The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Just as suddenly as all the activity had arrived, there was nobody on the bank of the river. Trixie looked north, but she couldn’t see Finn Hanlon and his team anymore. She looked south, but she couldn’t tell where she and Willie had come from. The sun had climbed almost directly overhead, washing out the ice so that it made her eyes burn even to pick out the trail from the field of white.

  Trixie sank down beside Juno on the straw and scratched the dog’s head with her glove. The husky stared up at her with one brown eye and one blue, and when he panted, it looked like he was smiling. Trixie imagined what it was like to be a sled dog, to have to pull your weight or realize you’d be left behind. She pictured how it would feel to trust your instincts in a strange land, to know the difference between where you had been and where you were going.

  • • •

  When the river froze in the winter, it got its own highway number, and at any given time you would see rusted trucks and dogsled teams driving over the ice in no particular direction or parallel course. Like most Yup’ik Eskimos, Nelson didn’t believe in a helmet or goggles; to brace himself against the wind on the old man’s snow machine, Daniel had to crouch down close to the windshield. Laura sat behind him, her face buried against the back of his coat.

  In the middle of the river was a stationary white truck. As Daniel slowed the snow-go, he could feel Laura relax—she was freezing, even if she wasn’t complaining. “This must be a checkpoint,” he said, and he got off the machine with his thighs still thrumming from the power of the engine.

  A dreadlocked white woman unrolled the driver’s side window. “Kingurauten Joseph, for the love of God, go pass out in someone else’s backyard.”

  Kingurauten was Yup’ik for too late. Daniel pulled down the neck warmer that covered his nose and mouth. “I think you’ve got me confused with someone else,” he began, and then realized that he knew the woman in the truck. “Daisy?” he said hesitantly.

  Crazy Daisy, that was what they’d called her when she used to run the mail out to the native villages by dogsled back when Daniel was a kid. She frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Daniel Stone,” he said. “Annette Stone’s son.”

  “That wasn’t the name of Annette’s kid. He was—”

  “Wassilie,” Daniel finished.

  Daisy scratched her scalp. “Didn’t you bug out of here because—”

  “Nah,” Daniel lied. “I just left for college.” It was common knowledge that Crazy Daisy had gotten that way by running with Timothy Leary’s crowd in the sixties, and that she’d pretty much fried the functioning parts of her brain. “Did you happen to see a snow-go pass by here with a kass’aq girl and a Yup’ik boy?”

  “This morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  Daisy shook her head. “Nope. Sorry.” She jerked her thumb toward the back of the truck. “You want to come in and warm up? I got coffee and Snickers bars.”

  “Can’t,” Daniel said, lost in thought. If Trixie hadn’t come past Akiak, then how had he missed her on the trail?

  “Maybe later,” Daisy yelled, as he turned the ignition on the snow machine again. “I’d love to catch up.”

  Daniel pretended not to hear her. But as he circled around the truck, Daisy started waving like a madwoman, trying to get his attention. “No one’s passed by this morning,” she said, “but a girl and boy came through last night, before the storm hit.”

  Daniel didn’t answer, just gunned the engine and drove up the riverbank into Akiak, the town he’d run away from fifteen years earlier. The Washeteria—the place they’d gone with their laundry and for showers—was now a convenience store and video rental shop. The school was still a squat, serviceable gray building; the house beside it where he’d grown up had two dogs staked out front. Daniel wondered who lived there now, if it was still the schoolteacher, if she had children. If basketballs still sometimes started to bounce in the gymnasium without being set in motion, if the last one to lock up the school building ever saw the old principal who’d killed himself, still hanging from the crossbeam in the only classroom.

  He stopped in front of the house next door to the school, a shack with a slight pedigree. A snow-go sat in front of the building, and an aluminum boat peeked out from beneath a blue tarp. Paper snow-flakes had been taped to the windows, as well as a red metallic crucifix. “Why are we stopping?” Laura asked. “What about Trixie?”

  He got off the snow machine and turned to her. “You’re not coming with me.”

  She wasn’t used to this kind of cold, and he couldn’t slow down for her and risk losing Trixie for good. And a part of him wanted to be alone when he found Trixie. There was so much he needed to explain.

  Laura stared at him, struck dumb. Her eyebrows had frosted over, her eyelashes were matted together with ice, and when she finally spoke, her sentence rose like a white banner between them. “Please don’t do this,” she said, starting to cry. “Take me with you.”

  Daniel pulled her into his arms, assuming that Laura thought this was a punishment, retribution for leaving him behind when she had her affair. It made her seem vulnerable; it made him remember how easy it was for them to still hurt each other. “If we had to walk through hell to find Trixie, I’d follow you. But this is a different kind of hell, and I’m the one who knows where he’s going. I’m asking you . . . I’m begging you to trust me.”

  Laura opened her mouth, and what might have been a reply came out only as a smoke ring full of what she could not say. Trust was exactly what they no longer had between them. “I can go faster if I don’t have to worry about you,” he said.

  Daniel saw true fear in her eyes. “You’ll come back?” she asked.

  “We both will.”

  Laura glanced around at the rutted street with snow-go tracks, at the public water receptacles at the base of the street. The community was silent, windswept, frigid. It looked, Daniel knew, like a dead end.

  “Come with me.” He led Laura up the set of wooden stairs and opened the door without knocking, entering a little antechamber. There were plastic bags stuck on nails in the frame overhead, and stacks of newspaper. A pair of boots toppled to the right, and a tanned hide was stretched on the back wall, beside the door that led into the house. Lying on the linoleum was a severed moose hoof and a half rack of frozen ribs.

  Laura stepped hesitantly over them. “Is this . . . is this where you used to live?”

  The interior door opened, revealing a Yup’ik woman about sixty years old, holding an infant in her arms. She took one look at Daniel and backed away, her eyes bright with tears.

  “Not me,” Daniel said. “Cane.”

  • • •

  Charles and Minnie Johnson, the parents of Daniel’s one and only childhood friend, treated him with the same sort of deference they might have given any other ghost who sat down at their kitchen table to share a cup of coffee. Charles’s skin was as dark and lined as a cinnamon stick; he wore creased jeans and a red western shirt and called Daniel Wass. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, as if life were something poured into a body, a vessel that could hold only so much before memories floated across the windows of consciousness.

  “It’s been a long time,” Charles said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been living Outside?”

  “With my family.”

  There was a long silence. “We wondered when you’d come home,” Minnie said.

  The Yupiit did not speak of the dead, and because of that, neither would Daniel. But he had less practice with silence. In a Yup’ik household, ten minutes might pass between a question and the answer. Sometimes you didn’t even have to reply out loud; it was enough to be thinking your response.

  They sat around the kitchen table in the quiet, until a young woman walked through the front door. She was clearly Minnie’s daughter—they had the same wide smile and smooth hickory skin—but Daniel remembered her only as a young girl who liked to story-knife—using a butter knife in
the soft mud to illustrate the tales she’d tell. Now, though, she held in her arms her own fat, squirming baby, who took one look at Laura and pointed at her and laughed.

  “Sorry,” Elaine said shyly. “He’s never seen anyone with that color hair before.” She unwound her scarf and unzipped her coat, then did the same for the baby.

  “Elaine, this is Wass,” Charles said. “He lived here a long time ago.”

  Daniel stood at the introduction, and when he did, the baby reached for him. He grinned, catching the boy as he twisted out of his mother’s arms. “And who’s this?”

  “My son,” Elaine said. “His name’s Cane.”

  • • •

  Elaine lived in the same house as her parents, along with her two older children and her husband. So did her sister Aurora, who was seventeen years old and heavily pregnant. There was a brother, too, in his late twenties; Laura could see him in the only bedroom in the house, feverishly playing Nintendo.

  On the kitchen table was a hunk of frozen meat in a bowl—if Laura had to guess, she would have said it was intimately related to the moose parts in the arctic entry. There was a stove but no sink. Instead, a fifty-five-gallon drum in the corner of the kitchen area was filled with water. Dusty ice-fishing lures and antique hand-carved kayak paddles were suspended from the ceiling; five-gallon buckets filled with lard and dried fish were stacked beside the threadbare couch. The walls were covered with religious paraphernalia: programs from church services, plaques of Jesus and Mary, calendars printed with the feast days of saints. Anywhere there was a spare square of paneling, a photograph had been tacked: recent pictures of the baby, old school portraits of Elaine and Aurora and their brother, the boy Daniel had been accused of murdering.

  There was a curious irony to being left behind here, even if the very thought of it made Laura break into a sweat. She kept remembering what Daniel had said about the Alaskan bush: It was a place where people tended to disappear. What did that bode for Trixie, or for Daniel? And what might it mean for Laura herself?

  In Maine, when Laura’s life had been jolted off course, it had been terrifying and unfamiliar. Here, though, she had no standard for comparison—and not knowing what came next was the norm. She didn’t know why no one would look her in the eye, why the boy playing video games hadn’t come out to introduce himself, why they even had state-of-the-art video equipment when the house itself was little more than a shed, why a family that at one point had believed you’d killed their son would welcome you into their home. The world had been turned inside out, and she was navigating by the feel of its seams.

  Daniel was speaking quietly to Charles, telling him about Trixie. “Excuse me,” Laura said, leaning toward Minnie. “Could I use your restroom?”

  Minnie pointed down the hall. At its end was a flattened cardboard refrigerator box, erected like a screen. “Laura,” Daniel said, getting to his feet.

  “I’m fine!” she said, because she thought if she could make Daniel believe it, then maybe he’d convince her of it as well. She slipped behind the screen, and her jaw dropped. There was no bathroom; there wasn’t even a toilet. Only a white bucket—like the ones in the living room that stored dried fish—with a toilet seat balanced on top of it.

  She peeled off her ski pants and squatted, holding her breath the whole time, praying nobody was listening. When Laura and Daniel had moved in together, there had still been a certain shyness between them. After all, she was pregnant, and that had speeded along a relationship that might have otherwise taken years to reach that level of commitment. Laura could remember Daniel separating his laundry from hers for the first few months, for example. And she had studiously avoided going to the bathroom if Daniel happened to be in there taking a shower.

  She couldn’t recall when, exactly, all their shirts and jeans and underwear had mixed in the washer together. Or when she’d been able to pee while he was two feet away from her, brushing his teeth. It was simply what happened when the histories of two people dovetailed into one.

  Laura straightened her clothes—washing her hands wasn’t even an option—and stepped out from behind the partition. Daniel was waiting for her in the narrow hallway. “I should have warned you about the honey bucket.”

  She thought of how Daniel couldn’t bear to run the dishwasher if it wasn’t overflowing, how his showers lasted less than five minutes. She’d always considered it thrifty; now she saw that when you grew up with water as a luxury and plumbing a distant wish, it might simply be a habit too deeply rooted to break.

  “I need to get going,” Daniel said.

  Laura nodded. She wanted to smile at him, but she couldn’t find it in herself. So much could happen between now and the next time she saw him. She wrapped her arms around Daniel and buried her face against his chest.

  He led her into the kitchen, where he shook Charles’s hand and spoke in Yup’ik: “Quyana. Piurra.”

  When Daniel walked into the arctic entry, Laura followed. She stood at the front door, watching him start the snow machine and climb aboard. He lifted one hand, a farewell, and mouthed words he knew she would not hear over the roar of the engine.

  I love you.

  “I love you, too,” Laura murmured, but by then, all that remained of Daniel was what he’d left behind: a trail of exhaust, hatched tracks in the snow, and a truth neither of them had spoken for some time.

  • • •

  Bartholemew stared at the sheet of results that Skipper Johanssen had given him. “How sure are you?” he asked.

  Skipper shrugged. “As sure as this particular typing can be. One-hundredth of one percent of the world’s population has the same mito DNA profile as your suspect. You’re talking about six hundred thousand people, any of whom could have been at the scene of the crime.”

  “But that also suggests that ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the population wasn’t there.”

  “Correct. At least not based on that piece of hair you found on the victim.”

  Bartholemew stared at her. “And Trixie Stone doesn’t fall into that ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent?”

  “Nope.”

  “So I can’t exclude Trixie Stone.”

  “Not mitochondrially speaking.”

  The odds were looking better, when you glanced at them from this angle, Bartholemew thought. “Even though Max said—”

  “No insult to Max, but no court is going to put stock in an analysis done by the human eye, as compared to a validated scientific test like mine.” Skipper smiled at him. “I think,” she said, “you’ve got yourself a suspect.”

  • • •

  The Johnsons were addicted to the Game Show Network. They especially liked Richard Dawson, who kissed anything on two legs while hosting Family Feud. “One day,” Minnie kept saying, elbowing her husband, “I’m gonna run away with Richard.”

  “He’ll run, all right, when he sees you coming after him.” Charles laughed.

  They had a satellite dish, a flat-screen TV, a PlayStation and a GameCube, as well as a DVD/VCR player and a stereo system that would have put Laura’s own to shame. Roland, the antisocial brother, had bought all the equipment with his check this year from the Alaska Permanent Fund—the dividends on oil that every Alaskan was paid by the government since 1984. The Johnsons had lived the entire year on the $1,100 of Charles’s check alone, supplemented by hunting expeditions for caribou and dried salmon caught during the summer at fish camp. Roland had told her that Akiak residents could even get wireless Internet for free—they qualified for government-funded technology because they were both rural and native—but that no one could afford it. A person had to have a computer first, which would cost nearly a whole year’s Permanent Fund check.

  When Laura had had her fill of Richard Dawson, she put on her coat and walked outside. On a telephone pole, someone had nailed a basketball hoop; the ball itself was half buried in a hummock of snow. She pulled it free and bounced it, amazed at how the sound echoed. Here there were no lawn mow
ers or blaring radios or rap music. No slamming of SUV doors, no clatter of kids spilling out of a school bus, no hum from a nearby highway. It was the sort of place where you could hear the tumblers of your mind falling into place as you pieced thought together, as you tried to match it to action.

  Although Laura knew without a doubt that Trixie had not murdered Jason, she didn’t understand what had made her daughter run away. Was Trixie just scared? Or did she know more about what had happened that night than she’d let on?

  Laura wondered if it was possible to run away forever. Daniel had certainly managed to do it. She knew that his childhood had been foreign, but she never could have envisioned something as stark as this. If she’d believed that there was a vast dichotomy between the man she’d met in college and the one she lived with now—well, there was an even greater gap between who Daniel had been when she met him and where he had started. It made Laura wonder where all of Daniel’s jettisoned personalities had gone. It made her wonder if you could know a person only at a single moment in time, because a year from now or a day from now, he might be different. It made her wonder if everyone reinvented himself or herself, if that was as natural as other animals shedding skin.

  If she was going to be honest now—and wasn’t it time for that, already?—Laura would have to admit that Trixie had changed, too. She had wanted to believe that behind that closed bedroom door, her daughter was still playing God with the denizens of her doll-house; but in fact Trixie had been keeping secrets, and pushing boundaries, and turning into someone Laura didn’t recognize.

  On the other hand, Daniel had been keeping a vigil for Trixie’s metamorphosis. He’d been so nervous about the thought of their daughter getting older, taking on the world, being flattened by it. As it turned out, though, Trixie had grown up during the one instant Daniel had turned away, momentarily distracted by his wife’s betrayal.