by Teal Swan
She looked over at the snow globe that was sitting on the desk adjacent to the bed. She was inside it, the silence and refuge of the secluded world it contained, the fake snow and sparkles falling on her face all she could feel, all she could let herself feel. Aria might be unable to escape the moment with her body, but she could leave her body behind and escape with her mind. It took her a moment after he had cum before she could let herself drift back, waiting for him to leave before grabbing tissues to clean herself with and drifting into a haunted sleep.
The next day, Aria rifled around in the various toolboxes of the garage, leaving lids open and tools scattered until she found the blade of an X-Acto knife, a deranged craving pulsing in the marrow of her bones. Like poison, despair trickled through her veins. She needed to be relieved of it. In a focused frenzy, she found a roll of duct tape and paper towels and carried them to the upstairs bathroom, and closed the door. Stripping down to her jeans and bra, she climbed into the bathtub, where she crouched and proceeded to let the blade speak against her skin. She shook as she drew the blade across both forearms, repetitively making diagonal cuts in both directions. Her skin yielded to the blade. Blood welled up out of the cuts and dripped over the side of her arms to splatter against the floor of the bathtub.
This wasn’t the first time Aria had intentionally cut herself. It was a habit that she had successfully concealed for months before her younger brother caught her doing it. When Mrs Johnson first became aware that she was cutting herself, she removed all the locks from the internal doors of the house and proceeded to shame Aria for it. She sat across from Aria at the kitchen table and read her a collection of Bible verses that pertained to the way God expected the human body to be treated. It was the way she dealt with anything. Any and all of Aria’s emotions were invalidated. Mrs Johnson had a habit of turning Aria’s feelings back on her by telling her that the way she felt meant that there must be something wrong with her, because in Mrs Johnson’s mind, there was no other valid reason for her to feel the way she felt. Of course this only served to exacerbate the problem. Aria hated Mrs Johnson. But Aria’s feelings were internalized. She became hypercritical of herself and that hatred, now internalized, was focused on herself.
Aria turned on the water faucet to a trickle. She felt the soothing relief eat away at the static of her anxiety. Her breathing slowed. She felt alive in this moment, mesmerized by the blood making its way, in streams that looked like watercolour, down the drain. Relief was all she wanted.
But the relief was short-lived. Having heard Aria hurry from the garage to the bathroom, Mrs Johnson gave in to her curiosity. She opened the door slowly. Aria was startled by the noise and tried to hide her arms. But it was too late. “Aria!” she gasped, rushing over to the bathtub.
She pulled at Aria’s arms so she could see them clearly. Once she was confident that none of the cuts were deep enough to need stitches, her panic turned to exasperation. She stood with her hands on her hips, shaking her head back and forth, and paced the length of the bathroom, muttering to herself. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked in an angry tone, looking at Aria out of the corner of her eye. “What have I done? What have I done to deserve this?”
Aria flushed with shame as she went on. “I’m taking you to see someone, this has got to stop!” she barked. She turned her back to Aria for a minute and then turned back to face her. “Do you think this is the right place for you? ’Cause I just don’t know anymore.”
“Yes,” piped Aria, suddenly overtaken by the very real threat of being abandoned again. She began to sob.
At the sight of her tears, Mrs Johnson began to cry too. She shook her head, trying to conceal the contortion of her face. She turned to leave the room and through the sounds of her cries she called behind her, “You clean it all up and for God’s sake don’t show anyone.” Her footsteps and sobs sounded down the hallway to her room.
Aria’s world was spinning. As if a perfect mirrored reflection of Mrs Johnson’s sobbing, she cried into the container of the lonely bathroom. She knew she was on thin ice and had been for quite some time.
The Johnsons had been planning to adopt her shortly after fostering her, just as they had done with her younger sister. But Aria’s frequent behavior problems had caused them to delay, and now, Aria was facing the possibility of being given up entirely. Her deep fear of being forsaken bubbled up with each sob.
She sat in the bathtub, crying, until she was shivering and the blood had stopped running from her forearms. She turned on the warm water. It stung as she cupped it over her arms, washing them clean of congealed blood. She dried them off and wrapped them sloppily in paper towel, anchoring it to her arms with uneven strips of duct tape. When she was done, aside from the warmth of it having been used, the bathroom looked as if nothing had taken place. She dumped the bloodstained towel down the laundry chute and walked to her room to find a long-sleeved hoodie to wear.
That week, Aria found herself contained within the astringent walls of a psychiatrist’s office. She flexed her feet. The leather couch squeaked under her weight. She filled out the patient intake form as the man sitting across from her studied her. When she handed him the completed form, he set it on his desk and proceeded to talk. “Do you know why you’re here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Aria said. “I’ve been hurting myself.”
“It says here that you’re in foster care, is that true?”
The psychiatrist shifted in his chair, adjusting the glasses on his nose as he awaited her answer. Aria nodded.
“Why are you hurting yourself?” he asked.
“It feels better. Everything just gets really quiet,” Aria said, pausing to put her elbows on her knees and resting her temples on her palms. “I don’t see why this is such a big deal to everyone.”
“It’s a big deal to everyone because we can’t have you being a danger to yourself, or to anyone else for that matter,” the man answered. He looked down at his hands in his lap and Aria could see that he was balding.
Sensing that this man was accustomed to extreme emotional displays, she seized the opportunity to release the pressure. “I fucking hate this place,” she said. “Who the fuck would want to live here?”
The psychiatrist received the words and stayed silent, welcoming more expression. Aria glanced around the room. “Life is like an air-filled syringe to the veins,” she said, playing with the end of her sleeve. “I wish that love could make this world good, instead of sugar-coat it.”
“Are you saying that you feel like love is fake?”
“Yes, love is fake!” Aria shouted.
The psychiatrist scribbled notes on the pad of paper in his hands. It made her feel like a lab rat there to be studied. As if to cut him off from his writing, Aria said, “You people don’t care about me, you don’t care about me at all. You just want me to die so you can be rid of me.”
“We don’t want you to die – that’s precisely why you’re here,” he said, not looking up from his paper.
A marked silence fell over the room. Eventually he looked up from his notes and steered the conversation in another direction. “You’ve experienced a pretty big loss; how do you feel about losing your mother?”
Aria looked at him in obstinate defiance. “I don’t think anything about it,” she answered.
He scribbled again in his notes. It went on like this for over an hour, the psychiatrist trying to extract information from her, Aria evading his questions. Inside she was dying. Inside, she heard the truthful answer to his questions arise within her chest; she knew that she was not OK. But she couldn’t let him know that.
When the appointment was over, the man stood up and put his hands in his pockets. “I’d be glad to keep seeing you if you want to come,” he said. Aria nodded and said OK. But she did not intend to return.
Aria made her way to a chair in the waiting room next to Mrs Johnson, who had been anxiously awaiting her return. The psychiatrist waved her mother into the room. The door c
losed behind them but they didn’t realize that Aria could still make out the conversation.
“I’m fairly certain that Aria has manic depression,” the psychiatrist explained. “The file I received from the agency said that she was treated for methamphetamine toxicity. I have to tell you that mood disorders are fairly common in children who have been exposed to meth.”
Aria could imagine Mrs Johnson looking at the floor rather than at the man telling her the news. “Yes, they said it was a possibility. But I just couldn’t imagine that with the right upbringing, she wouldn’t get better.” After a brief pause, she went on, “I have four other children at home. She can’t keep doing this. She’s a bad influence on them and I’m at the end of my rope.”
“I’ll write you a prescription for Lexapro,” Aria heard him say. “You can try her on 10mg a day. It may take up to six weeks to notice an improvement.”
“Thank you,” Mrs Johnson said, before coming out and making another appointment with the secretary at the front of the office.
The atmosphere between Aria and Mrs Johnson was icy on the drive back home. Neither of them said a single word. The city seemed to move in slow motion compared to the speed of the car. The world outside the car was like a movie Aria was watching rather than a world that she was a part of.
That night, before she went to bed, Mrs Johnson entered the room with a glass of water and a tiny white pill. She held them out to Aria and smiled as if hopeful that the pill would take all of their worries away. Aria swallowed the pill and handed the empty glass back to her. “Did you finish your homework?” Mrs Johnson asked.
“Yeah,” Aria said.
“Good,” Mrs Johnson said and left the room in a state of satisfaction.
Aria pulled out her journal and made her sentiments known. This is hell, she wrote. I wish I knew what sins could be forgiven and that love could feed the world instead of sugar-coat it. I wish I wasn’t left wanting a time when I still believed an ocean existed inside every spiral shell, and the sound there was waves instead of a change in the goddamn air pressure. They gave me pills today. I’m six feet under and a thousand feet deep; they have forgotten the shadow I creep between. I’m alone. I always have been and I always will be. She ended her entry with a scribbled zigzag that took up the remainder of the page.
That night, Aria tossed and turned with stomach pain. She couldn’t sleep. She felt nauseous but couldn’t throw up. She stayed home from school the next day. After two days, Mrs Johnson suspected that it was a side effect of the new medication. She called the psychiatrist’s office and described the symptoms. The doctor told her: “Lexapro has been known to cause nausea and stomach pain but the benefits outweigh the risks so keep her on it for another week. The side effect should go away.”
Aria agreed to take the pill for two more days. She writhed in agony on the floor of her room until she couldn’t take it anymore. She resolved to stop taking the pills. From then on, when Mrs Johnson brought the pill in to her before bedtime, Aria only pretended to take it. As soon as she left the room, Aria would spit it in the wastebasket in the corner of her room. Mrs Johnson was satisfied in her ignorance. When her daughter started feeling better, she felt confident that the side effect had worn off and that Aria was getting better.
That is, until she found the stash of unswallowed pills, on the very same day that Aria’s school called to tell her that her daughter had been suspended for being caught with a packet of cigarettes in her locker.
Aria sat outside the door in the hallway, listening to Mr and Mrs Johnson’s voices float back and forth. They had one thing in common: an air of defeat. Mrs Johnson had not bothered to take the issue up with Aria that day. She was past that point.
“She can’t stay here, Robert,” she said. “We have other children to think of and it’s not getting better. God give me the strength for this.”
She paced the room as her husband sat on the bed. To Aria’s amazement, he said, “I agree. She’s better off where she can get placed with a family that’s equipped to handle a girl with these struggles.”
Mr Johnson felt a foreign sense of reprieve at the prospect of Aria going away. The guilt that had preoccupied him for so long as a result of the indiscretions between himself and Aria might just come to an end. Somewhere inside of him, he felt a glimmer of hope that if Aria left, she wouldn’t tempt him anymore. He could live with himself. He could return to normal.
Aria could not believe her ears. She was sure that the secret they shared would at least bind him to come to her defense. She was sure that it would compel him to want her to stay here. But clearly she was wrong. She was worth nothing to either of them. Abandoned by one mother and hated by a second, and with a father who used her for his own idle pleasure without giving a damn, she stood up and retreated to her room. She shut herself in the closet and sat beneath her hanging clothes, confined in a sphere of sorrow.
She didn’t hear the surprise in Mrs Johnson’s voice at her husband’s words. “You really think so?” she asked.
“I think Aria needs more help than we can give her. I’ve got to work and you’ve got your hands full here at the house, and I just can’t stand seeing you like this every day.”
“But she’s my daughter …” Mrs Johnson started to weep. “She’s got to know that God loves her. No, I won’t give up on her, Robert. I can’t do that.”
In the closet, memories nagged at Aria. In the dark, she could see the sorrel-colored brick of the Eccles Children’s Home like it was yesterday. She had been there longer than at any other group home. She remembered the way the bleak linoleum hallway shone. The air of tragedy that hung in the place, only slightly more pungent than the smell of industrial cleaner. A dormitory of rooms with bunk beds, four children per room. The new ones crying at night, but no one there to comfort them. The emotional deprivation so thick you could breathe it in. There was nowhere for all the torment to go, so the children aimed it at each other. You couldn’t get attached to anyone, because there was no knowing when they were going to be placed in a foster home and leave you. It was anything but a “home,” it was just a place where she was forced to fall asleep at night.
She couldn’t go back to that place.
The torment of the idea of being returned to the group home compelled her to move from her place in the closet. She walked from one end of the room to the other in a frightened daze. She was breathing heavily. She decided to confront the Johnsons about their decision but when she walked down the hallway to their room, she could see through the crack below the door that the light in their room was out. They had already gone to sleep.
Time stood still again, just as it had that day 10 years ago when they had walked her to the school office to tell her that her mother was in the hospital. Again, as she walked down the hallway of the house she had thought would be her home, it felt like she was walking in slow motion. Aria went back to her room and lay under the covers of her bed. Her tears had given way to an unnerved numbness. It was not a conscious decision. The decision came from the deep recesses of her soul, a soul that could not bear the idea of being abandoned again. The decision was clear. She had to leave this place. She had to run away.
Aria rode the first wave of adrenaline across the room to fetch her school backpack. She emptied out the books onto her bed and proceeded to fill her backpack with all the things she could not leave behind: her journal, a change of clothes, her toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush, the blankie she had slept with for eight years and the snow globe beside her bed. The abrasive rip of the zipper jolted her into feeling again. She was terrified. Glancing around the room one last time, to make sure she had not left anything she could not live without, her eyes settled on Clifford. He was patiently sitting on the desk in her room, watching her intently as if he could sense what she had planned. Aria was leveled by the surge of grief she felt when she noticed him. For a minute, she entertained the notion that she would be leaving him and, with him, the only real sense of connection she h
ad ever had. But when she thought of taking him with her, the gush of relief she felt was enough to convince her to do it. She would make it work, no matter what. She picked up her coat that was heaped on the floor and zipped it halfway while she walked toward the cat. Lifting him into her coat, she kissed his head and made cooing sounds. As docile as he was, he made no protest. She felt guilty, realizing that her siblings would wake to find the family pet missing, but she zipped up her coat anyway, concealing Clifford inside.
Aria bent down to swing her backpack onto her back. She turned off the light in the room she was about to abandon. It felt empty already, even though everything was still in its proper place. She walked down the stairs, trying to make as little noise as possible, and crossed the floor to the doorway. She did not look back when she reached the door. As far as she was concerned, she did not have the option to second-guess herself. She unlocked the door and cracked it open with delicate movements, maneuvering her body past it. In the heat of the moment, she could not feel the cold of the air when it received her. She turned around to close the door as quietly as she could. The familiar wooden plaque on the door rattled a bit when she closed it.
She looked briefly at the house she was leaving forever. Surprisingly, she felt a fondness that she could not recall feeling before. But this was no time to turn back, so she spun around and tiptoed down the steps. When she reached the sidewalk, she began to walk swiftly, looking back over her shoulder only once to make sure that she hadn’t woken anyone in the house. When she saw that the lights were still off, she held Clifford tight to her chest and began running.
Aria had run away from home.
CHAPTER 3
The air outside was biting. Aria was caught up in the rush of having made the decision to leave them before they abandoned her. It made her feel like she was finally part of the outside world. She was out in it, instead of looking at it through a pane of glass. The darkness swallowed her up and she welcomed it. She felt a stronger sense of belonging in the shadowy spaces, between where the light from the street lamps could reach, than she had ever felt in the façade of that cinnamon-smelling shitshow called a home.
