Stew found her old hometown.
She knew exactly where her house was that shaped her childhood before coming into my life.
With years that had neglected it, the house had recently been bought up by new owners already mending the damage done.
The stickered sale sign rested against the frame of the stairs leading to the front door.
The fence Stew must have escaped through no longer bore the hole she searched for.
The front yard was bursting with flowers along the path to the front door.
In the front was a metal picket and chain that had been buried by the dirt and grass. Stew's hands followed the chain to yank at it and unearth the thick blue leather collar. The first notch of it was so embedded that the weathering threatened to snap it at the groove.
A rusted metal dog bowl sat in a beautified corner by the fence; now a home for the tadpoles and frogs teaming around it.
Engraved on the front was a single name Stew stared at.
Lacie.
There was nothing to suggest that Stew had anything to shield her from the elements as a child. It was just a picket and the bowl. The ground around the picket even dipped down where Stew had dug herself a pit to sleep in years ago. Now, it was drawn over and had rocks stacked beside it to be a proper place for a pond.
She stared up at the house and the door that opened up. It was bright blue and decorated with a wooden welcome sign.
Three blonde children swarmed behind the woman and her husband, curiously trying to get a better look at us.
Stew took this as her moment to leave. I followed down the footpath after her.
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Days passed and we lingered around the town. When I couldn't find Stew, I'd catch her just sitting outside the fence of her home, staring at it.
Sometimes, she'd be in the front yard again, around the dog bowl. Other times, she would be curled up in the ditch, crying to herself.
It was for her to find closure with. However long it took, I was going to wait for her.
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Weeks later, the pond went in and the cramped frog family was tipped into it. With the picket so deeply embedded into the ground, it had to remain. The collar was the only thing that could be cut free and dumped aside. Before it could be tossed into a garbage bag, a desperate bird swooped down to fly off with the scraps. The chain served as a perch the frogs could climb onto now that it was dipped into the water.
Stew watched with me from across the road when it all happened. The family, unsure what to do with the bowl now, saw us watching them. With a kind smile, one of the children ran inside with it and returned to place the sloshing bowl down on the footpath outside the fence.
Stew said nothing when she crossed the road to promptly dump it out. Grabbing it in her mouth, she started walking down the path.
Following behind her determined figure, we eventually rounded the town to come to a cliffside. A monument of a cannon rested here as tribute to darker times. It pointed out over the ocean, mounted on a gigantic boulder. Others rested along the cliffside too, mostly beneath towering pine trees bent by years of abuse by the wind.
Without a word, Stew dropped the bowl down before the closest boulder to the edge. Glaring at the rock, she lifted herself onto her legs, bowl clutched in her hands, to slam it down on the hard surface.
In a frenzy, Stew slammed the bowl over and over. It dented and crumpled with each tinging sound piercing through the air. She drove the bowl into the boulder with all of her strength, even when it was nothing but a crumpled wedge. With each continuing blow, she cursed all that she had been through. She became fiercer the more she spilled her trauma into the metal.
Stew flung the bowl off the edge of the cliff, screaming after it. Tears flew when we watched it sail down to the depths.
As the ocean shot forth to claim the object, Stew rested her head on my shoulder. We sat in silence and watched the ocean crash against the cliff, spraying the air with salty breeze.
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Stew changed after destroying the reminder of her past.
With the bowl etched with her name now settled in the depths of the ocean, and the chain swarming with delighted frogs the children squealed at, she smiled when she faced her old home.
The collar was now torn up for nesting material by the same bird we saw snuggled down for Spring. Without this part of her old life haunting her, Stew could move onto patching up the rest the holes.
For that, she decided to go alone.
Stew insisted it was something she wanted to do by herself, despite my worries of someone so young out in the world.
We had only been here for a few months. There was still so much I wanted to share with her before it came to this, but her determination fuelled her.
We walked in opposite directions that day, making sure not to look back; just in case. Bittersweet tears marked my path out of town, only drying when I had none left to give to the last time I saw Stew.
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