The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Today Daniel sat hunched at his drafting table, procrastinating. He twirled his mechanical pencil; he kneaded an eraser in his palm. He was having a hell of a time turning his main character into a hawk. He had gotten the wingspan right, but he couldn’t seem to humanize the face behind the bright eyes and beak.

  Daniel was a comic book penciler. While Laura had built up the academic credentials to land her a tenured position at Monroe College, he’d worked out of the home with Trixie at his feet as he drew filler chapters for DC Comics. His style got him noticed by Marvel, which asked him numerous times to come work in NYC on Ultimate X-Men, but Daniel put his family before his career. He did graphic art to pay the mortgage—logos and illustrations for corporate newsletters—until last year, just before his fortieth birthday, when Marvel signed him to work from home on a project all his own.

  He kept a picture of Trixie over his workspace—not just because he loved her, but because for this particular graphic novel—The Tenth Circle—she was his inspiration. Well, Trixie and Laura. Laura’s obsession with Dante had provided the bare-bones plot of the story; Trixie had provided the impetus. But it was Daniel who was responsible for creating his main character—Wildclaw—a hero that this industry had never seen.

  Historically, comics had been geared toward teenage boys. Daniel had pitched Marvel a different concept: a character designed for the demographic group of adults who had been weaned on comic books yet who now had the spending power they’d lacked as adolescents. Adults who wanted sneakers endorsed by Michael Jordan and watched news programs that looked like MTV segments and played Tetris on a Nintendo DS during their business-class flights. Adults who would immediately identify with Wildclaw’s alter ego, Duncan: a fortysomething father who knew that getting old was hell, who wanted to keep his family safe, whose powers controlled him, instead of the other way around.

  The narrative of the graphic novel followed Duncan, an ordinary father searching for his daughter, who had been kidnapped by the devil into Dante’s circles of hell. When provoked, through rage or fear, Duncan would morph into Wildclaw—literally becoming an animal. The catch was this: Power always involved a loss of humanity. If Duncan turned into a hawk or a bear or a wolf to elude a dangerous creature, a piece of him would stay that way. His biggest fear was that if and when he did find his missing daughter, she would no longer recognize who he’d become in order to save her.

  Daniel looked down at what he had on the page so far, and sighed. The problem wasn’t drawing the hawk—he could do that in his sleep—it was making sure the reader saw the human behind it. It was not new to have a hero who turned into an animal—but Daniel had come by the concept honestly. He’d grown up as the only white boy in a native Alaskan village where his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was simply gone. In Akiak, the Yupiit spoke freely of children who went to live with seals, of men who shared a home with black bears. One woman had married a dog and given birth to puppies, only to peel back the fur to see they were actually babies underneath. Animals were simply nonhuman people, with the same ability to make conscious decisions, and humanity simmered under their skins. You could see it in the way they sat together for meals, or fell in love, or grieved. And this went both ways: Sometimes, in a human, there would turn out to be a hidden bit of a beast.

  Daniel’s best and only friend in the village was a Yup’ik boy named Cane, whose grandfather had taken it upon himself to teach Daniel how to hunt and fish and everything else that his own father should have. For example, how after killing a rabbit, you had to be quiet, so that the animal’s spirit could visit. How at fish camp, you’d set the bones of the salmon free in the river, whispering Ataam taikina. Come back again.

  Daniel spent most of his childhood waiting to leave. He was a kass’aq, a white kid, and this was reason enough to be teased or bullied or beaten. By the time he was Trixie’s age, he was getting drunk, damaging property, and making sure the rest of the world knew better than to fuck with him. But when he wasn’t doing those things, he was drawing—characters who, against all odds, fought and won. Characters he hid in the margins of his schoolbooks and on the canvas of his bare palm. He drew to escape, and eventually, at age seventeen, he did.

  Once Daniel left Akiak, he never looked back. He learned how to stop using his fists, how to put rage on the page instead. He got a foothold in the comics industry. He never talked about his life in Alaska, and Trixie and Laura knew better than to ask. He became a typical suburban father who coached soccer and grilled burgers and mowed the lawn, a man you’d never expect had been accused of something so awful that he’d tried to outrun himself.

  Daniel squeezed the eraser he was kneading and completely rubbed out the hawk he’d been attempting to draw. Maybe if he started with Duncan-the-man, instead of Wildclaw-the-beast? He took his mechanical pencil and started sketching the loose ovals and scribbled joints that materialized into his unlikely hero. No spandex, no high boots, no half mask: Duncan’s habitual costume was a battered jacket, jeans, and sarcasm. Like Daniel, Duncan had shaggy dark hair and a dark complexion. Like Daniel, Duncan had a teenage daughter. And like Daniel, everything Duncan did or didn’t do was linked to a past that he refused to discuss.

  When you got right down to it, Daniel was secretly drawing himself.

  • • •

  Jason’s car was an old Volvo that had belonged to his grandmother before she died. The seats had been reupholstered in pink, her favorite color, by his grandfather for her eighty-fifth birthday. Jason had told Trixie he used to think about changing them back to their original flesh tone, but how could you mess with that kind of love?

  Hockey practice had ended fifteen minutes ago. Trixie waited in the cold, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her jacket, until Jason came out of the rink. His enormous hockey bag was slung over his shoulder, and he was laughing as he walked beside Moss.

  Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover-up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of the bum deals you kept getting, you hadn’t completely given up.

  When Jason noticed her, Trixie tried to pretend she didn’t see the look that ghosted over his face—regret, or maybe resignation. She concentrated instead on the fact that he was walking toward her alone. “Hey,” she said evenly. “Can you give me a ride home?”

  He hesitated, long enough for her to die inside all over again. Then he nodded and unlocked the car. She slid into the passenger seat while Jason stowed his gear, turned over the ignition, and blasted the heater. Trixie thought up a thousand questions—How was practice? Do you think it’ll snow again? Do you miss me?—but she couldn’t speak. It was too much, sitting there on the pink seats, just a foot away from Jason, the way she’d sat beside him in this car a hundred times before.

  He pulled out of the parking spot and cleared his throat. “You feeling better?”

  Than what? she thought.

  “You left psych this morning,” Jason reminded her.

  That class seemed like forever ago. Trixie tucked her hair behind her ear. “Yeah,” she said, and glanced down. Trixie thought of how she used to grasp the stick shift, so that when Jason reached for it, he would automatically be holding her hand. She slid her palm beneath her thigh and gripped the seat so she wouldn’t do anything stupid.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Jason said.

  “I wanted to ask you something.” Trixie took a deep breath for courage. “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like . . . like none of it mattered.”

  Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn’t been aware she was crying. “Trix,” he sighed, “it mattered.”

  By now, the tears were coming faster. “But I love you,”
Trixie said. There was no easy switch that she could flip to stem the flow of feelings, no way to drain the memories that pooled like acid in her stomach because her heart no longer knew what to do with them. She couldn’t blame Jason; she didn’t like herself like this, either. But she couldn’t go back to being the girl she’d been before she met him; that girl was gone. So where did that leave her?

  Jason was wavering, she could tell. When he reached over the console to pull her into his arms, she tucked her head against his neck and rounded her mouth against the salt of his skin. Thank you, she murmured, to God or Jason or maybe both.

  His words stirred the hair beside her ear. “Trixie, you’ve got to stop. It’s over.”

  The sentence—and that’s exactly what it was, in every sense of the word—fell between them like a guillotine. Trixie disengaged herself, wiping her eyes on the puffy sleeve of her coat. “If it’s us,” she whispered, “how come you get to decide?”

  When he didn’t answer—couldn’t answer—she turned and stared out the front window. As it turned out, they were still in the parking lot. They hadn’t gotten anywhere at all.

  • • •

  The entire way home, Laura planned the way she was going to break the news to Seth. As flattering as it was to have a twentysomething man find a thirty-eight-year-old woman attractive, it was also wrong: Laura was his professor; she was married; she was a mother. She belonged in a reality made up of faculty meetings and papers being published and think tanks conducted at the home of the dean of humanities, not to mention parent-teacher conferences at Trixie’s school and worries about her own metabolism slowing down and whether she could save money on her cellular service if she switched companies. She told herself that it did not matter that Seth made her feel like summer fruit about to drop from a vine, something she could not remember experiencing anytime in the last decade with Daniel.

  Doing something wrong, it turned out, packed a heady adrenaline rush. Seth was dark and uneven and unpredictable and—oh, God, just thinking about him was making her drive too fast on this road. On the other hand, Laura’s husband was the most solid, dependable, mild-mannered man in all of Maine. Daniel never forgot to put out the recycling bin; he set the coffee to brew the night before because she was a bear when she didn’t have any in the morning; he never once complained about the fact that it had taken a good decade longer than he’d liked to make a name for himself in the comics industry because he was the stay-at-home parent. Sometimes, ridiculously, the more perfect he was the angrier she got, as if his generosity existed only to highlight her own selfishness. But then, she had only herself to blame for that—wasn’t she the one who’d given him the ultimatum, who’d said he had to change?

  The problem was (if she was going to be honest with herself) that when she asked him to change, she was focusing on what she thought she needed. She’d forgotten to catalog all the things she’d lose. What she had loved most about Seth—the thrill of doing something forbidden, the understanding that women like her did not connect with men like him—was exactly what had once made her fall for Daniel.

  She had toyed with the idea of telling Daniel about the affair, but what good would that do, except hurt him? Instead, she would over-compensate. She would kill him with kindness. She would be the best wife, the best mother, the most attentive lover. She would give him back what she hoped he never realized had been missing.

  Even Dante said that if you walked through hell, you could climb your way to paradise.

  In the rearview mirror, Laura saw a carnival of flashing lights. “Goddamn,” she muttered, pulling over as the police cruiser slid neatly behind her Toyota.

  A tall officer walked toward her, silhouetted by the headlights of his vehicle. “Good evening, ma’am, did you know you were speeding?”

  Apparently not, thought Laura.

  “I’m going to need your license and . . . Professor Stone? Is that you?”

  Laura peered up at the officer’s face. She couldn’t place it, but he was young enough; she might have taught him. She offered her most humble expression. Had he gotten a high enough grade in her class to keep her from getting a ticket?

  “Bernie Aylesworth,” he said, smiling down at Laura. “I took your Dante class my senior year, back in 2001. Got shut out of it the year before.”

  She knew she was a popular teacher—her Dante course was rated even higher than the Intro to Physics lectures where Jeb Wetherby shot monkeys out of cannons to teach projectile motion. The Unauthorized Guide to Monroe College named her the prof students most wanted to take out for a beer. Had Seth read that? she thought suddenly.

  “I’m just gonna give you a warning this time,” Bernie said, and Laura wondered where he had been six months ago, when she truly needed one. He passed her a crisp piece of paper and smiled. “So where were you hurrying off to?”

  Not to, she thought, just back. “Home,” she told him. “I was headed home.” She waited until he was back in the cruiser to put on her signal—a penitent motion if ever there was one—and pulled into the gentle bend of the road. She drove well within the speed limit, her eyes focused ahead, as careful as you have to be when you know someone is watching.

  • • •

  “I’m leaving,” Laura said the minute she walked through the door. Daniel looked up from the kitchen counter, where he was chopping broccoli in preparation for dinner. On the stove, chicken was simmering in garlic.

  “You just got here,” he said.

  “I know.” Laura lifted the lid on the skillet, breathed in. “Smells really good. I wish I could stay.”

  He could not pinpoint what was different about her, but he thought it had to do with the fact that when she’d just said she wanted to be home, he believed her—most of the time, if she apologized for leaving, it was only because it was expected. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  She turned her back to Daniel and began to sort through the mail. “That departmental thing I told you about.”

  She had not told him; he knew she hadn’t told him. She unwound her scarf and shrugged out of her coat, draped them over a chair. She was wearing a black suit and Sorel boots, which were tracking snow in small puddles all over the kitchen floor. “How’s Trixie?”

  “She’s in her room.”

  Laura opened the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of water. “The crazy poet is trying to stage a coup,” she said. “She’s been talking to the tenured professors. I don’t think she knows that—” Suddenly, there was a crash, and Daniel turned in time to see the glass explode against the tile floor. Water spread in a puddle, seeping beneath the edge of the refrigerator. “Damn it!” Laura cried, kneeling to pick up the pieces.

  “I’ve got it,” Daniel said, tossing down paper towels to absorb the spill. “You’ve got to slow down. You’re bleeding.”

  Laura glanced down at the gash on the pad of her thumb as if it belonged to someone else. Daniel reached for her and wrapped her hand in a clean dish towel. They knelt inches apart on the tile floor, watching her blood soak through the checkered fabric.

  Daniel couldn’t remember the last time he and Laura had been this close to each other. He couldn’t remember a lot of things, like the sound of his wife’s breathing when she gave herself over to sleep, or the half smile that slipped out like a secret when something took her by surprise. He had tried to tell himself that Laura was busy, the way she always got at the beginning of a trimester. He did not ask if it could be anything more than that, because he did not want to hear the answer.

  “We need to take care of that,” Daniel said. The bones of her wrist were light and fine in his hand, delicate as china.

  Laura tugged herself free. “I’m fine,” she insisted, and she stood up. “It’s a scratch.” For a moment she stared at him, as if she knew, too, that there was another entire conversation going on here, one they had chosen not to have.

  “Laura.” Daniel got to his feet, but she turned away. “I really have to go change,” she said.
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  Daniel watched her leave, heard her footsteps on the stairs overhead. You already have, he thought.

  • • •

  “You didn’t,” Zephyr said.

  Trixie pushed her sleeves up and stared down at the cuts on her arms, a red web of regret. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said. “I started walking, and I wound up at the rink . . . I figured it was a sign. If we could just talk—”

  “Trixie, right now Jason doesn’t want to talk. He wants to take out a restraining order.” Zephyr sighed. “You are so Fatal Attraction.”

  “Fatal what?”

  “It’s an old movie. Don’t you ever watch anything that doesn’t have Paul Walker in it?”

  Trixie tucked the phone between her shoulder and her ear and carefully unwound the screw neck of the X-Acto knife that she’d taken from her father’s office. The blade came out, a tiny silver trapezoid. “I’d do anything to get him back.” Closing her eyes, Trixie scored the blade over her left arm. She sucked in her breath and imagined she was opening up a vent, allowing some of the enormous pressure to ease.

  “Are you going to complain about this until we graduate?” Zephyr asked. “Because if that’s the case, then I’m taking matters into my own hands.”

  What if her father knocked on the door right now? What if anyone, even Zephyr, found out that she was doing stuff like this? Maybe it wasn’t relief she was feeling, but shame. Both made you burn from the inside out.

  “So, do you want my help?” Zephyr asked.

  Trixie clapped her hand over the cut, stanching the flow.

  “Hello?” Zephyr said. “Are you still there?”

  Trixie lifted her hand. The blood was rich and bright against her palm. “Yeah,” she sighed. “I guess I am.”

  • • •

  “Good timing,” Daniel said, as he heard Trixie’s footsteps pounding down the stairs. He set two plates on the kitchen table and turned around to find her waiting in her coat, carrying a backpack. Her cascade of hair spilled out from beneath a striped stocking cap.