The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Jason nodded, shook it off. They met for another face-off, and this time when the kids took the puck Jason skated backward slowly, making no move to go after it. Unused to playing without the boards, he tripped over the plastic edge of the rink liner and fell into the arms of the crowd. He noticed Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein’s face, and a half-dozen others from school. “Sorry,” he muttered, staggering to his feet.

  When he stepped onto the ice again, Jason headed for the puck, hip-checking a player to get him out of the way. Except this time, his opponent was half his size and a third of his weight, and went flying.

  The boy banged into his goalie, who slid into the net in a heap, crying. Jason watched the kid’s father hurry onto the ice in his street shoes.

  “What is wrong with you today?” Moss said, skating close.

  “It was an accident,” Jason answered, and his friend reared back, smelling the alcohol.

  “Coach is going to rip you a new asshole. Get out of here. I’ll cover for you.”

  Jason stared at him.

  “Go,” Moss said.

  Jason took one last look at the boy and his father, then skated hard to the spot where he’d left his boots.

  • • •

  I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath:

  imagine for yourself what I became,

  deprived at once of both my life and death.

  Laura read Lucifer’s lines in the last canto of the Inferno, then closed the book. Hands down, Lucifer was the most fascinating character in the poem: waist-deep in the lake of ice, with his three heads gnawing on a feast of sinners. Having once been an archangel, he certainly had the freedom of choice—in fact, it was what got him to pick a fight with God in the first place. So if Lucifer had willingly chosen his course, had he known beforehand that he was going to end up suffering?

  Did he think, on some level, that he deserved it?

  Did anyone, who was cast in the role opposite the hero?

  It occurred to Laura that she had sinned in every single circle. She’d committed adultery. She’d betrayed her benefactor—the university—by seducing a student . . . which could also be considered treachery, if you classified Seth as an innocent pawn in the game. She’d defied God by ignoring her wedding vows: She’d defied her family by distancing herself from Trixie when Trixie needed her most. She’d lied to her husband, she’d been angry and wrathful, she’d sowed discord, and she’d been a fraudulent counselor to a student who came looking for a mentor and wound up with a lover.

  About the only thing Laura hadn’t done was kill someone.

  She reached behind her desk for an antique china human head she had found at a garage sale. It was smooth and white and divided into calligraphed subsections across the brain area: wit, glory, revenge, bliss. Over the skull she’d put a headband sporting two red devil horns, a gift from a student one Halloween. Now she took the headband off and tried it on for size.

  There was a knock on her door, and a moment later Seth stepped into her office. “Are those horns on your head,” he said, “or are you just happy to see me?”

  She yanked off the headband.

  “Five minutes.” He closed the door, locked it. “You owe me that much.”

  Relationships always sounded so physically painful: You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars? The problem with a marriage—or maybe its strength—was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later. If you weren’t, you wound up in your office with a boy fifteen years younger than you were, pouring his heart into your open hands.

  All right. If she was going to be honest, she had loved the way Seth knew what an anapest was, and a canzone. She loved seeing their reflection in a pane of glass as they passed a storefront and being surprised every time. She loved playing Scrabble on a rainy afternoon when she should have been grading papers or attending a departmental meeting. But just because she had called in sick that day didn’t mean she wasn’t still a professor. Just because she abandoned her family didn’t mean she wasn’t still a wife, a mother. Her biggest sin, when you got right down to it, was forgetting all that in the first place.

  “Seth,” she said, “I don’t know how to make this any easier. But—”

  She broke off, realizing the words she was about to say: But I love my husband.

  I always have.

  “We need to talk,” Seth said quietly. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and tossed a rolled newspaper onto the table.

  Laura had seen it. The front page chronicled the newly filed charge by the district attorney. Jason Underhill would be tried as an adult, due to the presence of date rape drugs in the victim’s bloodstream.

  “Ketamine,” Seth said.

  Laura blinked at him. From what the prosecutor had said, the drug found in Trixie’s system hadn’t even been one of the more popular date rape drugs. It hadn’t been listed in the newspaper, either. “How would you know that?”

  Seth sat down on the edge of her desk. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said.

  • • •

  “I’m coming!” Trixie yelled through the open door, as her father honked the horn for the third time. Jesus. It wasn’t like she wanted to go into town right now, and it wasn’t her fault that the pizza cheese he was using to cook dinner had grown enough mold to be classified as an antibiotic. She hadn’t been doing anything earth-shattering that she couldn’t interrupt, but it was the principle that was upsetting her: Neither parent felt comfortable letting Trixie out of sight.

  She stomped into the first pair of boots she could find and headed outside to his idling truck. “Can’t we just have soup?” Trixie said, slouching down in her seat, when what she really meant was: What will it take to make you trust me again?

  Her father put the truck into first gear to go down a long hill. “I know you want me to leave you home alone. But I hope you also know why I can’t do that.”

  Trixie rolled her eyes toward the window. “Whatever.”

  As they approached town, there was a glut of cars. People in bright parkas and scarves spilled across the street like a stream of confetti. Trixie felt her stomach turn over. “What’s the date?” she murmured. She’d seen the signs all over school: ICE = NICE. DON’T BE A SNOWFLAKE—COME TO WINTERFEST.

  Trixie shrank back in her seat as three girls she recognized from school came so close to the car they brushed the front bumper. Everyone came to the Winterfest. When she was little, her parents would take her to pat the sorry old reindeer idling near the camera store. She could remember seeing ordinary teachers and doctors and waitresses become Victorian carolers for a night. Last year, Trixie had been an elf along with Zephyr, the two of them wearing double layers of skating tights and handing out candy canes to the kids who sat on Santa’s lap.

  This year, walking down Main Street would be totally different. At first, no one would see her, because it was dark out. But then, someone would bump into her by accident. Sorry, they’d say, and then they’d realize who it was. They’d tap their friends. They would point. They’d lean close and whisper about how Trixie wasn’t wearing any makeup and how her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. Before she had made it to the other end of Main Street, their stares would have burned into the back of her coat like sunlight through a looking glass, starting a flash fire that reduced her to a pile of ashes.

  “Daddy,” she said, “can’t we just go home?”

  Her father glanced at her. He’d had to detour around Main Street and was now parked in a lot behind the grocery store. Trixie could see he was weighing the cost of reaching his destination against Trixie’s extreme discomfort. . . and factoring in her suicide attempt to boot. “You stay in the car,” her father conceded. “I’ll be right back.”

  Trixie nodded and watched him cross the parking lot. She closed her
eyes and counted to fifty. She listened to the sound of her own pulse.

  Yet as it turned out, what Trixie had thought she wanted most of all—being left alone—turned out to be absolutely terrifying. When the door of the car beside her slammed, she jumped. The headlights swept over her as the car backed out, and she ducked her face against the collar of her coat so that the driver couldn’t see.

  Her father had been gone for three minutes when she started to actively panic. It didn’t take much longer than that to buy some stupid cheese, did it? What if someone else came to this parking lot and saw her sitting there? How long before a crowd gathered, calling her a slut and a whore? Who would save her if they decided to pound on the windows, start a witch hunt, lynch her?

  She peered out the windshield. It would take fifteen seconds, tops, to make it to the door of the grocery store. By now her father would be in line. She might run into someone she knew there, but at least she wouldn’t be alone.

  Trixie got out of the car and started to race across the parking lot. She could see the buttery windows of the grocery mart and the line of wire shopping carts shivering against its outer wall.

  Someone was coming. She couldn’t see whether it was her father—the figure seemed big enough, but the streetlamp was behind him, obscuring the features. If it was her father, he’d see her first, Trixie realized. And if it wasn’t her father, then she was going to move past the stranger at the speed of light.

  But as Trixie broke into a sprint, she hit a patch of black ice and her feet gave out from underneath her. One leg twisted, and she could feel herself falling. The moment before her left hip struck the pavement, she was wrenched upright by the very person she’d been trying to avoid. “You okay?” he said, and she looked up to find Jason holding her upper arm.

  He let go almost as quickly as he’d grabbed her. Trixie’s mother had said that Jason couldn’t come near her, couldn’t cross paths with her—if he did, he’d be shipped off to a juvenile detention center before the trial. But either her mother had been wrong or Jason had forgotten, because he shook off whatever fear had made him release her and began advancing on her instead. He smelled like a distillery, and his voice was raw. “What did you tell them? What are you trying to do to me?”

  Trixie fought for breath. The cold was seeping through the back of her jeans and there was water in her boot where it had gone through the ice into a puddle. “I didn’t. . . I’m not . . .”

  “You have to tell them the truth,” Jason begged. “They don’t believe me.”

  This was news to Trixie and cut clean as a knife through her fear. If they didn’t believe Jason, and they didn’t believe her, who did they believe?

  He crouched in front of her, and that was all it took for Trixie to be whipped back to then. It was as if the rape was happening all over again, as if she couldn’t control a single inch of her own body.

  “Trixie,” Jason said.

  His hands on her thighs, as she tried to pull away.

  “You have to.”

  His body rising over hers, pinning her at the hips.

  “Now.”

  Now, he had said, throwing his head back as he pulled out and spilled hot across her belly. Now, he had said, but by then it was already too late.

  Trixie drew in a deep breath and screamed at the top of her lungs.

  Suddenly Jason wasn’t leaning over her anymore. Trixie glanced up to see him wrestling, trying to dodge her father’s punches. “Daddy!” she screamed. “Stop!”

  Her father turned, bleeding from a split lip. “Trixie, get in the car.”

  She didn’t get in the car. She scrambled away from their brawl and stood in the halo of the streetlamp, watching as her father—the same man who caught the spiders in her bedroom and carried them outside in a Dixie cup, the same man who had never in his life spanked her—pummeled Jason. She was horrified and fascinated all at once. It was like meeting someone she’d never seen before and finding out that all this time, he’d been living next door.

  The sound of flesh smacking flesh reminded Trixie of the blue-fish that got slapped hard against the docks in Portland by the fishermen, to still them before they were filleted. She covered her ears and looked down at the ground, at the plastic bag of shredded mozzarella that had fallen and been torn open under their boots during the fight.

  “If you ever,” her father panted, “ever . . .”

  He landed a punch to Jason’s gut.

  “ . . . ever come near my daughter again . . .”

  A blow across the right jaw.

  “I will kill you.” But just as he reared back his hand to strike again, a car drove past the parking lot, illuminating everything.

  • • •

  The last man Daniel had beaten up had already been dead. In the high school gym in Akiak, Daniel had slammed Cane against the floor, although his head already had a bullet hole in it. He’d done it because he wanted Cane to tell him to stop. He’d wanted Cane to sit up and take a swing back at him.

  The principal had tiptoed gingerly into this nightmare, absorbing Daniel’s sobs and the discarded rifle and the blood sprayed across the bleachers. Daniel, the principal had said, shocked. What did you do?

  Daniel had run, because he was faster than the principal and faster than the police. For a few days he was a murder suspect, and he liked that. If Daniel had meant to kill Cane, then he couldn’t feel as guilty about not keeping it from happening.

  By the time he left town, the rumors surrounding Daniel had died down. Everyone knew it was Cane’s hunting rifle, and Daniel’s fingerprints hadn’t been on it. Cane had not left a suicide note—that was rare, in the village—but he’d left his basketball jersey on the table for his little sister. Daniel had been cleared as a suspect, but he left Alaska anyway. It wasn’t that he’d been scared of his future; it was that he couldn’t see one, period.

  Every now and then, he still woke up with one thought caught like cotton on the roof of his mouth: Dead men don’t bruise.

  Tonight, he’d been stuck behind an old woman paying with pennies at the grocery mart. The whole time, he was second-guessing himself. At first, after the suicide attempt, Trixie had been distant and silent, but over the past few days her personality would bob to the surface every now and then. However, the minute they’d reached town, Trixie had gone still and blank—a relapse. Daniel hadn’t wanted to leave her alone in the car but couldn’t stand the thought of forcing her to leave that safety zone either. How long could it take to buy a single item? He’d hurried into the store, thinking only of Trixie and getting her back home as quickly as possible.

  It was when he’d stepped under the streetlamp that he’d seen it: that bastard’s hand on his daughter’s arm.

  For someone who has never given himself over to rage, it would be hard to understand. But for Daniel, it felt like shrugging on an old, soft suede coat that had been buried so deep in his closet he was certain it had long ago been given away to someone else who needed the cover. Lucid thought gave way to utter feeling. His body started to burn; his own anger buzzed in his ears. He saw through a crimson haze, he tasted his own blood, and still he knew he could not stop. As he gloried in the scrape of his knuckles and the adrenaline that kept him one step ahead, Daniel began to remember who he used to be.

  Every brawl with a bully in Akiak, every fistfight with a drunk outside a bar, every window he’d smashed to get inside a locked door—it was as if Daniel had stepped completely outside his body and was watching the tornado that had taken up residence there instead. In the ferocity, he lost himself, which was what he’d hoped for all along.

  By the time he was finished, Jason was shaking so hard that Daniel knew only his own hand at the boy’s throat was keeping him upright. “If you ever . . . ever come near my daughter again,” Daniel said, “I will kill you.”

  He stared at Jason, trying to commit to memory the way the boy looked when he knew he was defeated, because Daniel wanted to see it on his face again on the day they
handed down a verdict in the courtroom. He drew back his arm, focusing his sights on the spot just under the boy’s jaw—the spot where a good, strong blow would knock him unconscious—when suddenly the high beams of an oncoming car washed over him.

  It was the opportunity Jason needed to throw Daniel off balance. He pushed away and took off at a dead run. Daniel blinked, his concentration shattered. Now that it was over, he could not stop his hands from trembling. He turned to the truck, where he’d told Trixie to wait, and he opened the door. “I’m sorry you had to see—” Daniel said, breaking off as he realized his daughter wasn’t there.

  “Trixie!” he yelled, searching the parking lot. “Trixie, where are you?”

  It was too goddamned dark—Daniel couldn’t see—so he started running up and down the aisles among the cars. Could Trixie have been so upset, watching him turn into an animal, that she’d been willing to jump from the frying pan into the fire, to get as far away from him as possible, even if that meant she’d have to run into town?

  Daniel started sprinting down Main Street, calling for her. Frantic passed for festive in the dark. He pushed aside knots of carolers and divided families joined together at the hands. He barreled into a table with a sugar-on-snow display, kids rolling long strings of candied maple syrup around popsicle sticks. He climbed onto a sidewalk bench so that he could tower over the milling crowd and look around.

  There were hundreds of people, and Trixie wasn’t one of them.

  He headed back to his car. It was possible that she had gone home, although it would take her a while to cover the four-mile distance on foot, in the snow. He could take his truck and start searching . . . but what if she hadn’t left town? What if she came back looking for him, and he wasn’t here?

  Then again, what if she’d started home, and Jason found her first?

  He reached into the glove compartment and fumbled for his cell phone. No one answered at the house. After a hesitation, he called Laura’s office.

  Last time he’d done this, she hadn’t answered.

  When she picked up on the first ring, Daniel’s knees buckled with relief. “Trixie’s missing.”