Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  The second stew was both chalky and creamy; its filling consistency reminded Aria of split pea soup. But it was sunrise yellow. Toasted cumin hid in its thickness. It was comforting to eat and Aria imagined it would be even more comforting if it were a familiar flavor, like it must be for Omkar.

  The chapati was slightly blackened at the edges. It reminded Aria of Mexican tortillas, but it didn’t taste like tortilla. The dust from the flour glazing it came off on Aria’s hands. She nibbled around the edges. One of Aria’s little quirks was that she had always loved the flavor of burned bread. Aria pulled open one of the little bubbles in the bread and imagined herself inside it. She imagined what it would feel like to live in the soft light of the little dough cave. The bread was unmeasured. It felt rustic. As with all the food in his culture, the amounts of the various spices and ingredients were determined only by the fingertips of the cook. It was an emotional art form, not a science. Aria could taste his grandmother’s hands in the bread. The war of potent flavors in the food that was laid out before her had reconciled into a harmonious dance.

  Although it made her feel shamefully unsophisticated, eating Omkar’s food suddenly opened up a whole new world to her. It had never occurred to her that every culture and country might have its own foods; foods which, unless someone traveled to that part of the world, they would never see or taste in a lifetime.

  “Have you ever tried Indian food?” Omkar asked, surprised by the way that Aria was acting.

  “It’s kinda embarrassing, but no. I mean, I’ve seen Indian restaurants and stuff, but no one has ever taken me in one,” Aria responded. She felt ashamed to admit it, afraid of how Omkar would see her once he discovered just what kind of unsophisticated life she came from.

  Omkar sat back, watching her relish the food like a hungry animal. He guessed she ate with such fervor due to hunger as much as because she liked the taste of the food.

  “So tell me about your family,” he said. Aria felt herself at a crossroads. She could skirt the issue or she could tell it to him straight. Aria wanted him to love her. She wanted him to hold her in high esteem. But then again, she would rather have him decide to reject her now rather than after she had already become attached to him. So she threw the truth at him as if it were a test for him to pass.

  Omkar stayed silent as she spoke for over an hour.

  “Well, I guess you could say I don’t have one. I mean, I don’t even know if my mom’s alive, and I never met my dad. No one ever chooses to end up like this … like me … Poverty fuels the whole system. Anyone who says otherwise is fucking stupid. People who can’t make ends meet just end up coping in whatever way they can. No one can take care of kids when they can’t even figure out how to survive themselves. But no one helps them. They just come down and take their kids away, and that doesn’t help them. It just makes their lives even harder ’cause now they’re dying both inside and out.

  “Then they throw you in a group home, which is just a modern orphanage. You’re under constant surveillance by the social workers and psychologists and courts, but none of them really care about you. You’re just one big charity case that most people take advantage of so they can feel good about themselves. It’s nothing but rules and regulations instead of love. Some foster parents are OK – the good ones just want you to behave yourself and act like everything is fine now – but a lot of them are even worse and more abusive than the parents they take kids away from to begin with. No one hears you or cares what you say you want or need. They decide your life for you and they tell you you’re gonna see your parents again, but we all know it’s a goddamn lie. And when you’re like eighteen, you just age out of the system with no support and no skills, so a lot of ’em just end up repeating the same cycle. They follow in their parents’ footsteps because there aren’t any other footsteps to follow. The entire system is fucked.”

  Aria told him the truth about her mother and Travis, the truth about the state taking her away, the truth of what it had been like in foster care and group homes, and the truth of what had made her run away.

  Omkar did not break his focus from her. Instead, he leaned toward her, letting the surges of painful truth after painful truth hit him so as to not leave her alone in them. When her confession came to an end, he held her head against his chest and said, “I’m so sorry.”

  There was nothing more to say. Nothing he could say would have been good enough. So he let the comfort of his body do the talking and Aria let him hold her. Though she didn’t cry, she felt some small child within her crying. It was crying with the release of finally being contained between the protective walls of a person who would claim her.

  “I lost my brother and sister in an earthquake. My aunt died in it too,” he told her. Though he knew the story of his own tragedy could never compete with hers, Omkar saluted her willingness to be vulnerable by offering up his own vulnerability in return.

  She listened to him tell her about the earthquake and the dark cloud over his family, about the oppressive constraint of his culture and about moving to this completely foreign country, with one ear against his chest. When he had finished speaking, she listened to the sound of his fingers stroking and playing with her hair.

  Without them noticing, the sun had already set upon their time together. The glow from the city lights made the churn of the ocean water sparkle. Underneath the excitement of the romance, their bodies had found a home in each other, a sense of belonging that Aria had only met once before, while watching a part in a movie. When she was little, she had seen a Disney movie called Fantasia in which there was a segment, accompanied by the Pastoral Symphony, with a group of female centaurs of all different colors bathing and preparing themselves until the music changed, signaling the arrival of all the males. One by one, each female was united with the male of her corresponding color. But a blue male and blue female hadn’t found each other yet. They were sitting alone, feeling like they were the only ones without someone to belong with, until the cherubs drew them in each other’s direction and they saw each other for the first time.

  Aria had spent her life feeling like that last centaurette, waiting for someone to belong to, until today.

  Before it was so late that his parents would have grown concerned, Omkar drove her back to the car lot. Pulling up there, and knowing that she would be spending the night there in that reality, threatened to pollute the fantasy of their time on the beach. But he didn’t have an alternative, and he hated himself for consenting to drive her there.

  Before she got out of the car, he wrote his phone number down on a piece of paper towel he pulled out from the picnic bag and handed it to her. He worked up the courage to kiss her cheek. “Thank you so much for tonight. I had a wonderful time, truly.” Aria smiled at him lovingly and closed the door behind her. He watched her walk away until he couldn’t see her anymore and pulled away from the curbside, feeling like his life had finally begun.

  It had been the best day of Aria’s life. As in Taylor’s situation, the squalor she found herself in seemed more like treasure because of the promise of the way her life could feel with him in it. She walked toward the Land Cruiser with the intention of lying awake, preserving the feeling of being with him for as long as she could before falling asleep. But the bestial cruelty of the reality of her life thwarted her intention.

  There was a scuffle of panic near the broken-down black Camaro. Sensing the urgency of crisis instead of conflict, Aria ran toward Anthony and Wolf, who were crowded around the open door of the car EJ had claimed for his own. “He’s OD’ing!” Wolf yelled out to her. “We’ve got to get help quick.”

  Though still breathing, EJ was unresponsive, his body occasionally tensing up and going loose again. Wolf was holding him half out of the car and yelling at him to wake up. The sides of his face were tarnished by the acid of his own vomit and he was making choking sounds. Even through the dark, Aria could see his already pale skin turning the color of clam flesh. “We gotta get him somewhere fast!”
Wolf yelled, pulling EJ from the car with the help of Anthony. Both of them held one half of his limp body, and they started carrying him as fast as they could in the direction of the city.

  It was a sad reality that all of them knew without having to communicate it to each other. None of them owned a phone, but even if they had, they couldn’t risk calling the attention of police to the car lot. It would put every single one of them at risk. So they were rushing him away from the car lot as fast as they could to find help. Aria felt the pit of doom in her stomach. She had a feeling that EJ wouldn’t survive if they took so long.

  She looked back to where Omkar had dropped her off and realized he had already left. “Stay on the road and keep walking!” she yelled out to them, turning to run as fast as she could. She ran as fast as her legs could take her toward the city streets she knew would have some life still left on them. The shops and restaurants had all closed for the night. The stale light made them look cadaverous.

  Her chest burned and her legs spasmed but she kept on running, flailing her arms to try to stop any cars that passed her, but no one pulled over. She ran across a street, against the red light, toward a group of people waiting to get into a bar. “Help, we need help, someone’s in trouble, I need a phone!” she yelled at the group of startled people.

  There was a hiccup of hesitance before a man approached her and asked her if he should call 911. “Yes,” she gasped, completely out of breath. She watched him dial the number and tell the dispatcher that someone was in trouble before he handed the phone to Aria.

  She did her best to answer the questions being asked by the pacifying voice on the other side of the line. She described the emergency, telling them the name of the street that Wolf and Anthony were carrying EJ down and some of the buildings that were defining features on it. She described his condition. But when the woman asked Aria for her name and address and phone number, Aria went silent before hanging up the phone. She couldn’t afford to tell them. Part of her was terrified that not staying on the line would cost EJ his life, but she was fairly certain that they had already sent an ambulance.

  Aria thanked the man, who was standing over her, confused about why she had handed him back the phone so soon, and started running back in the direction she had come. By the time she spotted her friends in the distance, the red and blue flash of ambulance lights illuminated their figures. Aria stopped and watched, not wanting to be caught up. She watched the police officers and paramedics crowd around EJ, long enough to see him take a huge gasp of air and begin to cough uncontrollably in response to the naloxone being squirted up his nose.

  Anthony had run away at the first sight of police cars, afraid to be locked up again, and Wolf was standing against a length of chain-link fencing. He was out of breath, but giving information to the same officer they had seen take away the mentally ill man who was throwing rocks at cars the other day. Even at a distance, Aria recognized the way his glasses and his chubby face seemed to strip him of the ruthless authority that other cops had in spades.

  Wolf lied to him by saying that he didn’t know EJ, but that he had seen him collapsed on the sidewalk. He gave the officer his address back in Washington and told them he was visiting a relative nearby. The truth was Wolf had been trying to extricate EJ from the crepuscule of his downfall for months now.

  To Wolf, EJ was a lost brother that he had taken it upon himself to rescue. He knew that EJ had lost his way. He wasn’t always this way. EJ used to be a catcher on his high school baseball team. He had lived with the nagging pain of his parents’ divorce and the pain of never really feeling understood. It was pain that no one ever saw to begin with. He hid it beneath the bark of his popularity until he had suffered a sprain and labral tear in his shoulder. The doctor prescribed him OxyContin and when he took it, he noticed that it didn’t only take away the pain of his shoulder, it also numbed the emotional pain that he had grown accustomed to living with. For a while, he faked still being in pain and took to doctor-shopping so he could keep being prescribed his medication until he had to find another way to fuel his addiction. He bought painkillers off of other kids at school, and then he fell in with a group of other addicts who knew a dealer who could supposedly get him anything.

  Once he had touched the euphoria of fentanyl, there was no going back. EJ had thrown his entire life away for the haze of opioid addiction, using again and again to avoid the agony of withdrawal.

  EJ had run away from home years ago and couch-surfed before his first night on the streets. The night he ran away, he took three of his mother’s sleeping pills to try to hold him over long enough get his hands on a fix. Instead of sending him to sleep, they had put him in an altered state of mind. He put a pot of macaroni and cheese on the stove for two hours and nearly burned the house down. His girlfriend, who lived with him in his parents’ house, had woken up to the sound of the smoke alarm. When she confronted him, he found his father’s handgun and because of his inebriation, was lucky enough to shoot a bullet into the wall instead of through her. His father came downstairs before his mother did. He tackled EJ and called the police on his own son. When EJ was released from the police station, forcibly sobered up, he had no memory of the incident. He didn’t trust himself to be around people anymore. So he came back to his parents’ house just long enough to break up with his girlfriend and to collect a few of his things.

  The sound of the double doors being closed when the stretcher was loaded inside the ambulance was inaudible from where Aria was standing. The flashing lights, unaccompanied by the wail of the siren, felt eerie. Aria missed the sense of urgency in the sound.

  She’d sensed irritation in the paramedics’ body language instead of concern. Not fully understanding the pain that someone has to be in to end up like EJ, they were frustrated at having to put effort into someone who was so determined to destroy himself.

  She watched the ambulance pull away from the curb, do a U-turn and drive right past her. She tried to catch a glimpse of EJ through the back window as it drove by. His addiction rode the chassis of the ambulance with him like a phantom. It was a demon he could not exorcise from himself even for the sake of those who loved him. Though it was invisible, she could almost see it lurking there, knowing it would inevitably come to this.

  EJ would come back and say he was sorry. He said it every time sobriety found him in between the wave sets of his life. He said he would try, but never hard enough to withstand the crucifixion of the way getting sober felt. His soul cried out every time he’d swallow a pill or jam a needle into another vein, but he ignored it so long he could no longer hear the scream. Watching the ambulance disappear over the horizon, Aria stared down the invisible phantom that both was and wasn’t him, long enough to see that it wouldn’t be content until EJ’s life was a life that was wasted, until his breath was a breath that was gone.

  CHAPTER 24

  Just over a week had passed since Aria had seen the ocean for the first time. Just over a week with no word about EJ. That was how it was in this life where relationships were forged only by the commonality of circumstances. One day someone who had been a prominent figure in the mural of your life was suddenly gone and you might never hear of them again.

  Omkar and Aria had seen each other every day but one. On one of those days, for the first time in almost two years, Aria had gone to see a movie in a movie theater. Though the theater wasn’t fancy by any means, compared to all the places Aria had been for the last year, it might as well have been an opera house. She felt underdressed and self-conscious walking through the foyer. Omkar had taken her there on a date when his attempt to convince Aria to meet up with a friend of his had failed. There was an off chance that his friend might have let her stay on his couch for a while until Omkar could come up with a different solution, a better place for her to stay. But when he made the suggestion to Aria, she refused to entertain the notion. Aria was uninterested in favors. She didn’t like the feeling of owing anything to anyone, much less someone she had never
met before. She found the whole idea humiliating.

  It was a terrible movie, with all the underwhelming drama of a decidedly burned-out sequel to a movie that Aria had never seen. But she didn’t care. She watched the changing light from the scenes displayed on the screen, turning Omkar’s face dark, then illuminating it again. Aria had found some dandelions to eat off of someone’s lawn, but she hadn’t planned her day well enough to find anything else to eat. As a result, when Omkar bought her a bag of popcorn, she had gorged herself on it until her stomach hurt too much to eat anymore.

  At first, Omkar was shy and formal about the date. Aria had to graze the outside of his arm with her pinky finger to encourage him to lift up the armrest between them and take her hand. When he did, the dew of sweat started to accent the heat between their hands. Omkar was nervous and elated. But he felt frustrated with himself that no matter how many times he saw her, he couldn’t force himself to act cool. Instead, he felt like an immature schoolboy, devoured by the anxious limerence of puppy love. He found his own reaction all the more frustrating because he knew it wasn’t puppy love. What he felt for Aria was something much deeper. It was something that he could not name.

  Aside from the movie date, they managed to see each other for an hour or two in between Omkar’s classes and work shifts. For the most part, sustained by the little items that Omkar would bring her, Aria spent her time at the car lot, counting down the minutes between their time together. But today, knowing that they would not meet up until after sundown, Aria had decided to follow a tip that the St Francis Center offered a warm breakfast to those who needed a meal.

  Aria looked down to watch the blur of her high-top sneakers carrying her across the pavement. The walk, which she had started while it was still dark, had already been longer than she had anticipated. It had taken her through shopping centers, past highways and into industrial parts of town. She was beginning to wonder if she had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Wandering into unfamiliar territory was always a risk for anyone on the street. It was a risk that made her regret coming alone. But with Taylor gone an hour before her to the acting studio and both Luke and Wolf gone the night before to an art walk event, she hadn’t had a choice.