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.