I’ll call your mom next week and we’ll all get together.
If Raven were smart, she probably wouldn’t have told him about the test until he got back. What if he called her mom to talk right away? But he wouldn’t. Because then he’d have to tell her that he was in St. Lucia with Ella, since not telling her while he was calling her from the beach with a cocktail in his hand was the same as lying. Which her dad would never do. He was chronically honest. So, he’d mention where he was, try to make light of it. And, though her mom wouldn’t say anything, it would hurt. (And no one wanted Claudia to be hurt any more than she already had been.) But the reminder that Ayers had happily moved on with his life wouldn’t hurt as much as realizing that Raven had lied and was on her way into the city on her own to do who knew what. A shit storm for all involved would ensue.
Another station where she might have gotten off came and went. She even shouldered her bag and slid forward in her seat. But then she sat back down. She stuffed her phone in the pocket of her hoodie and leaned her head against the window.
It’s not like she was running away or anything. She’d stay in touch and be home when she was supposed to go home. It was just that she had an errand to run, one neither of her parents would understand.
It was Ella who had given her the idea. The man who raped Claudia was dead. But he had a family—a family that might be hers, as well. What if you reached out to them, Ella suggested. Just, you know, to see if you have anything in common, if there’s a connection. It never occurred to Raven that Ella was anything but well meaning.
His name was easy enough to find, since Raven’s own mother, in an effort to understand and forgive her rapist—had written extensively about him in an earlier blog. Melvin Cutter: abandoned by his mother to the system at age four, raised in foster care, arrested for the first time at fourteen, then three more times after that for various offenses from drug possession to assault. He held a job, a night watchman at a supermarket on Second Avenue. On the night he raped Claudia, he was twenty years old, illiterate, and high on meth. Police speculated that he’d likely broken into the apartment looking for something to steal and sell and ran into Raven’s mother instead.
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.