The Tenth Circle

by Picoult, Jodi

  One word might have saved them both.

  * * *

  Could you pinpoint the very moment when your life began to fall apart?

  For Laura, it seemed like each instance she found had an antecedent. Trixie's rape. Her own affair with Seth. Her unexpected pregnancy. The decision she made to find Daniel after he drew her. The first time she laid eyes on him and knew that everything else she saw from then on would no longer look the same. Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.

  It was easier for Laura to find the moment Trixie's life had been

  ruined. It all started, and ended, with Jason Underhill. If she'd never met him, if she'd never dated him, none of this would have happened. Not the rape, not the cutting, not even the suicide attempt. Laura had given it serious thought today: Jason was to blame for all of it. He had been the root of Trixie's deceptions; he had been the reason Laura hadn't been able to see her own daughter clearly.

  She lay alone in bed, wide awake. Sleep was out of the question, with Trixie still at the hospital. The doctors had assured Laura that Trixie would be watched like a hawk, that if all was well, they could bring her home tomorrow - but that didn't keep Laura from wondering if she was comfortable, if there was a nurse taking care of her right now.

  Daniel wasn't asleep either. She had been listening to his footsteps downstairs, moving like open-ended questions. But now she heard him heading upstairs. A moment later he stood by the side of the bed. “Are you still up?” he whispered.

  “I was never asleep.”

  “Can I... can I ask you something?”

  She kept her eyes trained on the ceiling. “Okay.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Of what?”

  “Forgetting?”

  Laura understood what he was trying to say. Although talking about what had happened to Trixie was the hardest thing in the world, they had to do it. If they didn't, they ran the risk of losing - by comparison - the memory of who Trixie used to be. It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

  It was why, even when they weren't actively discussing it, the word rape hung like smoke over all of their heads. It was why, even as they were making polite conversation, every other thought in Laura's and Daniel's heads was unfaithful.

  “Daniel,” Laura admitted, “I'm afraid all the time.” He sank to his knees, and it took her a moment to realize that he was crying. She could not remember ever seeing Daniel cry - he used to say that he'd used up his allotment of tears as a kid. Laura sat up in bed, the covers falling away from her. She put her hands on Daniel's bowed head and stroked his hair. “Sssh,” she said, and she drew him up onto the bed and into her arms. At first it was about comfort: Laura being able to give; Daniel softening under her hands. But then Laura felt the air move like liquid as Daniel's body pressed against hers, desperate, his actions full of now and need. She felt her pulse jump under his fingers, as she fell back in time, remembering him like this years ago, and herself reacting. Then just as abruptly as Daniel had begun, he stopped. In the dark, she could see only the shine of his eyes. “I'm sorry,” he murmured, backing away.

  “Don't be,” she said, and she reached for him.

  * * *

  It was all Daniel needed to let loose the last thread of restraint.

  He laid siege to Laura; he took no quarter. He scratched her skin and bit her throat. He reached for her hands and pinned them over her head. “Look at me,” he demanded, until her eyes flew open and locked on his. “Look at me,” he said again, and he drove himself into her.

  Daniel waited until she was underneath him, writhing, poised for each moment when he came into her. As his arms anchored her closer, she threw back her head and let herself break apart. She felt Daniel's hesitation, and his glorious, reckless fall. As his sweat cooled on her own body, Laura traced a message over Daniel's right shoulder blade. S-O-R-R-Y, she wrote, even though she knew that the truths that sneak up behind a person are the ones he's most likely to miss.

  Once, the Yupiit say, there was a man who was always quarreling with his wife. They fought over everything. The wife said her husband was lazy. The husband said his wife only wanted to sleep with other men. Finally, the wife went to a shaman in the village and begged to be changed into another creature. Anything but a woman, she said.

  The shaman turned her into a raven. She flew off and built a nest, where she mated with other ravens. But every night, she found herself flying back to the village. Now, ravens can't come inside dwellings, so she would sit on the roof and hope to catch a glimpse of her husband. She'd think of reasons for him to come outside.

  One night, he stepped through the entry and stood under the stars. Oh, she thought, how lovely you are.

  The words fell into her husbands outstretched hands, and just like that, the raven turned back into a woman. Just like that, the man wanted her once again to be his wife.

  The next morning, a chill snaked its way into the house. Daniel found his teeth chattering as he headed downstairs to make a pot of coffee. He put a call in to the hospital: Trixie had had a good night.

  Well. So had he. His mistake had been in not admitting just how much had gone wrong between him and Laura. Maybe you had to scrape the bottom before you could push your way back to the surface. He was bent over the fireplace, feeding kindling to the paper he'd read, when Laura came downstairs wearing a sweater over her flannel pajamas. Her hair was sticking up in the back, and her cheeks were

  still flushed with a dream. “Morning,” she murmured, and she slipped by him to pour herself a glass of orange juice. Daniel waited for her to say something about the previous night. to admit that things had changed between them, but Laura wouldn't even look him in the eye. Immediately, his boldness faded. What if this spiderweb connection they'd made last night was not, as he thought, a first step . . . but a mistake? What if the whole time she's been with Daniel, she'd wished she wasn't?

  “The hospital says we can get Trixie at nine,” he said neutrally. At news of Trixie, Laura turned. “How is she?”

  “Great.”

  “Great? She tried to kill herself yesterday.” Daniel sat back on his heels. “Well. . . compared to yesterday then ... I guess she is doing pretty damn great.” Laura looked down at the counter. “Maybe that's true for all of us,” she said.

  Her face was red, and Daniel realized she wasn't embarrassed but nervous. He stood up and walked into the kitchen until he was standing beside her. Sometime between when they had gone to bed last night and the sun coming up this morning, the world had shifted beneath them. It wasn't what they had said to each other but what they hadn't: that forgiving and forgetting were fused together - flip sides of the same coin - and yet they couldn't both exist at the saim time. Choosing one meant that you sacrificed seeing the other.

  Daniel slipped his arm around Laura's waist and felt her shiver. “Cold out,” she said.

  “Brutal.”

  “Did you hear anything about weather like this?” Daniel faced her. “I don't think anyone predicted it.” He opened his arms, and Laura moved into them, her eyes closing as she leaned against him. “I guess these things happen,” she replied, as a rogue burst of sparks rose up the chimney.

  * * *

  You could not walk out of the hospital, for insurance reasons. If you tripped before you crossed the threshold, you might sue. However, if you chose to throw yourself in front of a car the minute you stepped outside, no one would give a damn. Trixie was thinking about it.

  She'd already had to sit down with a shrink this morning, and apparently she was going to have to do that twice a week for the next five forevers, too, all because she had seen a brass ring in the bathroom and had tried to grab it. It didn't matter if, like Janice the rape counselor, these sessions
could eventually wind up in court. She had to attend them, or she had to stay in the hospital on the psych floor with a roommate who ate her own hair. She was going to have to take medicine, too - under the watchful eye of her parents, who would actually check the sides of her mouth and under her tongue to make sure she didn't fake swallowing. Since arriving at the hospital this morning, her mother was trying so hard to smile that Trixie expected her face to crack, and her father kept asking her if she needed anything. Yeah, she felt like answering. A life.

  Trixie seesawed between wishing everyone would leave her alone and wondering why everyone treated her like a leper. Even when that stupid psychiatrist had been sitting across from her, asking things like, Do you think you're in danger of wanting to kill yourself right now? she felt like she was watching the whole scene from a balcony, and it was a comedy. She kept expecting the girl who played her to say something smart, like, Why yes, thanks, I would like to kill myself right now. .. but I'll restrain myself until the audience is gone. Instead, she watched the actress who was really her fold like a fortune cookie and burst into tears. What Trixie wanted, most of all, was what she couldn't have to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.

  She survived the ride home by closing her eyes almost immediately and pretending she'd fallen asleep. Instead, she listened to the conversation between her parents in the front seat:

  Do you think it's normal, the way her voice sounds?

  How do you mean?

  You know. Like most of the notes are missing.

  Maybe it's the medicine.

  They said that would take a few weeks to kick in.

  Then how are we supposed to keep her safe in the meantime?

  Trixie almost would have felt sorry for her parents if she wasn't so sure that they'd brought this on themselves. After all, her mother didn't have to open the bathroom door yesterday. She felt the truth that she'd been hiding, like an after-dinner mint that might last for ages, if you were careful enough; the truth that she hadn't told the shrink or the doctors or her parents, no matter how much they tried to pull it out of her. She would swallow it whole before she spit it out loud. Trixie made a big show of stretching and yawning as they approached the turn to their street. Her mother turned around, that Halloween-mask smile still on her face. “You're awake!” Her father glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “You need anything?”

  Trixie turned and stared out the window. Maybe she had died, after all. And this was hell.

  Just about when Trixie decided things couldn't get any worse, the car turned into the driveway and she saw Zephyr waiting. The last conversation they'd had wasn't one that invited future chats, and it had left Trixie feeling like she'd been quarantined from the rest of the earth. But right now, Zephyr was the one who looked nervous.

  Zephyr knocked on the window. “Um, Mrs. Stone. I, was kind of, you know, hoping to talk to Trixie.”

  Her mother frowned. “I don't really think that now's the best time . . .”

  “Laura,” her father interrupted, and he glanced at Trixie in the rearview mirror: It's up to you.

  Trixie got out of the backseat. She hunched her shoulders, so that her wrists were even more hidden by the sleeves of her coat.

  “Hey,” she said cautiously.

  Zephyr looked the way Trixie had felt for the past twenty-four hours - like she was completely made up of tears and trying to hold some semblance of human form together before someone noticed that she was actually just a puddle. She followed Trixie into the house, up to her bedroom. There was one terrifying moment when Trixie passed the bathroom - had anyone cleaned up since yesterday? But the door was closed, and she fled into her own room before she had to think about it anymore. “Are you okay?” Zephyr said. Trixie wasn't about to fall for the false sympathy routine.

  "Who

  dared you?"

  “What?”

  “Are you, like, supposed to come back with a lock of my hair to prove you got close? Oh, that's right, I don't have any hair. I cut it off when I started to go psycho.”

  Zephyr swallowed. “I heard you almost died.” Almost doesn't count, Trixie's father used to say. Except in horseshoes and hand grenades.

  What about in rape cases?

  “Do you almost care?” Trixie said.

  Suddenly Zephyr's face crumpled. “I've been a total asshole. I was mad at you, because I thought you planned this whole revenge thing for Jason and didn't trust me enough to tell me . . .”

  “I never . . .”

  “No, wait, let me finish,” Zephyr said. “And I was mad at you for that night, when Moss paid more attention to you than to me. I wanted to get back at you, so I said . . . I said what they all were saying. But then I heard that you were in the hospital and I kept thinking about how awful it would have been if you ... if you, you know, before I had a chance to tell you I believe you.” Her face crumpled, "I feel like this was all my fault. I'd do anything to make it up to you.

  There was no way to tell whether Zephyr was telling the truth and even if she was, that didn't mean Trixie trusted her anymore. There was every chance that Zephyr was going to run to Moss and Jason and the rest of the hockey team and regale them with tales of the freak. But then again . . . maybe she wasn't; maybe the reason Zephyr was here had nothing to do with guilt or her mom telling her to be here but simply because she remembered, like Trixie did, that once when they were five they had been the only two people in the world who knew that fairies lived inside the kitchen cabinets and hid under the pots and pans when you opened the doors.

  Trixie looked at her. “Do you want to know how I did it?” Zephyr nodded, drawn forward.

  She slowly pulled the tape that sealed the bandage around her wrist and unraveled the gauze until the wound was visible: gaping and saw-edged, angry.

  “Wow,” Zephyr breathed. “That is sick. Did it hurt?” Trixie shook her head.

  “Did you see lights or angels or, like, God?” Trixie thought about it, hard. The last thing she could remember was the rusted edge of the radiator, which she focused on before blacking out. “I didn't see anything.”

  “Figures,” Zephyr sighed, and then she looked at Trixie and grinned.

  Trixie felt like smiling back. For the first time in a long time when she told her brain to do it, it actually worked.

  * * *

  Three days after Trixie tried to kill herself, Daniel and Laura found themselves in Marita Soorenstad's office, with Trixie between them

  Detective Bartholemew was seated to their left, and behind the desk the DA was ripping open a Pixy Stix. “Help yourselves,” she said, and then she turned to Trixie. “I'm certainly glad to see you're with us. From what I understand, that wasn't a sure thing a few days ago.”

  Daniel reached over and took his daughter's hand. It felt like ice. “Trixie's feeling much better.”

  “For how long?” the district attorney asked, folding her hands on the desk. “I don't mean to sound insensitive, Mr. Stone, but the only thing consistent in this case so far has been the lack of consistency.”

  The Tenth Circle

  Laura shook her head. “I don't understand ...”

  “As a prosecutor, my job is to present facts to a jury that make it possible for them to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that your daughter was the victim of a rape perpetrated by Jason Underhill. However, the facts I'm presenting are the ones that your daughter presented to us. And that means our case is only as good as the information she's provided me with and as strong as the picture she paints on the stand.”

  Daniel felt his jaw tighten. “I'd think that when a girl tries to kill herself, it's a pretty good indicator that she's suffering from trauma.”

  “Either that, or mental instability.”

  “So, you just give up?” Laura said, incredulous. “You don't try a case if you think it's going to be a tough sell?”

 
; “I never said that, Mrs. Stone. But I do have an ethical obligation not to bring a case to court if even I'm unsure a crime happened.”

  “You've got evidence,” Daniel said. “That rape kit.”

  “Yes. The same rape kit that allowed a laboratory to find evidence of semen in Trixie's mouth, when by her own statement she did not have oral sex that night. On the other hand, Jason Underhill says that the intercourse was consensual . . . and was both oral and vaginal.” The DA turned over a page in a file.

  "According to Trixie, she screamed no while she was being raped but said that her friend

  Zephyr wouldn't have been able to hear her over the music. Yet according to other witnesses, no music was playing during the time of the assault."

  “They're all lying,” Daniel said.

  Marita stared at him. “Or Trixie is. She lied to you about going to her friend's house for a quiet sleepover that night. She lied about losing her virginity the night of the assault...”

  “What?” Laura said, her jaw dropping, and at that moment Daniel remembered he'd never told her what the detective had said. Had he forgotten, or had he intended to forget all along?

  “she lied to the ER physician about the cuts on her wrist, some of which were made long before that Friday night,” Marita continued. “Which begs the question: What else is Trixie lying about?”

  “I want to speak to your boss,” Laura demanded.

  “My boss will tell you that I have a hundred other cases to prosecute that could be commanding my attention. I don't have time for a victim who's crying wolf.”

  Daniel couldn't look at Trixie. If he did, he thought he might break down. Where he'd grown up, a Yup'ik boy who cried wolf would simply turn into that animal forever. His relatives would say he had it coming. He'd spend the rest of his life watching his old family through yellow eyes, from a distance.