When I found her at the gas station, her slow movements, blank stares, and depressed cognitive abilities told me she was probably on drugs. I had no idea which kind. But there she was, alive. I immediately knew I was lucky.

When I found her at the gas station, she could not recall what she had been doing for the last thirty seconds, let alone the last thirty minutes. These last thirty minutes I had been sick with worry, watching her location on my tracking app and wondering what was taking so long.

We had spoken three hours earlier and she was upset. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t experience that motherly instinct I hear moms refer to with such pride, the instinct that tells you what’s happened, where to go, what to say, and what to do. An instinct that probably distinguishes the good moms from mediocre moms, like myself.

When I found her at the gas station, she was walking into the bathroom. She wore baggy gray sweatpants and a thin gray tank top. She’d cut the tank top off at the midriff, her shiny cubic zirconia belly button ring visible. I could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra, but at her age, her breasts had no sag to them. On her arms were homemade marker tattoos, some done herself, others courtesy of her friends. Colorful geometric patterns, curlicues, random lines, dots, a moon and stars, and lightning bolts covered a large majority of her exposed skin. Her short, curly hair was parted down the middle. Half of her hair was a dark grassy turquoise color and the other half was black. Her face was pale white and her hazel eyes, today leaning more towards green, refused to focus behind her large wire-rimmed glasses.

“Hey,” I said to her. She turned to me and raised her eyebrows, surprise registering. I reached out and put one hand gently on the side of her neck. Her skin was cool to the touch.

“Hey,” she returned. Her speech was slow and slightly slurred.

“What are you doing?” I asked, shifting the baby on my hip. It was almost midnight and I hadn’t wanted to wake the baby. The decision to disturb her sleep and leave the house had been a struggle. But the pulsing green dot that showed my older daughter’s location on the tracking app was no longer moving. I refreshed the screen every two minutes, then every minute, then every thirty seconds, then every ten seconds.

“What? What are you talking about? I’m at the gas station,” she replied. I looked into her eyes as she looked past mine. The telltale shifty, jerky movements of her eyeballs indicated to me that she’d taken some kind of substance. I could tell she was struggling to choose the right words. Her vowels were lazy and drawn out as she forced words to form.

“Obviously I know that! You’ve been here for half an hour!” I yelled, modeling the exact behavior I did not want her to repeat. I stopped short of shouting “You’re so selfish!” Still, I knew the energy of that thought hit her unconscious, diving into the fragile opening of her psyche created by the drugs she had taken. She managed to look me in the eye, but I couldn’t stop the wisps of misplaced anger that traveled from my wavelength to hers. I was tired, and she knew I would have to wake the baby to come find her.

“No I haven’t!” she yelled back.

I tried to explain that the tracking app showed how long she’d been here. She knew about the app but shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I’ve only been here a few minutes.” She almost sounded normal this time. Selfish! I thought again, though I wished that word would quit popping into my head. I was annoyed with myself for reacting poorly to the situation, my self-loathing further reducing my ability to control my tone and posture.

I decided there was no point in arguing. “Hurry the hell up and let’s go!” I said too loudly, clenching my jaw impatiently. A frumpy lady nearby turned to look at me. I saw judgment flood her eyes and I deepened my scowl. And you can mind your own damn business, frumpy! She turned away, message received.

My older daughter rolled her eyes and picked up a bag of chips she had dropped on the red tile floor of the gas station. She started wandering around and I followed. The baby squinted under the bright fluorescent lights and patted my back.

“Mama,” said the baby softly. “Mama.” She repeats my name when she’s nervous or uncertain or scared, like when I yell.

My older girl continued to walk around. She seemed to have a goal but clearly lacked a purpose. The other patrons in the store noticed something wasn’t right and steered clear of us.

I was finally able to direct my daughter to the checkout counter. She handed the cashier a bag of chips and a jar of cheese dip. As she fumbled with her debit card, my frustrated fury overwhelmed and defeated my fear and worry. I allowed my agitation to steal all gentleness and understanding. As if I’d never been through similar things myself. As if my own difficulties and struggles with infinite darkness were so far removed I couldn’t imagine what led her to this moment, fumbling with a debit card while trying to buy crinkle potato chips and yellow cheese dip.

For a moment, I remembered myself as a teenager and the many days I suffered through the same debilitating illness. I remembered the girl who did dumb, dangerous things while on the downward slide of the bleakest episodes of depression. The girl who took off walking at midnight without shoes and made it half a mile before taking a ride with a stranger, an older man in a beat-up pickup truck. Not caring if he took me where he said he would. The girl who experimented with substances and dressed inappropriately and who believed the pain I felt in those moments was the way I’d feel forever, so who cared what happened to me?

I quickly put those thoughts out of my head. After she paid, I let her drive the mile back home, because it was easier for me than leaving her car there. These days, every time I had to strap the baby in the car seat and make a trip that wasn’t necessary, it felt like a burden. I was spread too thin, like so many single moms, but that night I didn’t recognize or accept that my child’s safety should always come above my own comfort. Mistake twenty-two I made that evening as a mother and human. I still didn’t know what exactly was wrong with her. She assured me she could drive and I chose to believe her.

Once home, I thought to check her purse. Inside her green canvas bag were three cheese sticks, a honey bun, a jar of ranch dip, a big double chocolate chip cookie, a package of peppermint gum, a yogurt drink, teriyaki beef jerky, a giant dill pickle, and a Dr Pepper. She’d stolen it all.

I asked her what she’d been thinking and why she’d stolen those stupid things. “Fuck them,” she said, shrugging. She flopped on the couch and took a deep breath. “They have a no-chase policy. It’s not a big deal.”

I did my best to keep my head from exploding. So stupid! You could have been caught! You could have been arrested!

I sat down with the baby, who was ready to go back to sleep. I was tired and grouchy and wasn’t sure I was ready to take in the dump truck of pain I knew my daughter was holding onto. But I inhaled deeply and asked her what was wrong. Then I asked her what kind of drugs she’d taken.

As she talked, my heart clenched. She stopped her story, then started again. She became confused. Told me one thing, then jumped to something else, then back to part of the story she’d begun earlier. I was filled with anguish as she struggled to comprehend, process, and understand the hazards, perils, and hateful side of life.

While she spoke I watched her. My daughter is pretty and has smooth skin and bright, intelligent eyes. She inherited a body of enviable ebbs and flows, hills and valleys, and her youthful, wrinkle-free skin was untouched by time and gravity. She’s lucky her figure comes from her paternal genes, and that she doesn’t have my skinny, lanky frame. When she smiles, which hasn’t been much lately, I get a glimpse of the gentle, calm, content soul that hides deep inside her. Her smile is one of the few things in this world that can bring me out of my own dark hole.

When I found her at the gas station, my mind processed what could have happened to her in short flashes. These images intermingled with my irritation and caused my throat to intermittently tighten, forcing fearful tears to recede.

I was thankful she seemed okay, at least in body, but I couldn’t stop the anxious rage I felt at what might have happened to her at the gas station because of how reckless she’d been.

A couple of drunk men, acting like friends, talking to her outside. Asking her what she likes to drink and if she wants to smoke. Inviting her for a ride. Taking her back to a shabby apartment, encouraging her to drink more. Making false friends with her before forcing themselves on her. Making sure she’s so out of her mind she doesn’t protest—much. Then dropping her back off after they’re done with her. Or worse, killing her.

Her, my child, my little woman.

Or she could have been lured away by someone worse, sold and used and hurt and abused. It did not take a mother’s eyes to know that she was not fully capable of making appropriate decisions for herself. Anyone who looked closely at her at the gas station could see her vulnerability.

She didn’t tell me, but I knew well that as depression consumed her, she’d want to be anywhere but stuck inside her own head, feeling so bad it might kill her. I knew she’d want to feel something else, to do something dangerous and bad and scary and potentially life-altering. But she’s a kid, and she doesn’t have the resources, imagination, or courage to do something more catastrophic than take some drugs and steal things. If someone had been looking though, waiting for an opportunity, she would have presented as the kind of helpless, hopeless, vulnerable lost soul who is perfect prey for evil.

While she opened up about the fresh wounds that led her to drive to the gas station to steal things, I felt a deep, savage frustration rising within. For weeks, I had been calling mental health facilities, trying to get her the help she needed.

The therapist she had been seeing wasn’t helping. I looked skeptically at the art my daughter created while at her office: words glued on posterboard, abstract paintings, a small, decorated mannequin head. After many months in therapy without improvement, I wondered what the art projects were accomplishing. I imagined the therapist in her large office with her warm lamplights and comfortable couch talking soothingly to my daughter. Murmuring about the art, advising she glue a bead here or paint with yellow this time, asking about my daughter’s day or how she was sleeping or what she was eating, failing to dig into the heart of the problem.

The pills weren’t helping either. The pills had been prescribed to my daughter the first time I took her to the hospital because I was afraid of what else her demons might force her to do. This was after she’d shown me, while sobbing, the self-inflicted cuts that covered too much of the perfect skin on her arms and legs.

I had told the nurse practitioner who managed my daughter’s medications that the pills weren’t helping.

“Hmm, let’s try upping the dose,” the nurse said casually, as if this was business as usual, a bump in dosage here, a bump there.

I told the nurse and therapist that my daughter was feeling increasingly worse instead of better and that I was terrified she might hurt herself again. They said she might need inpatient treatment. They told me to find the treatment for her. As if they, practitioners in the field of mental health with years of education, experience, professional connections, resources, and knowledge beyond my reach, couldn’t be bothered to take this extra step for a patient, a child, desperately in need.

They provided me with the names of two mental health facilities for adolescents. I looked up a few others on my own. Call after call, I was shut down without being given further resources. I’m sorry, we can’t help you right now, they’d say, but of course they weren’t sorry. We don’t have any openings right now, followed by the click of disconnection before I could reply. I’m not sure our programs are right for her, yet nothing more was offered.

If I had called and said, “She’s bleeding everywhere!” urgent care would have been delivered. Asses would have sprung from seats, her physical well-being given priority above all else. A team assembled to stop the bleeding and repair what had been severed. It is not the same with invisible mental illnesses. These diseases eat away quietly, inside perfect teenage bodies, causing damage that may be irreparable. Damage that could kill.

When I found her at the gas station, I didn’t know she felt an emotional weight so painfully deep she thought she’d never feel good again. That she believed she had only one choice, one option left, because so far, no one and nothing had made her believe otherwise.

When I found her at the gas station, I didn’t know she’d taken a handful of sleeping pills in an attempt to permanently leave behind the pain of this world. I didn’t know she’d hoped to die.

Tiffany Avery is a writer, editor, mother, and soldier living near Kansas City, Missouri. She primarily writes raw, creative nonfiction to help process and learn from challenging experiences. She has a BA in English from Park University and an MA in writing from Missouri State University. Her nonfiction piece “Fear – Cut Sling Load” will be published in late fall 2021 in Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, vol. 10.

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