As he watched her, it occurred to Omkar that a man could stab a girl without making her bleed. He could break her heart without hearing it shatter. It was clear to him that she had been both stabbed and shattered, but that the affliction had not weathered the lily of her face. Unlike those men, he both saw and heard that pain.
The assault of the worry that he felt for her was pacified by her immediate acceptance of the things that he had given her. To be a man, taking care of a woman, even to this small degree that she would currently let him, made him feel a strength that until this point had been unknown to him. He felt that strength spill through his muscles. He felt it fortify his spine.
Omkar could not rationally explain his feelings for her to himself or to anyone else for that matter. She was still unknown to him and yet she was more known to him than his own breath.
He smiled from ear to ear. He tasted the value of that smile. He felt its symmetry against his lips. Once she was out of sight, he walked back to his car. The sound of his footsteps was no longer the sound of his movement forward in life. There was no longer a destination. Omkar knew he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
CHAPTER 21
Aria traced the scores lacing her arms. The cut marks she had made had been reformed into purple scars beneath the confines of her coat sleeves. Though raised, they were smooth to the touch. One part of her was ashamed of them. Another part wanted them to be her voice. She wanted them to scream for the rescue that she couldn’t. She waited until she was finished peeing, wiping herself with a leaf that she had pulled from the soil, and stood up from her squatting place in the woods.
Having done some research on edible plants at the library recently, Aria had been scouring the cracks between sidewalks in the vicinity of the car lot looking for purslane. And she had found some. Not in the dense mats that they are so often found in, but she found more than a few solitary patches crocheting the cracks in the cement. Its tiny jade-like leaves stretched outwards on stems whose red tint made them appear to be dyed with cherry juice. She had wandered off into the woods with a handful to find a spot to eat them. The tart flavor of the weed reminded her of watercress stained by citrus.
Aria was inspirited by the potential of foraging. Until recently, the idea was something she had never contemplated. It wasn’t until her body started breaking down that she began to value the freshness of natural foods. So much of the diet she had access to on the street was restricted to what contained enough preservatives to not need refrigeration, what cans of food were available at food banks and what uneaten leftovers could be salvaged out of trash cans. Her diet was causing her to crumble and her body told the tale. The idea that edible plants and especially weeds could be growing in abundance all around her, but that she didn’t know enough to recognize them yet, opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. It opened up the possibility of feeling good. It opened up the possibility of not panicking about where her next meal would come from. And it opened up the possibility of not having to entangle herself so deeply in the humiliating, and strings-attached, dependence on other people’s charity.
After such a successful mission, she resolved to return to the library soon to learn everything she could, and she walked back to the car lot in high spirits. Feeling passion again toward anything at all was like a tonic to her veins.
Climbing over the fence to the car lot, she felt happy to see that Taylor had arrived there first. He was sitting in the front seat of the Land Cruiser, looking through the black and white mesh of words in a local newspaper. She opened the back door to get inside. “You would never guess what I found,” she said. “There are plants growing all around the city that you can just eat. It’s so cool.”
Taylor smiled at her, more enthusiastic about the uplift of her attitude than he was about the actual subject matter responsible for that uplift.
She had brought him back a sprig of purslane to try. She handed it to him. Taylor put it in his mouth skeptically, twisting it around with his tongue and scrunching up his nose in disapproval of the taste.
“Oh my God, stop it. It’s good,” she said in response to the faces he was making and they both started giggling.
“Hey, do you know why these things were on the hood of the car?” Taylor asked nonchalantly, lifting a small collection of items from the area beside his feet. He expected Aria to give him an obvious answer. He handed them to Aria. “These newspapers were on the car too,” he added. Aria examined the items; a bottle of sunscreen, a pack of feminine hygiene pads,
