The Tenth Circle

by Picoult, Jodi

  imagined a loser who only had to whip off his glasses and step into a

  phone booth to morph into a paragon of manliness, a world where the geek got the girl at the end. The public, reeling from the Depression, embraced Superman, who took them away from a bleak reality.

  Daniel's first comic book had been about leaving, too. It had grown from a Yup'ik story about a hunter who stupidly set out alone and speared a walrus. The hunter knew he couldn't haul it in by himself, yet if he didn't let go of the rope it would drag him down and kill him. The hunter decided to release the line, but his hands had frozen into position and he was pulled underwater. Instead of drowning, though, he sank to the bottom of the sea and became a walrus himself.

  Daniel started to draw the comic book at recess one day, after he was kept inside because he'd punched a kid who teased him for his blue eyes. He'd absently picked up a pencil and drew a figure that started in the sea - all flippers and tusks - and evolved toward shore to standing position, gradually developing the arms and legs and face of a man. He drew and he drew, watching his hero break away from his village in a way that Daniel couldn't himself. He couldn't seem to escape these days, either. In the wake of Trixie's rape, Daniel had gotten precious little drawing done. At this point, the only way he would make his deadline was if he stayed awake 24/7 and managed to magically add a few hours to each day. He hadn't called Marvel, though, to break the bad news. Explaining why he had been otherwise occupied would somehow make what had happened to Trixie more concrete.

  When the phone rang at seven-thirty A.M., Daniel grabbed for it. Trixie was not going to school today, and Daniel wanted her to stay blessedly unconscious for as long as humanly possible. “You got something to tell me?” the voice on the other end demanded. Daniel broke out in a cold sweat. “Paulie,” he said. “What's up?”

  Paulie Goldman was Daniel's longtime editor, and a legend. Known for his ever-present cigar and red bow tie, he'd been a crony of all the great men in the business: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko. These days, he'd be just as likely to be found grabbing a Reuben at his favorite corner deli with Alan Moore, Todd McFarlane, or Neil Caiman.

  It had been Paulie who'd jumped all over Daniel's idea to bring a graphic novel back to former comic book fans who were now adults, and to let Daniel not only pencil the art but also write a story line that might appeal to them. He'd gotten Marvel on board, although they were leery at first. Like all publishers, trying something that hadn't been done before was considered anathema unless you succeeded, in which case you were called revolutionary. But given the marketing that Marvel had put behind the Wildclaw series, to miss a deadline would be catastrophic.

  “Have you happened to read the latest Lying in the Gutters?” Paulie asked.

  He was referring to an online trade gossip column by Rich Johnston. The title was a double entendre - gutters were the spaces between panels, the structure that made a comic illustration a comic illustration. Johnston encouraged “gutterati” to send him scoop to post in his articles, and “guttersnipes” to spread the word across the Internet. With the phone crooked against his shoulder, Daniel pulled up the Web page on his computer and scanned the headlines.

  A Story That's Not About Marvel Editorial, he read. The DC Purchase of Flying Pig Comics That Isn't Going to Happen.

  You Saw It Here Second: In The Weeds, the new title from Crawl

  ^^ace, will be drawn by Evan Hohman . . . but the pages are already popping up on eBay.

  And on the very bottom: Wildclaw Sheathed?

  Daniel leaned toward the screen. I understand that Daniel Stone, Kid of the Moment, has drawn . . . count 'em, folks . . . ZERO pages toward his next Tenth Circle deadline. Was the hype really just a hoax? What good's a great series when there's nothing new to read?

  “This is bullshit,” Daniel said. “I've been drawing.”

  “How much?”

  “It'll get done, Paulie.”

  “How much?”

  “Eight pages.”

  “Eight pages? You've got to get me twenty-two by the end of the week if it's going to get inked on time.”

  “I'll ink it myself if I have to.”

  “Yeah? Will you run it off on Xerox machines and take it to the distributor too? For God's sake, Danny. This isn't high school. The dog isn't allowed to eat your homework.” He paused, then said,

  “I know you're a last-minute guy, but this isn't like you. What's going on?”

  How do you explain to a man who'd made a life out of fantasy that sometimes reality came crashing down? In comics, heroes escaped and villains lost and not even death was permanent. “The series,” Daniel said quietly. “It's taking a little bit of a turn.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The storyline. It's becoming more . . . family oriented.” Paulie was silent for a moment, thinking this over. “Family's good,” he mused. “You mean a plot that would bring parents and their kids together?”

  Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “I hope so,” he said.

  * * *

  Trixie was systematically removing all traces of Jason from her bedroom. She tossed into the trash the first note he'd passed her in class. The goofy reel of pictures they'd taken at a booth at Old Orchard Beach. The green felt blotter on her desk, where she could feel the impression of his name, after writing it dozens of times on paper.

  It was when she went to throw the blotter out in the recycle bin that she saw the newspaper, the page open to the letter her parents had not wanted her to see.

  “If the town of Bethel was to pass judgment on this case,” Trixie read, “Jason Underhill would surely be found innocent.” What they hadn't said, in that awful editorial letter, was that this

  town had already tried and judged the wrong person. She ran upstairs again, to her computer, and connected to the Internet. She looked up the Web page for the Portland Press Herald and started to type a rebuttal letter.

  To Whom It May Concern, Trixie wrote.

  I know it is the policy of your paper to keep victims who are minors anonymous. But I'm one of those minors, and instead of having people guess, I want them to know my name.

  She thought of a dozen other girls who might read this, girls who had been too scared to tell anyone what had happened to them. Or the dozen girls who had told someone and who could read this and find the courage they needed to get through one more day of the hell that was high school. She thought of the boys who would think twice before taking something that wasn't theirs. My name is Trixie Stone, she typed.

  She watched the letters quiver on the page; she read the spaces between the words - all of which reminded her that she was a coward. Then she hit the delete button.

  * * *

  The phone rang just as Laura walked into the kitchen. By the time she'd picked up, so had Daniel on an upstairs connection.

  “I'm looking for Laura Stone,” the caller said, and she dropped the glass she was holding into the sink.

  “I've got it,” Laura said. She waited for Daniel to hang up.

  “I miss you,” Seth replied.

  She didn't answer right away; she couldn't. What if she hadn't picked up the phone? Would Seth have started chatting up Daniel?

  Would he have introduced himself? “Do not ever call here again,” Laura whispered.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Her heart was beating so hard she could barely hear her own voice. “I can't.”

  “Please. Laura. It's important.”

  Daniel walked into the kitchen and poured himself some water.

  “Please take me off your call list,” Laura said, and she hung up. In retrospect Laura realized that she'd dated Daniel through osmosis, taking a little of his recklessness and making it part of herself. She broke up with Walter and began sleeping through classes. She started smoking. She peppered Daniel with questions about the past he wouldn't discuss. She learned how her own body could be an instrument, how Daniel could play a symp
hony over her skin.

  Then she found out she was pregnant.

  At first, she thought that the reason she didn't tell Daniel was because she feared he'd run. Gradually, though, she realized that she hadn't told Daniel because she was the one considering flight. Reality kicked at Laura with a vengeance, now that responsibility had caught up to her. At twenty-four years old, what was she doing staying up all night to bet on cockfights in the basement of a tenement? What good would it be in the long run if she could lay claim to finding the best tequila over the border but her doctoral thesis was dead in the water? It had been one thing to flirt with the dark side; it was another thing entirely to set down roots there.

  Parents didn't take their baby trolling the streets after midnight. They didn't live out of the back of a car. They couldn't buy formula and cereal and clothes with the happenstance cash that dribbled in from sketches done here and there. Although Daniel could currently pull Laura like a tide to the moon, she couldn't imagine them together ten years from now. She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime. When Laura broke up with Daniel, she convinced herself she was doing both of them a favor. She did not mention the baby, although she had known all along she would keep it. Sometimes she'd find herself losing hours at a time, wondering if her child would have the same pale wolf-eyes as its father. She threw out her cigarettes and started wearing sweater sets again and driving with her seat belt fastened. She folded Daniel neatly away in her mind and pretended not to think about him.

  A few months later, Laura came home to find Daniel waiting at her condo. He took one look at her maternity top and then, furious, grabbed her by her upper arms. “How could you not tell me about this?”

  Laura panicked, wondering if she'd misinterpreted the jagged edge of his personality all along. What if he wasn't just wild, but truly dangerous? “I figured it was best if . . .”

  “What were you going to tell the baby?” Daniel said. “About me?”

  “I... hadn't gotten that far.”

  Laura watched him carefully. Daniel had turned into someone she couldn't quite recognize. This wasn't just some Bad Boy out to kick the system - this was someone so deeply upset that he'd forgotten to cover the scars.

  He sank down onto the front steps. “My mother told me that my dad died before I was born. But when I was eleven, the mail plane brought a letter addressed to me.” Daniel glanced up. “You don't get money from ghosts.”

  Laura crouched down beside him.

  “The postmarks were always different, but after that first letter he'd send cash every month. He never talked about why he wasn't here, with us. He'd talk about what the salt mountains looked like in Utah, or how cold the Mississippi River was when you stepped into it barefoot. He said that one day he'd take me to all those places, so I could see for myself,” Daniel said. “I waited for years, you know, and he never came to get me.” He turned to Laura. “My mother said she'd lied because she thought it would be easier to hear that my father was dead than to hear he hadn't wanted a family. I don't want our baby to have a father like that.”

  “Daniel,” she confessed, “I'm not sure if I want our baby to have a father like you.”

  He reared back, as if he'd been slapped. Slowly, he got to his feet and walked away.

  Laura spent the next week crying. Then one morning, when she went out to get the newspaper, she found Daniel asleep on the front steps of her condo. He stood up, and she could not stop staring: His shoulder-length hair had been cut military-short; he was wearing khaki pants and a blue oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He held out a stub of paper. “It's the check I just deposited,” Daniel explained. “I got a job working at Atomic Comics. They gave me a week's salary in advance.” Laura listened, her resolve cracking wide open. What if she was not the only one who had been fascinated by a personality different from her own? What if all the time that she'd been absorbing Daniel's wildness, he'd been looking to her for redemption?

  What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

  “I don't have enough cash yet,” Daniel continued, “but when I do, I'm going to take art courses at the community college.” He reached for Laura, so that their child was balanced between them.

  “Please,” he whispered. “What if that baby's the best part of me?”

  “You don't want to do this,” Laura said, even as she moved closer to him. “You'll hate me one day, for ruining your life.”

  “My life was ruined a long time ago,” Daniel said. “And I'll never hate you.”

  They got married at the city hall, and Daniel was completely true to his word. He quit smoking and drinking, cold turkey. He came to every OB appointment. Four months later, when Trixie was born, he doted over her as if she were made of sunlight. While Laura taught undergrads during the day, Daniel played with Trixie in the park an at the zoo. At night, he took classes and began doing freelance graphic art, before working for Marvel. He followed Laura from a teaching position in San Diego to one at Marquette to the current one in Maine. He had dinner waiting when she came home from lecturing; he stuffed caricatures of Trixie as SuperBaby in the pockets of her briefcase; he never forgot her birthday. He was, in fact, so perfect that she wondered if the wild in Daniel had only been an act to attract her. But then she would remember the strangest things out of the blue: a night when Daniel had bitten her so hard during sex he'd drawn blood; the sound of him fighting off imaginary enemies in the thick of a nightmare; the time he had tattooed Laura's body with Magic Markers - snakes and hydras down her arms, a demon in flight at the small of her back. A few years ago, wistful, she had gone so far as to bring one of his inking pens to bed. “You know how hard it is to get that stuff off your skin?” Daniel had said, and that was the end of that.

  Laura knew she had no right to complain. There were women in this world whose husbands beat them, who cried themselves to sleep

  because their spouses were alcoholics or gamblers. There were men in this world whose partners had said “I love you” fewer times in a lifetime than Daniel would in a week. Laura could shift

  the blame any old way she liked, but the stiff wind of truth would

  send it back to her: She hadn't ruined Daniel's life by asking him to

  change. She had ruined her own.

  * * *

  Mike Bartholemew glanced at the tape recorder to make sure it was still running.

  “She was all over me,” Moss Minton said. “Putting her hands in my hair, lap dancing, that kind of stuff.”

  The kid had come down willingly, at Mike's request, to talk. But less than five minutes into the conversation, it was clear that anything that came out of Moss's mouth was going to be unduly colored allegiance to Jason Underhill.

  “I don't know how to say this without sounding like a total jerk,” Moss said, “but Trixie was asking for it.” Bartholemew leaned back in his chair. “You know this for a fact.”

  “Well... yeah.”

  “Did you have intercourse with Trixie that night?”

  “No.”

  “Then you must have been in the room when your friend was having sex with her,” Bartholemew said. “Or how else would you have heard her consent?”

  “I wasn't in the room, dude,” Moss said. “But neither were you. Maybe I didn't hear her say yes, but you didn't hear her say no, either.”

  Bartholemew turned off the tape recorder. “Thanks for coming in.”

  “We're done?” Moss said, surprised. “That's it?”

  “That's it.” The detective took a card out of his pocket and handed it to Moss. “If you happen to think of anything else you need to tell me, just call.”

  “Bartholemew,” Moss read aloud. “I used to have a babysitter named Holly Bartholemew. I think I was around nine or ten.”

  “My daughter.”

  “No kidding? Does she still live around here?”
Mike hesitated. “Not anymore.”

  Moss stuffed the business card in his pocket. “Tell her I said hi the next time you see her.” He gave the detective a half wave and then walked out.

  “I will,” Mike said, as his voice unraveled like lace. ^|

  * * *

  Daniel opened the door to find Janice, the sexual assault advocate, on the other side. “Oh, I didn't know Trixie made plans to see you.”

  “She didn't,” Janice replied. “Can I speak to you and Laura for a second?”

  “Lauras at the college,” he said, just as Trixie poked her head over the railing from upstairs. Before, Trixie would not have hung back like that; she would have bounded down like lightning, certain that the visitor was for her.

  “Trixie,” Janice said, spotting her. “I need to tell you something you're not going to like.”

  Trixie came downstairs, sidling up beside Daniel, the way she used to do when she was tiny and saw something frightening.

  “The defense attorney representing Jason Underhill has subpoenaed the records of my conversations with Trixie.” Daniel shook his head. "I don't understand. Isn't that a violation

  of privacy?"

  “Only when you're talking about the defendant. Unfortunately, if you're the victim of a crime, it's a different story. You can wind up with your diary as evidence, or the transcripts of your psychiatric sessions.” She looked at Trixie. “Or your discussions with a rape crisis counselor.”

  Daniel had no idea what went on during the times Janice had met with Trixie, but beside him, his daughter was shaking. “You can't turn over the records,” she said.

  “If we don't, our director will be sent to jail,” Janice explained.

  “I'll do it,” Daniel said. “I'll go to jail in her place.”

  “The court won't accept that. Believe me, you're not the first father to volunteer.”

  You're not the first. Daniel slowly put the words together.