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
