For the few days following these episodes, Lucy would crash. As if she had lost the will to live, she slept away the hours. When she came back to life, she appeared starved, emaciated even. Her skin was beginning to turn gray. The exhaustion would not lift. She would exist in this state of living death for a week or so before deciding that the only way to alleviate the pain was to use again. And so she would. Giving in to the craving, Lucy began not only snorting meth but also slamming it.
The week before the state took her away, Aria could remember lying by her mother, who was passed out on the couch, staring at the track marks on her arm.
A few weeks after Aria’s seventh birthday, a school secretary came to escort Aria to the office in the middle of class. Even at that age, she knew as she walked to the office that life as she knew it was over. She was scared they were going to tell her that her mother was dead. Everything began to feel surreal. She could feel everything begin to move in slow motion. The world went silent. All she could hear was the sound of her own breath.
Inside the office, the school principal sat at a desk in front of two police officers, whose backs were turned toward her as she entered the room. They sat her down in a third chair and explained to her that her mother was very sick and in the hospital. Having contracted hepatitis B, she had developed jaundice. Upon seeing her writhing in pain, her skin and eyes yellowed, one of the people at the house they were staying in had become so worried about her that he had driven her to the hospital. The principal assured Aria that as soon as her mother was better, she could go back to living with her, but until then, she would be living in a group home.
He lied.
Aria left with the police that day and met with a social worker who placed her in an overcrowded group home. Since Aria had no address, she could not go back to collect her things. She went to the home with only the clothes on her back.
In one day, she had lost everything. Nothing was familiar anymore. It was the last time she saw her mother. The following years were a blur of group homes and foster homes. She switched schools sometimes more than twice each year. Aria didn’t belong anywhere. The pain of those years was reasonably suppressed in her memory.
When Aria was 14, a group of members from a Christian church brought a truckload of donations to the group home she was staying in, so that the children could receive stockings for Christmas. The children had been prepared by the staff to thank them by singing Christmas carols. Aria took her place in line and was singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer when she noticed a couple watching her rather intently with a look of pity in their eyes. A few weeks later, she was informed that there was a foster family who wanted to take her in and consider adopting her.
Aria was filled with mixed emotions. She would have done anything to get out of state homes. But she was also afraid. “What if they don’t like me?” she thought to herself when she rounded the corner with the social worker to meet them for the first time. She dared not get her hopes up; after all, she had been in and out of so many foster homes that she knew the chances of finding a family who wanted to keep her at this age were slim. Aria was surprised to see that the couple who were to be her new foster parents were the very same couple who had been eyeing her at the Christmas celebration only weeks before.
Robert and Nancy Johnson had met in college. Two months after they were married, Nancy was pregnant with their first child and she dropped out of school to become a homemaker. This, she felt, was her true calling. Mrs Johnson was a God-fearing woman, determined to walk the path of righteousness no matter the cost. Aria couldn’t help but feel that under her carefully perfected exterior, there was someone inside of her screaming. She strived toward goodness and toward making everyone around her good too, with a verve that was downright exhausting. It was especially exhausting for Mr Johnson.
Mr Johnson was a shell of a man. Even though he had grown up Christian too, the veracity of his wife’s faith kept him imprisoned beneath a wardrobe of cardigans and khaki dress pants. Purity was such a heavy expectation from the society that he found himself in that all of his deeper, carnal urges had to be suppressed and denied. But, as Aria soon found out, suppressed urges cannot be suppressed forever. If they are, they tend to be indulged in secret. Mr Johnson was the head of the household in title alone.
Mrs Johnson had given birth to two children before her last pregnancy, when she developed placenta accreta. The doctors had to perform a full hysterectomy to save her life. The event rocked their marriage and shook their faith. Mrs Johnson felt like God was punishing her by taking away her God-given
