The Tenth Circle

by Picoult, Jodi

“This happened before?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Janice admitted.

  “You said what I told you didn't leave that room!” Trixie cried. “You said you'd help me. How is this supposed to help me?” As Trixie flew up the stairs, Janice started after her. “Let me go talk to her.”

  Daniel stepped forward, blocking her way. “Thanks,” he said. But I think you've done enough."

  * * *

  The law says that Jason Underhill has the right to mount a defense, Detective Bartholemew explained on the phone. The law says that a victim's credibility can be questioned. And with all due respect, he added, your daughter already has some credibility issues.

  She was involved with this boy beforehand.

  She was drinking.

  She's made some inconsistent statements.

  Daniel's response: Like what?

  Now that he'd finished talking to the detective, Daniel felt numb. He walked upstairs and opened Trixie's bedroom door. She lay on her bed, facing away from him.

  The Tenth Circle

  “Trixie,” he said as evenly as he could. “Were you really a virgin?”

  She went still. “What, now you don't believe me either?”

  “You lied to the police.”

  Trixie rolled over, stricken. “You're going to listen to some stupid detective instead of . . .”

  “What were you thinking?” Daniel exploded. Trixie sat up, taken aback. “What were you thinking?” she cried. “You knew. You had to know what was going on.” Daniel thought of the times he had watched Trixie pull up in Jason's car after a date, when he had moved away from the window He'd told himself it was for her privacy, but was that true? Had he really turned a blind eye because he couldn't bear to see that boy's face close to his daughter's, to see his hand graze the bottom of Trixie's breast?

  He'd seen towels in the wash smeared with heavy eye makeup he couldn't remember Trixie wearing out of the house. He'd kept silent when he heard Laura complain because her favorite pair of heels or shirt or lipstick had gone missing, only to find them underneath Trixie's bed. He'd pretended not to notice how Trixie's clothes fit tighter these days, how her stride shimmered with confidence.

  Trixie was right. Just because a person didn't admit that something had changed didn't mean it hadn't happened. Maybe Trixie had screwed up ... but so had he.

  “I knew,” he said, stunned to speak the words aloud. “I just didn't want to.”

  Daniel looked at his daughter. There were still traces of Trixie as a stubborn little girl - in the curve of her chin when her jaw clenched, in the dusky length of her lashes, in her much-maligned freckles. She wasn't all gone, not yet. As he pulled Trixie into his arms and felt her unspool, Daniel understood: The law was not going to protect his daughter, which meant that he had to.

  “I couldn't tell them,” Trixie sobbed. “You were standing right there.”

  That was when Daniel remembered: When the doctor asked Trixie if she'd ever had intercourse before, he'd still been in the examination room.

  Her voice was small, the truth curled tight as a snail. "I didn't want you to be mad at me. And I thought if I told the doctor that Jason and I had already done it, she wouldn't believe I got raped. But it could still happen, couldn't it, Daddy? Just because I said yes before doesn't mean I couldn't say no this time

  . . . ? " She convulsed against him, crying hard. You signed no contract to become a parent, but the

  responsibilities were written in invisible ink. There was a point when you had to support your child, even if no one else would. It was your job to rebuild the bridge, even if your child was the one who burned it in the first place. So maybe Trixie had danced around the truth. Maybe she had been drinking. Maybe she had been flirting at the party. But if Trixie said she had been raped, then Daniel would swear by it.

  “Baby,” he said, “I believe you.”

  * * *

  A few mornings later, when Daniel was out at the dump, Laura heard the doorbell ring. But by the time she reached the hallway to answer

  it, Trixie was already there. She stood in her flannel pajama bottoms and T-shirt, staring at a man standing on the porch. Seth was wearing work boots and a fleece vest and looked as if he hadn't slept in several days. He was looking at Trixie with confusion, as if he couldn't quite place her. When he saw Laura approach, he immediately started to speak. “I've got to talk to you,” he began, but she cut him off.

  She touched Trixie's shoulder. “Go upstairs,” she said firmly, and Trixie bolted like a rabbit. Then Laura turned to Seth again.

  “I cannot believe you had the nerve to come to my house.”

  “There's something you need to know . . .”

  “I know that I can't see you anymore,” Laura said. She was shaking, partly with fear, partly because of Seth's proximity. It had been easier to convince herself that this was over when he wasn't standing in front of her. “Don't do this to me,” she whispered, and she closed the door.

  Laura rested against it for a second, eyes closed. What if Daniel had not been at the dump, if he'd opened the door, instead of Trixie? Would he have recognized Seth on sight, simply by the way his face changed when he looked at Laura? Would he have gone for Seth's throat?

  If they'd fought, she'd have sided with the victim. But which man was that?

  Gathering her composure, Laura walked up the stairs toward Trixie's room. She wasn't sure what Trixie knew, or even what she suspected. Surely she had noticed that her parents barely spoke these days, that her father had taken to sleeping on the couch. She had to wonder why, the night of the rape, Laura had been staying overnight in her office. But if Trixie had questions, she'd kept them to herself. It was as if she instinctively understood what Laura was only just figuring out: Once you admitted to a mistake, it grew exponentially, until there was no way to get it back under wraps.

  Laura was tempted to pretend that Seth was a Fuller Brush salesman or any other stranger but decided she would take her cues from Trixie herself. Laura opened the door to find Trixie pulling a shirt over her head. “That guy,” she said, her face hidden. “What was he doing here?”

  Well . . .

  Laura sat down on the bed. “He wasn't here because of you. I mean, he's not a reporter or anything like that. And he's not coming back. Ever.” She sighed. “I wish I didn't have to have this conversation.”

  Trixie's head popped through the neck of the shirt. “What?”

  “It's finished, completely, one hundred percent. Your father knows, and we're trying . . . well, we're trying to figure this out. I screwed up, Trixie,” Laura said, choking over the words. “I wish I could take it back, but I can't.”

  She realized that Trixie was staring at her, the same way she used to gaze hard at a math problem she simply couldn't puzzle into an answer. “You mean . . . you and him . ..” Laura nodded. “Yeah.”

  Trixie ducked her head. “Did you guys ever talk about me?”

  “He knew you existed. He knew I was married.”

  “I can't believe you'd do this to Daddy,” Trixie said, her voice rising. “He's, like, my age. That's disgusting.” Laura's jaw clenched. Trixie deserved to have this moment of rage; it was owed to her as part of Laura's reparation. But that didn't make it any easier.

  “I wasn't thinking, Trixie . . .”

  “Yeah, because you were too busy being a slut.” Laura raised her palm, coming just short of slapping Trixie across the face. Her hand shook inches away from Trixie's cheek, rendering both of them speechless for a moment. “No,” Laura breathed. “Neither of us should do something we won't be able to take back.”

  She stared Trixie down, until the fury dissolved and the tears came. Laura drew Trixie into her arms, rocked her. “Are you and Daddy going to get a divorce?” Her voice was small, childlike. “I hope not,” Laura said. “Did you ... love him?” She closed her eyes and imagined Seth's poetry, placed word by word onto her own tongue, a gourmet meal mixed with rhythm and description. She felt the immediacy
of a single moment, when unlocking a door took too long, when buttons were popped instead of slipped open.

  But here was Trixie, who had nursed with her hand fisted in Laura's hair. Trixie, who sucked her thumb until she was ten but only when no one could see. Trixie, who believed that the wind could sing and that you could learn the songs if you just listened carefully enough. Trixie, who was the proof that at one time, she and Daniel had achieved perfection together.

  Laura pressed her lips against her daughter's temple. “I loved you more,” she said.

  She had nearly turned her back once on this family. Had she really been stupid enough to come close to doing it again? She was crying just as hard as Trixie was now, to the point where it was impossible to tell which one of them was clinging to the other. Laura felt, in that moment, like the survivor of the train wreck, the woman who steps outside the smoking wreckage to realize that her arms and legs still work, that she has somehow come through a catastrophe unscathed.

  Laura buried her face in the curve of her daughter's neck. It was possible she'd been wrong on several counts. It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn't.

  * * *

  The first place it appeared was on the screen at the school library computer terminal where you could look books up by their Dewey decimal number. From there, it spread to the twenty iBooks and ten

  iMacs in the computer lab, while the ninth-graders were in the middle of taking their typing skills test. Within five more minutes, it was on the monitor of the desk of the school nurse. Trixie was in an elective, School Newspaper, when it happened. Although her parents had tried to talk her out of going to school, it turned out to be the lesser of two evils. Home was supposed to be a safe place, but had become a minefield full of explosions waiting to happen. School, she already knew, wouldn't be comfortable at all. And right now, she really needed to function in a world where nothing took her by surprise.

  In class, Trixie was sitting beside a girl named Felice with acne

  and beaver breath, the only one who would volunteer these days to

  be her partner. They were using desktop-publishing software to create columns of text about the losing basketball team, when the

  computer blue-screened. “Mr. Watford,” Felice called out. "I think

  we crashed..."

  The teacher came over, reaching between the girls to hit ControlAltDelete a few times, but the machine wouldn't reboot.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Why don't you two edit the advice column by hand then?”

  “No, wait, it's coming back,” Felice said, as the screen blossomed into Technicolor. Smack in the middle was Trixie, standing half naked in Zephyr's living room - the photo Moss had taken the night she was raped.

  “Oh,” Mr. Watford said faintly. “Well, then.” Trixie felt as if a pole had been driven through her lungs. She tore herself away from the computer screen, grabbed her backpack, and ran to the main office. There, she threw herself on the mercy of the secretary. “I need to talk to the principal” Her voice snapped like an icicle, as she glanced down at the conputer on the secretary's desk and saw her own face staring back She didn't stop running until she was standing on the bridge over the river, the same bridge where she and Zephyr had stood the day before she became someone different. She dug in her backpack through loose pencils and crumpled papers and makeup compacts until she found the cell phone her father had given her - his own, for emergencies. “Daddy,” she sobbed, when he answered, “please come get me.”

  It wasn't until her father assured her he would be there in two minutes flat that she hung up and noticed what she hadn't when she first placed the call: Her father's phone screen saver - once a graphic of Rogue, from the X-Men - was now the topless picture of Trixie that had spread to three-quarters of the cell phone users in Bethel, Maine.

  * * *

  The knock on Bartholemew's door caught him off guard. It was his day off - although he'd already been to Bethel High and back. He had just finished changing into pajama pants and an old police academy sweatshirt with a sleeve that Ernestine had chewed a hole through. “Coming,” he called out, and when he opened the door he found Daniel Stone standing on the other side of it. It wasn't surprising to him that Stone was there, given what had happened at the school. It also wasn't surprising that Stone knew where Bartholemew lived. Like most cops, he didn't have a listed address and phone number, but Bethel was small enough for most people to know other people's business. You could drive down the street and recognize folks by the cars they drove; you could pass a house and know who resided inside.

  He was aware, for example, even before Trixie Stone's case came to his attention that a comic book artist of some national renown lived in the area. He hadn't read the comics, but some of the other guys at the station had. Supposedly, unlike his violence-prone hero Wildclaw, Daniel Stone was a mild-mannered guy who didn't mind signing an autograph if you stood behind him in the grocery store

  checkout line. In his few dealings with Stone so far, the guy had seemed protective of his daughter and frustrated beyond belief. Unlike some of the men Bartholemew had run across in his career, who put their fists through glass walls or drowned their wrath in alcohol, Daniel Stone seemed to have a handle on his emotions . . . until now.

  The man was standing at the threshold of Bartholemew's door, literally shaking with rage.

  Stone thrust a printout of the now-infamous picture of Trixie into Bartholemew's hand. “Have you seen this?” Bartholemew had. For about three straight hours this morning, at the high school, on the computers at the town offices, everywhere he looked.

  “Hasn't my daughter been victimized enough?” Bartholemew instinctively went into calming mode, softening his voice. “I know you're upset, but we're doing everything we can.” Stone scraped his gaze over Bartholemew's off-duty attire. Yeah. You look like you're working your ass off.“ He looked up at the detective. ”You told us that Underhill's not supposed to have anything to do with Trixie."

  “Our computer tech guys traced the photo to Moss Minton's cell phone, not Jason Underhill's.”

  “It doesn't matter. My daughter's not the one who's supposed to be on trial.” Stone set his jaw. “I want the judge to know this happened.”

  “Then he's also going to know that your daughter was the one who took off her clothes. He's going to know that every eyewitness at that party I've interviewed says Trixie was coming on to a whole bunch of different guys that night,” Bartholemew said.

  “Look. I know you're angry. But you don't want to press this right now, when it might wind up backfiring.”

  Daniel Stone ripped the printed photo from the detective's grasp. “Would you be saying that if this was your daughter?”

  “If it was my daughter,” Bartholemew said, “I'd be thrilled. I'd be fucking delirious. Because it would mean she was still alive.”

  The truth rolled like mercury, and like any poison, it was the last thing either of them wanted to touch. You'd think, in this age of technology, there'd be some kind of network between fathers, one that let a guy who was in danger of losing his daughter instinctively recognize someone who'd already walked that barren road. As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.

  He expected Daniel Stone to offer his condolences, to tell Bartholemew he was sorry for mouthing off. But instead, the man threw the printed photo onto the ground between them like a gauntlet. “Then of all people,” he said, “you should understand.”

  * * *

  She didn't have a lot of time.

  Trixie's mother's voice swam up the stairs. Her mom was on babysitting detail and hadn't let Trixie out of her sight until she had headed for the bathroom. Her father, right now, was chewing out Detective Bartholemew or the superintendent of schools or maybe even both of them. And what difference would it make?

  They could burn ever
y last copy of that awful picture of her, and a few months from now, someone else would have a chance to strip her naked in court.

  Sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, she accidentally banged her funny bone against the wall. “Fuck!” she cried, tears springing to her eyes.

  Once, Trixie had had her mouth washed out with soap for roadtesting four-letter words. She was four years old, at the supermarket with her father, and she repeated what he'd whispered under his breath when the cashier couldn't do the math to make change: Use the damn register.

  She knew all sorts of four-letter words now; they just weren't the ones that most people considered foul language. Love.

  Help.

  Rape.

  Stop.

  Then.

  As a child, she'd been afraid of the dark. The closet door had to be shut tight, with her desk chair wedged under the knob, to keep the monsters from getting out. Her blanket had to be pulled up to her neck, or the devil might get her. She had to sleep on her belly, or a vampire could come and put a stake through her heart.

  She was still afraid, years later - not of the dark but of the days. One after another, and no end in sight.

  “Trixie?”

  Trixie heard her mother again and swiftly reached into the medicine cabinet. The hilarious thing - the thing that no one bothered to tell you - was that being raped wasn't the worst part of everything she'd been through. In fact, that first frantic fall didn't hurt nearly as much as getting back on your feet afterward.

  * * *

  It was the kind of doorknob that needed only a straightened wire hanger to pop the bolt. The minute Laura stepped inside the

  bathroom, she saw it - blood smearing the white wall of the sink,

  blood pooling beneath Trixie on the floor, blood covering Trixie's

  shirt as she hugged her slashed wrists to her chest.

  “Oh, my God,” Laura cried, grabbing Trixie's arms to try to stop the flow. "Oh,

  Trixie, no ..."

  Trixie's eyelids fluttered. She looked at Laura for a half second and then sank into unconsciousness. Laura held her daughter's limp Body up against her own, knowing that she had to get to a phone