by Teal Swan
She let the fury of her rejection of that life fuel her movements forward. It seemed to allow her to run further and faster than normal. It was empowering. But beneath the fever of that empowerment, Aria was terrified. She was terrified of the feeling of arriving wherever it was that she was going. She knew that once she got there, there would be nothing but silence and nothing but stillness. There would be nothing but space to second-guess herself.
A few times Aria stopped to check on Clifford, whose still demeanor beneath her coat owed more to his state of confusion than it did to pleasure. She felt guilty that he was along for the ride to suit her best interests rather than to suit his own. “It’s OK,” she said down to him, cradling him closer in an attempt to soothe away the anxiety, which was so obviously telegraphed by the agitated swivel of his ears.
Aria had run away without a specific destination in mind and that no longer made sense. No matter how hard she tried to search for a great idea, the corridors of her mind would only offer up a slideshow of familiar places. She decided on the one she felt most suited the current situation: the bleachers flanking her high school football field. She had spent time there on several occasions while skipping school, feeling exactly like she did now, like a fugitive. A fugitive intent on biding as much time as possible before making the next move.
The school looked menacing at nighttime, like a sophisticated modern megalith that seemed to be sleeping. As she walked to the edge of its grounds, Aria felt as if the building itself might wake, like a guard dog. Though it was spring, the grass under her feet had not been graced by the impulse of the season. It seemed dead, or dormant at least, and colorless. Making sure to draw no attention to herself, she found her familiar place underneath the bleachers. She was used to them during the daytime, when the sun had warmed them so deeply that they were soothing to the touch. This was different. At nighttime, the metal was like silver ice. She felt judged by them. And just as she’d been afraid of, a few minutes after she crouched down, the stillness and silence set in. The unfamiliar nature of this well-known place made her begin to doubt herself.
Clifford was unsettled by the stillness too. As soon as her body settled, the cat began squirming. He tried to jump up and out of the collar of her coat. “No,” she said, “stay here.” Trying to keep his movements hushed but to no avail, eventually she resorted to using one hand to untie the worn laces of one of her high-top sneakers and pull it out. She tied the shoelace to Clifford’s collar, like a leash, and watched, saying nothing, as he contended with it for a few minutes before lying down in the dust in a state of defeat. His tail was swishing. His ears were half pinned back. He had a look on his face of so much chagrin; Aria thought to herself that he almost looked human. She felt guilty, but, in her own state of distress, could conjure nothing within herself to remedy it.
Aria’s mind tried to distract her by running frantically through every possible scenario for how things could play out. She thought about going back home. She thought about being captured by the police. She thought about hitchhiking to another part of the country. She thought about running into the wilderness and creating a life for herself in nature. For a second, she decided to go back home, but then, as if snapping out of a daze, she remembered the conversation she had overheard between Mr and Mrs Johnson. They had already made up their mind to hand her back over to the state. If she went back home, she wouldn’t get there until dawn had already broken. Having them find out that she’d spent the night out of the house was like putting the signature on her eviction notice from their lives. It wasn’t an option.
That realization no longer was just a mental one. Her expendability hit her chest and stomach with the force of a semi truck. She unzipped her backpack to find her blankie. Holding it, she pulled Clifford close to her, as if the closer she held them both, the higher the chance was that the agony would go away. But it didn’t. Instead, that despair eventually lulled her into a cold, restless, dreamless sleep.
Panic woke her after just a few hours, panic that robbed the peaceful transition between sleeping and awake; panic that reminded her of the reality of her life in that moment before her eyes had even opened. The light that was slowly brightening before the sun had risen issued a warning. A warning of being found out.
Aria collected Clifford under her coat again, pulled her backpack over her shoulders and snuck away from the school grounds. Walking away, she turned back and realized that she was leaving her life behind in layers. First, the place she was supposed to belong with a family, called home. Second, the place she was supposed to learn to belong in society, called school. She was conscious that this meant she was dropping out. As much pain as there was in making the choice to leave it all behind, it was scary how easy it was. It took no effort. The fact that she could just slip away like this meant that there was nothing holding her there in the first place. That anything she thought was there to hold her wasn’t real. Grieving the loss of the illusion of that external security, she boarded a city bus.
Sitting in the very back of the bus, she kept her eye on the driver. Careful to conceal Clifford, she moved her body as much as was necessary to keep him placid and to not look suspicious. When she’d stayed on the bus for so long that her continued presence there began to create a palpable tension, she got off. She was in a part of town near the museum. To Aria, it felt like she had stepped away from one flavor of sadness straight into another. The path of devastation seemed to have led her in a circle against her will.
As she watched a conflux of school children gather in factions on the concrete steps of the museum, Aria remembered her real mother bringing her here during one of her manic episodes all those years ago. She could almost see herself, like a hallucination overlaying the current scene, walking up those steps, small enough at that age that she had to focus on climbing them. She remembered knowing that her mother’s drug-induced enthusiasm and her desire to both connect and be a mother would be short-lived. But Aria didn’t care. She had decided to soak up those up-days for as long as they lasted so they could carry her through the desolation of all the other days.
She recalled them almost running from exhibit to exhibit. On that day, even though she asked for nothing more than to be with her mother, there was nothing Lucy wouldn’t give her. Lucy bought the tickets to the museum and ice-cream cones and toys from the gift shop as if there was no limit to abundance in their world. She thrust them into Aria’s little arms as if to say that the world could be her oyster. Aria had laughed because it was an experience she had always wanted to have.
She’d wondered for a second if her mother knew something that she didn’t. Maybe something wonderful had happened and they didn’t have to struggle anymore. But she knew deep inside that underneath that laughter and that hope, they couldn’t afford any of it. That feeling reminded her that her mother was not fully there. Lucy was interacting with the world as if through the veil of some alternate reality that was better than this one. Still, Aria tried to keep up with that unattuned alternate reality, and, for the day, she had managed to feel closer to her mother than she had in years.
It was one of those times in her life where she came closest to the vision in her head of what it might be like to really have a mother who loved her and who showed her the wonders of the world. Aria felt nostalgic about that day, as tainted as it may have been. It was a good day.
But then, standing there, staring at the museum, Aria thought to herself, I had two mothers – one who took me to the museum and bought me everything I could ever want. And another who woke up the next day and panicked about the new toys she saw in my room and then returned them. It just so happened that these two mothers Aria remembered were both Lucy.
Aria spent the day in a state of shock. She figured that hanging around a public place like this would keep the people looking for her (assuming there were any) off of her trail. Her hope was that people would mistake her for a high school student on a field trip. And to her surprise, no one ever did suspect a thin
g.
On a few occasions, she let Clifford out onto the sidewalk. People would come by to pet him and remark at the cuteness of such a docile cat, which was behaving more like a dog on the end of her makeshift leash. She was able to sneak Clifford into a public restroom in the subway station adjacent to the museum, where she created a puddle for him to drink from in an indentation in the tile floor. Aria waited for the brief seconds in between people coming and going to stop pretending to wash her hands and instead drink from the faucet. They both went without food that day. And as the night set in, Aria realized, not having thought of it before leaving, that she had no idea how she was going to get food for either of them.
When the sun went down, she snuck into the public bathroom one last time. She pulled out her toothbrush and toothpaste and hairbrush and brushed her teeth just like she would have if she were home. She watched herself in the dirty mirror, pulling the bristles of her hairbrush through her hair. The way she felt had changed throughout the day. Now, she wasn’t feeling empowered anymore. She wasn’t feeling sadness anymore. Instead she was feeling lost in a world that she now realized she was completely unprepared for. She found herself staring at a leak of orange soap fluid on the sink, in a daze, when the automatic lights switched off. “Come here, sweetie pea,” she said to Clifford, scooping him up again.
That night Aria found an open entryway to an office building on a side street, a few blocks away from the museum. All the lights inside the building were off, so she felt reasonably sure that she wouldn’t be detected there. The russet of the bricks made it feel warmer inside than it really was. Once she was out of the elements, her skin relished the lull of the air there. She sat down and pulled her blankie out of her backpack. She let Clifford wander in the tiny area. He sniffed around for a time before relieving himself on the floor. Aria initially jerked up to try to stop him, but realized it was no use. She erupted into tears. Tears because she had no way to clean it up. Tears for fear of getting in trouble. Tears at the tragedy of the situation she had found herself in. Even though she didn’t have the luxury of wondering why she, specifically, was the unlucky one who had wound up with this life, she cried tears as if she was attending her own funeral.
Aria stayed in the entryway that she had planned to sleep in for less than an hour until the fear of being found out, and the desire to distance herself from the potential trouble of the mess that Clifford had made, got the better of her. She decided to find another place to stay for the night. But the city was too cold. The universe seemed to watch her with an ocean of indifferent stars. Cars passed her, their engines babbling of destinations unwilling to wait. Any place she tried to settle into quickly became unbearable. Her body would not let her sleep. So instead, she spent the night walking and stopping, walking and stopping. It was hard to walk with one shoe missing its laces. It was hard to walk with the foggy, weak discomfort of hunger. But it was harder not to walk.
At first, the Johnsons thought they owed Aria’s absence to her characteristic delinquency. They assumed that she would eventually come home with some excuse for her absence and that she would deliver that excuse so as to imply they were “in the wrong” for even asking where she was. But by dinnertime, Mrs Johnson gave in to the nagging uneasiness in the background of their routine. After checking Aria’s room and finding no clues to her whereabouts, she called the police just after sundown. Now, two nights had come and gone.
“When did you last see her?”
“Did you have any worries about the state of her mental health or any other cause for concern when you saw her last?”
“Has she ever run away like this before?”
The questions the officer asked seemed to float impersonally across the room. For reasons beyond her understanding, Mrs Johnson was less focused on the questions themselves than she was on how wrong it felt that he could ask them in such a detached way. Her arms were unconsciously hugging her sides as if trying to hold her together. She watched the officer scribble in a notepad every time she or her husband gave an answer. She had been so consumed by Aria’s disappearance that she did not even notice that their family cat was also gone.
Upstairs, the occasional squeak of a floorboard or scuffing of a drawer being opened was audible from a second officer who was examining Aria’s room. Given Aria’s past as a ward of the state, they did not have to wait to file a missing person’s report. But as much of a blessing as that was, the police seemed unmoved by her absence, as if it were a let-down to be expected from a “child like her.”
When the police had collected all the information that they could, Mr Johnson saw them out. Instead of comforting his wife, he stood there looking at her as if to say, “I don’t know what to do.” And he didn’t know what to do. About Aria missing. About his wife’s distress. He was just standing there, waiting for direction.
It was at times like this that Mrs Johnson’s picture-perfect family image began to burn at the edges, like filmstrip caught in the projector. She got up and found herself watching her other children – sent into the backyard during the police visit – through the window over the kitchen sink. This was her way of coping, to busy herself with petty tasks. The warmth of the water offered itself to her in ways that her husband would not. She found a certain security of control in the way the soap predictably cleared the filth from the dishes. Watching the children play outside, witnessing them explore the limits of gravity with smiles on their faces, she couldn’t help but be struck by their innocence. Mrs Johnson could not figure out why God would let things happen to corrupt that innocence.
At times like this, she would speak to God in her own mind. Today, her invisible prayer was to understand why one child is born into a home like theirs, with loving parents and all the advantages in life, and why another child is not. She could feel her husband standing behind her. It bothered her that he did not seem vexed by these kinds of questions. Perhaps it was because he was a man. She envied his capacity to simply accept whatever life threw at them. She also hated him for it.
They had already driven to every place across the city where they thought Aria could be. Necessity meant the other children were sustained with takeout food. Even though they reveled in it, it challenged Mrs Johnson’s delicate self-concept as a mother.
Now they were playing a waiting game. A waiting game heavily tainted by guilt and notions of all the possible things that might have happened to Aria.
CHAPTER 4
“You have not mothered me life, you have not fathered me life.”
The sentence repeated like poisonous poetry in Aria’s mind. She had been hiding behind a Pizza Hut for what felt like hours, waiting for the store to close. Beneath the delirium of her hunger, she felt humiliated. Before leaving, she had not considered what her life might be reduced to, nor what she might be reduced to doing after she ran away.
In a trickle as slow as molasses, all the employees had gone home for the day, except one. She could see him through the window, appearing and disappearing while puttering around the store. He bore his heavy weight like a cross that had been nailed to him long ago. She felt infuriated with how satisfied he seemed with his meager sense of power and the blatant underachievement that, tonight at least, he seemed oblivious to.
“Can you just be done already, goddamn, what the fuck is there to do?” She said the words out loud even though, with both distance and glass between them, he would never hear them. The projection of her irritation did not hurry him at all. How could she expect it to? This man was oblivious and she was hidden to the point that he would never know that she was there. Eventually, her irritation was disrupted by the assault of the sound of grating metal. The back door had opened. She watched the man carry four pizza boxes out to the dumpster and throw them in.
Aria waited despite her nerves, like a predator knowing that it cannot act on its prey just yet without losing the chance altogether. She suffered a few more minutes of watching him resume his puttering before all but a row of dim fluorescent
lights went out. Still she waited just those few moments longer to ensure that he was gone before rushing to the dumpster to tie the loose end of the shoelace that was affixed to Clifford’s collar to the dumpster wheel.
The weight of the lid was uneven against her palms. When she lifted it, to throw it back, a warm waft of sickly plastic rot came rushing out to greet her face. She turned away too late to avoid it. She found it funny that no matter where a dumpster was, or what went inside it, they all smelled the same. Grabbing two of the pizza boxes that she had just seen the man throw away, she closed the lid again and sat down on the pavement to eat as fast as she could. The white cheese had already hardened and the tomato sauce had turned to a paste. When she bit into it, the crust smelled like flour, having lost its succulence without the heat. But her starvation elevated both its status and flavor. It was the best pizza she had ever eaten.
Aria pulled the cheese off two slices, and placed it in front of Clifford. Her voracious chewing was making her view of him jiggle as she watched him. In the stress of the last few days, Clifford had failed to groom himself. His coat, which was usually shiny, was beginning to look dull.
Clifford sniffed at the cheese apprehensively. He seemed to be put off by it. Maybe it’s the tomato, she thought to herself. For the last two days, Aria had been suppressing the awareness that she did not have the wherewithal to take care of Clifford out here on the streets. She felt selfish for bringing him. And yet, until this moment, she had been able to lie to herself about his wellbeing enough to overlook the fact that he was beginning to decline. He had not eaten anything. She had tried on multiple occasions to find him something. But each time, he had protested. She wondered whether his pickiness genuinely owed itself to his tastes or whether it was a form of emotional protest taken out on the food. She knew the answer.
