The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Trixie bought herself french fries and chocolate milk—her comfort lunch, for when she screwed up on a test or had period cramps—and stood in the middle of the cafeteria, trying to find a place for herself. Since Jason had broken up with Trixie, she’d been sitting somewhere else, but Zephyr had always joined her in solidarity. Today, though, she could see Zephyr sitting at their old table. One sentence rose from the collective din: “She wouldn’t dare.”

  Trixie held her plastic tray like a shield. She finally moved toward the Heater Hos, congregating near the radiator. They were girls who wore white pants with spandex in them and had boyfriends who drove raised I-Rocs; girls who got pregnant at fifteen and then brought the ultrasounds to school to show off.

  One of them—a ninth-grader in what looked like her ninth month—smiled at Trixie, and the action was so unexpected, she nearly stumbled. “There’s room,” the girl said, and she slid her backpack off the table so that Trixie could sit down.

  A lot of kids at Bethel High made fun of the Heater Hos, but Trixie never had. She found them too depressing to be the butt of jokes. They seemed to be so nonchalant about throwing their lives away—not that their lives were the kind that anyone would have wanted in the first place, but still. Trixie had wondered if those belly-baring T-shirts they wore and the pride they took in their situation were just for show, a way to cover up how sad they really were about what had happened to them. After all, if you acted like you really wanted something even when you didn’t, you just might convince yourself along with everyone else.

  Trixie ought to know.

  “I asked Donna to be Elvis’s godmother,” one of the girls said.

  “Elvis?” another answered. “I thought you were going to name him Pilot.”

  “I was, but then I thought, what if he’s born afraid of heights? That would suck for him.”

  Trixie dipped a french fry into a pool of ketchup. It looked weak and watery, like blood. She wondered how many hours it had been since she’d talked out loud. If you didn’t use your voice, ever, would it eventually shrivel up and dry away? Was there a natural selection involved in not speaking up?

  “Trixie.”

  She looked up to see Zephyr sliding into the seat across from her. Trixie couldn’t contain her relief—if Zephyr had come over here, she couldn’t be mad anymore, could she? “God, I’m glad to see you,” Trixie said. She wanted to make a joke, to let Zephyr know it was okay to treat her like she wasn’t a freak, but she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “I would have called,” Zephyr said, “but I’ve sort of been grounded until I’m forty.”

  Trixie nodded. It was enough, really, that Zephyr was sitting here now.

  “So . . . you’re okay, right?”

  “Yeah,” Trixie said. She tried to remember what her father had said that morning: If you think you’re fine, you’ll start to believe it.

  “Your hair . . .”

  She ran her palm over her head and smiled nervously. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  Zephyr leaned forward, shifting uncomfortably. “Look, what you did . . . well, it worked. No question—you got Jason back.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You wanted payback for getting dumped, and you got it. But Trixie . . . it’s one thing to teach someone a lesson . . . and a whole different thing to get him arrested. Don’t you think you can stop now?”

  “You think . . .” Trixie’s scalp tightened. “You think I made this up?”

  “Trix, everyone knows you wanted to hook up with him again. It’s kind of hard to rape someone who’s willing.”

  “You’re the one who came up with the plan! You said I should make him jealous! But I never expected . . . I didn’t . . .” Trixie’s voice was as thin as a wire, vibrating. “He raped me.”

  A shadow fell across the table as Moss approached. Zephyr looked up at him and shrugged. “I tried,” she said.

  He pulled Zephyr out of her chair. “Come on.”

  Trixie stood up, too. “We’ve been friends since kindergarten. How could you believe him over me?”

  Something in Zephyr’s eyes changed, but before she could speak, Moss slid an arm around her shoulders, anchoring her to his side. So, Trixie thought. It’s like that.

  “Nice hair, G.I. Ho,” Moss said as they walked off.

  It had gotten so quiet in the cafeteria that even the lunch ladies seemed to be watching. Trixie sank down into her seat again, trying not to notice the way that everyone was staring at her. There was a one-year-old she used to babysit for who liked to play a game: He’d cover his face with his hands and you’d say, “Where’s Josh?” She wished it was that simple: Close your eyes, and you’d disappear.

  Next to her, one of the Heater Hos cracked her bubble gum. “I wish Jason Underhill would rape me,” she said.

  • • •

  Daniel had made coffee for Laura.

  Even after what she had done, even after all the words that fell between them like a rain of arrows, he had still done this for her. It might not have been anything more than habit, but it brought her to the verge of tears.

  She stared at the carafe, its swollen belly steaming with French roast. It occurred to Laura that in all the years they had been married, she could literally not remember it being the other way around: Daniel had been a student of her likes and dislikes; in return, Laura had never even signed up for the proverbial course. Was it complacency that had made her restless enough to have an affair? Or was it because she hadn’t wanted to admit that even had she applied herself, she would not be as good a wife as Daniel was a husband?

  She had come into the kitchen to sit down at the table, spread out her notes, prepare for her afternoon class. Today, thank God, was a lecture, an impersonal group where she got to do all the talking, not a smaller class where she might have to face the questions of students again. In her hands was a book, open to the famous Doré illustration for Canto 29, where Virgil—Dante’s guide through hell—berated his curiosity. But now that Laura could smell the grounds, inhale that aromatic steam, she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she was going to say about this drawing to her students.

  Explaining hell took on a whole new meaning when you’d been recently living smack in the middle of it, and Laura envisioned her own face on the sketch, instead of Dante’s. She took a sip of her coffee and imagined drinking from the River Lethe, which ran back to its source, taking all your sins with it.

  There was a fine line between love and hate, you heard that cliché all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You’d fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such closeness, one day, to feel like an intrusion.

  Laura stared down at the picture. With the exception of Dante, nobody chose to go willingly to hell. And even Dante would have lost his way if he hadn’t found a guide who’d already been through hell and come out the other side.

  Reaching up to the cabinet, Laura took out a second mug and poured another cup of coffee. In all honesty, she had no idea if Daniel took it with milk or sugar or both. She added a little of each, the way she liked to drink it.

  She hoped that was a start.

  • • •

  In the latest issue of Wizard magazine, on the list of top ten comic book artists, Daniel was ranked number nine. His picture was there, eight notches below Jim Lee’s number one smiling face. Last month, Daniel had been number ten; it was the growing anticipation for The Tenth Circle that was fueling his fame.

  It was actually Laura who had told Daniel when he was becoming famous. They’d gone to a Christmas party at Marvel in New York, and when they entered the room, they were separated in the crush. Later, she told him that as he walked through the crowd, she could hear everyone talking in his wake. Daniel, she had said, people definitely know you.

  When he’d first been given a test story to draw, years ago—a god-awful piece that took p
lace inside a cramped airplane—he’d worried about things that he never would have given a second thought to now: having F lead in his pencil instead of something too soft, testing the geometry of arches, mapping the feel of a ruler in his hand. If anything, he had drawn more from the gut when he was starting out—emotional art, instead of cerebral. The first time he’d penciled Batman for DC Comics, for example, he’d had to reimagine the hero. Daniel’s rendition had a certain length ear and a certain width belt that had little to do with the historical progression of art on that character and far more to do with poring over the comic as a kid, and remembering how Batman had looked at his coolest.

  Today, though, drawing wasn’t bringing him any joy or relief. He kept thinking about Trixie and where she would be at this hour of the day and if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she hadn’t called him yet to say how it was going. Ordinarily, if Daniel was restless, he’d get up and walk around the house, or even take a run to jog his brain and recover his lost muse. But Laura was home—she had no classes until this afternoon—and that was enough to keep him holed up in his office. It was easier to face down a blank page than to pull from thin air the right words to rebuild a marriage.

  His task today was to draw a series of panels in hell with adultery demons—sinners who had lusted for each other in life, and in death couldn’t be separated from each other. The irony of having to draw this, given his own situation, had not been lost on Daniel. He imagined a male and a female torso, each growing out of the same root of a body. He pictured one wing on each of their backs. He saw claws that would reach in to steal a hero’s heart, because that was exactly how it felt.

  He was cheating today, drawing the action sequences, because they were the most engaging. He always jumped around the story, to keep himself from overdoing it on the first panel he drew. But just in case he started running out of time on a deadline, it was easier to draw straight lines and buildings and roads than to dynamically draw a figure.

  Daniel began sketching the outline of an ungainly, birdlike creature, half man and half woman. He roughed in a wing—no, too bat-like. He was just blowing the eraser rubbings off the Miraweb paper when Laura walked into his office, holding a cup of coffee.

  He set down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. Laura rarely visited him in his office. Most of the time, she wasn’t home. And when she was, it was always Daniel seeking her out, instead of the other way around.

  “What are you drawing?” she asked, peering down at the panels.

  “Nothing good.”

  “Worried about Trixie?”

  Daniel rubbed a hand down his face. “How couldn’t I be?”

  She sank down at his feet, cross-legged. “I know. I keep thinking I hear the phone ring.” She glanced down at her coffee cup, as if she was surprised to find herself clutching it. “Oh,” she said. “I brought this for you.”

  She never brought him coffee before. He didn’t even really like coffee. But there was Laura with her hand outstretched, offering the steaming mug—and in that instant, Daniel could imagine her fingers reaching like a dagger between his ribs. He could see how a wing that grew from between her shoulder blades might sweep over the muscles of her trapezius, wrapping over her arm like a shawl.

  “Do me a favor?” he asked, taking the mug from her. He grabbed a quilt that he kept on the couch in his office and leaned down to pull it around Laura.

  “God,” she said. “I haven’t modeled for you in years.”

  When he was just starting out, he’d pose her a hundred different ways: in her bra and panties holding a water gun; tossed halfway off the bed; hanging upside down from a tree in the yard. He would wait for the moment when that familiar skin and structure stopped being Laura and became, instead, a twist of sinew and a placement of bone, one he could translate anatomically into a character sprawled just the same way on the page.

  “What’s the quilt for?” Laura asked, as he picked up his pencil and started to draw.

  “You have wings.”

  “Am I an angel?”

  Daniel glanced up. “Something like that,” he said.

  The moment Daniel stopped obsessing about drawing the wing, it took flight. He drew fast, the lines pouring out of him. This quick, art was like breath. He couldn’t have told you why he placed the fingers at that angle instead of the more conventional one, but it made the figure seem to move across the panel. “Lift the blanket up a little, so it covers your head,” he instructed.

  Laura obliged. “This reminds me of your first story. Only drier.”

  Daniel’s first paid gig had been a Marvel fill-in for the Ultimate X-Men series. In the event that a regular artist didn’t make deadline, his stand-alone piece would be used without breaking the continuity of the ongoing saga.

  He’d been given a story about Storm as a young child, harnessing the weather. In the name of research, he and Laura had driven to the shore during a thunderstorm, with Trixie still in her infant seat. They left the sleeping baby in the car and then sat on the beach in the pouring rain with a blanket wrapped around their shoulders, watching the lightning write notes on the sand.

  Later that night, on his way back to the car, Daniel had tripped over the strangest tube of glass. It was a fulgurite, Laura told him, sand fused the moment it was struck by lightning. The tube was eight inches long, rough on the outside and smooth through its long throat. Daniel had tucked it into the side of Trixie’s car seat, and even today it was still delicately displayed on her bookshelf.

  It had amazed him: that utter transformation, the understanding that radical change could come in a heartbeat.

  Finally, Daniel finished drawing. He put down his pencil, flexed his hand, and glanced down at the page: This was good; this was better than good. “Thanks,” he said, standing up to take the blanket off Laura’s shoulders.

  She stood, too, and grabbed two corners of the quilt. They folded it in silence, like soldiers with a casket’s flag. When they met in the middle, Daniel went to take the blanket from her, but Laura didn’t let go. She slid her hands along its folded seam until they rested on top of Daniel’s, and then she lifted her face shyly and kissed him.

  He didn’t want to touch her. Her body pressed against his through the buffer of the quilt. But instinct broke over him, a massive wave, and he wrapped his arms so tightly around Laura he could feel her struggling to breathe. His kiss was hungry, violent, a feast for what he’d been missing. It took a moment, and then she came to life beneath him, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt, pulling him closer, consuming him in a way he could not ever remember her doing before.

  Before.

  With a groan, Daniel dragged his mouth from hers, buried his face in the curve of her neck. “Are you thinking about him?” he whispered.

  Laura went utterly still, and her arms fell away. “No,” she said, her cheeks bright and hot.

  Between them on the floor, the quilt was now a heap. Daniel saw a stain on it that he hadn’t noticed before. He bent down and gathered it into his arms. “Well, I am.”

  Laura’s eyes filled with tears, and a moment later she walked out of his office. When he heard the door close, Daniel sank down into his chair again. He kept brushing up against the fact that his wife had cheated on him. It was a little like a scar on a polished wooden table—you’d try to see the rest of the gleaming surface, but your eyes and your fingers would be drawn to the pitted part, the one thing that kept it from being perfect.

  It was two-fifteen; only another half hour until he picked up Trixie at school. Only a half hour until she could serve as the cushion that kept him and Laura from rubbing each other raw.

  But in a half hour, lightning could strike. Wives could fall in love with men who weren’t their husbands. Girls could be raped.

  Daniel buried his face in his hands. Between his splayed fingers, he could see the figure he’d sketched. Half of a demon, she was wrapped in her own single wing. She was the spitting image of Laura. And she was reaching for a heart D
aniel couldn’t draw, because he’d forgotten its dimensions years ago.

  • • •

  Jason was missing practice. He sat in the swanky law offices of Yargrove, Bratt & Oosterhaus, wondering what drills Coach was putting the team through. They had a game tomorrow against Gray–New Gloucester, and he was on the starting line.

  Trixie had come back to school today. Jason hadn’t seen her—someone had made damn sure of that—but Moss and Zephyr and a dozen other friends had run into her. Apparently, she’d practically shaved her head. He’d wondered, on the drive down to Portland, what it would have been like if he had crossed paths with Trixie. The judge at the arraignment had said that was enough cause to have Jason sent to a juvy prison, but he must have meant Jason would be in trouble if he sought Trixie out . . . not if Fate tossed her in his path.

  Which is sort of what had happened in the first place.

  He still couldn’t believe that this was real, that he was sitting in a lawyer’s office, that he had been charged with rape. He kept expecting his alarm clock to go off any minute now. He’d drive to school and catch Moss in the hallway and say, Man, you wouldn’t believe the nightmare I had.

  Dutch Oosterhaus was talking to his parents, who were wearing their church clothes and were looking at Dutch as if he were Jesus incarnate. Jason knew his parents were paying the lawyer with money they’d scrimped together to send him for a PG year at a prep school, so that he’d have a better chance of making a Division I college hockey team. Gould Academy scouts had already come to watch him play; they’d said he was as good as in.

  “She was crying,” Dutch said, rolling a fancy pen between his fingers. “She was begging you to get back together with her.”

  “Yeah,” Jason replied. “She didn’t. . . she didn’t take the breakup very well. There were times I thought she was losing it. You know.”

  “Do you know if Trixie was seeing a psychiatrist?” Dutch made a note to himself. “She might even have talked to a rape crisis counselor. We can subpoena those records for evidence of mental instability.”