by Jodi Picoult
“What?” He could hear the bright blue edge of panic in Laura’s voice.
“We’re in town . . . she was in the car waiting . . .” He was not making any sense, and he knew it.
“Where are you?”
“In the lot behind the grocery store.”
“I’m on my way.”
When the line went dead, Daniel slipped the phone into his coat pocket. Maybe Trixie would try to call him. He stood up and tried to replay the fight with Jason, but he could not dissect it: It could have been three minutes, it could have been thirty. Trixie might have run off at the first punch or after the last. He had been so single-minded about wanting to do harm that he’d lost sight of his daughter while she was still standing in front of him.
“Please,” he whispered to a God he’d given up on years ago. “Please let her be all right.”
Suddenly a movement in the distance caught his eye. He turned to see a shadow crossing behind the brush at the far end of the parking lot. Daniel stepped out of the circle of light thrown by the street-lamp and walked toward the spot where he’d seen the dark overlap itself. “Trixie,” he called. “Is that you?”
• • •
Jason Underhill stood with his hands braced on the wooden railing of the trestle bridge, trying to see if the river had completely iced over yet. His face hurt like hell from where Trixie’s father had beaten the crap out of him, his ribs throbbed, and he didn’t have any idea how he was going to explain his battered face in the morning without revealing that he’d broken the conditions of his bail and interacted with not one but two members of the Stone family.
If they were going to try him as an adult, did that affect the rest? Once they found out that he’d approached Trixie, would he get sent to a real jail, instead of just some juvy facility?
Maybe it didn’t matter, anyway. Bethel Academy didn’t want him to play next year. His hopes to go professional one day were as good as dead. And why? Because he’d been considerate that night at Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein’s house and had gone back to make sure that Trixie was all right.
Three weeks ago, he had been the number one ranked high school hockey player in the state of Maine. He had a 3.7 grade point average and a penchant for hat tricks, and even kids who didn’t know him pretended they did. He could have had his pick of high school girls and maybe even some from the local college, but he’d been stupid enough to fall for Trixie Stone: a human black hole who camouflaged herself as a girl with a heart so clear you might look at it and see yourself.
He was seventeen, and his life was as good as over.
Jason stared at the ice beneath the bridge. If his trial started before the spring came . . . If he lost . . . how long would it be before he saw the river running again?
He leaned down, his elbows on the wooden railing, and pretended that he could see it now.
• • •
Daniel was sitting underneath the streetlamp when Laura came running up to him. “Did she come back?”
“No,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. “And she’s not answering, if she’s at the house.”
“Okay,” Laura said, pacing in a tight circle. “Okay.”
“It’s not okay. I got into a fight with Jason Underhill. He had his hands on her. And I . . . I. . . I snapped. I beat him up, Laura. Trixie saw every minute of it.” Daniel took a deep breath. “Maybe we should call Bartholemew.”
Laura shook her head. “If you call the police, you have to tell them you were fighting with Jason,” she said flatly. “That’s assault, Daniel. People get arrested for it.”
Daniel fell silent, thinking of his previous encounter with Jason—the one in the woods, with a knife. As far as he knew, the boy hadn’t said anything to anyone about it. But if it came out that Daniel had beaten him up, that other incident was bound to surface.
And it wasn’t just assault—it qualified as kidnapping, too.
He turned to Laura. “So what do we do?”
She stepped closer, the light from the lamp falling over her shoulders like a cloak. “We find her ourselves,” she said.
• • •
Laura ran into the house, calling for Trixie, but there was no answer. Shaking, she walked into the dark kitchen, still wearing her coat. She turned on the tap and splashed cold water on her face.
This couldn’t have happened.
She and Daniel had plotted a strategy: He would search the streets for Trixie, while Laura went home in case she showed up. You need to calm down, she told herself. This is all going to work out.
When the phone rang, she grabbed it. Trixie. But in the moment it took for her to bring the receiver to her ear, she had another thought—what if it was the police?
Laura swallowed. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Stone . . . this is Zephyr. Is Trixie there? I’ve got to talk to her.”
“Zephyr,” she repeated. “No. Trixie’s not—Have you seen her tonight?”
“Me? Um. No.”
“Well.” Laura closed her eyes. “I’ll tell her you called,” she said. She hung up the phone, sat down at the kitchen table, and steeled herself to wait for whatever came next.
• • •
Every summer, traveling fairs came through Maine. They arrived in caravans that popped open to reveal the baseball throw, the ringtoss, the balloon darts. A massive white truck unfolded, like a sleeping deer getting to its feet, to turn into the Tilt-A-Whirl; another transformed into the Indiana Jones Adventure House. There were kiddie rides—hot-air balloons that never left the ground, giant frogs with pink plaster tongues that chased flies in small circles, a carousel fit for a princess. But the ride Trixie looked forward to, year after year, was the Dragon Coaster.
The roller coaster had the enormous painted head of a Chinese New Year’s dragon, five cars, and then an arched tail with gold curlicues painted on it. It mutated from one of those folding trucks: a tight loop of steel track that swung into a waystation. The carney who ran the coaster had a long, thin ponytail and so many tattoos on his arms that you had to get close to see they weren’t just sleeves.
Trixie always tried to get the first car, the one that put you behind the dragon’s mouth. For a kiddie ride, the roller coaster was surprisingly fast, and the front car was quicker than any other—you whipped harder around the corners. You lurched to a more jarring stop.
The summer Trixie was eleven, she climbed into the front car as usual and realized something was wrong. She couldn’t pull the safety bar down over her knees. She had to turn sideways and jam herself along the side of the car. Trixie was convinced that this wasn’t the same roller coaster—that they’d gotten an upgrade and skimped on the proportions—but the carney said nothing had changed.
He was lying. She knew this, because even as he said it, and pushed his ponytail out of the way, he was staring at the writing on her T-shirt: BETHEL FARM “A” SOFTBALL scrawled across her chest.
Until that moment, Trixie had been looking forward to going to middle school and the privileges that came with it. She’d held the word adolescent on her tongue, enjoying the way it fizzed like a bath bomb. Until then, she hadn’t considered that there was a tradeoff, that she might not fit anymore in places where she’d been comfortable.
The next summer, when Trixie was twelve, she got dropped off at the fair with Zephyr. Instead of going on the rides, they bought an onion blossom and trolled through the crowd to find kids they knew.
Trixie was thinking about all this as she stood, shivering, in front of the Bank of Bethel. It was midnight, now, and the Winterfest was a memory. The police barriers blocking Main Street had been removed; the Christmas lights had been unplugged. The trash cans were stuffed with paper cups, plastic cider jugs, and broken candy canes.
The bank had a large mirrored window that had always fascinated Trixie. These days, when she passed by, she’d check herself out, or look to see if anyone else was doing the same. But as a kid, the mirror had taken her by surprise. For years she kept the secret fr
om her parents that there was a girl in Bethel who looked exactly like her.
In the reflection, Trixie watched her father approach. She looked at him or, really, at the twin of him, standing beside the twin of her. The moment he touched her, it was as if a spell had broken. She could barely stand on her feet, she was that tired.
He caught her as she swayed. “Let’s go home,” he said, and he lifted her into his arms.
Trixie rested her head on his shoulder. She watched the stars shimmer and wink in patterns, an alphabet everyone else seemed to know but that she could not for the life of her read.
• • •
Laura’s car was in the driveway when Daniel came back. That had been the plan: She’d drive back home and wait in the house, in case Trixie had made her way home. Daniel would walk the streets of Bethel, in case she hadn’t. Trixie was sound asleep when he carried her out of the truck and brought her up to her bedroom. There, he unlaced her boots and unzipped her parka. He thought for a moment about helping her into pajamas but instead drew the covers up over Trixie, fully clothed.
When he stood up, Laura was standing in the doorway. Seeing Trixie, her eyes were wide, her face as white as chalk. “Oh, Daniel,” she whispered, guessing the worst. “Something happened.”
“Nothing happened,” Daniel said softly, putting his arms around her.
Laura—who always seemed to know the right thing to do and the right thing to say—was at a complete loss. She wrapped her arms around Daniel’s waist and burst into tears. He led her into the darkened hallway and closed Trixie’s bedroom door so that she wouldn’t be disturbed. “She’s home,” he said, forcing a smile, even though he could see the scrapes on his knuckles, could feel the bruises that bloomed beneath his skin. “That’s all that counts.”
• • •
The next morning, Daniel assessed the damage in the bathroom mirror. His lip was split; he had a shiner on his right temple; the knuckles of his right hand were swollen and raw. But that inventory didn’t even begin to address the harm done to his relationship with his daughter. Because she’d fallen asleep, exhausted, Daniel still hadn’t had the chance to explain what had happened to him last night, what beast he’d turned into.
He washed his face and toweled it dry. How did you go about explaining to your daughter—the victim of a rape, for God’s sake—that violence in a man was like energy: transformed, but never destroyed? How did you tell a girl who was trying so hard to start fresh that you couldn’t ever obliterate your past?
It was going to be one of those days when the temperature didn’t climb above zero. He could tell, just by the bone-deep chill of the floorboards on his bare feet when he went downstairs and the way the icicles pointed like arrows from the outside overhang of the kitchen window. Trixie was standing at the refrigerator, wearing flannel pajama bottoms, a T-shirt that had gone missing from Daniel’s own dresser, and a blue bathrobe that no longer fit. Her wrists and hands stuck out too far from the sleeves as she reached for the orange juice.
Laura glanced up from the table, where she was poring intently over the newspaper—looking, Daniel assumed, for a story about his brawl with Jason last night. “Morning,” Daniel said hesitantly. Their eyes met, and they passed an entire conversation without speaking a word: How is she? Did she say anything? Do I treat this as an ordinary day? Do I pretend last night never happened?
Daniel cleared his throat. “Trixie . . . we have to talk.”
Trixie didn’t look at him. She unscrewed the Tropicana and began to pour some into a glass. “We’re out of orange juice,” she said.
The telephone rang. Laura stood up to answer it and carried the receiver into the living room that adjoined the kitchen.
Daniel sank down into the seat his wife had vacated and watched Trixie at the counter. He loved her, and in return she’d trusted him—and her reward was to see him turn into an animal before her eyes. It wasn’t all that different, really, from what she must have experienced during the rape—and that alone was enough to make Daniel hate himself.
Laura came back into the room and hung up the phone. She moved stiffly, her features frozen.
“Who was it?” Daniel asked.
Laura shook her head, covered her hand with her mouth.
“Laura,” he pressed.
“Jason Underhill committed suicide last night,” she whispered.
Trixie shook the empty container. “We’re out of orange juice,” she repeated.
• • •
In the bathroom, Trixie ran the hot water for fifteen minutes before she stepped into the shower, letting the small space fill with enough steam that she wouldn’t have to see her reflection in the mirror. The news had taken up residence in their house, and now, in the aftermath, nobody seemed to know what to do. Her mother had slipped out of the kitchen like a ghost. Her father sank down at the table with his head in his hands, his eyes squeezed shut. Distracted, he didn’t notice when Trixie left. Neither parent was around to see her disappear into her bathroom or to ask her to leave the door wide open, as they had for the past week, so that they could check up on her.
What would be the point?
There would be no rape trial anymore. There was no need to make sure she didn’t wind up in a mental hospital before she took the stand as a witness. She could go as crazy as she wanted to. She could secure herself a berth in a psych ward for the next thirty years, every minute of which she could spend thinking about what she’d done.
There was one Bic razor hidden away. It had fallen behind a crack in the sink cabinet and Trixie made sure to keep it there, in case of emergency. Now she fished for it and set it on the counter. She smacked it hard with a plastic bottle of bath gel, until the pink caddy cracked and the blade slipped out. She ran the tip of her finger over the edge, felt the skin peel back in an onion fold.
She thought about what it used to feel like when Jason kissed her, and she’d breathe in air that he’d breathed a moment before. She tried to imagine what it was like to not breathe anymore, ever. She thought of his head snapping back when her father hit him, of the last words he had said to her.
Trixie pulled off her pajamas and stepped into the shower. She crouched in the tub and let the water sluice over her. She cried great, damp, gray sobs that no one could hear over the roar of the plumbing, and she carved at her arm—not to kill herself, because she didn’t deserve such an easy way out—just to release some of the pain before it exploded inside her. She cut three lines and a circle, inside the crook of her elbow:
NO.
Blood swirled pink between her feet. She looked down at her tattoo. Then she lifted the blade and slashed hatch marks through the letters, a grid of gashes, until not even Trixie could remember what she’d been trying to say.
5
When Jason Underhill’s ghost showed up that night, Trixie was expecting him. He was transparent and white faced, with a gash in the back of his skull. She stared through him and pretended not to notice that he had materialized out of nowhere.
He was the first person Trixie knew who’d died. Technically, that wasn’t quite accurate—her grandmother had died in Alaska when Trixie was four, but Trixie had never met her. She remembered her father sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone still in his hand even though the person on the other end had hung up, and silence landing on the house like a fat black crow.
Jason kept glancing at the ground, as if he needed to keep track of his footsteps. Trixie tried not to look at the bruises on his face or the blood on his collar. “I’m not scared of you,” she said, although she was not telling the truth. “You can’t do anything to me.” She wondered if ghosts had the powers of superheroes, if they could see through linen and flannel to spot her legs shaking, if they could swallow her words and spit her lie back out like a bullet.
Jason leaned so close that his hand went right through Trixie. It felt like winter. He was able to draw her forward, as if he were magnetic and she had dissolved into a thousand metal filing
s. Pulling her upright in her bed, he kissed her full on the mouth. He tasted of dark soil and muddy currents. I’m not through with you, Jason vowed, and then he disappeared bit by bit, the pressure against her lips the last thing to go.
Afterward, Trixie lay in bed, shaking. She thought about the bitter cold that had taken up residence under her breastbone, like a second heart made of ice. She thought about what Jason had said and wondered why he’d had to die before he felt the same way she had felt about him all along.
• • •
Mike Bartholemew crouched in front of the boot prints that led up to the railing of the bridge from which Jason had jumped, a cryptic choreography of the boy’s last steps. Placing a ruler next to the best boot print, he took a digital photo. Then he lifted an aerosol can and sprayed light layers of red wax over the area. The wax froze the snow, so that when he took the mixture of dental stone and water he’d prepared to make a cast, it wouldn’t melt any of the ridge details.
While he waited for his cast to dry, he hiked down the slippery bank to the spot being combed by crime scene investigators. In his own tenure as a detective, he’d presided over two suicides in this very spot, one of the few in Bethel where you could actually fall far enough to do serious damage.
Jason Underhill had landed on his side. His head had cracked the ice on the river and was partially submerged. His hand was covered with dirt and matted leaves. The snow was still stained pink with blood that had pooled beneath his head.
For all intents and purposes, Jason had done the taxpayers a favor by saving them the cost of a trial and possible incarceration. Being tried as an adult for rape made the stakes higher—and more potentially devastating. Bartholemew had seen lesser motives that led folks to take their own lives.
He knelt beside Jerry, one of the forensic cops. “What have you got?”
“Maria DeSantos, only seventy degrees colder.”
Maria DeSantos had been their last suicide plunger in this location, but she had been missing for three weeks in the heat of the summer before the stench of the decomposing body had attracted a kayaker on the river.