Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  “Are you totally sure? I don’t want it to be weird for me to be here or whatever,” Aria asked again.

  “Yes, my God, it’s totally fine, I promise,” Omkar said, although he knew he was failing to completely convince her.

  He stayed downstairs with her until Neeraj yelled down to them, “Omkar, it’s time to go to sleep now, you have school in the morning.” It was his way of making sure his son wasn’t being irresponsible in more ways than one.

  Omkar kissed Aria on the cheek and said, “Sleep well tonight. I’ll be thinking of you all night just up there.” He pointed at a corner of the ceiling before running up the stairs.

  Aria waited until she could hear no more sounds in the house before tiptoeing upstairs, with all of the clothes she had in her backpack, and sneaking into the bathroom. Turning the water pressure on only halfway so it would be quieter, she let the hot steam asperse her skin. It was a feeling she had sorely missed.

  She washed her clothes by hand with shampoo and threw them all over the bar of the shower curtain before soaping herself. It was the first time since running away nearly a year ago that she had taken a shower that wasn’t timed and watched by an attendant. The feeling of being able to enjoy the water and brush her teeth inside the shower felt like a luxury beyond measure.

  When she went back downstairs, she draped the damp clothes over the top of the door and took out the little beaver statue that Robert had given her. She placed it by the statue of Ganesh. She did not realize the symbolism of having done so. She did not realize that the beaver was telling her that it, and she, had found home. Instead, she thought of Robert and all the other people at the car lot. She wondered whether they were OK or not. She wondered if they had all found some other place to stay. She reminded herself that the meaningfulness of her relationship to them might be entirely one-sided. Still, Aria made the decision that she would go back to the car lot the next day, when Omkar was at school. There was some closure she needed, even if it was to stand before the empty lot and to realize that she might never see any of them again.

  Aria turned the lights off and lifted back the top sheets of the bed to crawl between them. Her body felt the shock of there being no plastic between herself and the mattress. Every time she had stayed in a new house like this, it had been in a foster placement or a group home. They always put plastic on the beds to prevent damage from potential bed-wetting. The noise and feel of the plastic always made Aria feel bad, as if they expected her to be like a stray dog that wasn’t potty-trained. “This is how other people feel,” she thought to herself.

  She felt grief for the pain of her childhood as much as she was celebrating how good it felt to be trusted and welcomed enough that Jarminder had put the sheets directly on the unprotected mattress. The feeling of that trust that was placed in her put as much pressure on her as it took away. Pressure to stay in their favor. Pressure to earn her keep. Pressure to make them never regret it.

  When morning came, Aria cracked the door open wide enough to see that she had awoken before the sun had risen. She wasn’t accustomed to going to sleep so early. While everyone else was still asleep, she forced some of her damp clothes back over the shape of her body and looked around the store for ways to repay the Agarwals’ kindness. But because Neeraj was so careful about the upkeep of his store, Aria could not find much to do. She took the window chalk markers and rewrote the fading letters that spelled “New Year’s Sale On Items” on the front window before organizing the piles of papers and items stacked behind the checkout counter. She wrote a thank-you note to Neeraj and Jarminder and left it there. Then she wrote a letter to Omkar telling him to meet her at the car lot after he got off of school and signed it with a heart. She made her bed and left the letter on it.

  Once Aria had collected everything except her wet clothes back into her backpack, she left, holding the bell attached to the door when she opened it so it wouldn’t announce her exit. The air outside was crisp. The irrigation system in the neighbor’s lawn hissed from beneath the thick and newly cut buffalo grass when she passed it. One of the neighbors stopped her minivan with three kids in the back to ask Aria if she wanted a ride to the school bus stop. Aria thanked her, but declined, suddenly feeling insecure about how young she must look in comparison to how she felt and the life she had been living.

  As the morning sun touched her with its un-sugared rays, she turned back to look at Omkar’s window. Thinking of this new chapter of her life with him, she thought, “Has your life already spent its shade and has it stained you?” She stopped on the side of the road to write the verse in her journal. She did not know if any love or hope could wash the shadow from a person. But she hoped that maybe Omkar could love her with that ineffable stain she felt because she knew that now, without him, life would always be so much less.

  CHAPTER 31

  They were in the deserted doorways, their cardboard boxes erected like monuments to commemorate their anguish. The irony of their lives written in the sign on those boxes reading “this side up.” Their thirst could not be quenched by the water they didn’t have. Their hunger could not be satiated by the food they could not afford to buy.

  No one thinks they will end up like this. No little five-year-old boy or girl sits on the carpet of their kindergarten class during sharing time and says they want to be homeless when they grow up. Before Aria had become one of them, she had always looked at homeless people like they were “those people.” Now, she understood that a life on the streets was just a hair’s width away from almost anyone. Given the right cocktail of conditions, anyone could find themselves here. They were not a different species, even though it comforted people to think of them that way. To separate themselves from “those people” who were homeless made folks feel further away from being homeless themselves. But the truth is, “those people” were people just like you or me. They, the outcasts of mankind’s ambition; the carriers of the shadows that no one truly wants to face.

  There was a pining in their movements. A boundless yearning for a kindness they had either tasted or never tasted. A deep hunger for love they might or might not ever find. Their lives were the hunger of the pine.

  Aria walked toward the car lot, through the parts of town that served as a cocoon for those without a home. She felt a knot in her stomach when she got close enough to turn off onto the side street that would lead her there. At first she saw no movement and imagined that she would find herself standing before a deserted lot. But that was not what she found. They were living there, like a graft over the scar of the fire-damaged earth. With nowhere else to go, having been able to do nothing else, some of them had stayed there. EJ had not been seen since he had been taken away in the ambulance. Aston had been taken away by the state and Ciarra had been arrested. Taylor, who had moved in with Dan the night it happened, had not returned. But she could see Robert, Anthony, Darren and Wolf there, rebuilding their lives from nothing on the deflagrated landscape. Their tents and tarps had been turned into smoke. Only the frames of the broken-down cars remained; their windows gone, their colors turned to black. Darren, who usually marched through his disciplined daily routine as a replacement for the regimented life of the army, was passed out cold on the dirt under a tree. He had used the bottles of alcohol, which crowded him like debris from a shipwreck, as an anchor. He had tied his anxieties of having lost all of his things to the liquor and had sunk them deep into a drunken slumber.

  Anthony, Wolf and Robert were sitting against the fence, talking. Out of everyone – perhaps because of the sheer relief of not having been hassled by police, or because he laid claim to fewer possessions – Anthony seemed the least affected. He and Wolf had spent the night after the fire in a shelter before deciding that the shelter felt less safe than the streets and certainly less safe than the quiet of a charred car lot. So they came back to the lot to see if it had been reclaimed by the city. Finding it abandoned once again, they started over where they left off. Wolf seemed the same as he always did. The fir
e had reinforced the opinion he held about the world already.

  When Wolf caught sight of Aria, he lifted an arm against the sky as a salute to call her over. Robert cracked a toothless smile. “How ya been?” Anthony asked her, extending an arm up from where they were sitting for her to shake. When she took it, he shook it once firmly and folded his arms again.

  “Um, OK I guess. How about you guys?” Aria asked. They all chuckled as if in chorus.

  “Oh, you know, life’s been better.” Robert said. They chuckled louder because of his response, which was aimed more at them than at Aria. It egged Robert on so he continued. “The good news is, I’ve been thinkin’ … people pay lots o’ money to go camp out under the stars at them national parks and we get to do it for free.” His joke was met by an uproar of laughter and it egged him on even more. “I’ve been thinkin’ about those people who go camping with RVs … It’s like they start packin’ and at some point they go … what did I forget? Oh, I know … My house!”

  Again, his joke teased laughter from all of them, including himself. The way he talked, because of his missing teeth, added an additional layer to his humor. Though it lifted the mood, Aria could see that it was also his way of coping. Having lost all of his wood-whittling tools and figurines in the fire, it was obvious that he was at a loss for what to do with the hours of the day.

  “Is Darren OK?” she asked, looking over at him.

  “Oh, you know, he’s gettin’ on,” Robert said, conscious that in truth he wasn’t. But they could no more help him than they could help themselves.

  “Where’s Luke?” Aria asked.

  “He said he was comin’ back here right after goin’ to meditate,” Wolf said, winking at Anthony as a nod to their inside joke about how ridiculous Luke was. Though Wolf knew the value of both vision quests and sage, both he and Anthony hated that meditation and sage seemed to be the only tools Luke had at his disposal for dealing with things. Because of his mannerisms and life choices, they couldn’t see Luke as a man and often teased him about his various new-age habits.

  “What about Mike?” Aria asked, worried about what the response would be. The area where his camp had been was picked clean. There was nothing left to indicate that he had ever been there.

  Robert was the one to answer her question. “Oh, he came back here yesterday, said he was goin’ down to Hemet to stay with a relative and see about a job.” He looked suddenly somber. It was obvious that he considered Mike a friend. The telltale signs of missing him were carved deep into his demeanor.

  “I think for a father, seein’ your daughter that way just kinda does suhum to ya. Plus I think he’s feelin’ kinda responsible for it all. I told ’im you can’t do nothin’ about the way some kids turn out, but it doesn’t matter what I tell ’im.” Robert quickly changed the subject, hoping to put their focus on something less doleful. “You been stayin’ outta trouble?” he asked Aria.

  “Yeah, I’ve been OK. Actually, I met a boy and his parents have been letting me stay with them.”

  A smile crept across all of their faces. “He ain’t that fellow who came sneakin’ in here before, is he?” Robert asked. He was already certain of the answer. In his mind, the only reason that a young man would bring gifts for a girl, especially in secret, was if he was in love with her.

  “Um, yeah,” Aria said, her cheeks flushing.

  “Well, you can’t just drop somethin’ like that and not say nothin’ else about it, in’it?” Wolf said.

  Robert explained. “Aria here had a secret admirer. But it looks like he ain’t so secret anymore.”

  “His name is Omkar. I met him in a shop he works in, actually,” Aria said, hoping her lightweight answer would satisfy their curiosity.

  “Omkar ain’t sound like a normal name, in’it?” Wolf asked.

  “No. Actually, he’s from India,” Aria said.

  Wolf’s white teeth shone when he smiled at the idea of her being with someone who wasn’t white. Even though he felt a duty, if he ever settled down, to preserve his dying race by marrying another Native, knowing that Aria had fallen for a boy who wasn’t white made him feel one step closer to love. He let the conversation rest at that.

  An hour passed before Luke returned to the car lot. Aria made herself a place beside Robert and spent the hour listening to the three men talk. Palin spotted Aria long before Luke did. She pranced up to Aria with her tail furiously wagging. When Aria reached out for her, she flopped upside down to expose her belly and flailed with excitement in the dirt, the ground leaving her white fur dusted with ash.

  Luke started jogging when he saw her. “Hey, how’ve you been?” he asked, out of breath.

  “I’ve been OK, how about you?” she asked.

  “Dude, that was some crazy shit. I’ve been seriously worried about you,” Luke said. It surprised Aria that Luke had even thought about her. On the streets, you could never be sure if the people you spent time with really saw you as a friend, or if common circumstances simply caused you to trespass across each other’s lives. “Hey, there’s a festival next weekend up in Portland. I got us a ride if you and Tay wanna come.” Though it bothered Taylor, “Tay” was Luke’s nickname for him.

  “Oh, thanks. I kinda need to stick around here. I got a boyfriend now,” Aria said.

  “Oh really? That’s great. What’s his name?” he asked.

  Aria told him, but Luke had asked out of formality. He was not even listening when she said his name.

  The mood between them seemed immediately colder. It was a chill that was noticeable to all of them. Wolf was the first to try to remedy it. “Hey, you had somethin’ you wanted to talk to Aria about, in’it?”

  Luke took a stick and poked at the ground. What little maturity he had, drained from his appearance. “Yeah, you wanna take a walk?” Luke asked her.

  Aria looked toward the rest of them as if asking permission. Anthony and Wolf, who took the social shift as a cue to start walking toward town in search of an open meal program, stood up. Anthony shook her hand warmly. Wolf, as if sensing it would be a long goodbye between them, hugged her and placed his palm over the crown of her head. Aria didn’t understand the words he said quietly under his breath, but when he placed his palm against her, he said an ancient blessing for her wellbeing. “See you around,” he said.

  She turned to allow Luke to lead her wherever he had it in his mind to go. In her heart, she missed them already. It was strange to her that people could come and go so fast from her life. It was even stranger that people who came and went could leave such permanent footprints inside of her.

  Luke led Aria back in the direction that he had taken her on one of the first days she had been at the car lot. Back in the direction of the stream, which was now more of a river. Back in the direction of the place where they had laid bare their life stories to each other.

  Seeing a cluster of plants with leaves that looked like lily pads, Aria squealed, “Hey look, it’s mallow.” She plucked a few of the tender young leaves of the plant and inspected them before biting a piece out of one and holding it out toward Luke. “Try it, you can eat it. Apparently you can eat the seedpods, too, as long as they haven’t gone woody. This is so exciting; I read that they didn’t really grow like this until spring.”

  Luke took a curious bite out of the leaf. “It’s not that bad,” he said, suddenly stopping to hold his throat, pretending to be poisoned as a joke.

  “Good Lord, cut it out. It’s really good, I swear,” Aria said.

  “I didn’t know you were into this kinda thing,” Luke said. “You’d love this lady I stayed with up in Mount Shasta. No joke, she knows like everything there is to know about plants and plant medicines. She’s kinda like a witch. This one time I was up there, I got such bad allergies and she collected this batch of stinging nettles. It was so cool – she poured boiling water over the leaves and let them sit there for like ten minutes and made me drink the water. I swear to God, I didn’t have any more problems the whole time I wa
s there.”

  Her interest in foraging revived, Aria chewed on the mallow leaves as she walked. When they arrived at the spot where she and Luke had spent the day together months earlier, Luke sat down on the same rock where they had sat before. The water had swollen beyond the confines of the bank. Aria sat down beside him, waiting for him to initiate whatever he had wanted to talk about.

  “It’s just kind of strange that you are just now telling me you have a boyfriend,” Luke said eventually.

  His obvious irritation bemused Aria. She didn’t understand why he would care. “Well, it just happened, it’s not like I’ve been hiding it from you forever,” she said.

  “OK, let me start over. What I was going to tell you was that I like you,” Luke said. “I mean, I think I’m in love with you. At first when I felt something, I figured it’s just that because I’ve done so much plant medicine that I can fall in love with anyone. But it just kind of got more and more intense and so I talked to Wolf about it and he made me realize that I just wasn’t admitting to myself that I was in love with you.”

  Aria felt her stomach tighten. “Dude, what the fuck … you can’t just spend all this time with someone and not ever say something and never even act like it and then act betrayed when they get with someone else,” Aria said.

  “Yeah, I know it’s stupid,” Luke said. He reached into his backpack. He took out a folded letter that was surprisingly neat, given that he had been keeping it in his backpack for over a week. He handed it to Aria. When she opened it, a red tail hawk feather, which he had folded into the paper for her, fluttered to the ground. He picked it up for her and began twirling it in his fingers to distract himself.

  “Do you want me to read this now or later?” she asked.

  “Whenever … No, actually, you can read it now,” he said.

  Aria was surprised to see that he had written the letter in immaculate cursive.

  To My Twin Flame,