The Red Hunter(4)

“It’s not my fault,” said Raven, slamming shut the locker door.

“It never is, is it?” said Claudia.

That glare, those dark eyes in that ivory skin. That full, pink mouth and ridiculously long eyelashes. Raven’s beauty was shocking, frightening in its intensity, in her utter obliviousness to it. We need to get a burka on that kid, Martha had joked. A body like that? On a fifteen-year-old? It should be illegal.

Luckily, Raven’s gorgeousness was tempered by the boyish way she carried herself. She loped. If Claudia didn’t insist on showers and hair brushing, the girl would look most of the time as if she’d been dragged through a bush. And still, the way they stared. Men, boys, the same stunned goofy expression, eyes wide, smile wolfish on male faces young and old. Raven didn’t even see. Claudia took to carrying pepper spray in her bag. She’s a baby, Claudia had to keep herself from screaming. Don’t you look at her like that!

Claudia knew that she was a fairly attractive woman still, and she’d been pretty hot when she was younger—blonde and bubbly, with glittery blue eyes. Never thin, never one of those waifish, patrician women she’d always admired. She was full-bodied and curvy, never smaller than a size 12, sometimes bigger than that when she wasn’t watching every single goddamn bite of food she put into her mouth. Still, she’d turned her share of heads.

But she’d never looked anything like Raven—a princess, a fairy, a siren, men climbing towers, and slaying dragons, and crashing themselves upon jagged rocks, dying happy. More disturbing though was the way women looked at Raven—with a kind of naked hatred, unmasked envy. They knew what a commodity had been bestowed upon Raven, through no fault of her own. The kid had won some kind of genetic lotto. Did anyone really know how isolating it was? How dangerous? No doubt it was part of the reason Raven was drawing fire from her classmates.

“Mom!” Was it only Raven who could imbue the single syllable with so much annoyance? “You’re doing it again.”

“Sorry.” Getting lost, drifting off into her own thoughts, being somewhere else. According to her daughter, Claudia did that all the time. God forbid a mother should have her own inner life.

“What did she say?” Claudia asked as they exited the building and headed to the car. She dropped an arm around her daughter’s shoulder again, pulling her in. And the girl shifted closer, matching her gait.

Raven shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

And maybe Raven was right. It didn’t matter what Clara had said. What was important—what had been important back in the city—was that Raven couldn’t control herself, her mouth, her temper. Impulse control was the problem.

They climbed into the rattling old Ford pickup, almost an antique, still a workhorse, which she needed in her business, something she wasn’t worried about scratching or dinging, something that could haul loads.

“I hate this truck,” said Raven. It was a far cry from Raven’s father’s Range Rover, certainly.

“I know,” said Claudia, pulling out of the school driveway and onto the road home.

Claudia always found it funny—not funny but rather interesting or notable—that one moment or really a series of moments might derail your entire life. There you are, moving along on one track, full speed. You have your destination clearly in mind, and the journey itself is not half bad either. In fact, you’re quite happy with the whole package.

And then one thing, or a series of things . . .

Maybe a woman, suffering from depression, drives her car onto the tracks a moment too late for the conductor to stop the train on which you’re commuting. Your path (and the conductor’s and other commuters’) and hers collide. What happened to her in her life and what happened to you in yours—everything, where you were born, how you were raised, if your parents were nice, if you were bullied in school, if the gene for depression was turned on in her or not, or in you, all of these infinitesimal elements of her existence and yours lead you to be in the exact same place at the exact same moment and—KABOOM.

Or a gust of wind takes your scarf, and who should catch it but your husband-to-be, who happens to be walking past you on the same street, in the direction the wind is blowing at the exact moment on the right trajectory so that it trails beside him a flash of red and he reaches for it and turns around and your eyes meet and—SHAZAM. Love at first sight. These moments—less dramatic but equally meaningful—happened every day, Claudia often thought, and almost no one seems to notice how many things have to go wrong or right for them to occur.

It’s never one thing that leads to a tragic accident, she was sure she’d read once—though she couldn’t say where. It’s usually seven things—seven mistakes, or errors in judgment, or acts of negligence. If you reverse engineer any major disaster—oil spill or train derailment or airplane crash—there are usually seven things that had to go wrong in order for them to occur.

Claudia had spent a lot of time thinking about that theory, even though what happened to her wasn’t an accident by any measure. Especially in the darker moments—like this one—when she questioned the wisdom of almost every decision she’d made since that night. It was comforting in an odd way to look back and think that if she had changed any one of those seven things, she’d still be on that figurative train heading in the right direction.