Sitting in the very back of the bus, she kept her eye on the driver. Careful to conceal Clifford, she moved her body as much as was necessary to keep him placid and to not look suspicious. When she’d stayed on the bus for so long that her continued presence there began to create a palpable tension, she got off. She was in a part of town near the museum. To Aria, it felt like she had stepped away from one flavor of sadness straight into another. The path of devastation seemed to have led her in a circle against her will.
As she watched a conflux of school children gather in factions on the concrete steps of the museum, Aria remembered her real mother bringing her here during one of her manic episodes all those years ago. She could almost see herself, like a hallucination overlaying the current scene, walking up those steps, small enough at that age that she had to focus on climbing them. She remembered knowing that her mother’s drug-induced enthusiasm and her desire to both connect and be a mother would be short-lived. But Aria didn’t care. She had decided to soak up those up-days for as long as they lasted so they could carry her through the desolation of all the other days.
She recalled them almost running from exhibit to exhibit. On that day, even though she asked for nothing more than to be with her mother, there was nothing Lucy wouldn’t give her. Lucy bought the tickets to the museum and ice-cream cones and toys from the gift shop as if there was no limit to abundance in their world. She thrust them into Aria’s little arms as if to say that the world could be her oyster. Aria had laughed because it was an experience she had always wanted to have.
She’d wondered for a second if her mother knew something that she didn’t. Maybe something wonderful had happened and they didn’t have to struggle anymore. But she knew deep inside that underneath that laughter and that hope, they couldn’t afford any of it. That feeling reminded her that her mother was not fully there. Lucy was interacting with the world as if through the veil of some alternate reality that was better than this one. Still, Aria tried to keep up with that unattuned alternate reality, and, for the day, she had managed to feel closer to her mother than she had in years.
It was one of those times in her life where she came closest to the vision in her head of what it might be like to really have a mother who loved her and who showed her the wonders of the world. Aria felt nostalgic about that day, as tainted as it may have been. It was a good day.
But then, standing there, staring at the museum, Aria thought to herself, I had two mothers – one who took me to the museum and bought me everything I could ever want. And another who woke up the next day and panicked about the new toys she saw in my room and then returned them. It just so happened that these two mothers Aria remembered were both Lucy.
Aria spent the day in a state of shock. She figured that hanging around a public place like this would keep the people looking for her (assuming there were any) off of her trail. Her hope was that people would mistake her for a high school student on a field trip. And to her surprise, no one ever did suspect a thing.
On a few occasions, she let Clifford out onto the sidewalk. People would come by to pet him and remark at the cuteness of such a docile cat, which was behaving more like a dog on the end of her makeshift leash. She was able to sneak Clifford into a public restroom in the subway station adjacent to the museum, where she created a puddle for him to drink from in an indentation in the tile floor. Aria waited for the brief seconds in between people coming and going to stop pretending to wash her hands and instead drink from the faucet. They both went without food that day. And as the night set in, Aria realized, not having thought of it before leaving, that she had no idea how she was going to get food for either of them.
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
