The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Zero gravity.

  Nowhere in that list was the power to keep your child from growing up. If a superhero couldn’t do it, how could any ordinary man?

  • • •

  There was a knock on the examination room door. “It’s Daniel Stone,” Laura heard. “I, um, have Trixie’s clothes.”

  Before Janice could reach the door, Laura opened it. She took in Daniel’s disheveled hair, the shadow of beard on his face, the storm behind his eyes, and thought for a moment she had fallen backward fifteen years.

  “You’re here,” he said.

  “I got the message on my cell.” She took the stack of clothing from his hands and carried it over to Trixie. “I’m just going to talk to Daddy for a minute,” Laura said, and as she moved away, Janice stepped forward to take her place.

  Daniel was waiting outside the door for Laura. “Jason did this?” she turned to him, fever in her eyes. “I want him caught. I want him punished.”

  “Take a number.” Daniel ran a hand down his face. “How is she?”

  “Nearly finished.” Laura leaned against the wall beside him, a foot of space separating them.

  “But how is she?” Daniel repeated.

  “Lucky. The doctor said there wasn’t any internal injury.”

  “Wasn’t she . . . she was bleeding.”

  “Only a tiny bit. It’s stopped now.” Laura glanced up at Daniel. “You never told me she was sleeping at Zephyr’s last night.”

  “She got invited after you left.”

  “Did you call Zephyr’s mother to—”

  “No,” Daniel interrupted. “And you wouldn’t have, either. She’s gone to Zephyr’s a hundred times before.” His eyes flashed. “If you’re going to accuse me of something, Laura, just do it.”

  “I’m not accusing you—”

  “People in glass houses,” Daniel murmured.

  “What?”

  He moved away from the wall and approached her, backing her into a corner. “Why didn’t you answer when I called your office?”

  Excuses rose inside Laura like bubbles: I was in the restroom. I had taken a sleeping pill. I accidentally turned the ringer off. “I don’t think now is the time—”

  “If this isn’t the time,” Daniel said, his voice aching, “maybe you could give me a number at least. A place I can reach you, you know, in case Trixie gets raped again.”

  Laura stood perfectly still, immobilized by equal parts shame and anger. She thought of the deepest level of hell, the lake of ice that only froze harder the more you tried to work yourself free.

  “Excuse me?”

  Grateful for a distraction, Laura turned toward the voice. A tall, sad-eyed man with sandy hair stood behind her, a man who’d most likely heard every word between her and Daniel. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt. I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Stone?”

  “That’s us,” Laura said. In name, at least.

  The man held out a badge. “I’m Detective Mike Bartholemew. And I’d really like to speak to your daughter.”

  • • •

  Daniel had been inside the Bethel police station only once, when he’d chaperoned Trixie’s second-grade class there on a field trip. He remembered the quilt that hung in the lobby, stars sewn to spell out PROTECT AND SERVE, and the booking room, where the whole class had taken a collective grinning mug shot. He had not seen the conference room until this morning—a small, gray cubicle with a reverse mirrored window that some idiot contractor had put in backward, so that from inside, Daniel could see the traffic of cops in the hallway checking their reflections.

  He focused on the winding wheels of the tape recorder. It was easier than concentrating on the words coming out of Trixie’s mouth, an exhaustive description of the previous night. She had already explained how, when she left home, she changed into a different outfit. How there was a posse of players from the hockey team present when she arrived at Zephyr’s, and how, by the end of the evening, it was only the four of them.

  One parent was allowed in with Trixie when she gave her statement. Because Laura had been at the hospital exam—or maybe because of what Daniel had said to her in the hall—she had decided that he should be the one to go. It was only after he was inside that he realized this was more of a trial than an advantage. He had to sit very still and listen to Trixie’s story in excruciating detail, smiling at her in encouragement and telling her she was doing great, when what he really wanted was to grab the detective and ask him why the hell he hadn’t locked up Jason Underhill yet.

  He wondered how, in just an hour’s time, he’d regressed back to being the kind of person he’d been a lifetime ago—someone for whom feeling came before thought, for whom reason was a postscript. He wondered if this happened to all fathers: as their daughters grew up, they slid backward.

  Bartholemew had brewed coffee. He’d brought in a box of tissues, which he put near Trixie, just in case. Daniel liked thinking that Bartholemew had been through this before. He liked knowing that someone had.

  “What were you drinking?” the detective asked Trixie.

  She was wearing the pink shirt and sweatpants that Daniel had brought, plus his coat. He’d forgotten to bring hers back, even when he went home again. “Coke,” Trixie said. “With rum.”

  “Were you using any drugs?”

  She looked down at the table and shook her head.

  “Trixie,” the detective said. “You’re going to have to speak up.”

  “No,” she answered.

  “What happened next?”

  Daniel listened to her describe a girl he didn’t know, one who lap-danced and played strip poker. Her voice flattened under the weight of her bad judgment. “After Zephyr went upstairs with Moss, I figured everyone was gone. I was going to go home, but I wanted to sit down for a minute, because I had a really bad headache. And it turned out Jason hadn’t left. He said he wanted to make sure I was all right. I started to cry.”

  “Why?”

  Her face contorted. “Because we broke up a couple of weeks ago. And being that close to him again . . . it hurt.”

  Daniel’s head snapped up. “Broke up?”

  Trixie turned at the same time the detective stopped the tape. “Mr. Stone,” Bartholemew said, “I’m going to have to ask you to remain silent.” He nodded at Trixie to continue.

  She let her gaze slide beneath the table. “We . . . we wound up kissing. I fell asleep for a little while, I guess, because when I woke up, we weren’t near the bathroom anymore . . . we were on the carpet in the living room. I don’t remember how we got there. That was when he . . . when he raped me.”

  The last drink that Daniel had had was in 1991, the day before he convinced Laura that he was worth marrying. But before that, he’d had plenty of firsthand knowledge about the faulty reasoning and slurred decisions that swam at the bottom of a bottle. He’d had his share of mornings where he woke up in a house he could not recall arriving at. Trixie might not remember how she got into the living room, but Daniel could tell her exactly how it had happened.

  Detective Bartholemew looked squarely at Trixie. “I know this is going to be difficult,” he said, “but I need you to tell me exactly what happened between you two. Like whether either of you removed any clothing. Or what parts of your body he touched. What you said to him and what he said to you. Things like that.”

  Trixie fiddled with the zipper of Daniel’s battered leather jacket. “He tried to take off my shirt, but I didn’t want him to. I told him that it was Zephyr’s house and that I didn’t feel right fooling around there. He said I was breaking his heart. I felt bad after that, so I let him unhook my bra and touch me, you know . . . my breasts. He was kissing me the whole time, and that was the good part, the part I wanted, but then he put his hand down my pants. I tried to pull his hand away, but he was too strong.” Trixie swallowed. “He said, ‘Don’t tell me you don’t want this.’”

  Daniel gripped the edge of the table so hard that he thought he would crac
k the plastic. He took a deep breath in through his mouth and held it. He thought of all the ways it would be possible to kill Jason Underhill.

  “I tried to get away, but he’s bigger than I am, and he pushed me down again. It was like a game to him. He held my hands up over my head and he pulled down my pants. I said I wanted him to stop and he didn’t. And then,” Trixie said, stumbling over the words. “And then he pushed me down hard and he raped me.”

  There was a bullet, Daniel thought, but that would be too easy.

  “Had you ever had sex before?”

  Trixie glanced at Daniel. “No,” she answered. “I started screaming, because it hurt so much. I tried to kick him. But when I did, it hurt more, so I just stayed still and waited for it to be over.”

  Drowning, Daniel thought. Slowly. In a sewer.

  “Did your friend hear you screaming?” Detective Bartholemew asked.

  “I guess not,” Trixie said. “There was music on, pretty loud.”

  No—a rusty knife. A sharp cut to the gut. Daniel had read about men who’d had to live for days, watching their insides being eaten out by infection.

  “Did he use a condom?”

  Trixie shook her head. “He pulled out before he finished. There was blood on the carpet, and on me, too. He was worried about that. He said he didn’t mean to hurt me.”

  Maybe, Daniel mused, he would do all of these things to Jason Underhill. Twice.

  “He got up and found a roll of paper towels so I could clean myself up. Then he took some rug cleaner from under the kitchen sink, and he scrubbed the spot on the carpet. He said we were lucky it wasn’t ruined.”

  And what about Trixie? What magical solution would take away the stain he’d left on her forever?

  “Mr. Stone?”

  Daniel blinked, and he realized that he had become someone else for a moment—someone he hadn’t been for years—and that the detective had been speaking to him. “Sorry.”

  “Could I see you outside?”

  He followed Bartholemew into the hallway of the police station. “Look,” the detective said, “I see this kind of thing a lot.”

  This was news to Daniel. The last rape he could remember in their small town happened over a decade ago and was perpetrated by a hitchhiker.

  “A lot of girls think they’re ready to have sex . . . but then change their mind, after the fact.”

  It took Daniel a minute to find his voice. “Are you saying . . . that my daughter’s lying?”

  “No. But I want you to understand that even if Trixie is willing to testify, you might not get the outcome you’re hoping for.”

  “She’s fourteen, for God’s sake,” Daniel said.

  “Kids younger than that are having sex. And according to the medical report, there wasn’t significant internal trauma.”

  “She wasn’t hurt enough?”

  “I’m just saying that given the details—the alcohol, the strip poker, the former relationship with Jason—rape could be a hard sell to a jury. The boy’s going to say it was consensual.”

  Daniel clenched his jaw. “If a murder suspect told you he was innocent, would you just let him walk away?”

  “It’s not quite the same—”

  “No, it’s not. Because the murder victim’s dead and can’t give you any information about what really happened. As opposed to my daughter, the one who’s inside there telling you exactly how she was raped, while you aren’t fucking listening to her.” He opened the door to the conference room to see Trixie with her arms folded on the table, her head resting on her hands.

  “Can we go home?” she asked, groggy.

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “The detective can call us if he needs anything else.” He anchored his arm around Trixie. They were halfway down the hall when Daniel turned around again to face Bartholemew. In the reflection of the backward mirror, he could see their faces, white ovals that hovered like ghosts. “You have any kids?” he asked.

  The detective hesitated, then shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so,” Daniel said, and shepherded Trixie through the door.

  • • •

  At home, Laura stripped the sheets off Trixie’s bed and remade it with fresh ones. She found a plaid flannel quilt in the cedar chest in the attic and used that, instead of Trixie’s usual quilt. She picked up the clothes that were tossed on the floor and straightened the books on the nightstand and tried to turn the room into something that would not remind Trixie of yesterday.

  At the last minute, Laura walked toward a shelf and pulled down the stuffed moose that Trixie had slept with until she was ten. Bald in some spots and missing one eye, it had been retired, but Trixie hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to put it into a garage sale pile. Laura settled this squarely between the pillows, as if it might be just that easy to take Trixie back to childhood.

  Then she hauled the laundry downstairs and began to stir it into the washing machine. It was while she was waiting for the barrel to fill with water that she spilled bleach on her skirt, one of her work skirts, part of an expensive suit. Laura watched the color leach from the wool, a scar in the shape of a tear. She swore, then tried to reverse the damage by holding the hem of the skirt under running water in the sink. Finally, defeated, she sank down in front of the humming belly of the Kenmore and burst into tears.

  Had she been so busy keeping her own secret that she didn’t have the time or the inclination to dissolve Trixie’s? What if, instead of seeing Seth, Laura had been here every night? What if she’d quizzed her on her French vocabulary, or carried a cup of hot chocolate to her room, or invited her to sit on the couch and make fun of the hairstyles on an old sitcom? What if Laura had given Trixie a reason to stay home?

  She knew, on some level, that it would not have worked that way. Just because Laura felt like playing übermother did not mean Trixie would choose to join the game: At her age, a mother’s touch couldn’t compare to the brush of a boy’s hand down the valley of your spine. Laura forced herself to picture Jason Underhill’s face. He was a good-looking boy—a tangle of black hair, aquamarine eyes, an athlete’s body. Everyone in Bethel knew him. Even Laura, who wasn’t a devotee of hockey, had seen Jason’s name splashed all over the sports pages of the newspaper. When Daniel had worried about an older boy dating Trixie, Laura had been the one to tell him to relax. She saw kids nearly that age every single day, and she knew that Jason was a catch. He was smart, polite, and crazy about Trixie, she’d told Daniel. What more could you want for your daughter’s first crush?

  But now, when she thought of Jason Underhill, she considered how persuasive those blue eyes might be. How strong an athlete was. She started to twist her thinking, boring it deep as a screw, so that it would truly take hold.

  If all the blame could be pinned on Jason Underhill, then it wasn’t Laura’s fault.

  • • •

  Trixie had been awake now for twenty-eight hours straight. Her eyes burned, and her head was too heavy, and her throat was coated with the residue of the story she’d been telling over and over. Dr. Roth had given her a prescription for Xanax, telling her that no matter how exhausted Trixie was, she was most likely going to find it difficult to sleep, and that this was perfectly normal.

  She had, finally, wonderfully, been able to take a shower. She stayed in long enough to use an entire bar of soap. She had tried to scrub down there, but she couldn’t get all the way inside where she still felt dirty. When the doctor had said there was no internal trauma, Trixie had nearly asked her to check again. For a moment, she’d wondered if she’d dreamed the whole thing, if it had never really happened.

  “Hey,” her father said, poking his head into her bedroom door. “You ought to be in bed.”

  Trixie pulled back the covers—her mother had changed her sheets—and crawled inside. Before, getting into bed had been the highlight of her day; she’d always imagined it like some kind of cloud or gentle nest where she could just let go of all the stress of acting cool and looking
perfect and saying the right things. But now, it loomed like a torture device, a place where she’d close her eyes and have to replay what had happened over and over, like a closed-circuit TV.

  Her mother had left her old stuffed moose on top of the pillows. Trixie squeezed it against her chest. “Daddy?” she asked. “Can you tuck me in?”

  He had to work at it, but he managed to smile. “Sure.”

  When Trixie was little, her father had always left her a riddle to fall asleep on, and then he’d give her the answer at breakfast. What gets bigger the more you take away from it? A hole. What’s black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when you throw it away? Charcoal.

  “Could you maybe talk to me for a little while?” Trixie asked.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to talk, really. It was that she didn’t want to be left alone in this room with only herself for company.

  Trixie’s father smoothed back her hair. “Don’t tell me you’re not exhausted.”

  Don’t tell me you don’t want this, Jason had said.

  She suddenly remembered one of her father’s nighttime riddles: The answer is yes, but what I mean is no. What is the question?

  And the solution: Do you mind?

  Her father notched the covers beneath her chin. “I’ll send Mom in to say good night,” he promised, and he reached over to turn off the lamp.

  “Leave it on,” Trixie said, panicking. “Please.”

  He stopped abruptly, his hand hovering in the air. Trixie stared at the bulb, until she couldn’t see anything but the kind of brilliant light everyone says comes for you when you’re about to die.

  • • •

  The absolute worst job, if you asked Mike Bartholemew, was having to go tell a parent that his or her kid had been in a fatal car crash or had committed suicide or OD’d. There just weren’t words to hold up that kind of pain, and the recipient of the news would stand there, staring at him, certain she’d heard wrong. The second absolute worst job, in his opinion, was dealing with rape victims. He couldn’t listen to any of their statements without feeling guilty for sharing the same gender as the perp. And even if he could collect enough evidence to merit a trial, and even if there was a conviction, you could bet it wouldn’t be for very long. In most cases, the victim was still in therapy when the rapist got done serving his sentence.