Despite her fear about Aria’s wellbeing, wherever she was, Nina walked to her car feeling almost at ease with Aria’s decision to run away. She hated foster parents like this. People who simply did not get that if a child didn’t have a problem before being separated from their parents, they had one the minute they were. People who expected that putting a roof over a child’s head or a warm plate of food on the table or a Bible verse on the wall would somehow whitewash over the pain and make it not exist anymore. Nina found it as abusive to deny and erase the emotional truth of a child as it was to physically abuse them. Call it her personal pet peeve. Driving away, she knew deep down that Aria, with her perpetual feeling that no one cared about her, was just as likely to disappear completely as she was to pop up again as if nothing had happened.

When all was said and done, Mrs Johnson was once again grappling with her faith. Unable to accept that it was actually as hard as they said it was for authorities to find a child. Unable to accept that, with all her efforts to make Aria feel loved, she hadn’t succeeded. Unable to accept that God had a good plan for creating the suffering behind the statistics she had just been given.

The other children in the house, having heard the door close, had flooded into the living room to watch cartoons. She sat by the youngest of them, petting her bangs as if this child were the last surviving emblem of her identity as a good mother. She didn’t look to her husband to comfort her or to do anything else useful this time. They would deal with reality in their own way.

To her surprise, he sat down beside her and stared at the television set. She knew that he wasn’t really watching the TV. She knew he was grappling with the very same reality as she was. The fact that everyone had done everything that could have been done. Now they had to wait, but not wait. Their lives could not be put on hold forever, especially in light of the statistics they had just been given. The only thing they could do was to keep an open door in their hearts if Aria ever did come back.