She washed her clothes by hand with shampoo and threw them all over the bar of the shower curtain before soaping herself. It was the first time since running away nearly a year ago that she had taken a shower that wasn’t timed and watched by an attendant. The feeling of being able to enjoy the water and brush her teeth inside the shower felt like a luxury beyond measure.
When she went back downstairs, she draped the damp clothes over the top of the door and took out the little beaver statue that Robert had given her. She placed it by the statue of Ganesh. She did not realize the symbolism of having done so. She did not realize that the beaver was telling her that it, and she, had found home. Instead, she thought of Robert and all the other people at the car lot. She wondered whether they were OK or not. She wondered if they had all found some other place to stay. She reminded herself that the meaningfulness of her relationship to them might be entirely one-sided. Still, Aria made the decision that she would go back to the car lot the next day, when Omkar was at school. There was some closure she needed, even if it was to stand before the empty lot and to realize that she might never see any of them again.
Aria turned the lights off and lifted back the top sheets of the bed to crawl between them. Her body felt the shock of there being no plastic between herself and the mattress. Every time she had stayed in a new house like this, it had been in a foster placement or a group home. They always put plastic on the beds to prevent damage from potential bed-wetting. The noise and feel of the plastic always made Aria feel bad, as if they expected her to be like a stray dog that wasn’t potty-trained. “This is how other people feel,” she thought to herself.
She felt grief for the pain of her childhood as much as she was celebrating how good it felt to be trusted and welcomed enough that Jarminder had put the sheets directly on the unprotected mattress. The feeling of that trust that was placed in her put as much pressure on her as it took away. Pressure to stay in their favor. Pressure to earn her keep. Pressure to make them never regret it.
When morning came, Aria cracked the door open wide enough to see that she had awoken before the sun had risen. She wasn’t accustomed to going to sleep so early. While everyone else was still asleep, she forced some of her damp clothes back over the shape of her body and looked around the store for ways to repay the Agarwals’ kindness. But because Neeraj was so careful about the upkeep of his store, Aria could not find much to do. She took the window chalk markers and rewrote the fading letters that spelled “New Year’s Sale On Items” on the front window before organizing the piles of papers and items stacked behind the checkout counter. She wrote a thank-you note to Neeraj and Jarminder and left it there. Then she wrote a letter to Omkar telling him to meet her at the car lot after he got off of school and signed it with a heart. She made her bed and left the letter on it.
Once Aria had collected everything except her wet clothes back into her backpack, she left, holding the bell attached to the door when she opened it so it wouldn’t announce her exit. The air outside was crisp. The irrigation system in the neighbor’s lawn hissed from beneath the thick and newly cut buffalo grass when she passed it. One of the neighbors stopped her minivan with three kids in the back to ask Aria if she wanted a ride to the school bus stop. Aria thanked her, but declined, suddenly feeling insecure about how young she must look in comparison to how she felt and the life she had been living.
As the morning sun touched her with its un-sugared rays, she turned back to look at Omkar’s window. Thinking of this new chapter of her life with him, she thought, “Has your life already spent its shade and has it stained you?” She stopped on the side of the road to write the verse in her journal. She did not know if any love or hope could wash the shadow from a person. But she hoped that maybe Omkar could love her with that ineffable stain she felt because she knew that now, without him, life would always be so much less.
CHAPTER 31
They were in the deserted doorways, their cardboard boxes erected like monuments to commemorate their anguish. The irony of their lives written in the sign on those boxes reading “this side up.” Their thirst could not be quenched by the water they didn’t have. Their hunger could not be satiated by the food they could not afford to buy.
No one thinks they will end up like this. No little five-year-old boy or girl sits on the carpet of their kindergarten class during sharing time and says they want to be homeless when they grow up. Before Aria had become one of them, she had always looked at homeless people like they were “those people.” Now, she understood that a life on the streets was just a hair’s width away from almost anyone. Given the right cocktail of conditions, anyone could find themselves here. They were not a different species, even though it comforted people to think of them that way. To separate themselves from “those people” who were homeless made folks feel further away from being homeless themselves. But the truth is, “those people” were people just like you or
