Aria sprang out from beneath the tension like a racehorse out of the gate. She ran upstairs and closed the door to her room. She could still hear the sound of her younger siblings in the background. She reached below her bed and felt around until her fingers found the texture of her journal. Pulling it up onto her bed, she grabbed a pen from her backpack and began to write her frustrations down between the lines on the paper. She is not my mother. He is not my father. Who the hell does she think she is? I hate her. She underlined the word hate with three straight lines for emphasis.
The woman who was downstairs cooking was not her mother. The man who would be coming home soon was not her father. The children whose noises she could hear beyond the door were not her siblings. The omnipresent dust of the past covered Aria’s world with grief. There is something about the shock and groundlessness that comes with grief that makes the world around you stand still. Aria’s world had been standing still for quite some time now.
Aria didn’t know where her real mother was. She had been taken by the state at seven years old. From what Aria had been able to piece together, her mother had dropped out of high school when she was 16 years old after finding out that she was pregnant. Her name was Lucy. She was named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” She used to play that song for Aria on repeat when Aria was young. The lyrics were etched into Aria’s memory for all time. Her mother loved music. She had always wanted to play the guitar but because Aria came along, she hadn’t had the time or resources to learn. When Aria was born, Lucy stared down at her perfect little face and felt that this baby was her great creation, this baby was her song … her aria. And so Lucy named her as such.
After Aria was born, Lucy had struggled to afford day care. She worked at a fast-food restaurant to afford a low-income apartment. Aria could only just remember the contours of her face. Most of all, she remembered the look of desperation and she remembered the bruises. When Aria was four, her mother had met a man named Travis. He was in his 20s when he got a job washing dishes at the fast-food joint that Lucy worked in. Travis became enamored with Lucy. They began flirting at work and he eventually asked her out on a date. Desperate for love and support, she was relieved to find someone to share her burdens. Travis moved in shortly after they met. Aria could still remember the sound of his blue Camaro.
Two weeks after he moved in with them, Lucy walked to work on a bitter cold morning only to find a note on the door of the building that said “Closed out of business.” The owner of the chain had known the business was going under for quite some time, but could only bring himself to tell the managers. And the managers did not bother to tell the staff. With no warning, just like that, Lucy was out of a job.
For the next two weeks, she tried desperately to find work, but each time she went in for an interview they would tell her something to the tune of, “We’ll call you back within two weeks to tell you if you have the job.” Despite her embarrassment, sheer desperation drove Lucy to apply for food stamps. But when she walked up to the desk with her paperwork filled out, the woman behind the social services desk informed her that it would take up to 30 days to receive her benefits in the mail. She went to a local food bank but the doors were closed for the night. That evening, Lucy stole a can of soup and an apple from a local supermarket because she didn’t know what else to do.
Aria recalled the arguments that began between Travis and Lucy. She remembered the numb paralysis that would devour her when she heard their voices gashing through the air in the apartment. Sometimes she could hear her mother being hit or held against a wall. She would hide in her mother’s closet and close her eyes and ears until Travis slammed the door and she could hear the sound of her mother weeping. It became a common scene. Aria would venture out to find Lucy bruised or bleeding, staring out the window as Travis drove away, muttering “please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave” between panicked tears.
When the rent came due later that same month and neither Lucy nor Travis could pay it, an eviction notice came in the mail. At that time, Aria did not understand what was going on when she watched her mother crawl underneath the secondhand linoleum table in the kitchen and cry. All she knew was that they were in trouble. They were facing homelessness. Lucy had to pull Aria out of daycare. The television became her babysitter at that point.
But then one day Travis burst through the door of their apartment with a smile on his face. He walked straight up to Lucy and slapped what he was holding in his hand on the table. It was three $50 bills. “Where did you get it?” Lucy gasped, exhaling in relief but also suspicion. Travis pulled her into the bedroom to explain. He had an acquaintance that made his money selling crystal meth and prescription pain pills. When Travis had lost his job, he couldn’t believe his luck when he was offered some money in exchange for doing a hand-off to a local nightclub. It was Lucy’s poverty that forced her to consent.
Travis soon stopped looking for other jobs. What was the point? He could make enough money to afford the apartment and his car, and best of all he didn’t have to answer to anyone. After realizing how much money he could make as a supplier instead of a runner, he began to cook meth himself in the utility closet of their apartment. Lucy was so naive that she didn’t know how toxic the process of cooking meth really was. So when Aria developed a cough and dizzy spells, Lucy didn’t know it was because of exposure; all she could think was she couldn’t afford to take her to the doctor. When Aria’s symptoms worsened and lethargy began to set in, Lucy was so desperate that she asked Travis for some money. He smiled and said, “Yeah, I’ll give you the money but you got to deliver something for me.” She nodded in acceptance and later that night Lucy ran drugs for Travis for the very first time.
For a few months, Aria’s life began to settle. She started kindergarten at a nearby public school and Lucy didn’t seem afraid about money anymore. She even took Aria to get an icecream cone after school every Friday. It was a luxury they could never have afforded before. But then Lucy came home one day in January to find all of Travis’s things gone.
His absence sent her deep into the torment of a depression. She could not function on her own. For a couple of weeks, she would walk Aria to the school bus and then go back to bed and stay there. Aria would make her way back from the bus stop in the afternoon, drag a chair to the counter and climb up on it to find whatever food was left in the cupboards. She tried to cheer her mother up with little pictures she scribbled with marker on the backs of food wrappers. She would watch hour upon hour of shows on Nickelodeon. She wanted to play outside but Lucy always said no. Lucy had withdrawn from Aria’s life. She couldn’t face her own life any more than she could face her daughter.
One day when Aria returned from school, she tried to open the door to the apartment only to find it locked. She sat down on the steps and tried to distract herself from worry by finishing her homework in the stairway. Having nothing solid to write on, she wrote the answers to her worksheet against the cement of the stairs. The imperfections in the cement made the pencil lines look scribbled. After hours of sitting there, just as it was getting too dark to see her paper, Aria heard the sound of footsteps and laughter coming her way. It was her mother’s laugh. With excitement but also fear, she froze to wait for her mother to turn the corner. Lucy tripped up the stairs with Travis in tow. They were both drunk. When Lucy spotted Aria, she smiled and reached down to grab her chin and plant a kiss on her face. She missed and fell forward, catching herself with her hands, and began hysterically laughing. Aria wanted to get out of there as fast as she could but her legs wouldn’t move. She was confused. She was afraid of Travis and didn’t understand what he was doing back there, much less with her mother.