The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  “Trixie?” her father said. “Is that you?”

  8

  In the middle of the Alaskan tundra, staring at a daughter he could barely recognize, Daniel thought back to the moment he’d known that everything between him and Trixie was bound to change.

  It was, like so many of those minutes between a father and a little girl, unremarkable. The season might have been summertime, or it could have been fall. They might have been bundled up in winter coats, or wearing flip-flops. They could have been heading to make a deposit at the bank, or leaving the bookstore. What stuck in Daniel’s mind was the street—a busy one, in the middle of town—and the fact that he was walking down it with Trixie, holding her hand.

  She was seven. Her hair was French-braided—badly, he’d never quite gotten the hang of that—and she was trying not to walk on the breaks in the sidewalk. They reached the intersection, and like always, Daniel reached for Trixie’s hand.

  She very deliberately slipped it free and stepped away from him before she looked both ways and crossed by herself.

  It was a hairline crack, one you might never have noticed, except for the fact that it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon between them. A child’s job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?

  This time, instead of a busy street, Trixie had crossed an entire country by herself. She stood in front of Daniel, bundled in an oversized canvas coat, with a wool cap pulled over her head. Beside her was a Yup’ik boy with hair that kept falling into his eyes.

  Daniel didn’t know what was more shocking: seeing a girl he’d once carried on his shoulders and tucked into bed and wondering if she’d committed murder, or realizing that he’d hide in the Alaskan bush with Trixie for the rest of his life if that was what it took to keep her from being arrested.

  “Daddy . . .?” Trixie launched herself into his arms.

  Daniel felt a shudder work down his spine; relief, when you came right down to it, was not all that different from fear. “You,” he said to the boy who stood a distance apart, watching them with a guarded expression. “Who are you?”

  “Willie Moses.”

  “Can I borrow your rig?” Daniel tossed him the keys to the snow-go, a trade.

  The boy looked at Trixie as if he was about to speak, but then he dropped his gaze and walked to the snow machine. Daniel heard the lion’s growl of its engine, and the high-pitched whine as it sped away, and then led Trixie to the truck. Like most Alaskan vehicles, this one would never have passed inspection in the lower forty-eight. It was rusted clean through on the side panels; its speedometer was stuck at 88 mph, and first gear didn’t work at all. But the light over the rearview mirror did, and Daniel turned that on to scrutinize his daughter.

  With the exception of dark circles under her eyes, she seemed to be all right. Daniel reached up and pulled off her wool cap, revealing a sleek cap of black hair. “Oh,” she said when his eyes widened. “I forgot about that.”

  Daniel slid across the bench seat and pulled her into his arms. God, was there anything more solid, more right, than knowing your child was where she ought to be? “Trixie,” he said, “you scared the hell out of me.”

  He felt her grab a fistful of his coat. He had a thousand questions for her, but one sprang to the surface first, the one that he couldn’t help but ask. “Why here?”

  “Because,” Trixie murmured, “you said it’s where people disappear.”

  Daniel drew away from her slowly. “Why did you want to?”

  Her eyes filled with tears, until finally one spilled over and ran to the point of her chin. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Daniel held on to her, as her thin body started to shake. “I didn’t do what everyone thinks . . .”

  Daniel threw his head back and winged a prayer to a God he’d never quite believed in: Thank you.

  “I wanted him back. I didn’t really want to fool around like Zephyr told me to, but I was willing to do anything if it got things back to the way it was before Jason broke up with me.” She swallowed hard. “When everyone left, he was so nice at first, I thought maybe it had worked. But then everything started happening so fast. I wanted to talk, and he didn’t. When he started . . . when we started . . .” She took a ragged breath. “He said that this was exactly what he needed—a friend with benefits. And that’s how I realized that he didn’t want me back. He just wanted me for fifteen minutes.”

  Daniel didn’t move. Surely if he did, he’d shatter.

  “I tried to get away, but I couldn’t. It felt like I was underwater, like when I told my arms and legs to move, they didn’t work fast enough, strong enough. He thought it was a game, me fighting just a little bit, like I was still playing hard to get. He pinned me down and . . .” Trixie’s skin was flushed and damp. “He said, Don’t tell me you don’t want this.” She looked up at Daniel in the halo of the overhead light. “And I . . . I didn’t.”

  • • •

  Trixie had once seen a science fiction movie that suggested we all had doppelgängers, we just couldn’t ever run into them because our worlds would collide. It was like that, now that her father had come to rescue her. Just this morning, walking back with Willie from the maqi, she had entertained the thought of what it would be like to stay in Tuluksak. Maybe they needed someone to be a teaching assistant. Maybe she could move in with one of Willie’s cousins. But with her father’s arrival, the world had jarred to a stop. He didn’t fit here, and neither did she.

  She had told him her secret: that she was a liar. Not just about being a virgin and playing Rainbow . . . but even more. She’d never said no to Jason that night, although she’d told the DA she had.

  And the drugs?

  She was the one who’d brought them.

  She hadn’t realized, at the time, that the guy at the college who sold pot to the high school kids was sleeping with her mother. She’d gone to buy some for Zephyr’s party, in the hopes that she could take the edge off. If she was going to be as wild as Zephyr planned for her to be, she needed a little pharmaceutical help.

  Seth was out of pot, but Special K was supposed to be like Ecstasy. It would make you lose control.

  Which, in a completely different way, she had.

  This much wasn’t a lie: She hadn’t taken it that night, not on purpose. She and Zephyr had planned to get high together, but it was a real drug, not pot, and at the last minute, Trixie had chickened out. She’d forgotten about it, until the DA brought up the fact that she might have had a drug in her system. Trixie didn’t really know what Zephyr had done with the vial: if she’d used it herself, if she’d left it sitting on the kitchen counter, if someone else at the party had found it first. She couldn’t say for a fact that Jason had slipped it into her drink. She’d had so much to drink that night—half-empty cans of Coke left lying around, screwdrivers with the ice cubes melting—it was possible that Jason had had nothing to do with it at all.

  Trixie hadn’t known that adding drugs into the legal mix would mean Jason was tried as an adult. She hadn’t been looking to ruin his life. She’d only wanted a way to salvage her own.

  It was not a coincidence, Trixie thought, that no and know sounded the same. You were supposed to be able to say the magic word, and that was enough to make your wishes—or lack of them—crystal clear. But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why, then, didn’t a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against a chest speak just as loudly? Why did you have to actually say the word no for it to be rape?

  That one word, spoken or not, didn’t make Jason any less guilty of taking something Trixie hadn’t wanted to give. It didn’t make her any less foolish. All it did was draw a line in the sand, so that the people who hadn’t been there to witness it—Moss and Zephyr, her parents, the police, the district attorney—could take sides.

  But somewhere along the line, it also made her realize that she couldn’
t blame Jason, not entirely, for what had happened.

  She had thought of what it would be like when the trial started, when it was a hundred times worse than it was now, and Jason’s lawyer would get up in court and paint Trixie as a complete slut and a liar. She had wondered how long it would be before she just gave in and admitted they were right. She’d started to hate herself, and one night, when the dark had folded itself around Trixie like the wings of a heron, she wished that Jason Underhill would drop dead. It was just a secret, silent thought, and she knew better than anyone at this point that what was not said aloud didn’t count. But then one thing led to another: Jason was charged as an adult, not a minor. Jason ran into her at the Winterfest. And then, before she knew it, her wish had come true.

  Trixie knew the police were looking for her. We’ll take care of it, her father kept saying. But Jason was dead, and it was her fault. Nothing she said now—or didn’t say—was going to bring him back.

  She wondered if she would be sent to jail in Jason’s place, and if it would be horrible there, like you saw in the movies, or if it would be full of people like Trixie, people who understood that there were some mistakes you never got to erase.

  While her father explained to the Jesuit Volunteers that they were about to lose a fake staff member, Trixie sat in the truck and cried. She had thought that by now, she would have been bone dry, a husk, but the tears didn’t ever stop. All she had wanted was for something to feel right again in her life, and instead, everything had gone impossibly wrong.

  There was a knock at the window of the truck, and she looked up to see Willie, his fingers stuck in a bowl of something pink. He scooped out a bit with his middle and index fingers as she unrolled the window.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She wiped her eyes. “Hey.”

  “You okay?”

  Trixie started to nod, but she was so sick of lying. “Not so much,” she admitted.

  It was nice, the way Willie didn’t even try to say something to make her feel better. He just let her sadness stand. “That’s your dad?” he asked.

  She nodded. She wanted to explain everything to Willie, but she didn’t know how. As far as Willie had been concerned, she was a Jesuit Volunteer, one who had been stranded by the storm. With him, she had not been a rape victim or a murder suspect. How did you tell someone that you weren’t the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you’d meant the things you’d said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie?

  He held out the dish. “Want some?”

  “What is it?”

  “Akutaq. Eskimo ice cream.” Trixie dipped her finger in. It wasn’t Ben & Jerry’s, but it wasn’t bad—berries and sugar, mixed with something she couldn’t recognize.

  “Seal oil and shortening,” Willie said, and she wasn’t in the least surprised that he could read her mind.

  He looked down at her through the window. “If I ever get to Florida, maybe you could meet me there.”

  Trixie didn’t know what was going to happen to her tomorrow, much less after that. But she found that in spite of everything that had happened, she still had the capacity to pretend, to think her future might be something it never actually would. “That would be cool,” she said softly.

  “Do you live nearby?”

  “Give or take fifteen hundred miles,” Trixie said, and when Willie smiled a little, so did she.

  Suddenly Trixie wanted to tell someone the truth—all of it. She wanted to start from the beginning, and if she could make just one person believe her, at least it was a start. She lifted her face to Willie’s. “At home, I was raped by a guy I thought I loved,” Trixie said, because that was what it was to her and always would be. Semantics didn’t matter when you were bleeding between your legs, when you felt like you’d been broken from the inside out, when free will was taken away from you.

  “Is that why you ran away?”

  Trixie shook her head. “He’s dead.”

  Willie didn’t ask her if she was responsible. He just nodded, his breath hanging on the air like lace. “I guess sometimes,” he said, “that’s the way it works.”

  • • •

  It was bingo night at the village council offices, and Laura had been left alone in the tiny house. She had read every Tundra Drums newspaper twice, even the ones stacked in the entryway for disposal. She’d watched television until her eyes hurt.

  She found herself wondering what kind of person would choose to live in a place like this, where conversation seemed abnormal and where even the sunlight stayed away. What had brought Daniel’s mother here?

  Like Annette Stone, Laura was a teacher. She knew you could change the world one student at a time. But how long would you be willing to sacrifice your own child’s happiness for everyone else’s?

  Maybe she hadn’t wanted to leave. Daniel had told Laura about his wandering father. There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future. Laura understood how you might spend your whole life waiting for that kind of man to come back.

  It was a choice Daniel’s mother had made for both of them, one that immediately put her son at a disadvantage. To Laura, it seemed selfish, and she ought to know.

  Was it tough love, putting your child through hell? Or was it the best of parenting, a way to make sure your child could survive without you? If Daniel hadn’t been teased, he might have felt at home on the tundra. He might have become one of the faceless kids, like Cane, who couldn’t find a way out. He might have stayed in Alaska, forever, waiting for something that didn’t come.

  Maybe Annette Stone had only been making sure Daniel had an escape route, because she didn’t herself.

  Outside, a truck drove into the yard. Laura jumped up, running out the arctic entry to see if Daniel and Trixie had returned. But the truck had a bar of flashing blue lights across the top of the cab, casting long shadows on the snow.

  Laura straightened her spine. You’d do whatever it took to protect your child. Even the things that no one else could possibly understand.

  “We’re looking for Trixie Stone,” the policeman said.

  • • •

  Trixie fell asleep on the ride back to Akiak. Daniel had wrapped Trixie in his own balaclava and parka; she rode the snow machine with her arms around his waist and her cheek pressed up against his back. He followed the setting sun, a showgirl’s tease of pink ribbon trailing off the stage of the horizon.

  Daniel didn’t really know what to make of his daughter’s confession. In this part of the world, people believed that a thought might turn into an action at any moment; a word held in your mind had just as much power to wound or to heal as the one that was spoken aloud. In this part of the world, it didn’t matter what Trixie had or had not said: What Jason Underhill had done to Trixie did count as rape.

  He was also painfully aware of the other things Trixie had not said out loud: that she hadn’t killed Jason; that she was innocent.

  In Akiak, Daniel revved up the riverbank and past the post office to reach Cane’s house. He turned the corner and saw the police truck.

  For just a moment, he thought, I have reinvented myself before, I can do it again. He could drive until the gas ran out of the snow-go, and then he would build a shelter for himself and Trixie. He’d teach her how to track and how to hunt and, when the weather turned, where to find the salmon.

  But he could not leave Laura behind, and he couldn’t send for her later. Once they left, he would have to make sure they could never be found.

  He felt Trixie stiffen behind him and realized that she had seen the policemen. Even worse, when the officer got out of the car, he understood that they’d been seen, too.

  “Don’t talk,” he said over his shoulder. “Let me take care of this.”

  Daniel drove the snow-go toward Cane’s house and turned off the ignition. Then he got off the vehicle and stood with his hand on Trixie’s shoulder.

  When you loved someone, you di
d whatever you thought was in her best interests, even if—at the time—it looked utterly wrong. Men did this for women; mothers did it for sons. And Daniel knew he’d do it for Trixie. He’d do anything. What made a hero a hero? Was it winning all the time, like Superman? Or was it taking on the task reluctantly, like Spider-Man? Was it learning, like the X-Men had, that at any moment you might fall from grace to become a villain? Or, like Alan Moore’s Rorschach, was it being human enough to enjoy watching people die, if they deserved it?

  The policeman approached. “Trixie Stone,” he said, “you’re under arrest for the murder of Jason Underhill.”

  “You can’t arrest her,” Daniel insisted.

  “Mr. Stone, I’ve got a warrant—”

  Daniel didn’t take his eyes off his daughter’s face. “Yes,” he said. “But I’m the one who killed him.”

  • • •

  Trixie couldn’t talk, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think. She was frozen, rooted to the permafrost like the policeman. Her father had just confessed to murder.

  She stared at him, stunned. “Daddy,” she whispered.

  “Trixie, I told you. Not a word.”

  Trixie thought of how, when she was tiny, he used to carry her on his shoulders. She, like her mother, got dizzy up high—but her father would anchor her legs in his hands. I won’t let you fall, he said, and because he never did, the world from that vantage point stopped being so scary.

  She thought of this and a thousand other things: how for one entire year, he’d cut her lunch box sandwiches into letters so that they spelled out a different word each week: BRAVE, SMART, SWEET. How he’d always hide a caricature of her in one of the pages of his comic books. How she would rummage in her backpack and find, tucked in a pocket, peanut M&M’s that she knew he’d left for her.

  Her eyes filled with tears. “But you’re lying,” she whispered.

  The policeman sighed. “Well,” he said, “somebody is.”