The Red Hunter(46)
“Zoey,” said my father. “What are you doing?”
The smaller man went off in the direction I’d indicated. The other man sat astride me. That’s when he started touching me, the face, my throat, my breast. I thrashed and bucked, but he must have weighed a thousand pounds. I couldn’t get away from him, couldn’t move. That feeling of powerlessness, being helpless. Never let them pin you. Never let it be a match of strength alone.
“What do you see?” he called. “What’s back there?”
“There’s nothing back here.” The voice was muffled. He was right. There was nothing back there. I had no idea what they were looking for. I was stalling, buying time.
The man on top of me took out the hunting knife.
“Hey.” It was the boy, standing on the stairs now. He was thin and pale, standing masked in the shadows. “Don’t hurt her anymore. Please.”
“Shut up, kid,” said the man on top. “Go upstairs and do your job.”
I knew that the blade on that knife was sharp as a razor.
“Where is it?” said the standing man, his voice low and cool, his lips pulled in a grim smile. “Somebody better start talking.”
And then the knife was on my skin and I was alone in the world with the pain of my flesh slicing open, my screams seeming to rocket through my father’s body causing him to arc on the ground. His voice drowned out all other sounds. That knife, what happened next, most of it is not accessible. The psyche splits, my shrink said, or can in trauma. It does what it must to survive. Again that rising of myself above to watch a man cut and beat a helpless young girl with her father wailing bound and immobilized just feet away, her mother dying upstairs. Until. Until. How long did it go on? It couldn’t have been more than an hour. Somewhere in the far distance, a high-pitched wail. A siren.
I didn’t hear the shots. The one that killed my father. The one that was supposed to kill me. They didn’t need to shoot my mother. She bled to death upstairs.
sixteen
The problem, the real problem was that Raven just felt so floaty all the time. Disconnected from the people around her, even her parents. She’d be standing there—at school, or even sometimes with her friends, and she’d feel herself just lift away. She would start thinking about something else, or the ambient noise around her would become distracting. She’d notice a thing about the other person—like how silky was her hair, or how big were her eyes, or how pretty were her clothes. And then she’d think about that person’s parents, and it would get her thinking about her own origins. And then she’d start drifting toward that dark place, that shadowy region. Once she was there, that’s when she did or said the kind of things she regretted later.
Raven never felt like that with Troy. He grounded her somehow, kept her in the moment. He had her tightly by the hand and they were striding—he was striding because he had long legs and an engine inside that caused him to practically run everywhere and she was half-jogging to keep up with him—down Avenue A toward the club where Andrew Cutter’s band Trash and Angels was playing. She was wearing a tight black dress, which she would never be allowed to wear if either of her parents were around. She had taken a pair of thigh-high black boots from Ella’s stash of clothes in her father’s closet, and this kind of distressed denim cropped jacket. She blew her hair flat, made her eyes smoky in shades of brown. In the mirror, the girl she saw was the polar opposite of her mother—dark to light, soft features to fine. There was something in her mouth—its fullness, its upturned corners. Something in the apples of her cheeks that evoked Claudia. But there was nothing of Ayers. Not a shade or a shadow that she could see.
When she came out into the living room, Troy looked at her funny and didn’t look away.
“What?” she asked. She found her bag and crossed the long strap across her body.
“Aren’t you—” he started. He took off his glasses and looked away, wiped the lenses on his shirt. The color had come up in his cheeks. What was his problem? “Aren’t you going to be cold?”
“We’ll take a cab.”
She was cold. The wind had picked up, and she’d opted out of a heavier jacket over her outfit. She didn’t want to disrupt the look and have to worry about a coat all night. But traffic was ridiculous, and they finally just got out of the cab that was crawling and costing them a fortune, deciding to walk the last ten blocks. Trash and Angels went on at eleven, and it was already quarter to the hour.
At the door, the line was stupid long, stretching up the street and wrapping around. It was kind of the “it” indie band venue of the moment, Downtown Beirut, named after an old East Village dive bar that had closed long ago. Now, supposedly there was some burgeoning music scene in Beirut and hence the name of the hole in the wall.
Troy stopped at the end of the line. But Raven kept going, and he followed. They were not going to have to wait in line. They were hot and well-dressed, and young—twenty-two-year-olds that looked like sixteen-year-olds. No one was going to know that they were sixteen-year-olds trying to pass for twenty-two. The bulldozer-sized bouncer at the door—complete with shaved, tattooed head—and his slender, leather-clad hostess, lithe with dark skin and bleached white hair, never said a word. She just lifted the rope and shined that light on their fake IDs. They must have been good—like the kind of IDs that would get you in trouble if you got caught carrying them. They must have been the real deal, illegally obtained, and that was a serious crime. The hostess didn’t look twice at the cards in her hand, there wasn’t that tense moment when you wondered if you were going to get kicked out. She just handed them back to Troy and gave him a hungry smile. Troy flushed again. Raven grabbed his hand and pulled him inside.