But she could not stop thinking about that money. She watched the priest thank the crowd and hand it to a dutiful member of the congregation, who then disappeared with it into the hallway adjacent to the curtain. Aria waited for ten more minutes before pretending to excuse herself to the bathroom. She even asked a few people where it was. They pointed her in the opposite direction to where the man had gone.
Acting as if she was going to the bathroom, she sauntered into the outlying hallways of the building and wandered frantically through the maze of corridors, trying to ascertain where the money in that basket might have been taken. Soon, she spotted a door with a door mount that read “Pastor Ferguson.” It was a long shot to think that it would be open. It was also a long shot to think that the money would be there. But Aria reached for the doorknob anyway. To her surprise, the door was open. She looked both ways to ensure that no one had seen her before slipping inside.
Sitting on the desk, as if part of a cosmic joke being set up in her favor, was the basket, still filled with money. Waiting for the pastor to allocate it to its proper place, it was just sitting there. Aria ran toward it and grabbed money out of it by the handful. She stuffed all but a few of the bills into her backpack as fast as she could, not bothering to count it, terror-stricken that someone might catch her in the act.
She waited a few seconds for the right moment to exit, and while she was waiting she caught sight of a picture of the pastor’s family, neatly displayed in a frame on the bookshelf by his desk. In the picture, his wife and two kids were all wearing white T-shirts. It was a close-up taken at a park. They were smiling and posed as if to suggest that it was placed there to set an example to the other members of the church. As contrived as it was, before Aria exited, she felt that all-too-familiar punch of envy, the bait of a belonging that would never be hers.
Aria left the building in a collected manner that would have suggested to no one what she had done. She made her way into the waiting room of a hospital – Taylor had given her the idea that it was the perfect place for someone underage to go unnoticed by the police. Placing her backpack on her lap, she was able to disguise her actions in smoothing out and counting the money that she had just stolen. From what she could tell, it amounted to $519.
She felt torn. On the one hand, she felt guilty to have unintentionally taken so much more than she thought she had taken. On the other hand, it provided unfathomable relief. She entertained the idea of all of the things she could do with it, replacing the basic luxuries she had gone without. But then she remembered that she could not afford to just spend it. She didn’t know what the future held and liked the security of knowing that she could use it as a kind of secret safety net.
Taylor had gone off to find food for both of them. When he arrived at the hospital, he was carrying a container of Chinese takeout, full to the brim with white rice. Rice was dead cheap. You could fill your belly with it to offset the hunger and buy yourself some time to find better food. Aria didn’t tell him that she had stolen money. She hadn’t even told him that she didn’t have any in the first place. No matter how close they were to each other, they both knew that in a state of desperation, relational ties meant next to nothing.
For the first time in weeks, while Taylor napped in his chair, Aria took out her journal and wrote. She wrote about everything that had happened to her in the last few weeks. She cried as she wrote. It was as if her pen had uncorked everything she had been suppressing and the grief could finally get out. Like every day in the hospital, in those hygienic halls looking over the city, the windows kept grief in and held life out.
With a kind of cold devotion, the machines that kept lungs breathing in and out told of people’s inability to see death clearly enough not to fear it or resist it.
Aria could see despair in the minds and movements of the people there, holding each other’s grief tightly. Trying to survive the unknown together. Every trivial thing erased by the emptiness of loss … By the earthquake of a moment of change. She felt at home there, with people who, due to the tragedies that required them to sit in that hospital waiting room, shared her despair.
A few mornings later, they approached the counter to purchase their tickets to Los Angeles.
“Hello, I’m Taylor and this is my sister. We’re going home to see our father in Los Angeles. He’s really sick and in the hospital, our mother is already there with him. We thought he was gonna get better, but he isn’t so the whole family has to be there with him.”
Taylor handed the receptionist a forged minor travel consent form and both of their
