Mr Johnson felt a foreign sense of reprieve at the prospect of Aria going away. The guilt that had preoccupied him for so long as a result of the indiscretions between himself and Aria might just come to an end. Somewhere inside of him, he felt a glimmer of hope that if Aria left, she wouldn’t tempt him anymore. He could live with himself. He could return to normal.
Aria could not believe her ears. She was sure that the secret they shared would at least bind him to come to her defense. She was sure that it would compel him to want her to stay here. But clearly she was wrong. She was worth nothing to either of them. Abandoned by one mother and hated by a second, and with a father who used her for his own idle pleasure without giving a damn, she stood up and retreated to her room. She shut herself in the closet and sat beneath her hanging clothes, confined in a sphere of sorrow.
She didn’t hear the surprise in Mrs Johnson’s voice at her husband’s words. “You really think so?” she asked.
“I think Aria needs more help than we can give her. I’ve got to work and you’ve got your hands full here at the house, and I just can’t stand seeing you like this every day.”
“But she’s my daughter …” Mrs Johnson started to weep. “She’s got to know that God loves her. No, I won’t give up on her, Robert. I can’t do that.”
In the closet, memories nagged at Aria. In the dark, she could see the sorrel-colored brick of the Eccles Children’s Home like it was yesterday. She had been there longer than at any other group home. She remembered the way the bleak linoleum hallway shone. The air of tragedy that hung in the place, only slightly more pungent than the smell of industrial cleaner. A dormitory of rooms with bunk beds, four children per room. The new ones crying at night, but no one there to comfort them. The emotional deprivation so thick you could breathe it in. There was nowhere for all the torment to go, so the children aimed it at each other. You couldn’t get attached to anyone, because there was no knowing when they were going to be placed in a foster home and leave you. It was anything but a “home,” it was just a place where she was forced to fall asleep at night.
She couldn’t go back to that place.
The torment of the idea of being returned to the group home compelled her to move from her place in the closet. She walked from one end of the room to the other in a frightened daze. She was breathing heavily. She decided to confront the Johnsons about their decision but when she walked down the hallway to their room, she could see through the crack below the door that the light in their room was out. They had already gone to sleep.
Time stood still again, just as it had that day 10 years ago when they had walked her to the school office to tell her that her mother was in the hospital. Again, as she walked down the hallway of the house she had thought would be her home, it felt like she was walking in slow motion. Aria went back to her room and lay under the covers of her bed. Her tears had given way to an unnerved numbness. It was not a conscious decision. The decision came from the deep recesses of her soul, a soul that could not bear the idea of being abandoned again. The decision was clear. She had to leave this place. She had to run away.
Aria rode the first wave of adrenaline across the room to fetch her school backpack. She emptied out the books onto her bed and proceeded to fill her backpack with all the things she could not leave behind: her journal, a change of clothes, her toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush, the blankie she had slept with for eight years and the snow globe beside her bed. The abrasive rip of the zipper jolted her into feeling again. She was terrified. Glancing around the room one last time, to make sure she had not left anything she could not live without, her eyes settled on Clifford. He was patiently sitting on the desk in her room, watching her intently as if he could sense what she had planned. Aria was leveled by the surge of grief she felt when she noticed him. For a minute, she entertained the notion that she would be leaving him and, with him, the only real sense of connection she had ever had. But when she thought of taking him with her, the gush of relief she felt was enough to convince her to do it. She would make it work, no matter what. She picked up her coat that was heaped on the floor and zipped it halfway while she walked toward the cat. Lifting him into her coat, she kissed his head and made cooing sounds. As docile as he was, he made no protest. She felt guilty, realizing that her siblings would wake to find the family pet missing, but she zipped up her coat anyway, concealing Clifford inside.
Aria bent down to swing her backpack onto her back. She turned off the light in the room she was about to abandon. It felt empty already, even though everything was still in its proper place. She walked down the stairs, trying to make as little noise as possible, and crossed the floor to the doorway. She did not look back when she reached the door. As far as she was concerned, she did not have the option to second-guess herself. She unlocked the door and cracked it open with delicate movements, maneuvering her body past it. In the heat of the moment, she could not feel the cold of the air when it received her. She turned around to close the door as quietly as she could. The familiar wooden plaque on the door rattled a bit when she closed it.
She looked briefly at the house she was leaving forever. Surprisingly, she felt a fondness that she could not recall feeling before. But this was no time to turn back, so she spun around and tiptoed down the steps. When she reached the sidewalk, she began to walk swiftly, looking back over her shoulder only once to make sure that she hadn’t woken anyone in the house. When she saw that the lights were still off, she held Clifford tight to her chest and began running.
Aria had run away from home.
CHAPTER 3
The air outside was biting. Aria was caught up in the rush of having made the decision to leave them before they abandoned her. It made her feel like she was finally part of the outside world. She was out in it, instead of looking at it through a pane of glass. The darkness swallowed her up and she welcomed it. She felt a stronger sense of belonging in the shadowy spaces, between where the light from the street lamps could reach, than she had ever felt in the façade of that cinnamon-smelling shitshow called a home.
She let the fury of her rejection of that life fuel her movements forward. It seemed to allow her to run further and faster than normal. It was empowering. But beneath the fever of that empowerment, Aria was terrified. She was terrified of the feeling of arriving wherever it was that she was going. She knew that once she got there, there would be nothing but silence and nothing but stillness. There would be nothing but space to second-guess herself.
A few times Aria stopped to check on Clifford, whose still demeanor beneath her coat owed more to his state of confusion than it did to pleasure. She felt guilty that he was along for the ride to suit her best interests rather than to suit his own. “It’s OK,” she said down to him, cradling him closer in an attempt to soothe away the anxiety, which was so obviously telegraphed by the agitated swivel of his ears.
Aria had run away without a specific destination in mind and that no longer made sense. No matter how hard she tried to search for a great idea, the corridors of her mind would only offer up a slideshow of familiar places. She decided on the one she felt most suited the current situation: the bleachers flanking her high school football field. She had spent time there on several occasions while skipping school, feeling exactly like she did now, like a fugitive. A fugitive intent on biding as much time as possible before making the next move.