It was actually her fault. The reason she and Ayers didn’t make it. She could see that now. At the time she thought it was him. Most people assumed that it was him, that he couldn’t handle what had happened to her, that he couldn’t accept Raven, that maybe on some primal level, he didn’t want Claudia after she’d been violated. Or maybe, they assumed, she didn’t want him, or any man ever again. People made a lot of assumptions about trauma, about rape, about men and women. Old ideas and attitudes clung to the DNA, even if intellectually or culturally we think we’ve moved on.
But really, when she looked at it in moments of clarity, it was Claudia who was to blame for how it all fell apart. She thought he couldn’t understand her pain. Ayers wanted so badly for her to move on, for them to go back to where they were. But nothing in Claudia’s body, mind, or spirit could allow that, and there was no way back to the person she was before Melvin Cutter raped her. Ayers wanted her to forget. But every time she climbed the stairs, or the room got too dark, she saw Melvin Cutter lurking in doorways. Ayers wanted her to stop writing, stop posting, stop talking about it, but that was the only thing that made her feel better, that gave her any power.
Claudia grew to hate him for his distance from the rape. She hated him for not being the first man through the door. She hated him for being able to forget—from her perspective—what happened. She even hated him—darkly, secretly—for loving Raven with his whole heart as he clearly did. She was ashamed of that more than anything else; it was baser than she knew herself to be. Because Ayers had promised Claudia that he could love the baby completely, that he would convince himself that there was no way she might not be his. The universe would not punish them in that way. And he did that. And somehow, even though she did exactly the same, she hated him for it. She’d have had more compassion, hated him less, if he’d had to work at it.
Ayers wasn’t raging, holding on to anger, filled with a desire for revenge against the man who hurt her. He forgave; he moved forward. She’d been beaten and raped in their home. She’d lost her freedom, her identity, her sense of safety. And Ayers was as evolved as a monk. That’s what undid them, she realized much later, how easily he got past it all. She saw it as a kind of betrayal.
She confided in Martha when, after so much therapy, she finally got it.
“It’s primal,” her sister said. “You want him to beat his chest, turn back time, and protect you. You want him to be in the house with you that night and stop all of it before it happened. But you didn’t fall in love with Ayers because he was a tough guy. You married him because he was everything Dad wasn’t.”
Dad. Distant. Strict disciplinarian. Ruthless businessman. Never showed either of them an ounce of affection. Claudia could never remember him even kissing their mother. He was gone most of the time, a fearful stick figure in their lives. Mom was the soft one, the loving one who was always there—hosting sleepovers, going on field trips. If Mom was unhappy with Dad, she’d never showed it.
Claudia’s mother died from ovarian cancer when Claudia was still in college; Claudia never got to ask her the hard questions about marriage, about motherhood, about what compromises she felt she’d made. She got to know her dad a little better then; he was more awkward, maybe with a touch of Asperger’s. Distant because he didn’t know how to be with people. But then he died from a heart attack two years after Mom.
She and Ayers didn’t have huge fights; neither one of them were up to that. It wasn’t an angry, nasty split. Claudia took Raven to spend a summer at Martha’s retreat in New Mexico. She wrote there, the beauty of the place, the energy of it—it healed her. He called every night after work, begged her to come home. She finally did, but then she moved out a few weeks later into an apartment on the Upper West Side. They shared custody of Raven, who was almost five then—a loved, normal little girl who, like so many kids, had two homes. Ayers, true to form, just let Claudia go. If that’s what you want, Claudia. Even as she left him, she wondered why he didn’t fight for her.
Now, Claudia could see that she drove away a good man who loved her. Melvin Cutter had smashed in the front door of her life and hurt her terribly, left her world in ruin. But she was the one who’d burnt the remains to the ground. In fact, she could smell the smoke.
Smoke.
Slowly, the world came back—tilted, wobbling, in ugly patches. The pain in her head, at the bridge of her nose, the hard, cold ground beneath her.
“Raven,” she croaked.
Josh at the door. His brother. Running for the stairs. The hammer in her hand. She tasted blood in her mouth. As she pushed herself up, she saw a deep red swath down her shirt.
There were voices, yelling. Where were they coming from? Her head cleared a little. Oh, God. The men were gone. Where was her daughter?
“Raven?”
“Mom!” Every mother knows the pitch of panic, of pain. She crawled toward the sound.
“Raven!”
Muffled, terrified. “Mom, we’re trapped in here. He’s coming. He’s coming to the house.”
But Claudia was alone. The door at the top of the stairs was closed, even though she knew it had been opened. And the door to the crawl space was also shut and locked. She searched around for the key she’d seen, the smell of smoke growing stronger. She pounded—frantically, uselessly—on the tunnel door.
“It’s locked,” she yelled, her voice cracking with fear. “There’s no key.”
The drill, that’s what she needed. She needed to drill the lock and break it.
“Get back!” A male voice yelled from inside the tunnel with Raven. Was that Josh? Was that freak in the tunnel with Raven? Where was Troy?
“Stay away from her,” Claudia screeched.
There was a hard pounding then. She backed away.
Once. Twice. Three times. The door burst open and a pair of work boots stuck out. Josh slid out, panting, red in the face. He pulled Raven out, who leapt into Claudia’s arms. Troy climbed out behind them, looking stunned.
“Mom,” Raven sobbed. “Mom, are you okay? What happened to you? There’s so much blood.”
Claudia held on to her daughter, weeping. She couldn’t talk, just clung to her girl.
“Mom,” Raven said. “It was there. A huge bag of money. He took it. The bad guy.”
Claudia could barely hold on to what was happening. It was chaos. She started to cough. What was that smell? What was burning?
Josh was already on his way up the stairs. They watched as he put his hand on the door and pulled it back quickly. He looked back at them, stricken.
“Fire,” he said. “He started a fire.”
? ? ?
THE THINKER CHATTERS. SHE YAMMERS on about this and that, an incessant soundtrack of worries and wants, judgments, observations. She’s shallow, distracting, bossy—always telling you what you should do, or could have done, or why things would be better if circumstances were different. The thinker is the enemy of wisdom.