The Red Hunter(24)

Cutter shouldn’t have been free that night; he’d been in custody just hours earlier, brought in on suspicion of another rape. But lack of evidence caused the police to let him go. Cutter had a son, the child of a teenage girlfriend, that was being raised by his maternal grandmother. Eventually, he was murdered in prison by another inmate over some slight. A wasted life, characterized by pain and misery, ending in tragedy, Claudia had written. He was a victim, too. Still, I find I can’t forgive him. My body won’t forgive him.

Why would she want to forgive him? Raven marveled. What was the big deal about forgiveness? If it were Raven? She’d just want to kill him. In fact, she did want to kill him—even though he was already dead. She wished she could get in a time machine, Terminator style, and go back and kill him before he ever hurt her mother. But then, possibly, she would be killing herself, as well. That’s why she needed to know who she was. That was part of it. It was complicated, a red tangle of anger and fear inside of her.

A little searching on Google and Raven found Andrew Cutter, who was twenty and a college student at CUNY. He was smart, a graduate of Bronx High School of Science. He had dark eyes like his father, and a mass of silky curls, but his features were fine where Melvin’s were thick. He didn’t have the vacant, disaffected look of his father. A thinker. A wonderer who wants to make a difference in this place we share. That was his Twitter bio, his tag: @angryyoungman.

She followed him, and he followed her back. She wasn’t supposed to have a Twitter account, but she did: @butterflydreams. She had a selfie up on her profile, overexposed and filtered, so that her skin looked paper white and her eyes dark as space. She knew it was too sexy and that it made her look much older than she was. Her mom wouldn’t like it.

I think we may have something in common @angryyoungman.

Oh, yeah, @butterflydreams? I’d like to know what that is.

She DM’d him then: Melvin Cutter.

I’m sorry, came the curt reply. But I don’t have anything in common with him.

Except that he’s your father and might be mine, too.

He’d unfollowed her, then. It was kind of a slap in the face, one that smarted. But she could still see his posts in her newsfeed since she’d followed him. He was in a band called Trash and Angels, and they were playing this weekend at some dive bar on the Lower East Side. Raven and her forever best friend since kindergarten Troy were going. She wanted to see the boy who might be her half brother. She’d know right away, wouldn’t she? She’d feel the energy, that something, no matter how dark, connected them.

I’m on my way, she texted to Troy.

Are we totally sure about this?

Yeah. Totally.

She and Troy had been best friends since the first minute of the first day of kindergarten. They sat next to each other during circle time, and he reached for her hand because it was the first time he’d been away from his mom. Even though he was crying a little, he was still smiling. She took his hand because it was the first time she’d ever been away from her mom, and she knew just how he felt. He’d had a wild head of white-blond curls, in stark contrast to his dark skin, glasses, and a big toothless smile. Though his front teeth had since grown in, he didn’t look that different now. He was taller than she was, even though he’d always been the littlest kid in class. Somewhere during the summer between seventh and eighth grade, he shot up. He still giggled like a little kid. He called her Birdie. And she was pretty sure she didn’t have to tell him that she was not, in fact, totally sure about this or anything even when she pretended otherwise.

Okay, he wrote. Let’s do it.

The train came to a stop at another little station. She grabbed her bag and almost got off. But then, she didn’t. She sank back down and put her headphones on, David Bowie was singing about how there was a starman waiting in the sky. She watched the trees turn into a green-black blur, the train taking her toward what? She had no idea.





eight


Where is she?

There’s no one else here.

I saw her. Bring her to me.

I can still hear those voices. Some memories never go away. They stay. They get buried, tamped down, but then resurface in dreams, when you’re tired, hungry, lonely. Or angry like I was today, practically vibrating with it. I was having a hard time keeping my composure, pulling that energetic curtain, my invisibility cloak, around me. I didn’t have time to breathe through my feelings. So I started my shift jittery and unsettled.

It was the call from Seth that unstitched me. Someone’s moved into the house, he said.

It wasn’t big news. Or it shouldn’t have been. But the words landed like a gut punch, knocking the air out of my lungs. It was so much easier to think of that place rotting and empty, falling to pieces. I’d been there so many times, walking those echoing halls, looking. It didn’t seem as if lives could be lived there anymore.

“Who?” I managed.

“The old man’s daughter, I think. She’s renovating the place,” he said. He paused a moment. I could feel him measuring his words. “There’s a blog.”

“A blog,” I repeated. “About the house?”

“About the renovation,” he said. “About her, you know, journey—or whatever.”

I couldn’t think of what to say.

“I know,” said Seth. “It’s weird.”