There was a pining in their movements. A boundless yearning for a kindness they had either tasted or never tasted. A deep hunger for love they might or might not ever find. Their lives were the hunger of the pine.
Aria walked toward the car lot, through the parts of town that served as a cocoon for those without a home. She felt a knot in her stomach when she got close enough to turn off onto the side street that would lead her there. At first she saw no movement and imagined that she would find herself standing before a deserted lot. But that was not what she found. They were living there, like a graft over the scar of the fire-damaged earth. With nowhere else to go, having been able to do nothing else, some of them had stayed there. EJ had not been seen since he had been taken away in the ambulance. Aston had been taken away by the state and Ciarra had been arrested. Taylor, who had moved in with Dan the night it happened, had not returned. But she could see Robert, Anthony, Darren and Wolf there, rebuilding their lives from nothing on the deflagrated landscape. Their tents and tarps had been turned into smoke. Only the frames of the broken-down cars remained; their windows gone, their colors turned to black. Darren, who usually marched through his disciplined daily routine as a replacement for the regimented life of the army, was passed out cold on the dirt under a tree. He had used the bottles of alcohol, which crowded him like debris from a shipwreck, as an anchor. He had tied his anxieties of having lost all of his things to the liquor and had sunk them deep into a drunken slumber.
Anthony, Wolf and Robert were sitting against the fence, talking. Out of everyone – perhaps because of the sheer relief of not having been hassled by police, or because he laid claim to fewer possessions – Anthony seemed the least affected. He and Wolf had spent the night after the fire in a shelter before deciding that the shelter felt less safe than the streets and certainly less safe than the quiet of a charred car lot. So they came back to the lot to see if it had been reclaimed by the city. Finding it abandoned once again, they started over where they left off. Wolf seemed the same as he always did. The fire had reinforced the opinion he held about the world already.
When Wolf caught sight of Aria, he lifted an arm against the sky as a salute to call her over. Robert cracked a toothless smile. “How ya been?” Anthony asked her, extending an arm up from where they were sitting for her to shake. When she took it, he shook it once firmly and folded his arms again.
“Um, OK I guess. How about you guys?” Aria asked. They all chuckled as if in chorus.
“Oh, you know, life’s been better.” Robert said. They chuckled louder because of his response, which was aimed more at them than at Aria. It egged Robert on so he continued. “The good news is, I’ve been thinkin’ … people pay lots o’ money to go camp out under the stars at them national parks and we get to do it for free.” His joke was met by an uproar of laughter and it egged him on even more. “I’ve been thinkin’ about those people who go camping with RVs … It’s like they start packin’ and at some point they go … what did I forget? Oh, I know … My house!”
Again, his joke teased laughter from all of them, including himself. The way he talked, because of his missing teeth, added an additional layer to his humor. Though it lifted the mood, Aria could see that it was also his way of coping. Having lost all of his wood-whittling tools and figurines in the fire, it was obvious that he was at a loss for what to do with the hours of the day.
“Is Darren OK?” she asked, looking over at him.
“Oh, you know, he’s gettin’ on,” Robert said, conscious that in truth he wasn’t. But they could no more help him than they could help themselves.
“Where’s Luke?” Aria asked.
“He said he was comin’ back here right after goin’ to meditate,” Wolf said, winking at Anthony as a nod to their inside joke about how ridiculous Luke was. Though Wolf knew the value of both vision quests and sage, both he and Anthony hated that meditation and sage seemed to be the only tools Luke had at his disposal for dealing with things. Because of his mannerisms and life choices, they couldn’t see Luke as a man and often teased him about his various new-age habits.
“What about Mike?” Aria asked, worried about what the response would be. The area where his camp had been was picked clean. There was nothing left to indicate that he had ever been there.
Robert was the one to answer her question. “Oh, he came back here yesterday, said he was goin’ down to Hemet to stay with a relative and see about a job.” He looked suddenly somber. It was obvious that he considered Mike a friend. The telltale signs of missing him were carved deep into his demeanor.
“I think for a father, seein’ your daughter that way just kinda does suhum to ya. Plus I think he’s feelin’ kinda responsible for it all. I told ’im you can’t do nothin’ about the way some kids turn out, but it doesn’t matter what I tell ’im.” Robert quickly changed the subject, hoping to put their focus on something less doleful. “You been stayin’ outta trouble?” he asked Aria.
“Yeah, I’ve been OK. Actually, I met a boy and his parents have been letting me stay with them.”
A smile crept across all of
