When she was about six Claire started wondering what had happened to her parents. She tried to ask her grandparents about them, but they got so upset with her that she cried for days and decided never to bring up the subject again. Children tend to believe that everything that’s not right with the world must be their fault and adults will be mad at them for it and stop loving them, and Claire was no exception. Of course she never ceased questioning the issue, silently, and over the years constructed fantastic scenarios about what might have happened to them, stories which were heroic and extraordinary and made her hope that maybe some of their exceptional quality rubbed off on her too.
One wouldn’t call Claire’s life exceptional. One wouldn’t call it miserable either. She had worked so hard at fitting in that the results, which turned out to be the exact opposite of that, were almost hilariously bad. Unfortunately Claire couldn’t appreciate the fine irony because she had lost her sense of humor somewhere along the way and replaced it with a pleasant attitude meant to accommodate any opinion she might encounter on her journey.
That afternoon, when she asked what had happened to her parents and got scolded, Claire ran out into the garden and hid in the natural hollow created by the thick and gnarly roots of an oak tree where they broke the ground, and that spot became her secret hideaway from the world from that day on, the place where she could go to dream and find comfort in good times and in bad. That oak tree remained her best friend throughout her childhood: it didn’t judge, it had no expectations and it listened to whatever Claire’s wild imagination came up with. A weird friend for a child, but, as I said, Claire herself was weird.
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