by Teal Swan
Mike stood motionless as Ciarra paced. “Who the fuck do they think they are … Fucking pigs. I’m gonna fucking sue them, I swear to God!” she yelled, talking as much to the universe as she was to her father.
“We can get us a house and then we can get ’im back,” Mike told her, as unable to moderate her distress as he was his own.
Ciarra sank to the floor, kneeling with her legs splayed. She cried against the complete powerlessness that she felt until she couldn’t take it anymore. She ran to the purple van to get her coat and then took off on foot. Mike didn’t know where she was going, but he guessed, especially after what the CPS workers had said, that she was going to find a dealer.
The entire thing had been like a concussion grenade going off in their little camp. Mike explained what had happened to Robert, who had been minding his own business in his little tent since finding out that the police were only there to find Ciarra. Though buoyed by Robert’s encouragement, Mike felt like it was entirely his fault. He re-evaluated the kind of father he had been or not been. He wanted to have faith in Ciarra, but he couldn’t. He made himself a cup of coffee as a comfort.
The only consolation he could find was in the plan he was hatching to get a more stable job. A job where he could afford a house with steady paychecks arriving in the mail. Once that happened, he would try to get custody of Aston for himself. He would make up for the poor job he had done in Ciarra’s childhood by giving them both a stable place to live. Tomorrow, he would go to ask for a job at every trucking company he could find.
CHAPTER 27
“I used to put it down to the fact I wasn’t fit enough or I didn’t look good enough or how big my nose was or that my legs look like chicken legs or whatever. But I really think all that had nothin’ to do with it. I was just avoiding the bigger issue.”
Taylor was eating an oatmeal cookie that he had saved from the free lunch he had been given at the church. He chewed it while he talked. “I mean, I knew there was somethin’ wrong with me when other boys wanted to start hangin’ out with girls and I just wanted to hang out with them. I basically did everything in my power not to face it. I think I just felt so much shame I couldn’t admit to it until I kinda had to, you know?”
Aria was listening to him from the back seat of the car. The rest of the car lot was void of movement. Everyone else had already turned in for the night. “There was this boy in middle school, Brian Meyer. He was the first boy I ever kissed. I don’t know, he was prob’ly just having fun. Straight guys like to do that sometimes. But I was so in love with him I used to write my name and his, and then my name with his last name in my school notebook over and over. I was stayin’ with this real Christian family at the time. The mom found my notebook and kicked me out of the house ’cause of it. I guess the idea of movin’ in with someone is just scary ’cause it means I kinda have to own it, you know. Like I still feel like maybe it’s somethin’ I gotta do in secret. But if I’m living there then everyone kinda knows.”
Dan had been pressuring Taylor to move in with him. Aria had known about Taylor’s resistance to doing so for weeks now. But tonight, she tried to relieve the boredom of trying to fall asleep – neither of them was tired – by digging deeper about the real reasons why. To Aria it made no sense at all why someone in Taylor’s position wouldn’t jump at the first opportunity to get off the street, especially given everything Taylor had told her about Dan so far. With Omkar in her life, Taylor’s frequent absences felt less like abandonment than they did before. Given how effeminate he was and how out of the closet he seemed, it shocked Aria that Taylor was still so ashamed for people to know that he was gay. She tried to counter his shame by telling him there was nothing wrong with it, but nothing she said seemed to sink in. Eventually, the conversation slowed and she heard the louder, labored breathing of his sleep.
Later that night, the shrill sound of Palin’s bark startled them awake; the hysterical alarm of her intonations sent a wave of dread up and down both Taylor’s and Aria’s spines. They threw off the weight of their sleeping bags in preparation for conflict before they even knew what the conflict was. It was Taylor who realized first what was happening.
“Holy shit … Oh my fucking God, we gotta get out of here … Quick!” he yelled to Aria, flailing to collect whatever things he could in time to escape.
The entire car lot was alive with fire. Its molten veins had already claimed Mike’s tent as well as the Camaro where EJ used to stay. And it was reaching to swallow everything else in sight. Before Aria could make sense of what was happening, she grabbed the shoulder strap of her backpack and pulled it free from beneath the seat. She yanked the hood of Taylor’s sweater to make him run with her, so tightly that he was forced to abandon most of his things.
The heat from the fire had veiled the air in an elemental static that distorted vision. They ran through the only visible break and climbed over the fence as fast as they could, unable to make out whatever it was Ciarra was screaming. When the cold began to offer solace, Aria knew that she had run far enough to ensure that she could stay beyond the span of the flames. She turned back around.
Aria’s imagination was plagued by worst-case scenarios. She tried to decipher who was and who wasn’t OK through the turbulent screen of fire. Anthony was pouring his last two bottles of water onto a group of flames that were nipping at the edges of his tarp. It was an exercise in futility. He tried to untie the ropes that affixed it to the tree before giving up his efforts and running toward them. Wolf, who had woken up Robert just in time, was yanking the older man to safety. Robert was visibly in a daze. Already mauled by age, he was lethargic and still half asleep.
It took them all a minute to comb through the dizzy collage of disbelief in order to accept what was occurring. Luke ran to what tents and cars that he could, checking to see if anyone was still in them before he couldn’t access them anymore. Palin’s crazed barking cried out above it all. She was barking in the direction of Ciarra, who was manically squeezing the liquid from a small pile of white jugs of lighter fluid before throwing them toward the fire. “I know one of you fuckers did it … Come out and show yourself!” she screamed, before throwing another one. “I know you’re all fucking narcs.”
The holocaust of her fury was painted across the car lot as the fire that was decimating all of it. From the spaghetti-like trails that the flames followed, Aria could see that while they had been sleeping, Ciarra had poured lighter fluid in a deranged maze across the expanse of the lot.
Terrified that Mike had been killed by Ciarra’s rage, Aria scanned for him frantically until she found his outline. He was standing just outside the fence behind his tent, watching it burn to the ground. He did not intervene in the destruction. He watched everything he had to his name evaporate into smoke and ash, as if he deserved it. His arms were folded in defeat. He made no attempt to respond to Ciarra, who continued screaming insults and fueling the fire until there was no more lighter fluid left. Watching her tantrum, Mike thought about how much Ciarra was just like her mother. From the years he had been married to her, Mike had learned that confronting either of them once they had tipped over the edge like this would only add fuel to the fire.
Ciarra abandoned the scene before a fire truck arrived but only made it a few blocks before she was arrested. Aria, Taylor and Anthony eventually ventured around the perimeter of the chain-link fence to reunite with Luke, Robert, Wolf, Mike and Darren. But once they did, they barely talked. Instead, they all stood in the darkness just beyond the reach of the light being discharged by the fire; watching the firemen scamper around the lot, watching everything turn black. There was nothing to be done.
The fire that had taken everything was a flicker compared to the forest fire of guilt that Aria felt, knowing that in a way, because she had been the one to report Ciarra, she was the one to blame for all this. The people standing next to her were the people in the world who were already the most powerless and already the poorest. Now, because of her decisio
n, the only thing they had was their lives and whatever items they could grab before running.
Darren was the one who anguished her the most. Because of his gruff, military demeanor, before tonight Aria had not imagined that he could cry. But Darren was crying. He stood in front of the rest of them, chaotically pacing back and forth. Each time he stopped, it seemed like he might run straight into the flames toward his camper. Each time he stopped, he re-evaluated the reality of his powerlessness to save his things. What shard of safety he possessed had been taken from him. The only relationships he had, which were with his things, were lost. Since he was a hoarder, it was a thousand times worse for him than it was for the rest of them.
Eventually, he went down on his knees and elbows in the dirt. He held his head with his hands and started rocking back and forth. Except for Palin, who by alerting them had most likely saved all of their lives, no one went to comfort Darren. They felt as powerless to comfort him as they felt about the fire. He began to hyperventilate and pull sticks and handfuls of soil toward himself and hug them as a barren replacement for the things that he had lost. The sight of him doing it made Aria start to cry.
With nowhere to be, once the ground had given way to ash and only the heat of what happened remained, they divided up. Luke, Wolf and Anthony took Darren deeper into nature to spend what was left of the night there. Robert and Mike started walking toward the city. But they didn’t sleep that night. Instead, they found a gas station, sat on one of the picnic tables outside and spent the night trying to help each other make sense of what had happened.
Taylor’s resistance to staying with Dan had been cremated along with the rest of his things. He took the fire as a sign from God that he was meant to move in with Dan, so he called him on the phone that the older man had recently given him. The phone had felt like an unwelcome leash until he had needed it tonight, Dan’s way of keeping track of him. But now it felt like a lifeline instead of a chain.
Aria had taken again to the streets. When Taylor offered to talk Dan into letting her stay with them, she had lied that she was going to follow Luke and everyone else. Instead, she headed in the direction of the Super Sun Market. She planned to wait across the street for him to emerge from the store in the morning.
Omkar was locked in the kind of dream that would make no sense upon waking, despite it being all too logical and real while he was in it. The low, repetitive buzz of the vibrator on his phone eventually drew him out of it.
“Hello, sir, this is Officer Hawkes. I have an Aria Abbott here,” the pleasant male voice told him. “Sir, am I correct in understanding that you have assumed responsibility for Aria while she is in town?”
“Yes, sir,” Omkar replied automatically. Having been taught well to fear authority, Omkar was hardly breathing. He listened like a soldier, waiting for orders.
“Sir, I don’t know if you’re aware but we have a curfew for anyone under eighteen. They cannot be out between 10pm and sunrise unless accompanied by an adult. Can you tell me your exact address?”
Not wanting his parents to be involved, Omkar recited the numbers belonging to a house three doors down from the store. Hearing the address, Officer Hawkes realized that the address was only six blocks away. As far as Officer Hawkes was concerned, because he was wasting his time doing juvenile sweeps anyway, instead of going through the hassle involved with taking her into the station or driving her the six blocks to the house, he decided to delegate the task. “Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to come pick her up,” Officer Hawkes said. “I can’t let her out of my custody until an adult can come get her.”
“OK, sir, I can definitely do that. Where can I pick her up?” Omkar asked, listening to the policeman relay their whereabouts, with the phone pressed between his cheek and shoulder so he could swiftly get dressed. When Officer Hawkes hung up, Omkar climbed out of his second-story window and dangled off of the ledge of the windowsill before dropping in order to avoid waking his parents up.
A year or so earlier, a string of nighttime shootings had made the city councilmen call for police to enforce a teen curfew in the city. Even though all the shootings had involved only adults, the police were directed to use every law enforcement tool they could to crack down on the recent spike in violent crime. On this, one of only two nighttime shifts he worked, Officer Hawkes and a group of other officers had been sent out on a juvenile sweep. Hawkes knew the routine well. He was expected to arrest them and either take them home or take them to a law enforcement post until their parents could come pick them up. It had been a rather ironic stroke of bad luck that Aria was spotted walking across the city exactly on that night. But her bad luck was offset by the fact that Officer Hawkes hated curfew law. Not only was there absolutely no evidence that it did anything to prevent crime, he found it to be an embarrassing waste of law enforcement resources. Most of the kids he ended up arresting were Latino or black, and every time he put the handcuffs on, he could feel the already strained relationship between law enforcement and minority groups worsening.
When he had spotted Aria weaving in and out of alleyways and under overpasses, he had considered whether to simply let her go. He worried more for her safety than that she was up to no good. But he decided to give her a scare in the hope that it would discourage her from running amuck at this time of night. Aria didn’t run. When she saw the police car sparkle its lights once from behind her, she stopped dead in her tracks.
Aria was surprised at first to see the officer that stepped out from the car. This was the third time she had crossed paths with this same cop. Though she had seen him act kindly, that did not fool her into forgetting that he was a cop and she was an underage runaway. Aria pretended to be ignorant of the curfew law and told Officer Hawkes that she was visiting a friend here because she was from out of town. She had expected to be arrested. She had half expected the karma of what had happened at the car lot to make today the day that she was caught and sent back to Illinois state foster care.
Officer Hawkes had heard excuses like hers before, but to his surprise, when she presented him with her ID and he shone his flashlight across it, he could clearly see that the license was in fact an out-of-state license. Instead of arresting her and forcing her to call her parents, who obviously would not even be able to pick her up, he asked her for a number so he could call whoever she was staying with in Los Angeles. Aria pulled out the number that Omkar had written on the scrap of paper towel from her backpack.
While they were waiting the few minutes for Omkar to arrive, Officer Hawkes asked her trivial questions about things like where she went to school and what it was like where she came from and how she liked her time in Los Angeles so far. Aria hated it when police tried to act so friendly. It always seemed to be a contrived attempt to make themselves come across like good guys instead of bad guys. No cop had ever made her life better. Plus, she found it hard to accept a cop as a benevolent keeper of the peace with a Beretta and handcuffs visibly displayed on his belt. She wasn’t compliant or nice to him while they waited out of an actual liking for him. She was compliant and nice out of fear of what would happen if she wasn’t.
The feeling of sitting down in Omkar’s car and being enclosed inside it was ineffable. No longer having to keep it together in the face of a situation that could very probably have separated them, Aria started to cry. She could not believe any of what had happened or how close she had come to the very thing she had spent nearly a year trying to avoid.
Omkar pulled away from the curb and drove out of sight of the cop car before pulling back up and turning the engine off. Despite his multiple attempts to quiet her tears and find out what was happening, Aria kept weeping. Omkar noticed when he hugged her that her clothing smelled distinctly like smoke. He was forced to wait for her to offer an explanation. When she finally did, Omkar felt out of his depth. He knew he had lived a sheltered life and couldn’t understand the pressures she had been under. He tried to release her from the guilt of having called CPS.
He felt a ton of responsibility for her wellbeing. Aria had no place to go. And Omkar could not live with the idea of handing that responsibility back to her. While she talked, his mind raced for possible solutions. He settled on a temporary one. He would sneak back into the house and set up some blankets on the floor of the storeroom in the shop before sneaking Aria in for the night. He could set his alarm and leave with her before his father even got dressed in the morning. It would at least buy him a day to come up with another plan.
Both of them were almost bewildered when the plan worked. Their entry had solicited no stirring from upstairs. The blankets Omkar had found smelled like him. Aria breathed them in when she lay down in them.
Omkar sat down against the wall behind her, pulling her back against his chest. Aria apologized again for inconveniencing him. If she had known that he would end up having to pick her up anyway, she would have called him from Taylor’s phone. But Omkar did not feel inconvenienced. He felt good to finally carry the weight of her welfare. Though he did not yet know exactly what to do with it, it felt like there was suddenly more space for him in her life. The smell of smoke in her hair caused him to imagine what it would be like to take her camping and to roast marshmallows. Omkar stayed as long as he could without raising suspicion.
Aria would not normally have been able to sleep after the sequence of events that had taken place that day. She would have writhed, reliving the torture. But Omkar’s presence was laden with consolation. Being near him caused Aria to feel the strange juxtaposition of being completely overwhelmed and at the same time, calmed by the cottony refuge of Omkar’s being. Eventually, it was that refuge that coerced her into sleep.
When Omkar finally climbed back up the stairs, his anger toward the prejudice of his own culture climbed the stairs with him. Leaving her in the unfurnished starkness of the storeroom made Omkar feel like a fugitive in his own house. He wanted to keep her with him. He didn’t want to have to hide her or the way they felt about each other.
