroom. "I can do it, Mam. I'm fine." Later, when I went upstairs tocheck on her, I found a half-clad body stretched out across the bed.Unable to get her blue jeans over her shoes, she had given up andfallen back on to her pillow. I called her name. She slurred a response:"I love you, Mam. I'll do better. I will." I helped her get hershoes off and into her pajamas. She turned on to her side and drewher favorite stuffed bear, Humphrey, to her chest. She had namedhim when she was five years old after the gray whale that had gottenoff course, swum too far inland up the Sacramento River. The residentsalong the tidal river tried everything, even beating on theirsaucepans underwater, finally getting the lost whale turned around.Sophie succumbed to sleep. The image of her vulnerable body,half stripped, incapable of helping herself, was too desperate for meto ignore. "How long," my friend asked after an Al-Anon meeting,"are you going to watch her circle the drain before you do something?"I was ready. Hand me the saucepan.

Excerpted from Then There Was No Mountain by Sam and Ellie Waterston, Taylor Trade Publishing, Copyright 2003.