Home was not a person. Home was not a place. Having dug up their roots so many times, Taylor and Aria were beginning to wonder if people like themselves were homeless less because no home existed and more because neither of them even knew what home was. Other people seemed to know. They’d found it somewhere. Those people lacked the anxious searching that polluted Taylor and Aria’s lives. The pair debated the concept of home on their way to the church where Luke had taken them the day after they had met him so many months ago, hoping to find the doors open for lunch once again. Aria was conscious of how good it felt to walk down the street in new socks.
Something that Aria had come to find out is that when you are homeless, suddenly wealth is determined by a pair of new socks. They keep you warm, they keep you clean, they prevent a whole host of different ailments that occur when it seems like all you are doing with your life is walking. And as she had found out the hard way, when push comes to shove, they can serve many other functions than that which they were originally intended for.
The $10 that Aria had gathered on Christmas Day had run out. When Taylor had gone out to the city looking for jobs, which he had done every day the previous week, Aria had waited for him to leave before setting out on her own. First she spent some of the money at a grocery store on a packet of cigarettes. Then she bought a bus fare so she could save herself from walking. She spent the rest of the money on a carton of plain rice from a Chinese fast-food restaurant. Part of her felt guilty for having spent money that she could have saved for emergency situations. Contrary to what people often say about people on the streets, it was not in her nature to spend money all at once. But having nice things and having money on the street is more dangerous than spending it. It would have made Aria a target. And she already knew what it felt like to save money only to have it stolen. So she decided it would be better to spend it on herself than to potentially lose it all.
On their way to the church, Taylor and Aria paused at a stoplight near a shopping center, waiting for it to turn green. Aria felt her heart jump a little at the familiar sight of Darren, who was standing across the intersection from them, panhandling. When the light turned green, Aria held Taylor back so they could spy on him without him noticing. He was sitting on a bench with his battered crutches laid out in plain view. A sign propped up in front of him read “Homeless Vet Support Your Troops.” His prosthetic leg was intentionally displayed.
In the months they had spent at the camp, Aria had come to understand Darren. His entire presentation was meant to guilt people. He was angry. The lack of opportunities that he’d had in life were opportunities that the army had promised to give him. He had enlisted with a sense of national honor and pride. Back then, he felt like he belonged to something bigger than himself. But that honor and that pride were now timeworn. They had frayed out from underneath him, exposing instead a void of terminal aloneness.
Darren now felt as if the very country he served had turned its back on him. And he was determined to make the country and its ungrateful, idiot civilians remember him. He displayed the sacrifices he had made for them in plain view as if to say, “Shame on you, look what I sacrificed for you, now give something back to me for it.”
Aria felt conflicted watching him. On the one hand, his sense of entitlement and the shame he used as a tool of extortion were enough to make you hate him. Many of the citizens he was now guilting, including herself, had never wanted him to go to war in the first place. It’s hard to feel grateful for a sacrifice you never wanted or asked someone to make. But on the other hand, he was right. Aria imagined that in his position, she would be angry too if she had offered up her life for someone or something else and in return had ended up losing everything; reduced to constant pain both emotionally and physically. The country had turned its back on him, especially the very institutions that had promised him belonging in the first place. Like a broken Springfield Model civil war rifle, he was now a forgotten symbol of war. Patched together and gathering dust, he was no longer a tool the government could use for the violence of their foreign policy.
Like that broken gun, Darren was less devastated to be on the shelf than he was to be considered worthless now, his dignity abolished by every passerby that ignored him.
Taylor and Aria decided to cross the street perpendicular to where he was sitting. They did so without him ever noticing that they were there. When they reached the church, the line was shorter than it had been the last time they had come there. The big black woman, Imani, was manning the table once again, her rich, welcoming smile pulling people down the line. She seemed happy to see Aria again, which took Aria by surprise. “How you two doin’?” she asked, ladling chili into two paper bowls on the table in front of her.
“We’re OK ma’am, how are you?” Taylor answered, suddenly reverting to the manners that were beaten into him in his youth.
“Well, I’m fine today, just fine,” she responded, pausing to collect two care kits from a cardboard box underneath the table before continuing to speak. “We’ve got these here for you today. Some deodorant, some hand lotion and chapstick and some baby wipes. The kids made ’em themselves.” She pointed to each item as she listed them, all of which had been carefully packed in a plastic ziplock bag.
Taylor and Aria paused awkwardly, not knowing if they should take the bowls and care packages from the table themselves or whether they should wait for her to hand them over directly, until Imani broke that pause. “You know I’d been hopin’ to see you here again. I wrote the number down to my office in case you ever wanted some help with anythin’. We’ve got some great programs you might like.” She handed Aria a business card, which advertised the church. On its back, she had handwritten her phone number and her name.
“Thanks,” Aria said, trying to disguise her distrust with openness. She put the card into her pocket.
“You two come back and see me now,” Imani said, carefully handing each of them their chili and care packages.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Taylor said. Aria just smiled and nodded her head to indicate that she had heard her. Imani felt the relief of knowing that her first attempt to establish connection with Aria had successfully landed.
Imani was a social worker on a mission, on several missions in fact. Her sense of purpose in the world had replaced the conscious need for a partner or any other form of support for that matter. She was a member of the church, where she handed out lunch to the homeless on most days of the week. Every morning and also at unexpected times, when crises occurred, Imani had her hands full with her work at a family services center in one of the worst parts of town. In the afternoons, she went home to her two-bedroom apartment, to take care of her family members that were incapable of taking care of themselves, much less each other.
It seemed to Imani that all she did was manage crises, whether it was in her professional life or in her private life. In fact, handing out food to the homeless and attending church were the two most stress-free facets of her life. When the state found Imani’s sister to be unfit to take care of her three kids, their custody was passed to Imani’s mother, the children’s grandmother, who was progressively being rusted through by both diabetes and heart disease. Now, one year later, Imani found herself sleeping on her own pull-out couch and caretaking all of them. Because of this, Imani had no spare time to speak of. She had no other choice than to be strong. Her moral heart had made self-sacrifice its bedrock. The fact was that Imani took care of everyone in her life.
In common with many of her background and culture, Imani was a God-fearing woman. But she wore her faith with more self-effacing grace than others. She believed in every fiber of her being that Jesus cared for all his children and did so in mysterious ways. Her faith was so deep and unshakable that she was not troubled with doubtful questions about the ways in which this “care” happened. When tragedy struck, which it so often did around her, she knew it was not God that was mistaken but she that could not grasp the full picture. In her wallet, she carried a paper, now crinkled from years of use, that said, Faith only occurs in the absence of knowing. It was her favorite quote and she lived her life by it.
Imani had worked out the first time she saw her that Aria was homeless and that she was underage. But she also knew that calling the police was not the solution. “You just gotta love ’em,” she thought in her head. That first time, Aria had been with Luke. Imani had seen him in the line before. She knew him to be a man who could be counted on to take advantage of all the benefits the church could offer. Like nearly everyone else, she could tell that he had chosen to be homeless and because of this, his entitlement drove her crazy. Still, she hoped that because Luke had been the one to lead Aria there, he would bring her back and gradually, she might be able to connect Aria with the necessary resources to get her off of the street.
Imani had no way of knowing whether Aria would do anything with the connection she’d tried to make, or whether she had been too damaged at this point to recognize opportunity when it was handed to her. But Imani could rest in knowing that she had done what she could do for now. She also knew that the best way to get Aria to trust her was to put absolutely no pressure on her at all. These kids who had no home to go to were like stray animals. You had to be patient and not react or trap them, and stay consistent while they tested you again and again. Sometimes Imani felt like they were actually trying to get her to act in such a way that they could prove to themselves that no one loved them. It was like playing a game of chess where what these kids didn’t get was that winning this game meant killing their own best interests.
The slurry of flavors scalded Aria’s nose before she had even tasted it. It was not the best bowl of chili. It probably wasn’t even good. But Aria’s current circumstances elevated her appraisal of it. The way the sharp musk of cumin coated her throat, and its heavy sustenance, made her feel cradled on the inside.
Taylor and Aria ate without talking. A warm meal had been so hard to come by that it was a pleasure worth the silence. Having become accustomed to one meal a day and some days none, Aria struggled to finish the chili. By the time she fished the last bean from the bowl, her stomach was sore. Taylor, who finished before she did, announced he was going to take a short nap and to wake him up whenever she was ready to go. He lay down in the grass and covered his face with his jacket.
Aria leaned back on her elbows to try to relieve the ache of being too full. She watched Imani serving the other people in the line. A young man had made himself at home on a cardboard box beside her. He was slumped over his bowl of chili, spooning it into his mouth boorishly and laughing. From the familiarity of the body language and talk between them, Aria guessed that they must know each other personally. His head was covered in a purple do-rag. He wore an oversized puffy blue coat and oversized jeans that rode so low they didn’t quite cover his boxers. The knock-off gold watch he was wearing on his left wrist made the brown skin, under the jungle of black tattoos on his arm, look copper. He had thick lips and wide-set dark eyes. Even from a distance, Aria could see that his eyes caught so much light, the reflection in them made his pupils look white instead of black. In fact, the reflection made his eyes look like he was crying even when he was smiling. Underneath his carefully constructed image of bravado, Aria could see the child still alive in him inside his eyes. A five-year-old boy looking at the world as if he was still watching his father leave him. He seemed to be forever crying without crying at a loss still unresolved within him.
Aria switched her attention to the cook. Imani seemed to her to be the epitome of a big black woman. Her skin was the color of hickory. The entire length of her coarse hair was regulated into box braids, two of which she had tied together in the back, as if in a last-minute attempt to keep them out of her face and to tame the rest. She spoke with a twangy paralanguage common to the African-Americans who had spent their youth on the South Central side of the city. The way she moved her body was both slow and loose. This mannerism of casual familiarity made people feel at ease. She wore a pair of black-rimmed prescription glasses and a loose-fitting blouse with stretch pants over her heavy curves.
After a time, the young man got up and gave Imani a sideways hug. “You be good now, don’t you be gettin’ into any trouble!” she yelled after him when he turned away. He afforded her a sideways smile and a wave before bounding across the street. He held the belt of his pants up as he jogged.
Aria watched him check and recheck his watch on the side of the street until an iridescent black low-rider car drove up behind him. She watched him get into the car and drive away without ever knowing whether they had anything in common with each other. Without ever saying hello or waving goodbye.
She poked at Taylor’s side and said, “What do you want to do?”
Taylor pulled the coat down from his face, squinting against the sunlight. “I don’t know,” he said, realizing that neither of them had thought past trying to seek out a meal. “There’s a temp office like ten blocks away. They might have gotten something new in for me.” He said it like a question more than a statement.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Aria said. “I can stay here and wait for you to get back if you’d like.”
Taylor was taken aback, having assumed that she would go with him and wait outside the office instead. “Don’t you want to come with?” he asked.
“No, I don’t want to just stand around outside. Besides, I can talk to her about whatever she was talking about before,” she said, pointing to Imani.
Taylor suddenly seemed insecure about the idea of wandering the city alone. But he didn’t want to risk being pushed away by pressing her to accompany him. “OK,” he said. “It’ll only take me like two hours. I’ll meet you back here and we can go back home.”
He pulled his backpack up onto his back and, before navigating his way to the sidewalk, he said, “Cross your fingers for me.” She smiled and gave him a thumbs up. The way he walked was so obviously gay that she caught herself worrying about his safety, strutting down the road in this part of town unaccompanied. She felt compelled to join him to avoid the guilt she would feel if anything happened to him because she wasn’t there. But Aria wanted to talk to Imani away from Taylor’s tendency to blindly trust people and accept their assistance, no matter the hidden consequence. She wanted to see if Imani’s offer was legitimate or truly full of shit.
Aria watched Imani, waiting for what looked like a good time to cut in. That time never came. By the time she was about to make a move to go over and talk to her, the woman had disappeared inside the building, leaving a younger girl in charge of the table, and didn’t come back out for so long that Aria decided the opportunity had closed. She walked briskly in the same direction as Taylor had gone, hoping that if she walked fast enough, she would be able to catch up with him. Soon she found herself standing at an intersection two blocks away from the church, not knowing which way he had gone. She stopped to lean against an inhospitable brick wall for long enough to decide whether to continue looking for him or to go back and idle at the church, waiting for him to come back.
In front of Aria, there was the Super Sun Market, or so it said in red 3D lettering affixed to a yellow stripe of paint above the door. It was a corner store on an unpeopled street. Despite the new year having come and gone, Happy New Year was still written across the front windows, surrounded by doodles of poorly drawn fireworks. Its door was propped open as if begging for customers to come in. For some reason unknown to her, instead of immediately walking back to the church, Aria decided to heed its invitation. As she stepped through the door, the smell of the place gave away that it was a store that belonged to immigrants. In addition to the usual things that can be found in any small general market – candy bars, medicines and overpriced refrigerated goods – there were items that Aria had never seen before. She paused in front of a stack of bags containing what looked like little orange beads. The packages said Masoor Dal, beneath the icon of a flaming genie’s bottle.
Aria peered around hesitantly, trying to locate whoever was tending the store. There were a few closed doors that clearly led to other rooms or closets and a staircase that led to a second floor, which didn’t look like it was intended for customers. Aria took advantage of the absence immediately, attempting to trick any potential security cameras by pretending to look at one item with one hand, while using the other to steal things away in her jacket pocket. She had taken a candy bar, a packet of gum and a packet of peanuts before she heard the heavy, hurried footsteps of someone coming down the stairs.
“Hello, welcome.” The man’s voice preceded his entry into the room. He nearly fell through the doorway to the stairs in his eagerness to greet her. For the briefest of seconds, Aria thought that she had been caught red handed. But instead, the man looked ashamed that he had not been there to tend to her needs when she had first entered the store. He had been raised with a strict sense of customer service, which he had clearly fallen short of by leaving the store untended for a few minutes. He must have mistakenly assumed that no one would show up in the time he had given himself to use the bathroom.
The man who stood before her did not appear to be much older than herself. He was thin and tall. She could not tell if he was Middle Eastern or Indian. Bushy eyebrows framed his almond-shaped eyes. They were the color of melted chocolate. They peered down at her from an almost uncomfortably close distance. They were as trusting as they were curious. His face was almost childlike, only a hint of stubble gracing his chin and upper lip. Even though his long nose, prominent ears and thin upper lip made it so that he would not be what most people would consider handsome, there was something that Aria found stately and tempting about him.
“Do you need help finding anything?” he asked.
“Nah, I’m just looking around,” she said.
“OK. I am Omkar,” he said, putting his hand against his chest. “Tell me if you need anything.” His accent stressed the syllables rhythmically, the words almost entirely spoken in the front of his mouth. She liked the way he put emphasis on the wrong syllables. It made him all the more endearing.
He looked almost disappointed at her rejection. She couldn’t work out whether the let-down she felt was due to the fact that he had worked out that “just looking around” meant “probably not going to buy anything.” Or whether it was because he was lonely and desperate for the discourse implied in showing her around the store.
Aria felt bad for having stolen anything from a man who was so obviously nice. But it was too late to change her mind now. She wandered through the aisles to deceive him into thinking she had looked around without finding anything interesting to buy. She was fully aware of Omkar restlessly waiting behind the checkout stand in case she was to indicate the need for his assistance. Aria was impressed that so much of his personal energy filled up the room. His essence was so thick it nearly sucked the breath out of the room. This was not the kind of place that a man with such obvious charisma would normally be found.
After a few minutes, she made her way to the door and said “thanks” before stepping outside of it. She heard his voice yell out behind her, “Thank you, come back again.” Aria felt strange leaving, as if by stepping into the store, she had exited her own life and entered his. She hadn’t realized how her own story had faded into the background of the thick smell of Punjab spices when she was walking around the shop. Suddenly, the street outside felt colder and her loneliness more bleak. As she walked back to the church, she used the momentum of her body to emotionally push through and past the way the feel of him haunted her.
Taylor arrived long before he had promised. The temp office had told him that they had no new listings and so he had turned back as quickly as he’d come. Aria felt like they were occupying two different worlds despite their physical proximity. Taylor, who didn’t mind the surface chitchat that took place between them on their way back to the car lot, was oblivious to the distance between them.
When they arrived back at the lot, there was a commotion taking place. Aria and Taylor watched at a distance, sensing the tension in the air. Ciarra was screaming, “Get the fuck outta here you sick fuck,” as she threw a handful of dirt in the direction of a man who had parked his Chevy Beretta on the street just outside the lot. The man wore an ill-fitting flat-brimmed hat over a mullet. The top of his too-tight jeans was hidden beneath the bottom of a loose-fitting gym tank that he obviously wore to show off his muscles. He stalked toward his car in a rage. His cowboy boots kicked up dust under his angry footsteps.
Ciarra continued to cry and scream at him and throw rocks long after he was out of range. When he drove away, she got into the purple van, slammed the door and sobbed against the steering wheel.
Taylor and Aria walked with trepidation through the gate toward the white Land Cruiser. Luke called out to them before they reached it. Palin came bounding up toward them, her tail wagging and her ears pinned with elation, curling her body like a fish under their hands.
Aria coddled Palin with endearments, ecstatic to see her again and feeling the heaven of being so obviously wanted by someone. They went over to sit with Luke in the doorway of his tent, leaving their legs just outside the door instead of taking their shoes off. Luke smelled of campfire smoke and sweat. He had obviously not taken a shower in a long time but was oblivious to his own stench. “Dude, that was off the hook,” he said referring to his recent travels. “There were so many people there, dude. There were bonfires every night and dancing and chanting and just magic people, you know?”
Taylor took the bait and started asking him questions. Even though Aria was barely listening, Luke spilled the details of his journey that he so obviously wanted to tell the both of them as if they were listening equally.
Aria let his voice fade into the background. She was petting Palin when a sound near Ciarra’s purple van caught her attention. It was Aston indignantly digging holes in the dirt with his stick like he so often did, there being nothing else to preoccupy himself with. Aria’s stomach sank when she saw him. She was close enough to see that the brow on the left side of his face bore a cleaned-up cut. A bruise that covered half his face had swollen his left eye shut.
She knew that marks like that on a child so young could never have come from a school fight or an accidental fall. She knew that Aston had been beaten. She wondered if that was the reason Ciarra had ended up in the fight they had just walked in on.
Aria was consumed by fury that she could do nothing about. She watched Aston sit alone in the dirt, his mother having closed the door on him, drowning in her own self-pity. It reminded her of her own childhood. The many times she watched her own mother cry her eyes out over the very person who was ruining their lives. Her body went numb with the memory of it.
But she didn’t approach Aston because she knew the kind of mother that Ciarra was. She would abandon her son but consider any person who tried to take her place an enemy. And Aria couldn’t afford that. At least not right now. She was terrified of Ciarra. In fact, she hated her. But her safety depended upon Ciarra never knowing it.
Aria knew that the man who had stormed off in a rage was Aston’s father. A deadbeat who showed up like a hero to take his son somewhere only rarely, whenever his band was in town. He lived in Las Vegas. One of two electric guitarists in a heavy metal band that got few gigs, he had a day job doing assembly at a manufacturing plant. It was not enough to pay child support. Or, more to the point, he said it wasn’t, and Ciarra was so afraid of him stealing Aston as retribution for taking him to court that she never forced the issue. But on more than one occasion, today being one of those occasions, Aston’s failure to please him during one of their outings had resulted in a beating under the disguise of discipline.
Ciarra couldn’t find it in herself to be a mother. The agony of being left to fend for the both of them and the deprivation of having no support made it impossible for her to comfort Aston, who she knew was sitting on his own just outside the door. She knew it wasn’t fair to him. She also knew he hated her for it. But she couldn’t blame him because no matter what she said, she knew that she deserved it. She hated herself for it, too. There was nothing more painful than knowing she had to be a mother, but not feeling capable of being one. It was always the same. She hated herself for thinking that today would be any different. How many times had they been through this? He would stroll into their lives unpredictably, promising that this time would be different. But it never was. They would never be a family again, not that they ever were. But Ciarra couldn’t stop herself from hoping that, by some miracle, their dysfunctional liaisons would transform into the picture she had in her head of a white picket fence and meals together at the dinner table.
Ciarra dreaded the aftermath. She knew that she couldn’t take Aston to school that week. She had made the excuse that he had fallen or gotten into some kind of accident one too many times. She also dreaded how her father would react. Mike would come back to find Aston bruised and battered, and he’d lecture her, like he always did, about her poor choices in life and how unfit she was to be a mother. She couldn’t face it. So instead, she decided to take Aston away.
Aria watched Ciarra get out of the van and grab his arm to come with her as if he were in trouble. She watched her pick him up and walk straight out of the car lot and disappear down the adjacent street. Ciarra wouldn’t return for over a week, staying with one of the other girls who worked for the same pimp until she ran out of money and had to rely on Mike to watch Aston again. It had happened before. It would happen again.
Aria felt the all-too-familiar seduction of her usual way of coping with emotions at times like this. She tried for a while to defy it until she couldn’t do so any longer. She needed the release. The release of pain.
She told Taylor and Luke she was going to pee and went out into the woods to a place outside of their visual range. She found the sullied shards of a broken beer bottle and, buzzing with adrenaline, drew the edges that were sharpest across her arms. The electric sting that sliced through her forearms as she cut them again and again was more powerful than her overwhelming feelings. The glass, now coated with her blood, became slippery as she used it. She started crying. But the multitude of splits in her arms were still weeping more than she was. The sharp sting had climaxed to an overall burning sensation that induced her body to start shaking. She watched her body forming clots to stop the flow of blood. She could feel the disunity in part of her wanting to be punished and another part, whatever part was forming those clots, wanting her to thrive. She watched her blood fall into the dust and laminate the grass blades.
Aria could see herself in the bruises that hugged Aston’s face. It was a tragedy to be hidden. A cycle of perpetual let-down that neither of them could find a way to escape. It was not even the pain of yesterday that mattered. It was that the pain was back again today.
She wanted there to be a sunrise on the darkness of his life. But she couldn’t make one for him any more than she could make one for herself.