The Tenth Circle

by Picoult, Jodi

  ink all over his hands. Behind him was a makeshift cardboard stand, onto which he'd pinned dynamic drawings of Batman and Superman and Wolverine. “These are amazing,” Walter said, and Laura had thought at the time that she'd never seen him get so excited about something. “I used to collect comics as a kid.” When the artist looked up, he had the palest blue eyes, and they were focused on Laura. “Ten bucks for a sketch,” he said. Walter put his arm around Laura. “Can you do one of her?” Before she knew it, she'd been seated on an overturned milk crate. A crowd gathered to watch as the sketch took shape. Laura glanced over at Walter, wishing that he hadn't suggested this. She startled when she felt the artist's fingers curl around her chin, turning her face forward again. “Don't move,” he warned, and she could smell nicotine and whiskey.

  He gave the drawing to Laura when he was finished. She had the body of a superhero - muscular and able - but her hair and face and neck were all her own. A galaxy swirled around her feet. There were people sketched into the background - the crowd that had gathered. Walter's face was nearly off the edge of the page. Beside the figure of Laura, however, was a man who looked just like the artist. “So that you'll be able to find me one day,” he said, and she felt as if a storm had blown up inside her. Laura looked at Walter, holding out his ten-dollar bill. She lifted her chin. “What makes you think I'll be looking?” The artist grinned. “Wishful thinking.”

  When they left Mill Avenue, Laura told Walter it was the worst sketch she'd ever seen - her calves weren't that big, and she'd never be caught dead wearing thigh-high boots. She planned to go home and throw it in the trash. But instead, that night, Laura found herself staring at the bold strokes of the artist's signature: Daniel Stone. She examined the picture more closely and noticed what she hadn't the first time around: In the folds of the cape the man had drawn were a few lines darker than the rest, which clearly spelled out the word MEET.

  In the toe of the left boot was ME.

  She scrutinized the sketch, scanning the crowd for more of the message. She found the letters AT on the rings of the planet in the upper left corner. And in the collar of the shirt worn by the man who looked like Walter was the word HELL.

  It felt like a slap in the face, as if he knew she'd be reading into the drawing he'd made. Angry, Laura buried the sketch in her kitchen trash can. But she tossed and turned all night, deconstructing the language in the art. You wouldn't say meet me at hell; you'd say meet me in hell. In suggested submersion, at was an approach to a place. Had this not been a rejection, then, but an invitation?

  The next day, she pulled the sketch out from the trash, and sat down with the Phoenix area phone book.

  Hell was at 358 Wylie Street.

  She borrowed a magnifying glass from an ASU biology lab but couldn't find any more clues in the drawing regarding a time or date. That afternoon, once she finished her classes, Laura made her way to Wylie Street. Hell turned out to be a narrow space between two larger buildings - one a head shop with bongs in the window, the other a XXX video store. The jammed little frontage had no windows, just a graffiti-riddled door. In lieu of a formal sign, there was a plank with the name of the establishment hand-lettered in blue paint.

  Inside, the room was thin and long, able to accommodate a bar and not much else. The walls were painted black. In spite of the fact that it was three in the afternoon, there were six people sitting at the bar, some of whom Laura could not assign to one gender or the other. As the sunlight cracked through the open doorway, they turned to her, squinting, moles coming up from the belly of the earth.

  Daniel Stone sat closest to the door. He raised one eyebrow and stubbed out his cigarette on the wood of the bar. “Have a seat.” She held out her hand. “I'm Laura Piper.” He looked at her hand, amused, but didn't shake it. She crawled onto the stool and folded her purse into her lap. “Have you been waiting long?” she asked, as if this were a business meeting. He laughed. The sound made her think of summer dust, kicked up by tires on a dirt road. “My whole life.” She didn't know how to respond to that. “You didn't give me a specific time . . .”

  His eyes lit up. “But you found the rest. And I pretty much live here, anyway.”

  “Are you from Phoenix?”

  “Alaska.”

  To a girl who'd grown up on the outskirts of the desert, there was nothing more remarkable or idealistically romantic. She pictured snow and polar bears. Eskimos. “What made you come here?” He shrugged. “Up there, you learn the blues. I needed to see reds.” It took Laura a moment to realize that he was talking about colors and his drawing. He lit another cigarette. It bothered her

  - she wasn't used to people smoking around her - but she didn't know how to ask him not to. “So,” he said. “Laura.” Nervous, she began to fill in the silence between them. “There was a poet who had a Laura as his muse. Petrarch. His sonnets are really beautiful.”

  Daniel's mouth curved. “Are they, now.”

  She didn't know if he was making fun of her, and now she was conscious of other people in the bar listening to their conversation, and frankly, she couldn't remember why she'd ever come here in the

  first place. She was just about to get up when the bartender set a shot

  of something clear in front of her.

  “Oh,” she said. “I don't drink.” Without missing a beat, Daniel reached over and drained the shot glass.

  She was fascinated by him, in the same way that an entomologist would be fascinated by an insect from the far side of the earth, a specimen she had read about but never imagined she'd hold in the palm of her hand. There was an unexpected thrill to being this close

  “Don't we?” Daniel approached her, pinning the door shut with one arm. “Did you tell your boyfriend you were coming to see me?” When Laura remained stone-silent, he laughed.

  Laura stilled underneath the weight of the truth: She had lied not only to Walter but also to herself. She had come here of her own free will; she had come here because she couldn't stand the thought of not coming. But what if the reason Daniel Stone fascinated her had nothing to do with difference . . . but similarity? What if she recognized in him parts of herself that had been there all along, underneath the surface?

  What if Daniel Stone was right?

  She stared up at him, her heart hammering. “What would you have done if I hadn't come here today?” His blue eyes darkened.

  “Waited.”

  She was awkward, and she was self-conscious, but Laura took a step toward him. She thought of Madame Bovary and of Juliet, of poison running through your bloodstream, of passion doing the same.

  * * *

  Mike Bartholemew was pacing around near the emergency room's Coke machine when he heard his name being called. He glanced up to find a tiny woman with a cap of dark hair facing him, her hands buried in the pockets of her white physician's coat. C. Roth, M.D.

  “I was hoping to talk to you about Trixie Stone,” he said. , She nodded, glancing at the crowd around them. "Why don't we

  * go into one of the empty exam rooms?"

  There was nowhere Mike wanted to be less. The last time he'd been in one, it was to ID his daughter's body. He had no sooner walked across the threshold than he started to weave and feel the room spin. “Are you all right?” the doctor asked, as he steadied himself against the examination table. “It's nothing.” “Let me get you something to drink.”

  She was gone for only a few seconds and came back bearing a paper cone from a water cooler. When Mike finished drinking, he crushed the cup in his hand. “Must be a flu going around,” he said, trying to dismiss his own weakness. “I've got a few follow-up questions based on your medical report.”

  “Fire away.”

  Mike took a pad and pen out of his coat pocket. “You said that Trixie Stone's demeanor was calm when she was here?”

  “Yes, until the pelvic exam . . . she got a bit upset at that. But during the rest of the exam she was very quiet.”

  “Not hysterical?”

/>   “Not all rape victims come in that way,” the doctor said. “Some are in shock.”

  “Was she bleeding?”

  “Minimally.”

  “Shouldn't there have been more, if she was a virgin?” The doctor shrugged. “A hymen can break when a girl is eight years old, riding a bike. There doesn't have to be blood the first time there's intercourse.”

  “But you also said there was no significant internal trauma,” Mike said.

  The doctor frowned at him. “Aren't you supposed to be on her side?”

  “I don't take sides,” Mike said. “But I do try to make sense of the facts, and before we have a rape case, I need to make sure that I've ruled out inconsistencies.”

  "Well, you're talking about an organ that's made for accommodation. Just because there wasn't visible internal trauma doesn't

  mean there wasn't intercourse without consent." Mike looked down at the examination table, uncomfortable, and suddenly could see the still, swathed form of his daughters battered body. One arm, which had slipped off to hang toward the floor, with its black user's bruise in the crook of the elbow.

  “Her arm,” Mike murmured.

  “The cuts? I photographed them for you. The lacs were still oozing when she came in,” the doctor said, “but she couldn't remember seeing a weapon during the attack.”

  Mike took the Polaroid out of his pocket, the one that showed Trixie's left wrist. There was the deep cut that Dr. Roth was describing, still angry and red as a mouth, but if you looked carefully you could also see the silver herringbone pattern of older scars. “Is there any chance Trixie Stone did this to herself?”

  “It's a possibility. We see a lot of cutting in teenage girls these days. But it still doesn't preclude the fact that Trixie was sexually assaulted.”

  “You'd be willing to testify to that?” Mike asked. The doctor folded her arms. “Have you ever sat in on a female rape kit collection, Detective?”

  She knew, of course, that Mike hadn't. He couldn't, as a man.

  “It takes over an hour and involves not just a thorough external examination but a painfully thorough internal one as well. It involves having your body scrutinized under UV light and swabbed for evidence. It involves photography. It involves being asked intimate details about your sexual habits. It involves having your clothes confescated. I've been an ER OB/GYN for fifteen years, Detective, and I have yet to see the woman who'd be willing to suffer through a sexaual assault exam just for the hell of it.” She glanced up at Mike. “Yes,” Dr. Roth said. “I'll testify.”

  * * *

  Janice didn't just have tea in her office. She had Toolong, Sleepytime, and orange pekoe. Darjeeling, rooibos, and sencha. Dragon Well, macha, gunpowder, jasmine, Keemun. Lapsang souchong: Yunnan and Nilgiri. “What would you like?” she asked, Trixie hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “Coffee.”

  “Like I haven't heard that before.”

  Trixie had come to this appointment reluctantly. Her father had dropped her off and would be back to get her at five. “What if I have nothing to say?” Trixie had asked him the minute before she got out of the car. But as it turned out, since she'd sat down, she hadn't shut up. She'd told Janice about her conversation with Zephyr and the way Moss had looked through her like she was a ghost. She'd talked about the condoms in her locker and why she hadn't reported them to the principal. She talked about how, even when people weren't whispering behind her back, she could still hear them doing it.

  Janice settled down onto a heap of pillows on the floor - her office was shared by four different sexual assault advocates and was full of soft edges and things you could hug if you needed to.

  “It sounds to me like Zephyr's a little confused right now,” Janice said. “She thinks she has to pick between you and Moss, so she isn't going to be a viable form of support.”

  “Well,” Trixie said, “that leaves my mom and dad, and I can't quite go dragging them to school with me.”

  “What about your other friends?”

  Trixie worried the fringe of the pillow on her lap. “I sort of stopped spending time with them when I started hanging out with Jason.”

  “You must have missed them.”

  She shook her head. “I was so wrapped up in Jason, there wasn't room for anything else.” Trixie looked up at Janice. “That's love, isn't it?”

  “Did Jason ever tell you he loved you?”

  “I told him once.” She sat up and reached for the tea that Janice had given her, even though she'd said she didn't want any. The mug was smooth in her palms, radiant with heat. Trixie wondered if this was what it felt like to hold a heart. "He said he loved

  me too."

  “When was that?”

  October fourteenth, at nine thirty-nine P.M. They had been in the back row of a movie theater holding hands, watching a teen slasher

  flick. She had been wearing Zephyr's blue mohair sweater, the one that made her boobs look bigger than they actually were. Jason had bought Sour Patch Kids and she was drinking Sprite. But Trixie thought that telling Janice the details that had been burned into her mind might make her sound too pathetic, so instead she just said, “About a month after we got together.”

  “Did he tell you he loved you after that?” Trixie had waited for him to say it first, without prompting, but Jason hadn't. And she hadn't said it again, because she was too afraid he wouldn't say it back.

  She had thought she heard him whisper it afterward, the other night, but she was so numb by then she still was not entirely sure she hadn't just made it up to soften the blow of what had happened.

  “How did you two break up?” Janice asked. They had been standing in Jason's kitchen, eating M&M's out of a bowl on the table. I think it might be a good thing if we saw other people, he had said, when five seconds earlier they had been talking about a teacher who was taking the rest of the year off to be with the baby she'd adopted from Romania. Trixie hadn't been able to breathe, and her mind spun frantically to figure out what she had done wrong. It isn't you, Jason had said. But he was perfect, so how could that be true?

  He said he wanted them to stay friends, and she nodded, even though she knew it was impossible. How was she supposed to smile as she passed by him at school, when she wanted to collapse? How could she unhear his promises?

  The night Jason broke up with her, they had gone to his house to hook up - his folks were out. Afraid that her parents might do something stupid, like call, Trixie had told them that a whole bunch of kids were going to a movie. And so, after Jason dropped the bomb, Trixie was forced to spend another two hours in his company, until the time the movie would have been over, when all she really wanted to do was hide underneath her covers and cry herself dry.

  “When Jason broke up with you,” Janice asked, “what did you do to make yourself feel better?”

  Cut. The word popped into Trixie's mind so fast that only at the very last moment did she press her lips together to keep it inside. But at the same time, she subconsciously slid her right hand over her left wrist.

  Janice had been watching too closely. She reached for Trixies arm and inched up the cuff of her shirt. “So that didn't happen during the rape.”

  “No.”

  “Why did you tell the doctor in the emergency room that it did?” Trixies eyes filled with tears. “I didn't want her to think I was crazy.”

  After Jason broke up with her, Trixie lost any semblance of emotional control. She'd find herself sobbing when a certain song came on the car radio and have to make up excuses to her father. She would walk by Jason's locker in the hope that she might accidentally cross paths with him. She'd find the one computer in the library whose screen in the sunlight mirrored the table behind her, and she'd watch Jason in its reflection while she pretended to type. She was swimming in tar, when the rest of the world, including Jason had so seamlessly moved on.

  “I was in the bathroom one day,” Trixie confessed, “and I opened up the medicine cabinet and saw my father's razor blades. I just
did it without thinking. But it felt so good to take my mind off everything else. It was a kind of pain that made sense.”

  “There are constructive ways to deal with depression . . .”

  “It's crazy, right?” Trixie interrupted. “To love someone who's hurt you?”

  “It's crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you,” Janice replied.

  Trixie lifted her mug. The tea was cold now. She held it in a way that blocked her face, so that Janice wouldn't be able to look her in

  the eye. If she did, surely she'd see the one last secret Trixie had managed to keep: that after That Night, she hated Jason

  . . . but she hated herself more. Because even after what had happened, there was a part of Trixie that still wanted him back.

  * * *

  From the Letters to the Editor page of the Portland Press Herald:

  To the Editors:

  We would like to express our shock and anger at the allegations leveled against Jason Underhill. Anyone who knows Jason understands that he doesn't have a violent bone in his body. If rape is a crime of violence and dominance over another person, shouldn't there then be signs of violence?

  While Jason's life has been brought to a screeching halt, the so-called victim in this case continues to walk around undeterred. While Jason is being redrawn as a monster, this victim is seemingly absent of the symptoms associated with a sexual assault. Might this not be a rape after all... but a case of a young girl's remorse after making a decision she wished she hadn't?

  If the town of Bethel was to pass judgment on this case, Jason Underhill would surely be found innocent.

  Sincerely,

  Thirteen anonymous educators from Bethel H.S and fifty-six additional signatories

  * * *

  Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be resurrected. The first, and arguably the most legendary, arrived in the 1930s, care of Shuster and Siegel, two unemployed, apprehensive Jewish immigrants who couldn't get work at a newspaper. They