by Lisa Unger
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.
The first thing was that her (now ex-) husband Ayers wanted to live in Midtown, since it was where they both worked. But she was in love with the East Village and had been since college. That was the real New York City—Yaffa Café and Trash and Vaudeville and St. Marks Books. There was still grit, even though it was very stylized now, and most of those wonderful places were gone or going. And very expensive even then. But she’d found a place she just loved on Fifth Street. Out back there was a garden, and it butted up against a church and an old graveyard, and the windows opened. It was utterly unlike the place Ayers wanted in Midtown, a tower with a doorman and central air, a pristine gym, and Friday socials on the sun deck.
Ayers was not a fan of grit. But he gave Claudia her way, because that’s the kind of man he was. The kind of man who subordinated his wants and needs for Claudia’s. A good man, a darling husband who she knew right away would be a lovely father.
There were gates on the back windows, of course there were. It was the East Village and as much as New York City was gentrified, junkies still busted in and took your stuff if you didn’t have bars on the windows. So they got bars, even though it bummed Ayers out. He loved unmarred city vistas. They were nice gates, painted white, with wrought-iron ivy and twisting branches, and they opened like French doors. Claudia was terrible about closing them and locking them. She forgot sometimes. That was two.
They had been married a year and they were trying to have a baby. Not in that sad, desperate way that people often seemed to. More in a joyful, let’s fuck all the time with no protection because we’re—wink wink—trying for a baby. They’d been trying for about eight months, and no baby. But hey, said Ayers, it’s about the journey, not the destination! Now take off your panties, you little tart.
Because they’d had a glass of Prosecco, Ayers got frisky. Then they messed around, having a quickie with her underpants around her ankles and her skirt hiked up, while he took her from behind over the couch. They were late to meet his parents at Café des Artistes. She never went back upstairs in their charming duplex, but mopped up carelessly in the little bath off the kitchen, putting on lipstick and sweeping up her hair, feeling dirty and naughty and loving it because Ayers’s mother was so proper. Neither Claudia nor Ayers went back to the bedroom to close the gates. That was three.
Claudia and her mother-in-law were almost exact opposites—which was probably why they got along. Claudia admired Sophie’s buttoned-up, ever stylish, cool (not cold, but unflappable) demeanor. And Claudia often caught Sophie smiling at her when she rambled on, or got exuberant, or passionate. If Sophie was pressed linen, Claudia was crinoline. If Sophie was crepe, Claudia was sequins. It worked. And her father-in-law Chuck was a bear of a man, always sweet and looking sleep-tousled, with a big appetite and sudden, explosive laugh.
After dinner, Claudia tried to convince everyone to have one last drink. But Ayers said he was tired, that he had an early meeting and wanted to work out first thing in the morning. That was four.
She was drunk. No, not drunk. Tipsy. Not puking, falling down, ugly drunk, of course—never that. But she was bouncy, giggly, silly. OTM was the code Claudia and her girlfriends used: One. Too. Many. OTM and you might get teary, telling your friends how much you love them, or laugh too loud, or dance with abandon—even though you were a terrible dancer. Which was fine under most circumstances. Perhaps not with your in-laws. But any more and you were going to regret it. Any more and tomorrow was going to be a bad day. Maybe that was the real reason Ayers wanted to go home. Because for his mother, there were limits. Pressed linen, it creased terribly. You could never tell if cr
inoline had been hugged too long or too tight. I love my mother, Ayers often said, as if such a thing needed saying. But I remember as a kid that she only had so much patience for affection. Claudia had no idea what that meant. Why would you need patience for affection? Claudia had maybe drifted too close to the line; there had been lots of hugging and declarations of affection (from Claudia to Sophie), and maybe Sophie was getting a little stiff. Anyway, if Claudia hadn’t been OTM, she might have noticed as soon as she came home what they only noticed later: That the lights in the kitchen were on, when they hadn’t been before. That a coat had been knocked from one of the hooks on the wall beneath the stairs. If she hadn’t been OTM, she might have seen those things and deduced the truth before it was too late. There was someone in the apartment. That was five.
Ayers was still outside, and Claudia came into the apartment alone. Claudia had taken on Mrs. Swanson, their impossibly elderly landlord. Which meant that she often loaned Ayers out to her. Oh, Ayers will help you with that. Won’t you, honey? They helped her with small things—like changing lightbulbs and getting dead mice away from Mittens, her ginger tabby. When Claudia was at the store, she often picked up eggs, bread, and 2 percent milk, dropping them off on her way upstairs. Usually Ashley, Mrs. Swanson’s daughter came to take the trash out. But Ashley was sick with the flu that night, so Ayers had promised to do it. That’s what he was doing. That was why Claudia went alone into their apartment. That was six.
Stumbling up the narrow duplex stairs, she’d noticed a strange smell. Something musky. She dismissed it. That was one of the reasons she’d wanted to live in the East Village, in an apartment where the windows opened. The city had a smell, especially in summer. And it wasn’t just garbage and bums and dog piss. There were aromas from trees and flowers, from bakeries and fine restaurants, from baristas and something else, hot asphalt and rubber, something indefinably New York. And you couldn’t smell it in Midtown. She thought absently on entering—see, she did it even then—had she forgotten to close the window? Was she too exuberant with Sophie? Was Ayers embarrassed of her? Maybe she shouldn’t have told that story about her friend Misha who had recently dyed her unapologetically long underarm hair neon green and delighted in showing it off everywhere possible. Her absentmindedness often kept her from seeing things that were right in front of her. That was seven.
A lot of women don’t remember the event, her doctor told her. And that must be a wonderful mercy. Because Claudia remembered. Every crushing, bruising, airless second from the moment he stepped out of the bedroom in front of her and grabbed her by her hair, pulling her inside and closing and locking the door. Every detail of his face from his dark eyes, to the stubble on his jaw, to the scar on his chin, to the rank of his breath, the black stains on his teeth. He punched her with a closed fist right in the face—so jarring, so brutal, blinding white stars and pain that traveled from her jaw and the bridge of her nose, up over the crown of her head, her neck snapping back.
She struggled for orientation. No, no, this wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be. He pressed his arm over her throat, cutting off air. She couldn’t breathe so she couldn’t scream. Funny how that went. She wouldn’t have thought about that. No air, no sound. She was silent, writhing. Utterly powerless against his far, far superior physical strength. She took kickboxing! She had thick powerful legs, athletic calves that never fit into those sleek high boots she so adored. She was bigger than Ayers—there was no carrying Claudia over the threshold, nothing that would have been pretty. They play wrestled all the time. He was strong, Ayers, but not like this. She couldn’t move. She was as helpless as a child. His eyes. They were blank, totally blank. He didn’t see her; she wasn’t even there. He thrust himself into her, a heinous ripping impact. The violation. It was unspeakable, beyond comprehension, and the pain. A horrible, tearing, burning. One, two, three. He shuddered, eyes closing—release, not pleasure—and it was done. He hit her again.
Stop looking at me! A hard crack against her cheekbone.
She fell back, and he kicked her brutally in the ribs. She threw up on the floor and managed to be humiliated about it even though he was already gone, out that window that offered such a pretty view of Mrs. Swanson’s garden and the graveyard. She lost herself then. Went somewhere else. The next thing she remembered was the door crashing in. Not Ayers but a uniformed cop. Why not Ayers? Why wasn’t he the first person through that door?
“Oh Jesus,” the young cop said. Claudia wanted to apologize about the vomit. Crazy, wasn’t that? Then she was out again.
It was two weeks later that she knew she was pregnant. No AIDS, no other sexually transmitted diseases. It was possible to determine paternity in vitro, but the test was invasive and caused risk to the fetus. They both decided. She thought that they both decided (though Ayers would later claim that it was all about Claudia, that he was just doing what he thought she needed) that they didn’t want to know. A baby was a gift, no matter how it was delivered. Wasn’t it? They would love the child. They would never seek to discover the true paternity. No matter what, they’d raise the baby as their own.
Don’t do this, Martha had begged. You don’t know how you’re going to feel. It’s not fair to the child.
So it’s fair to—terminate the pregnancy?
Claudia was shocked at how unanimous was the sentiment that she should have an abortion. What a horrible word: the brutal end of something before it began. Even her doctor seemed to assume. Do you want to schedule the D&C? No, said Claudia. I don’t know.
Life at any cost, then? Martha asked.
This baby is proof that even out of the most horrific possible moment, in your darkest hour, something wonderful is possible, Claudia had countered.
Martha, who was fifteen years older than Claudia, just shook her head, looked off into the middle distance as if she were the long-suffering knower of all things, just waiting for her little sister to catch up.
Ayers and I were together that night. It is equally possible that it is his child.
And if it isn’t?
It won’t matter. We’re enough—strong enough, in love enough. It’s possible. I’ve done the research.
Claudia remembered gazing out at the vista from their new apartment in a luxury Chelsea high-rise with windows that couldn’t be opened and a doorman who looked like a professional wrestler (they’d moved within two weeks of the attack) hoping—praying that she was right. She wasn’t right, not by a long shot. Not about that. Not about anything, it seemed, since that.
• • •
CLAUDIA PULLED UP THE LONG drive to their farmhouse. Twenty acres, most of them wooded, in a dot on the map called Lost Valley, New Jersey. Lost Valley? Raven had raged. Are you kidding? You’re moving us from Manhattan to a place with a name like that? It’s like something out of a horror movie. This land had been in her family for decades, bought with cash on one of her father’s real estate whims—one of many. He got it for a song—$15,000 for twenty acres in the seventies, the barn and old house falling to pieces. He’d never set foot on it in all the years he owned it, then left it to Claudia when he died.
Claudia never set foot on the farmhouse property either, until one day she got it in her head that she’d renovate the buildings and start a blog about it. Single city mom moves to the country and renovates two historic properties. She’d take pictures. Eventually it would become a book—poignant, moving, inspiring. It wasn’t just about the property. It was about rebuilding in the spiritual sense. Never mind that she wasn’t really a writer or a photographer, or that she didn’t have any experience with home renovation. And she liked the name of the town. It was romantic, wasn’t it? A secret place, a hidden gem, a place where magic was still possible.
Weirdly, it was all kind of working. Claudia was in fact a quite decent writer, according to Martha. And her photographs had a “certain special energy,” according to Ayers. She had blog “subscribers,” was “building a platform,” had a query yesterday from an advertiser. And she wa
s—dare she say it?—happy-ish. Something she never would have believed possible once. Now, if she could just get Raven on track.
“You’re doing it again.”
Claudia had pulled the old pickup to a stop. How long had they been sitting there, with her just staring at the barn door—which, by the way, looked like it was going to fall off its hinges any minute?
“Jesus, Mom,” said Raven, climbing out of the truck and slamming the door as hard as she could. “Wake up!”
Claudia watched as Raven stormed up to the house and slammed through the front door. You were never so acutely aware of your own flaws as you were in the presence of your child. Why was that?
The sky overhead was a menacing gunmetal. She was staring up at it when a blue car, a Toyota Camry pulled into the drive. It came to a stop and a man, a stranger, climbed out. It had been more than fifteen years since her rape in the East Village. Her heart didn’t thump with alarm every time a strange man approached anymore. She didn’t think every unknown person was a potential assailant. What was different about the woman she was now versus the girl she was then, was that she was prepared if he was. She’d taken a self-defense class and spent nearly a year training every Tuesday and Thursday, when Raven was still a toddler, with a former Navy SEAL named Jet. Defense starts on approach, he used to say. Watch the body language, the eyes. Trust your instincts. If it feels like something’s not right, it probably isn’t.
What she noticed about the man who got out of the blue Camry first was a careful aura, a gentleness. He hung back a bit, lifted a hand, and offered a smile. That’s what good men did, they kept their distance. Selfish men, arrogant men, dangerous men, the first thing they usually did was violate the space bubble, or the respect bubble—moving in too close, or maybe making some inappropriate comment, calling you sweetie or babe. Maybe he squeezed your hand too hard when you shook for the first time, signaling his strength.
“Hey, there,” he said. “Mrs. Bishop?”