The Tenth Circle

by Picoult, Jodi

  “They knew,” Laura said.

  “Who?”

  “Everyone. At school.” She rolled toward him, so that in the plush dark he could make out the green of her eyes. “They all were talking about it.”

  Daniel could have told her that none of this would go away, not until he and Laura and even Trixie could get past it. He had learned this when he was eleven years old, and Cane's grandfather took him on his first moose hunt. At dusk, they'd set out on the Kuskokwim River in the small aluminum boat. Daniel was dropped off at one bend, Cane at another, to cover more ground. He had huddled in the willows, wondering how long it would be before Cane and his grandfather came back, wondering if they ever would. When the moose stepped delicately out of the greenery spindled legs, brindled back, bulbous noseDaniel's heart had started to race. He'd lifted his rifle and thought, I want this, more than anything.

  At that moment, the moose slipped into the wall of willows and disappeared.

  On the ride home, when Cane and his grandfather learned what had happened, they muttered kass'aq and shook their heads. Didn't Daniel know that if you thought about what you were hunting while you were hunting it, you might as well be telegraphing to the animal that you were there?

  At first, Daniel had shrugged this off as Yup'ik Eskimo superstition - like having to lick your bowl clean so you wouldn't slip on ice, or eating the tails of fish to become a fast runner. But as he grew older, he learned that a word was a powerful thing. An insult didn't have to be shouted at you to make you bleed; a vow didn't have to be whispered to you to make you believe. Hold a thought in your head, and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.

  “If we want things to be normal,” Daniel said, “we have to act like we're already there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe Trixie should go back to school.”

  Laura came up on an elbow. “You must be joking.” Daniel hesitated. “Janice suggested it. It isn't much good to sit around here all day, reliving what happened.”

  “She'll see him, in school.”

  “There's a court order in place; Jason can't go near her. She has as much right to be there as he does.”

  There was a long silence. “If she goes back,” Laura said finally, “it has to be because she wants to.” Daniel had the sudden sense that Laura was speaking not only of Trixie but also herself. It was as if Trixie's rape was a constant fall of leaves they were so busy raking away they could ignore the fact that beneath them, the ground was no longer solid. The night pressed down on Daniel. “Did you bring him here? To this bed?”

  Laura's breathing caught. “No.”

  “I picture him with you, and I don't even know what he looks like.”

  “It was a mistake, Daniel”

  “Mistakes are something that happen by accident. You didn't walk out the door one morning and fall into some guy's bed. You thought about it, for a while. You made that choice.” The truth had scorched Daniel's throat, and he found himself breathing hard.

  “I made the choice to end it, too. To come back.”

  “Am I supposed to thank you for that?” He flung an arm across his eyes, better to be blind.

  Laura's profile was cast in silver. “Do you ... do you want me to move out?”

  He had thought about it. There was a part of him that did not want to see her in the bathroom brushing her teeth, or setting the kettle on the stove. It was too ordinary, a mirage of a marriage. But there was another part of him that no longer remembered who he used to be without Laura. In fact, it was because of her that he'd become the kind of man he now was. It was like any other dual dynamic that was part and parcel of his art: You couldn't have strength without weakness; you couldn't have light without dark; you couldn't have love without loss. “I don't think it would be good for Trixie if you left right now,” Daniel said finally. Laura rolled over to face him. “What about you? Would it be good for you?”

  Daniel stared at her. Laura had been inked onto his life, as indelible as any tattoo. It wouldn't matter if she was physically present or not; he would carry her with him forever. Trixie was proof of that. But he'd folded enough loads of laundry during Oprah and Dr. Phil to know how infidelity worked. Betrayal was a stone beneath the mattress of the bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

  When Daniel didn't respond to her, Laura rolled onto her back.

  “Do you hate me?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes I hate myself, too.”

  Daniel pretended that he could hear Trixie's breathing, even and untroubled, through the bedroom wall. "Was it really so bad?

  The two of us?"

  Laura shook her head.

  “Then why did you do it?”

  For a long time, she did not answer. Daniel assumed she'd fallen asleep. But then her voice pricked on the edges of the stars strung outside the window. “Because,” she said, “he reminded me of you.”

  * * *

  Trixie knew that at the slightest provocation, she could stand up and walk out of class and head down to the office for refuge without any teacher even blinking. She had been given her fathers cell phone. Call me anytime, he said, and I will be there before you hang up. She had stumbled through an awkward conversation with the school principal, who phoned to tell her that he would certainly do his best to make Bethel High a haven of safety for her. To that end, she was no longer taking psych with Jason; she had an independent study instead in the library. She could write a report on anything. Right now, she was thinking of a topic: Girls Who Would Rather Disappear.

  “I'm sure that Zephyr and your other friends will be happy to see you,” her father said. Neither of them mentioned that Zephyr hadn't called, not once, to see how she was doing. Trixie tried to convince herself that was because Zephyr felt guilty, with the fight they'd had and what had happened afterward as a direct result. She didn't explain to her father that she didn't really have any other friends in the ninth grade. She'd been too busy filling her world with Jason to maintain old relationships, or to bother starting new ones.

  “What if I've changed my mind?” Trixie asked softly. Her father looked at her. “Then I'll take you home. It's that easy, Trix.”

  She glanced out the car window. It was snowing, a fine fat-flaked

  dusting that hung in the trees and softened the edges of the landscape. The cold seeped through the stocking cap she wore - who knew her hair had actually kept her so warm? She kept forgetting she'd cut it all off in all the smallest ways: when she looked in the mirror and got the shock of her life, when she tried to pull a long nonexistent ponytail out from beneath the collar of her coat. To be honest, she looked horrible - the short cap of hair made her eyes look even bigger and more anxious; the severity of the cut was better suited to a boy - but Trixie liked it. If people were going to stare, she wanted to know it was because she looked different, not because she

  was different.

  The gates of the school came into view through the windshield wipers, the student parking lot to the right. Under the cover of snow, the cars looked like a sea of beached whales. She wondered which

  one was Jason's. She imagined him inside the building already, where he'd been for two whole days longer than her, sowing the seeds of his side of the story that by now, surely, had grown into a thicket.

  Her father pulled to the curb. “I'll walk you in,” he said. All live wires inside Trixie tripped. Could there be anything that screamed out loser! more than a rape victim who had to be walked into school by her daddy? “I can do it myself,” she insisted, but when she went to unbuckle her seat belt she found that her mind couldn't

  make her fingers do the work they needed to.

  Suddenly she felt her father's hands on the fastenings, the harness coming free. “If you want to go home,” he said gently,

&nb
sp; “that's okay.”

  Trixie nodded, hating the tears that welled at the base of her throat. “I know.”

  It was stupid to be scared. What could possibly happen inside that school that was any worse than what already had? But you could reason with yourself all day and still have butterflies in your stomach.

  “When I was growing up in the village,” Trixie's father said,

  “the place we lived was haunted.”

  Trixie blinked. She could count on one hand the number of times in her life that her father had talked about growing up in Alaska. There were certain remnants of his childhood that labeled him as different - like the way, if it got too loud, he'd have to leave the room, and the obsession he had with conserving water even though they had an endless supply through their home well. Trixie knew this much: Her father had been the only white boy in a native Yup'ik Eskimo village called Akiak. His mother, who raised him by herself, had taught school there. He had left Alaska when he was eighteen, and he swore he'd never go back.

  “Our house was attached to the school. The last person who'd lived in it was the old principal, who'd hanged himself from a beam in the kitchen. Everyone knew about it. Sometimes, in the school, the audiovisual equipment would turn on even when it was unplugged. Or the basketballs lying on the floor of the gym would start to bounce by themselves. In our house, drawers would fly open every now and then, and sometimes you could smell aftershave, out of nowhere.” Trixie's father looked up at her. “The Yupiit are afraid of ghosts. Sometimes, in school, I'd see kids spit into the air, to check if the ghost was close enough to steal their saliva. Or they'd walk around the building three times so that the ghost couldn't follow them back to their own homes.” He shrugged. “The thing is ... I was the white kid. I talked funny and I looked funny and I got picked on for that on a daily basis. I was terrified of that ghost just like they were, but I never let anyone know it. That way, I knew they might call me a lot of awful names . . . but one of them wasn't coward.”

  “Jason's not a ghost,” Trixie said quietly. Her father tugged her hat down over her ears. His eyes were so dark she could see herself shining in them. “Well, then,” he said,

  “I guess you've got nothing to be afraid of.”

  * * *

  Daniel nearly ran after Trixie as she navigated the slippery sidewalk up to the front of the school. What if he was wrong about this? What if Janice and the doctors and everyone else didn't know how cruel teenagers could be? What if Trixie came home even more devastated?

  Trixie walked with her head down, bracing against the cold. Her green jacket was a stain against the snow. She didn't turn back to look at him.

  When she was little, Daniel had always waited for Trixie to enter the school building before he drove away. There was too much that could go wrong: She might trip and fall; she could be approached by a bully; she might be teased by a pack of girls. He'd liked to imagine that just by keeping an eye on her, he could imbue her with the power of safety, much like the way he'd draw it onto one of his comics panels in a wavy, flowing force field. The truth was, though, that Daniel had needed Trixie far more than Trixie had ever needed him. Without realizing it, she'd put on a show for him every day: hopping, twirling, spreading her arms and taking a running leap, as if she thought that one of these mornings she might actually get airborne. He'd watch her and he'd see how easy it was for kids to believe in a world different from the one presented to them. Then he'd drive home and translate that stroke by stroke onto a fresh page.

  He could remember wondering how long it would take for reality to catch up to his daughter. He could remember thinking: The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.

  Daniel waited until Trixie slipped through the double doors of the school, and then pulled carefully away from the curb. He needed a load of sand in the back of his pickup to keep it from fishtailing in the snow. Whatever it took, right now, to keep his balance.

  3

  Trixie knew the story behind her real name, but that didn't mean she hated it any less. Beatrice Portinari had been Dante's one true love, the woman who'd inspired him to write a whole batch of epic poems. Her mother the classics professor had singlehandedly filled out the birth certificate when her father (who'd wanted to name his newborn daughter Sarah) was in the bathroom.

  Dante and Beatrice, though, were no Romeo and Juliet. Dante met her when he was only nine and then didn't see her again until he was eighteen. They both married other people and Beatrice died young. If that was everlasting love, Trixie didn't want any part of it.

  When Trixie had complained to her father, he said Nicolas Cage had named his son Kal-el, Superman's Kryptonian name, and that she should be grateful. But Bethel High was brimming with Mallorys, Dakotas, Crispins, and Willows. Trixie had spent most of her life pulling the teacher aside on the first day of school, to make sure she said Trixie when she read the attendance sheet, instead of Beatrice, which made the other kids crack up. There was a time in fourth grade when she started calling herself Justine, but it didn't catch on.

  Summer Friedman was in the main office with Trixie, signing into school late. She was tall and blonde, with a perpetual tan, although Trixie knew for a fact she'd been born in December. She turned around, clutching her blue hall pass. “Slut,” she hissed at Trixie as she walked past.

  “Beatrice?” the secretary said. “The principal's ready for you.”

  Trixie had been in the principal's office only once, when she made honor roll during the first quarter of freshman year. She'd been sent during homeroom, and the whole time she'd been shaking, trying to figure out what she'd done wrong. Principal Aaronsen had been waiting with a Cookie Monster grin on his face and his hand extended. “Congratulations, Beatrice,” he had said, and he'd handed her a little gold honor roll card with her own disgusting name printed across it.

  “Beatrice,” he said again this time, when she went into his office. She realized that the guidance counselor, Mrs. Gray, was waiting there for her too. Did they think that if she saw a man alone she might freak out? “It's good to have you back,” Mr. Aaronsen said.

  It's good to be back. The lie sat too sour on Trixie's tongue, so she swallowed it down again.

  The principal was staring at her hair, or lack of it, but he was too polite to say anything. “Mrs. Gray and I just want you to know that our doors are open any time for you,” the principal said.

  Trixie's father had two names. She had discovered this by accident when she was ten and snooping in his desk drawers. Wedged into the back of one, behind all the smudged erasers and tubes of mechanical pencil leads, was a photograph of two boys squatting in front of a cache of fish. One of the boys was white, one was native. On the back was written: Cane & Wass, fish camp. Akiak, Alaska 1976.

  Trixie had taken the photo to her father, who'd been out mowing the lawn. Who are these people? she had asked.

  Her father had turned off the lawn mower. They're dead.

  “If you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable,” Principal Aaronsen was saying. “If you just want a place to catch your breath ...”

  Three hours later, Trixie's father had come looking for her. The one on the right is me, he'd said, showing her the photo again. And that's Cane, a friend of mine.

  Your name's not Wass, Trixie had pointed out.

  Her father had explained that the day after he'd been born and named, a village elder came to visit and started calling him Wass

  - short for Wassilieafter her husband, who'd fallen through the ice and died a week before. It was perfectly normal for a Yup'ik Eskimo who had recently died to take up residence in a newborn. Villagers would laugh when they met Daniel as a baby, saying things like, Oh, look. Wass has come back with blue eyes! or Maybe that's why Wass took that English as a Second Language class!

  For eighteen years, he'd been known as Daniel to his white mother and as Wass to everyone else. In the Yup'ik world, he told Trixie, souls get recycled. In the Yup'ik world, no one ever re
ally gets to leave.

  “... a policy of zero tolerance,” the principal said, and Trixie nodded, although she hadn't really been listening. The night after her father told Trixie about his second name, she had a question ready when he came to tuck her in. How come when I first asked, you said those boys were dead?

  Because, her father answered, they are.

  Principal Aaronsen stood up, and so did Mrs. Gray, and that was how Trixie realized that they intended to accompany her to class. Immediately she panicked. This was way worse than being walked in by her father; this was like having fighter jets escort a plane into a safe landing: Was there any person at the airport who wouldn't be watching out the windows and trying to guess what had happened on board?

  “Um,” Trixie said, “I think I'd kind of like to go by myself.” It was almost third period, which meant she'd have time to go to

  her locker before heading to English class. She watched the principal look at the guidance counselor. “Well,” Mr. Aaronsen said, “if that's what you want.”