When the sun went down, she snuck into the public bathroom one last time. She pulled out her toothbrush and toothpaste and hairbrush and brushed her teeth just like she would have if she were home. She watched herself in the dirty mirror, pulling the bristles of her hairbrush through her hair. The way she felt had changed throughout the day. Now, she wasn’t feeling empowered anymore. She wasn’t feeling sadness anymore. Instead she was feeling lost in a world that she now realized she was completely unprepared for. She found herself staring at a leak of orange soap fluid on the sink, in a daze, when the automatic lights switched off. “Come here, sweetie pea,” she said to Clifford, scooping him up again.
That night Aria found an open entryway to an office building on a side street, a few blocks away from the museum. All the lights inside the building were off, so she felt reasonably sure that she wouldn’t be detected there. The russet of the bricks made it feel warmer inside than it really was. Once she was out of the elements, her skin relished the lull of the air there. She sat down and pulled her blankie out of her backpack. She let Clifford wander in the tiny area. He sniffed around for a time before relieving himself on the floor. Aria initially jerked up to try to stop him, but realized it was no use. She erupted into tears. Tears because she had no way to clean it up. Tears for fear of getting in trouble. Tears at the tragedy of the situation she had found herself in. Even though she didn’t have the luxury of wondering why she, specifically, was the unlucky one who had wound up with this life, she cried tears as if she was attending her own funeral.
Aria stayed in the entryway that she had planned to sleep in for less than an hour until the fear of being found out, and the desire to distance herself from the potential trouble of the mess that Clifford had made, got the better of her. She decided to find another place to stay for the night. But the city was too cold. The universe seemed to watch her with an ocean of indifferent stars. Cars passed her, their engines babbling of destinations unwilling to wait. Any place she tried to settle into quickly became unbearable. Her body would not let her sleep. So instead, she spent the night walking and stopping, walking and stopping. It was hard to walk with one shoe missing its laces. It was hard to walk with the foggy, weak discomfort of hunger. But it was harder not to walk.
At first, the Johnsons thought they owed Aria’s absence to her characteristic delinquency. They assumed that she would eventually come home with some excuse for her absence and that she would deliver that excuse so as to imply they were “in the wrong” for even asking where she was. But by dinnertime, Mrs Johnson gave in to the nagging uneasiness in the background of their routine. After checking Aria’s room and finding no clues to her whereabouts, she called the police just after sundown. Now, two nights had come and gone.
“When did you last see her?”
“Did you have any worries about the state of her mental health or any other cause for concern when you saw her last?”
“Has she ever run away like this before?”
The questions the officer asked seemed to float impersonally across the room. For reasons beyond her understanding, Mrs Johnson was less focused on the questions themselves than she was on how wrong it felt that he could ask them in such a detached way. Her arms were unconsciously hugging her sides as if trying to hold her together. She watched the officer scribble in a notepad every time she or her husband gave an answer. She had been so consumed by Aria’s disappearance that she did not even notice that their family cat was also gone.
Upstairs, the occasional squeak of a floorboard or scuffing of a drawer being opened was audible from a second officer who was examining Aria’s room. Given Aria’s past as a ward of the state, they did not have to wait to file a missing person’s report. But as much of a blessing as that was, the police seemed unmoved by her absence, as if it were a let-down to be expected from a “child like her.”
When the police had collected all the information that they could, Mr Johnson saw them out. Instead of comforting his wife, he stood there looking at her as if to say, “I don’t know what to do.” And he didn’t know what to do. About Aria missing. About his wife’s distress. He was just standing there, waiting for direction.
It was at times like this that Mrs Johnson’s picture-perfect family image began to burn at the edges, like filmstrip caught in the projector. She got up and found herself watching her other children – sent into the backyard during the police visit – through the window over the kitchen sink. This was her way of coping, to busy herself with petty tasks. The warmth of the water offered itself to her in ways that her husband would not. She found a certain security of control in the way the soap predictably cleared the filth from the dishes. Watching the children play outside, witnessing them explore the limits of gravity with smiles on their faces, she couldn’t help but be struck by their innocence. Mrs Johnson could not figure out why God would let things happen to corrupt that innocence.
At times like this, she would speak to God in her own mind. Today, her invisible prayer was to understand why one child is born into a home like theirs, with loving parents and all the advantages in life, and why another child is not. She could feel her husband standing behind her. It bothered her that he did not seem vexed by these kinds of questions. Perhaps it was because he was a man. She envied his capacity to simply accept whatever life threw at them. She also hated him for it.
They had already driven to every place across the city where they thought Aria could be. Necessity meant the other children were sustained with takeout food. Even though they reveled in it, it challenged Mrs Johnson’s delicate self-concept as a mother.
Now they were playing a waiting game. A waiting game heavily tainted by guilt and notions of all the possible things that might have happened to Aria.
CHAPTER 4
“You have not mothered me life, you have not fathered me life.”
The sentence repeated like poisonous poetry in Aria’s mind. She had been hiding behind a Pizza Hut for what felt like hours, waiting for the store to close. Beneath the delirium of her hunger, she felt humiliated. Before leaving, she had not considered what her life might be reduced to, nor what she might be reduced to doing after she ran away.
In a trickle as slow as molasses, all the employees had gone home for the day, except one. She could see him through the window, appearing and disappearing while puttering around the store. He bore his heavy weight like a cross that had been nailed to him long ago. She felt infuriated with how satisfied he seemed with his meager sense of power and the blatant underachievement that, tonight at least, he seemed oblivious to.
“Can you just be done already, goddamn, what the fuck is there to do?” She said the words out loud even though, with both distance and glass between them, he would never hear them. The projection of her irritation did not hurry him at all. How could she expect it to? This man was oblivious and she was hidden to the point that he would never know that she was there. Eventually, her irritation was disrupted by the assault of the sound of grating metal. The back door had opened. She watched the man carry four pizza boxes out to the dumpster and throw them in.
Aria waited despite her nerves, like a predator knowing that it cannot act on its prey just yet without losing the chance altogether. She suffered a few more minutes of watching him resume his puttering before all but a row of dim fluorescent lights went out. Still she waited just those few moments longer to ensure that he was gone before rushing to the dumpster to tie the loose end of the shoelace that was affixed to Clifford’s collar to the dumpster wheel.