A Deal with the Devil

Chapter 4: Blue

(In which Aria sneaks out of the house.)

There was something strange in the air, Aria noticed. Almost like the little sting on the end of your tongue when a thunderstorm is due. It tasted of fear, expectation, promise, and oppression.

Like a cocktail of emotion.

Good grief, had she really just thought that? Thank heaven her mother hadn’t been around if she’d actually said it aloud. She could just imagine the dramatics that would ensue: “What are you talking about? Cocktails? What do you know of cocktails? You’re far too young to be drinking! How dare you drink alcohol?! I am so disappointed in you I could howl. Go to your room. Drinking! The very idea!”

That’s how things like that always escalated in her house. She’d make a comment on how something was similar to something she’d only seen but never experienced, like saying that her room looked like a bomb site or something so harmless, and before she knew what had happened, her mother was on the phone, crying hysterically to all and sundry that her daughter was making explosives in her room.

So she didn’t talk much around her mom anymore. Her dad? He’d never been part of the picture. Aria had heard he was arrested and her mom took her and ran away, that he was killed before she was born, that she was the result of a one-night stand with some random musician, and even that she wasn’t really her mom’s daughter at all, but was found on a hiking trip in Montana.

Really, none of the theories mattered to Aria. She had always been here, always taken care of her mom when she got wild ideas about spending all their savings on a weekend in Vegas or a trip to France or anything else she came up with. Aria had been in charge of the household funds since she was eight years old, and she was good at it. Her mom could never know, but she’d managed to save them up a little nest-egg fund. She’d been hoping to put a down payment on a house soon so they could move to the country, where her mother seemed to stay calmer longer.

Ah, dreams. They seemed to sustain her these days. Dreams of moving to the country, dreams of going to university, dreams of taking Cerberus and leaving the United States, even dreams of having better dreams to cling to. It seemed dreams were more like memories to her heart lately. She thought on this, and suddenly was reminded of one summer with her grandmother in Arizona.

Her mother had been inside the little trailer they were sharing. Her grandmother Irene had been nomadic, and those precious summers with her in the desert had taken form in Aria’s memory as enchanted days spent with her gypsy tribal family. That night had been particularly beautiful, and the caravan her grandmother travelled with had stopped for the night out on the open desert plain and built a large bonfire in the middle of the camp.

The women danced and sang around the bonfire, the men strummed on twelve-stringed guitars and beat out rapid heartbeats and tattoos on the drums, and everyone sang. Singing in so many different languages, but they all seemed to melt together to become one beautiful, wild, burning song of heart and soul and wild.

Aria’s grandmother sat by the fire, and held Aria with her wrapped in her huge quilt shawl. The air had smelled of sand and mesquite smoke and steam and cooking meat and vegetables. Aria rested her head on her grandmother’s chest, listening to her heart beating in time with the drums and her breathing turning into the quietest hum as she sang in her soft way with the other women.

Suddenly her grandmother spoke, and Aria remembered her words as clearly today in her living room in the concrete urban jungle as she did that night as she closed her eyes under the open stars and danced with the other girls in the caravan: “These are the memories, Aria. These are the ones you can keep with you and wrap around you like an old quilt when the world is cold and you are scared and alone. These are the memories you can weave into your quilt to keep your heart warm when the world tries to make you cold.”