For a few months, Aria’s life began to settle. She started kindergarten at a nearby public school and Lucy didn’t seem afraid about money anymore. She even took Aria to get an icecream cone after school every Friday. It was a luxury they could never have afforded before. But then Lucy came home one day in January to find all of Travis’s things gone.

His absence sent her deep into the torment of a depression. She could not function on her own. For a couple of weeks, she would walk Aria to the school bus and then go back to bed and stay there. Aria would make her way back from the bus stop in the afternoon, drag a chair to the counter and climb up on it to find whatever food was left in the cupboards. She tried to cheer her mother up with little pictures she scribbled with marker on the backs of food wrappers. She would watch hour upon hour of shows on Nickelodeon. She wanted to play outside but Lucy always said no. Lucy had withdrawn from Aria’s life. She couldn’t face her own life any more than she could face her daughter.

One day when Aria returned from school, she tried to open the door to the apartment only to find it locked. She sat down on the steps and tried to distract herself from worry by finishing her homework in the stairway. Having nothing solid to write on, she wrote the answers to her worksheet against the cement of the stairs. The imperfections in the cement made the pencil lines look scribbled. After hours of sitting there, just as it was getting too dark to see her paper, Aria heard the sound of footsteps and laughter coming her way. It was her mother’s laugh. With excitement but also fear, she froze to wait for her mother to turn the corner. Lucy tripped up the stairs with Travis in tow. They were both drunk. When Lucy spotted Aria, she smiled and reached down to grab her chin and plant a kiss on her face. She missed and fell forward, catching herself with her hands, and began hysterically laughing. Aria wanted to get out of there as fast as she could but her legs wouldn’t move. She was confused. She was afraid of Travis and didn’t understand what he was doing back there, much less with her mother.