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Aurnia
Every ring at the front door the next day sent me scrambling over my bed, slinging my backpack (packed and at the ready on the only post of the four-post bed that hadn’t been snapped off) onto my shoulder, and hoisting myself up to crouch on the deteriorating frame of the open window. The beds of my fingernails would turn bright red as I pressed them tighter and tighter against the splintering wood and strained to listen down the dark, narrow hallway to the front door.
It was always with a painful release of tension that I sagged back down and collapsed in exhaustion onto my bed when I failed to hear footsteps approaching my closed (and locked) bedroom door.
On the one hand, it was a relief to know that it wasn’t the police, that it was just a quick drug deal, a “friend” of my father’s come over for a smoke, or one of the several dealers that lived out of the basement coming back from God knows where. On the other hand, it was no relief at all.
Because I knew. Because I knew, eventually, the police were coming, the police were coming for me.
At least when you’re robbing a store or vandalizing a side street, you’re on the move. There’s constant action, there’s plenty of movement to burn off the adrenaline that makes your chest tight. But the day after I tried to rob Dublin Ink there was nothing to do but wait.
Waiting sucked. I had been waiting all morning, all early afternoon. And all that the rest of the day promised was more waiting and then…juvie.
There was nothing to be done. They were absolutely coming, the police. I wasn’t an expert on the terms of my parole, I’d tuned most of it out to be honest, too busy watching a girl get finger-wagged at by her father for stealing a pair of earrings from the mall. Ha! My father would have berated me for stopping at the earrings. I could hear his slurred voice: what, you couldn’t fit the necklace in your backpack? The bracelet was too heavy for those little hands of yours you never even lift a pinkie to help your dear old dad?
Anyway, I knew enough to guess that trying to rob the place where you were supposed to be working off your parole (for robbery, no less) was probably in violation.
The doorbell rang again, a quick succession of rings that implied urgency. A part of me hoped this was finally it as I went through the whole drill that had become rote: scramble, grab, climb, wait. A part of me hoped it was the police and that they’d been smart enough to post someone at the chain link fence in the back. A part of me hoped the officer who caught me would pat me, not unkindly, on the back, and guide me to the car, saying, “Now, you.” A part of me thought that juvie couldn’t possibly be worse than what I had at home.
And when I heard his voice slither down the hallway toward my bedroom, that part of me grew. Instead of hopping down from the window’s ledge in relief, I lowered one toe and then the other as slowly as possible. I inched carefully across the dirty carpet, careful not to step on the places that I knew creaked. I didn’t dare climb back onto the bed for fear of the old springs moaning. I just stood in place, holding my breath, as footsteps, slow and meandering, moved down the hallway. A whistle was on his lips as usual. I covered my mouth with my hand when his shoes came to a stop outside my bedroom door, two black voids in the strip of yellow. The whistling stopped and this terrified me most of all.
I imagined a hand pulled from a ratty army-green jacket. I imagined it moving toward the doorknob of my bedroom door. I imagined it turning, slowly. The quick jerk when it caught on the lock. I knew how easy it was to open, how feeble the lock I placed so much of my sense of security really was. To keep out all the other goons in the house out of my bedroom, I wedged a chair beneath the knob. But I didn’t with him; I knew it would only prove to him that I was in there.
I so hated the way he called to me through the closed door, the way he drew out my name, the way he drew out a whistle: Auuuuuuurnia.
“Nick!” my father called from the living room. I turned my eyes to the ceiling in thanks. “Nick, you bastard, we’remissing some of the shite! Where are ye?”
The shoes hesitated for just a moment before disappearing, footsteps growing distant as I exhaled. This time when I fell back onto my bed, fingers drawing shakily through my hair, it was a different kind of impatience that swept over me, a new kind of frustration. I suddenly became indignant.
What in the hell was taking the police so long? I thought with a wildly beating heart. They should have been here by now. Why wasn’t someone, anyone here to take me away? To take me, I thought with a pained longing that constricted my chest, far, far, far away?
I became angry at the man from the tattoo parlour, that giant covered in striking art who took my beating upon his chest like he somehow deserved it, whose fingers were still wrapped around my wrist like a bracelet of amethyst and sapphire. What was taking him so goddamn long? What was he waiting for before calling Diarmuid? Was he trying to torture me? Was that his plan all along?
Staring up at the prickled ceiling in the dying light, I remembered back to the prior evening. There, on his motorcycle, muscles shaking, knuckles straining, he had looked at me with such vehemence in his pale green eyes. I could only imagine where he would have taken me had he managed to get me onto his motorcycle. He looked like he had wanted to yank my body against his and drive the two of us straight off a cliff. I could almost feel how his heart would have beat against my back.I could almost feel his heat, almost feel the press of his thighs against mine, almost feel the place where he would hold me tight: right between my breasts, right against the ridges of my ribcage, right where he could feel my own heart most strongly, feel it most rewardingly when it stopped beating beneath his searing-hot touch.
He had hated me, I was sure of that. He had felt nothing toward me but pure rage. I had ignited something in him with deep, dark roots. So why, I thought with a sense of hopelessness that I hadn’t experienced before, hadn’t he turned me in? Why, I thought, hadn’t he called the authorities to tell them what I’d done?
As I heard Nick’s voice in the living room, I twisted into the sheets and drew up my knees to my chest. Why hadn’t he saved me?
