The Red Hunter

by Lisa Unger

  But I didn’t believe that then with my feet crunching on the gravel. I thought my dad was paranoid and my mother was too passive, always following his rules. Paul always said that the world was my oyster, that it wasn’t small but big and full of possibilities. I was flushed with the excitement of meeting Seth Murphy alone in the night. With my dog.

  I think they were already there waiting; they must have been. When I reconstruct that night, I try to remember. Could I have missed their vehicle, parked in the shadows waiting for hours of quiet before they went inside? I don’t know. Did they see me leave? Did they wait for me to come back?

  Seth Murphy didn’t show. I waited an hour, then headed home, let down, disappointed—but weirdly relieved, too. What would come of meeting a boy at the bridge in the middle of the night? Catcher was his usual docile self, not perturbed in the least that we’d gone out together in the middle of the night.

  When I moved out through the trees into the clearing where the farmhouse stood, I saw the light on in the kitchen and the bottom of my stomach dropped out. Please let it be Mom, I thought. Mom was easy, slow to anger. There was something between us, a shared desire to laugh things off that I didn’t have with my father. I could tell my mother anything. I could tell her that I liked Seth and that I wanted to meet him but that he didn’t show and I wouldn’t have done anything with him anyway. I just wanted to know what it would be like to sneak out in the middle of the night and maybe, maybe kiss a boy. She would get it. We’d talk it through. She wouldn’t hide it from my father, but she’d make it more palatable. If it was him, sitting there in the kitchen, waiting? There’d be yelling and tears, grounding. And that look, the stern frown of disapproval. That was the worst of all. I stood in the trees, trying to see inside from a distance. The gray of my father’s tee-shirt or the pink of my mom’s PJs. Someone walked quickly past the window. That’s when Catcher started to growl, low and deep.

  “What is it, boy?” I said. “Quiet.”

  I had to think of a lie. Catcher was sick? I took him for a walk? No one would ever believe that. I had to do a project about owls for school; I went out looking for some. Nope. My mother knew every single thing about my schoolwork. That wasn’t going to fly. If there had been an owl project, she’d be out there with me.

  We moved closer, Catcher growling, me holding on to the frayed red collar he’d worn as long as I could remember. The brush of his fur rubbed against my fingers, his dog smell strong and weirdly comforting as I crouched down low.

  “Catch,” I said. “I’m so dead. Stop growling.”

  How did he know there was something wrong all the way back there? How did he know? I stood up slowly and peered around the window frame. The scene was so odd, so strange that I almost couldn’t understand what I was seeing at first.

  Two men. One was smallish but muscled and wiry, standing by the door, a gun nearly the size of his forearm gripped in his hand. One tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed in black. Both of them wearing black ski masks. Another man was sitting on a chair, arms tied, slumped, a bag pulled over his head. My father. He wore his Lost Valley Police Department tee-shirt. My mother was on the ground, her pink pajama top open to reveal her belly button—lying quiet and peaceful on her side, as if she were just sleeping. There was a third stranger, someone thin and small, a boyish body, also wearing a mask, at the kitchen table with his head in his hand. The taller man was standing in the doorway with a shotgun.

  I drew in a ragged breath and swallowed a scream. Sinking onto my haunches, my mind raced. The next farmhouse was a little over a mile up the road. If I ran as fast as I could, I could make it in twelve minutes. My father kept a gun locker in the old barn. I wasn’t supposed to know the code, but I did. The same code he used for everything, my mother’s birthday. I knew how to fire every one—from the service revolver, to the Glock 9mm, to the Sig, to the shotgun. Never pick up a gun unless you’re prepared to kill someone with it. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. But be ready if it does. Our hunting trips hadn’t gone well. I had bad aim and lacked the hunter’s heart to take the life of a creature who never did anything but munch on leaves. But I knew the shotgun made up for bad aim and the men in my house were not deer or bunnies.

  Catcher had gone quiet, issuing a low whine, feeling my fear, knowing instinctively to stay quiet. I put my arms around his neck.

  Run for help or stay and fight? I asked him silently.

  But when a shot rang out from inside, Catcher pulled away and ran to the door, his explosive barking filling the night. The pounding of footsteps, the screen door slammed open. I was already running toward the barn, fast as I could. A hole opened in the world that minute, a dark doorway though which I passed into a place where nothing would ever be what it was before.

  There was a screaming child in my head, one in terror, afraid for herself and shattered by what she’d seen in the window. But there was also someone else, someone I’ve since come to know as “the watcher.” The one who calmly observes the chaos around her, the one who can see exactly how far is the barn, can hear how close is the stranger behind her, the one who knows that there is no running for help now, only getting to the gun locker and arming herself before the man behind her catches her.

  Catcher’s barks were vicious and undercut by a feral growling behind me until there was a hard thud and primal yelp of pain, then silence. Then heavy footfalls again. I stopped at the barn door—don’t look, don’t look, don’t look—and had to use all my strength to open it. Then I pulled it closed hard and latched it, just as someone thumped against it.

  “Open the door,” said the voice on the other side. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I ran to the locker and to my great dismay found both the doors standing open. The shotgun was gone; yes, it was the one I’d seen in the stranger’s hand. The revolver. The semiautomatic. The rifle. All gone. The only thing left was a serrated hunting knife. The black oxide grip was molded to my father’s hand, a gift from Uncle Paul on my father’s fortieth birthday. I took and shoved it into the inside pocket of my jacket. It was too big.

  “There are no guns in there.”

  He was at the window, his voice muffled through the glass. I dove to the side so that he couldn’t see me. Every nerve ending in my body sizzled with terror.

  “You’re trapped in there now,” he said. It was a young voice. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay there.”

  “Who’s out there?” Another voice, older, harder.

  “No one,” said the boy. He was just a boy. “There’s no one there, just the dog.”

  “Bullshit,” said the other. “It’s the kid, right?”

  “No,” he said. “Just the dog. He ran off into the woods. I kicked him hard; he won’t come back.”

  The window shattered then, an exploding shower of slicing rain around me as I bowed my head into my arms. An impossibly hard grip on my hair yanked me from above, shards of glass digging into the back of my neck, my face. The razor edges sliced through my jacket as he dragged me with superhuman strength over that sill. I’m sure I was screaming, but I don’t remember really. I clawed at his arms, but he didn’t release me until I was lying on the ground at his feet. I turned on my side away from the mask that was his face and the terrified eyes of the boy, only to see Catcher lying before the trees where we’d just emerged. And the stars. And the clear, clear night white with moonlight.

  He pulled me to my feet.

  “She’s cut,” said the boy. “She’s bleeding.”

  “Shut up,” said the older man. And he started dragging me toward the house. That’s when I heard my mother screaming my name; it hurt worse than the glass embedded in my skin, the pitch of her terror connecting to every nerve ending in my body.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T WANT TO THINK about it anymore. I slammed my fist down on the desk, startling the cats, who shot away silent, dark shadows. I went out of the apartment and took the stairway up to the roof—using my center a
nd my breath, the pumping of my arms to carry me up.

  I was breathing hard but not breathless as I emerged onto the roof deck, downtown Manhattan splayed around me. I wanted to let out a scream into the sky; one scream among millions in this city. Instead, I swallowed the energy. Never grunt, blow breath, make a noise of effort—it’s a shameful waste of power. Keep it all inside, a red-hot ball of flame in your center, your chi, your life force. Let it burn hot, let it fill you. The Red Hunter.

  I climbed up to the ledge and stood looking at the vertiginous drop below me. Then I sat, cross-legged, on the thin edge—the concrete cutting at my ankles, digging into my bottom. There was nothing beneath me to keep me from falling all the way to the street below, a fall that would likely break every bone in my body, leaving me to bleed out on the sidewalk.

  With my breath, I moved into the discomfort and then through it. With my breath, the sound beneath all other sounds, the cool at my nostrils, the rise and fall of my chest, my belly. The Red Hunter bowed and retreated. Pain, anger, fear, sadness, they receded clinging only for a few moments. They have no home in the present moment. Here there is only room for the breath. I am breathing in. I am breathing out. I took the seat of the watcher, the one who is quiet in the chaos.

  eleven

  Careless gold curls and wire-rimmed specs sat on the long bridge of his nose, in relief against sienna skin and blue eyes. Grace and Sophia were always going on and on about how hot Troy was, but Raven didn’t see it. Not that she didn’t see it. It’s just that it didn’t matter. Troy was Troy.

  That’s what had first drawn Raven to him, she thought, even though they were just little kids, even though he was crying a little because he missed his mom. He always seemed to know who he was. He was small, but no one picked on him. He was kooky, but everyone thought he was funny. Once he punched a bigger, older kid named Max right in the face because—why?—Raven couldn’t even remember. Troy had been suspended. And when he came back he was a hero, and no one ever messed with him again.

  “Do you want to marry me?” he asked her in kindergarten.

  “Okay,” she said, even though she was pretty sure you couldn’t get married in kindergarten, and her father had told her to stay far away from boys as a general rule.

  Troy took her hand then, and they’d been holding hands ever since. They were married in a totally nonsexual, pure-love kind of way, the way you can only love your childhood friends. Troy was Troy.

  He lounged on the couch in her father’s living room. The doorman, Carey, had known Raven all her life. He probably knew she shouldn’t be there when Dad was away, but he was too cool to ask her any questions when she walked in earlier. He gave her a kind of look, though, a knowing sideways glance. He sent Troy up an hour later without even calling to say he was coming. Would he call her dad? Mom? Raven didn’t think so.

  “I guess what I’m thinking,” said Troy, simultaneously tapping on his phone. “Is that this is a bad idea. I mean—I’m in. I’m with you. You know that. I just think you might be making a mistake.”

  His red sneakers dangled over the arm of the couch. Was he that tall?

  “How can it be a mistake to try to find out who you are?” Raven asked.

  He regarded her with that cool gaze he’d perfected. She sat on the chair opposite him, her legs over the arm of the chair and a half.

  “Where you came from doesn’t define you,” he said. “You are who you are right now. And, he unfollowed you. To me that means he’s not going to be happy to see you.”

  Troy was a good kid, a mama’s boy, a straight-A student. He looked alternative, but he was a button-down geek at heart.

  “So what if he’s your half brother,” Troy went on. “He’s a stranger. You share biology and nothing more. I’m more your brother than he is.”

  He looked different somehow, his face fuller; maybe it was just that they didn’t see each other every day like they used to—in person anyway. They FaceTimed almost daily, did their homework together. He had a little bit of stubble at his jaw. And his voice kept doing this weird thing, like he had a cold. It would get deeper, then higher. He kept coughing when it happened, looking at her weirdly.

  She turned out her phone to show him a picture of Andrew Cutter, he was on stage—black jeans, red tee-shirt, combat boots. He stared down at the electric guitar in his arms.

  He reached out and took the phone, stared, then looked back at her. “He does look like you—a little.”

  “A lot,” she said.

  He shook his head. “It’s hard to tell from a picture. Lots of people have black hair and dark eyes.”

  “Lots of people have brown hair,” she said, lifting a strand of her own. “Not black, not like this.”

  “If he doesn’t want anything to do with his father, what makes you think he’s going to want anything to do with you—even if you are, by some distant chance, his sister? Half sister.”

  “It’s not a distant chance,” she said. “It’s like a fifty-fifty chance.”

  Troy sighed, tossed back her phone.

  “Like I said.” He sat up and leaned forward, arms on his knees. “I’m with you. I’m just—worried about you, Birdie. I don’t want anyone to hurt you.”

  She moved over to the couch and sat next to him. He dropped an arm around her, and she let her head sink to his shoulder. They sat like that awhile, the afternoon sun washing in through the big west-facing windows.

  “I’m already hurting,” she said. “This is about trying to stop.”

  She wondered if that was true. If that’s what this was really about—lying to her parents, Twitter stalking @angryyoungman, going to the club where his band was playing to try to talk to him.

  Troy shifted to take out his wallet—a beat-up old pleather thing with the stamp of a shamrock. He slid two cards from one of the slots and held them up before her. She drew in a breath.

  “You did it,” she said. She was shocked. Maybe he wasn’t such a goody two-shoes after all. She really didn’t think he’d pull it off, even after they stopped in that copy shop and had their pictures taken, supposedly for passports.

  “My cousin did it.”

  Oh, right, his mysterious cousin with supposed ties to the Latin Kings, the Hispanic gang that ruled Riverside and East Harlem. She took the fake non-driver’s ID from Troy, held it out. It looked real—like really real. It even had a glittery rainbow seal underneath the laminate. Raven Bishop-Martin, twenty-two years old. She could pass for twenty-two, couldn’t she? She stood up and looked in the mirror over the couch. Hmm . . . maybe not. Her breasts were barely there. Without a padded bra, she was almost completely flat. With enough makeup, though? The right outfit? Maybe.

  He took it back from her and shoved it in his wallet along with his.

  “You promised only with me,” he said. “And only this once. So I can keep it, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You can keep it.”

  He got like that sometimes, all big brother, protector. Sometimes it was nice. Sometimes it was annoying. He was only older than her by eighteen days.

  He flopped back down on the couch and started tapping with his thumbs again, texting, tweeting, Instagramming pictures of himself, whatever. Whenever she logged on to anything, it was a wall of Troy, pictures of himself, what he was eating, thinking, feeling, where he was, what he was doing.

  How can you miss your friends? her mother asked. Their entire consciousness is on display online. Like Claudia should talk. If anyone was oversharing, it was Raven’s mother. She was the poster child for TMI.

  But there was more to people than that, though, wasn’t there? What they posted about? The online Troy was not the guy on her couch, the one who held her hand in kindergarten. Her mom was not just a rape victim, a home repair blogger.

  She walked over to the window, and the sun was already dipping low. She hated this time of day before the afternoon had fully ended and night was yet to begin. There was something about the transition between light and
dark that made her sad. She wanted to call her mother and confess—where she was, what she was planning. Troy certainly wouldn’t stop her.

  But she didn’t. There was a tug, something pulling her down the path she was on. It was too strong to resist. She went into her room to get changed.

  twelve

  Afternoon seemed to leak into early evening as Josh walked through the house following Claudia. He watched her, the way she threw her arms around when she talked, listened to the bright bell chime of her laugh. He examined the house. The way the stairs had creaked beneath his weight, how the old wood dipped. He observed the water stains on the ceiling. The banister was dangerously loose, and the wainscoting looked at is if termites might be getting at it. There were lots of problems he knew, many of them worse than she thought.

  The basement was the worst of it, with those beams that had fallen. They’d need to be shored up before it was even safe. The last time he’d been down there, he’d heard a suspicious creaking. And it had been impossible to clear away the debris on his own.

  But the bones were there. A good old house, solid in its foundation. Not like the crap that went up now, houses that felt like Styrofoam boxes, cheap and flimsy.

  It’s in there. I know it is.

  It’s not. I’ve been through every room, every closet, the attic, the cellar. It’s not there. It never was.

  It’s in there.

  Josh knew that house. Over the years, he’d come to know it intimately, his hands had been all over her, probing into all her private places. She had never given him what he was looking for. Rhett was convinced now that he’d have reason to really tear the place up, they’d find what was hidden. He was wrong. This house wasn’t keeping any secrets.

  From the kitchen window, Josh had watched Rhett slip from the backseat of the car and duck into the barn. Was he still in there? Or was he back in the car? Claudia had said the boys from Just Old Doors were coming out. Rhett better get his ass out of that barn before they did.