by Teal Swan
Travis carried Lucy into the house and placed her on the bed. She grabbed at him when he tried to leave, but he left her anyway. She was so out of it that she soon passed out. Aria stayed silent and let Travis pass by her. On his way back to the door, he handed her the uneaten half of his Snickers candy bar. “You be good now,” he said and closed the door behind him. Once the door was shut, she ate the candy bar as fast as she could. Like most nights, she went without dinner.
The next morning, Lucy was still passed out. When Aria couldn’t rouse her from her sleep, she walked to the school bus alone. When the time came for lunch, she lined up her orange lunch tray and, shy as she was, scooted it down the length of the counter while the cafeteria lunch ladies placed various foods upon it. She carried her tray as carefully as she could to a place in the far corner of the cafeteria. She sat down on the bench of the long table, trying to find sanctuary from the violent noise of the room. Aria picked up her Sloppy Joe sandwich and placed it to the side of her tray. She couldn’t stand the thought or taste or texture of meat. But she was too shy to tell the lunch ladies not to put it on her tray. It was easy enough to find someone who wanted a second helping. She ate everything else on her plate, saving the best for last; the vanilla pudding, which tasted vaguely artificial, was nonetheless a comfort to her. The thickness of it made her feel like life might be OK after all. She closed her eyes after each bite to extend the pleasure of it. School lunch was just about the only opportunity she had to eat at that point in her life.
That day when she got home, the door was unlocked, but her mother wasn’t there. Aria turned on the TV and waited for hours until Lucy finally did come home. But when the door swung open, she saw Lucy had deteriorated. Her hair was messy and had lost its shine. Mascara stained the bottoms of her eyelids. She could barely keep them open to walk across the living room. “Mom!” Aria called out to her. But Lucy did not respond. She just stumbled toward the bedroom, shedding her purse and coat on the floor behind her in her wake.
Some time earlier, Travis had returned one of Lucy’s frantic calls in which she was begging him to return. He had agreed to meet her in the parking lot of a nearby mall. When Lucy confessed to the misery she felt after he’d left, he told her that he knew what would make her feel better. In the back seat of his blue Camaro, Travis pulled out an old licence plate and a bag from under the seat of his car. He pulled some crystalline shards from the bag and crushed them into a fine powder against the metal plate. He then showed Lucy how to snort the powder through the hollow shaft of a ballpoint pen. Lucy was nervous when she snorted the powder for the first time. But four minutes later, her heartbeat began to race. She felt the pressure in her body rise. She could feel herself lifting out of the despair. Euphoria took over her body and blunted the edge of her emotions. She started to feel good about herself. She started to laugh and the implosion of her misery turned into an explosion of aggressive confidence.
Lucy was high. She had left her worries behind. She felt like she could take on anything.
Desperate to stay feeling better and desperate for his affection, Lucy was willing to do anything to remain close to Travis. When Aria was at school, Travis would pick Lucy up in front of the apartment and they would deliver crystal meth to different locations and people around the city and neighboring towns. After they were done, they would get high together.
Lucy had become a tweaker.
Travis eventually disappeared from their lives. Aria and her mother saw him from a distance in the parking lot of a movie theater some time after he disappeared. He was opening the passenger door of his car for a woman dressed in high boots and a miniskirt. It caused Lucy to go on another binge.
When Aria was six, they lost their apartment. Lucy had pawned off everything just to afford her addiction. They moved from apartment to apartment, staying with random people that Aria didn’t know for days or weeks at a time before moving again. For the next eight months, Aria watched her mother go through seemingly endless cycles. She would come home from school to find her mother manic, high with a kind of synthetic empowerment. On days like that, Lucy would drag Aria around the town, determined to show her a good time. But Lucy was delusional. All too often her enthusiasm would turn into aggression and she would find herself in altercations. These would push Lucy into a state of energized paranoia. Several hours later, when the high would wear off, Lucy would isolate herself and succumb to hallucinations. Disconnected from reality and losing a sense of herself, she would lie under the covers of the bed or on the floor of the bathroom, itching and clawing at her skin.
For the few days following these episodes, Lucy would crash. As if she had lost the will to live, she slept away the hours. When she came back to life, she appeared starved, emaciated even. Her skin was beginning to turn gray. The exhaustion would not lift. She would exist in this state of living death for a week or so before deciding that the only way to alleviate the pain was to use again. And so she would. Giving in to the craving, Lucy began not only snorting meth but also slamming it.
The week before the state took her away, Aria could remember lying by her mother, who was passed out on the couch, staring at the track marks on her arm.
A few weeks after Aria’s seventh birthday, a school secretary came to escort Aria to the office in the middle of class. Even at that age, she knew as she walked to the office that life as she knew it was over. She was scared they were going to tell her that her mother was dead. Everything began to feel surreal. She could feel everything begin to move in slow motion. The world went silent. All she could hear was the sound of her own breath.
Inside the office, the school principal sat at a desk in front of two police officers, whose backs were turned toward her as she entered the room. They sat her down in a third chair and explained to her that her mother was very sick and in the hospital. Having contracted hepatitis B, she had developed jaundice. Upon seeing her writhing in pain, her skin and eyes yellowed, one of the people at the house they were staying in had become so worried about her that he had driven her to the hospital. The principal assured Aria that as soon as her mother was better, she could go back to living with her, but until then, she would be living in a group home.
He lied.
Aria left with the police that day and met with a social worker who placed her in an overcrowded group home. Since Aria had no address, she could not go back to collect her things. She went to the home with only the clothes on her back.
In one day, she had lost everything. Nothing was familiar anymore. It was the last time she saw her mother. The following years were a blur of group homes and foster homes. She switched schools sometimes more than twice each year. Aria didn’t belong anywhere. The pain of those years was reasonably suppressed in her memory.
When Aria was 14, a group of members from a Christian church brought a truckload of donations to the group home she was staying in, so that the children could receive stockings for Christmas. The children had been prepared by the staff to thank them by singing Christmas carols. Aria took her place in line and was singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer when she noticed a couple watching her rather intently with a look of pity in their eyes. A few weeks later, she was informed that there was a foster family who wanted to take her in and consider adopting her.
Aria was filled with mixed emotions. She would have done anything to get out of state homes. But she was also afraid. “What if they don’t like me?” she thought to herself when she rounded the corner with the social worker to meet them for the first time. She dared not get her hopes up; after all, she had been in and out of so many foster homes that she knew the chances of finding a family who wanted to keep her at this age were slim. Aria was surprised to see that the couple who were to be her new foster parents were the very same couple who had been eyeing her at the Christmas celebration only weeks before.
Robert and Nancy Johnson had met in college. Two months after they were married, Nancy was pregnant with their first child and she dropped out of sch
ool to become a homemaker. This, she felt, was her true calling. Mrs Johnson was a God-fearing woman, determined to walk the path of righteousness no matter the cost. Aria couldn’t help but feel that under her carefully perfected exterior, there was someone inside of her screaming. She strived toward goodness and toward making everyone around her good too, with a verve that was downright exhausting. It was especially exhausting for Mr Johnson.
Mr Johnson was a shell of a man. Even though he had grown up Christian too, the veracity of his wife’s faith kept him imprisoned beneath a wardrobe of cardigans and khaki dress pants. Purity was such a heavy expectation from the society that he found himself in that all of his deeper, carnal urges had to be suppressed and denied. But, as Aria soon found out, suppressed urges cannot be suppressed forever. If they are, they tend to be indulged in secret. Mr Johnson was the head of the household in title alone.
Mrs Johnson had given birth to two children before her last pregnancy, when she developed placenta accreta. The doctors had to perform a full hysterectomy to save her life. The event rocked their marriage and shook their faith. Mrs Johnson felt like God was punishing her by taking away her God-given gift to bear children. She was inconsolable for months. But when she saw the children at the group home, she spied a kind of hope. She suddenly grasped a greater vision. Her prayers were answered. She could see clearly that God had not taken her ability to bear children away to punish her. God had taken her ability to bear children away so that she could see her greater purpose, as a mother to those who have no mothers. The Johnsons had adopted a little three-year-old girl the summer before, bringing their collection of children to four before they set their sights on Aria.
The day they came to meet Aria for the first time, they brought a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Aria sat in a chair and reluctantly took one from the stack, watching the couple with an enthusiasm that was watered down by an equal amount of suspicion. A caseworker listened with a quizzical smile on her face while Mrs Johnson spoke: “The Lord has trusted us with the care of his children. We believe that by providing an example of God’s love, we are giving these children, who have had a rough start, the opportunity to know him personally.
“Through the witness of our family and the hearing of the gospel message, these children can say yes to the Lord, and because of that they have a real chance at a good life.”
Sentimental tears welled up in her eyes as she finished her message. And she stared at Aria longingly. It was arranged for Aria to move in with them the following week. That was three years ago. Aria had been living with them ever since.
CHAPTER 2
“Dinner time!” Mrs Johnson called from the bottom of the stairs.
Aria ran her fingers through the silky black fur of the cat napping on her bed. Clifford, who was the only family pet, preferred to sleep his days away in Aria’s room. Her younger siblings had named the cat after the famous cartoon Clifford the Big Red Dog, in the innocent hope that the cat would soon grow large enough to ride. Aria loved Clifford. She buried her face in his side and breathed him in, letting the inhale and exhale of his purr console her. She felt a trace of belonging with Clifford that she felt with no one else.
She walked into the little dining room adjoining the kitchen. The table was set with white plastic plates and paper napkins. To one side, a sheet cake with unlit candles took up a good portion of the table. On its surface, “Happy Birthday Aria” was piped in red gel that almost ran into Mrs Johnson’s haphazard attempt to create buttercream flowers. Aria took her usual place and watched the pans and serving bowls make their way divisively through the hyperactive movements of the other children to be placed in the center of the table. Aria loved food. It was the only thing in her life without ulterior motives. She could trust food.
Once everyone was seated, her younger sister was prompted to say grace. They all folded their arms and bowed their heads for the length of the speech. There was a palpable relief when grace was through. To Aria, grace felt like a spiritual tollbooth you had to pass through to get to where you wanted to go.
“Mom,” Aria said, “can you pass the soup?” Mrs Johnson had insisted the week after Aria moved in that she begin to call her Mom. This bothered Aria. Regardless of the fact that Lucy had abandoned her, it still felt like a betrayal to call any other woman Mother. It felt fake and contrived every time she said it.
Mrs Johnson hefted the heavy pot in Aria’s direction so she could ladle the soup into her bowl. Delicate steam wove its way through the air just above the bowl. A few dots of amber oil hovered on the surface of the broth. Aria found a bay leaf in the bowl and picked it up between her index finger and thumb. She placed it in her mouth and held it there. The sound of the room faded and gave way to the experience of it. If wisdom and perspective had a taste, she thought, it would be bay leaf. It reminded her of a candid black and white image of an old hand-hewn log cabin with its occupants, in 1800s clothing, smiling at one another. She could taste the image of a wood-burning oven at the end of summer, right before summer slowed down into fall. It tasted like a nostalgic antique.
Everyone had settled into the rhythm and quiet of consuming the meal when Mrs Johnson’s voice cut through the scene. “Aria cut first class again today.” She was aiming her statement in her husband’s direction.
He looked up from his plate. “Is that so,” he said, rolling the bite of food he had in his mouth around to make way for the words while he talked. “I’ll have a talk with her later,” he said, eyeing Aria with a disciplining stare.
The stare was like a veil concealing an intimacy that shouldn’t exist between father and daughter. Aria felt a chill go through her. She had hoped that the fact that today was her birthday would allow her more than the usual leniency for her errors. She had underestimated Mr and Mrs Johnson’s tendency to make birthdays feel like every other day of the year.
For the rest of the dinner, she was replete with unease, watching the rest of her family converse, anticipating what was to come. Oblivious to her discomfort, they laughed and talked and ate and sang her the happy birthday song as if rejoicing more in the sound of their own voices than in the celebration of Aria’s existence.
When dinner was done, the youngest kids went up to their rooms to play. Mr Johnson walked over to the television and sat down in the recliner. He pressed the buttons on the remote control until he found a golfing tournament and settled in to watch it in a fixated silence. Aria got up to help her two oldest siblings do the dishes while their mother sponged off the table. Mrs Johnson was wearing a look of self-satisfaction as she cleaned.
It was at times like this that Aria felt her lack of belonging the most. This after-dinner routine was standard procedure. Everyone seemed unbothered by the unconscious, mundane repetition. That is, everyone but her. She felt like a fish trying to make its home with a nest of birds. She couldn’t breathe in the emotional atmosphere of this house. It wasn’t the presence of emotions that bothered her. It was the lack of them. It was the vacuum of those moments where the surface veneer of a happy family sat like a film over the truth. The truth was, it was all just one giant act.
Aria retreated to her room, holding a bowl of vanilla ice cream. The house was quietening for the night. Clifford, who was smoothing the white patch of fur on his chest with his tongue, looked up at her when she entered the room. She sat down by him, stroked his head and began to eat her ice cream. Vanilla tasted stable and cozy to Aria. It was like the parts of childhood that one might actually miss, like warm towels fresh out of the dryer. She spent nearly an hour staring out the little window in her room at the rows of identical houses on the block. She watched cars come and go. She watched people take out the trash. She watched dogs zigzag in disorganized patterns on the end of their leashes until twilight turned into night.
She was lying awake with her covers pulled over her head when she heard a soft rapping on the door of her bedroom. The familiar sound of Mr Johnson’s gait became louder as he approached the bed. She
stayed frozen, pretending to be asleep. The covers were pulled up on one side, letting a rush of cold air flood her spine. His weight as he crawled into bed jostled her and tilted the mattress.
Suppressed urges are exercised in secret. It had been like this for two years now. On some nights, when Mr Johnson could find an excuse to be absent from his wife, he would slip into bed with Aria. This time, her school absence was the perfect excuse. Mrs Johnson trusted that he was going to set her straight, but setting her straight was not what her husband had in mind at all.
She could feel his hands against her back. Her tear-blinded eyes turned up toward heaven. She was no longer a child. He was no longer a man. This was their little secret, the secret that devoured Aria’s life with confusion. She did not know if it felt wrong or right. He was the only father she had known and she was terrified of him, but she wanted his affection so much that she would lie silent to let his hands slide across her naked body.
The warm desperation of his breath gripped at the skin on her neck when he spoke. “You’re such a bad girl,” he said as he rolled her toward him. Aria’s arms fiercely folded over the top of her breasts in self-preservation, her closed hands pressed together, covering her lips. It only encouraged him further.
“Why do you want to seduce me?” he asked. “Are you lookin’ for a spanking?”
He lifted his body on top of hers, unaware of the crushing strain of his weight. She squirmed and fought to breathe. She struggled out from underneath him, which made him laugh. “Don’t you tease me now,” he said. He caught her hair and smelled it. His hand traced the length of the inside of her thigh. He began to jerk off with his other hand, his breath sucking in and out in sporadic spurts of exertion.
Aria was incapacitated by the bankruptcy of his heart. She surrendered to the simultaneous feeling of pain and pleasure as his fingers crept between her legs. She was only half there. Drowning in his perverted domination, she took the only exit that was available to her.