by Jodi Picoult
Zephyr turned to Trixie. “Stack the deck. I want to see if he’s really a guy.”
“Hey, Trixie, what about you?” Moss asked.
Trixie’s head was cartwheeling, but she could feel Jason’s eyes on her. Maybe this was where she was supposed to go in for the kill. She looked to Zephyr, hoping for a cue, but Zephyr was too busy hanging on Moss to pay attention to her.
Oh, my God, it was brilliant.
If the goal of this entire night was to get Jason jealous, the surest way to do it would be to come on to his best friend.
Trixie stood up and tumbled right into Moss’s lap. His arms came around her, and her cards spilled onto the coffee table: two of hearts, six of diamonds, queen of clubs, three of clubs, eight of spades. Moss started to laugh. “Trixie, that’s the worst hand I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah, Trix,” Zephyr said, staring. “You’re asking for it.”
Trixie glanced at her. She knew, didn’t she, that the only reason she was flirting with Moss was to make Jason jealous? But before she could telegraph this with some kind of ESP, Moss snapped her bra strap. “I think you lost,” he said, grinning, and he sat back to see what piece of clothing she was going to take off.
Trixie was down to her black bra and Ace bandage and her low-rise jeans—the ones she was wearing without underwear. She wasn’t planning on parting with any of those items. But she had a plan—she was going to remove her earrings. She lifted her left hand up to the lobe, only to realize that she’d forgotten to put them on. The gold hoops were sitting on her dresser, in her bedroom, just where she’d left them.
Trixie had already removed her watch, and her necklace, and her barrette. She’d even cut off her macramé anklet. A flush rose up her shoulders—her bare shoulders—onto her face. “I fold.”
“You can’t fold after the game,” Moss said. “Rules are rules.”
Jason pushed away from the wall and walked closer. “Give her a break, Moss.”
“I think she’d rather have something else . . .”
“I’m out,” Trixie said, her voice skating the thin edge of panic. She held her hands crossed in front of herself. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it would burst into her palm. Suddenly, this seemed even worse than Rainbow, because the anonymity was gone. Here, if she acted like a slut, everyone knew her by name.
“I’ll pinch-strip for her,” Zephyr suggested, leaning into Moss.
But at that moment, Trixie looked at Jason and remembered why she had come to Zephyr’s in the first place. It’s worth it, she thought, if it brings him back. “I’ll do it,” she said. “But just for a second.”
Turning her back to the three of them, she slipped the straps of her bra down her arms and felt her breasts come free. She took a deep breath and spun around.
Jason was staring down at the floor. But Moss was holding up his cell phone, and before Trixie could understand why, he’d snapped a picture of her.
She fastened her bra and lunged for the phone. “Give me that!”
He stuffed it in his pants. “Come and get it, baby.”
Suddenly Trixie found herself being pulled off Moss. The sound of Jason’s fist hitting Moss made her cringe. “Jesus Christ, lay off!” Moss cried. “I thought you said you were finished with her.”
Trixie grabbed for her blouse, wishing that it was something flannel or fleece that would completely obliterate her. She held it in front of her and ran into the bathroom down the hall. Zephyr followed, coming into the tiny room and closing the door behind her.
Shaking, Trixie slipped her hands into the sleeves of the blouse. “Make them go home.”
“But it’s just getting interesting,” Zephyr said.
Trixie looked up, stunned. “What?”
“Well, for God’s sake, Trixie. So he had a camera phone, big fucking deal. It was a joke.”
“Why are you taking his side?”
“Why are you being such an asshole?”
Trixie felt her cheeks grow hot. “This was your idea. You told me that if I did what you said, I’d get Jason back.”
“Yeah,” Zephyr shot back. “So why were you all over Moss?”
Trixie thought of the paper clips on Zephyr’s backpack. Random hookups weren’t random, no matter what you told yourself. Or your best friend.
There was a knock on the door, and then Moss opened it. His lip was split, and he had a welt over his left eye. “Oh, my God,” Zephyr said. “Look at what he did to you.”
Moss shrugged. “He’s done worse during a scrimmage.”
“I think you need to lie down,” she said. “Preferably with me.” As she tugged Moss out of the bathroom and upstairs, she didn’t look back.
Trixie sat down on the lid of the toilet and buried her face in her hands. Distantly, she heard the music being turned off. Her temples throbbed, and her arm where she’d cut it earlier. Her throat was dry as leather. She reached for a half-empty can of Coke on the sink and drank it. She wanted to go home.
“Hey.”
Trixie glanced up to find Jason staring down at her. “I thought you left.”
“I wanted to make sure you were all right. You need a ride?”
Trixie wiped her eyes, a smear of mascara coming off on the heel of her hand. She had told her father she would be staying overnight, but that was before her fight with Zephyr. “That would be great,” she said, and then she began to cry.
He pulled her upright and into his arms. After tonight, after everything that had happened and how stupid she’d been, all she wanted was a place where she fit. Everything about Jason was right, from the temperature of his skin to the way that her pulse matched his. When she turned her face into the bow of his neck, she pressed her lips against his collarbone: not quite a kiss, not quite not one.
She thought, hard, about lifting her face up to his before she did it. She made herself remember what Moss had said: I thought you were done with her.
When Jason kissed her, he tasted of rum and of indecision. She kissed him back until the room spun, until she couldn’t remember how much time had passed. She wanted to stay like this forever. She wanted the world to grow up around them, a mound in the landscape where only violets bloomed, because that was what happened in a soil too rich for its own good.
Trixie rested her forehead against Jason’s. “I don’t have to go home just yet,” she said.
• • •
Daniel was dreaming of hell. There was a lake of ice and a run of tundra. A dog tied to a steel rod, its nose buried in a dish of fish soup. There was a mound of melting snow, revealing candy wrappers, empty Pepsi cans, a broken toy. He heard the hollow thump of a basketball on the slick wooden boardwalk and the tail of a green tarp rattling against the seat of the snow machine it covered. He saw a moon that hung too late in the sky, like a drunk unwilling to leave the best seat at the bar.
At the sound of the crash, he came awake immediately to find himself still alone in bed. It was three thirty-two A.M. He walked into the hall, flipping light switches as he passed. “Laura,” he called, “is that you?”
The hardwood floors felt cold beneath his bare feet. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary downstairs, yet by the time he reached the kitchen he had nearly convinced himself that he was about to come face-to-face with an intruder. An old wariness rose in him, a muscle memory of fight or flight that he’d thought he’d long forgotten.
There was no one in the cellar, or the half bath, or the dining room. The telephone still slept on its cradle in the living room. It was in the mudroom that he realized Trixie must have come home early: Her coat was here, her boots kicked off on the brick floor.
“Trixie?” he called out, heading upstairs again.
But she wasn’t in her bedroom, and when he reached the bathroom, the door was locked. Daniel rattled it, but there was no response. He threw his entire weight against the jamb until the door burst free.
Trixie was shivering, huddled in the crease made by the wall and the shower stall. “Baby,” he said, c
oming down on one knee. “Are you sick?” But then Trixie turned in slow motion, as if he were the last person she’d ever expected to see. Her eyes were empty, ringed with mascara. She was wearing something black and sheer that was ripped at the shoulder.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, and started to cry.
“Trixie, what happened?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but then pressed her lips together and shook her head.
“You can tell me,” Daniel said, gathering her into his arms as if she were small again.
Her hands were knotted together between them, like a heart that had broken its bounds. “Daddy,” she whispered. “He raped me.”
2
She had kissed him back. They must have both fallen asleep for a while, because Trixie woke up with him leaning over her, his lips against her neck. She’d felt her skin burn where he touched her.
She was jerked back to the present as her father reached for the controls of the heater on the dashboard. “Are you too hot?”
Trixie shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s okay.” But it wasn’t, not anymore, not by a long shot.
Daniel fiddled with the knob for another moment. This was the nightmare that sank its teeth into every parent’s neck. Your child is hurt. How quickly can you make it better?
What if you can’t?
Beneath the tires, he heard the name that he couldn’t get out of his head, not since the moment he’d found Trixie in the bathroom.
Who did this to you?
Jason. Jason Underhill.
In a tornado of pure fury, Daniel had grabbed the first thing he could lay hold of—a soap dish—and hurled it into the bathroom mirror. Trixie had started shrieking, shaking so hard it took him five minutes to calm her down. He didn’t know who’d been more shocked at the outburst: Trixie, who’d never seen him like this, or Daniel himself, who’d forgotten. After that, he’d been careful which questions he asked his daughter. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to her; he was just afraid to hear her answer, and even more afraid he would again do the wrong thing. He had never learned the protocol for this. It went beyond comfort; it went beyond parenting. It meant transforming all the rage he felt right now—enough to breathe fire and blow out the windshield—into words that spread like balm, invisible comfort for wounds too broad to see.
Suddenly, Daniel braked hard. The logging truck in front of them was weaving over the median line of the divided highway. “He’s going to kill someone,” Daniel said, and Trixie thought, Let it be me. She felt numb from the waist down, a mermaid encased in ice. “Will Mom meet us there?”
“I hope so, baby.”
It was after her father had wrapped her in a blanket and rocked her and told her they were going to the hospital, when Trixie was still crying softly for her mother, that her father admitted Laura wasn’t home. But it’s three-thirty in the morning, Trixie had said. Where did she go? There had been a moment where the pain had stopped belonging to Trixie and started to belong to her father instead, but then he’d turned away to get her another blanket, and that was when Trixie realized she wasn’t the only casualty of the night.
The logging truck veered sharply to the left. HOW AM I DOING? read the bumper sticker on its back door, the one that encouraged motorists to report reckless driving to an 800 number. I am doing fine, Daniel thought. I am hale and whole, and next to me the person I love most in this world has broken into a thousand pieces.
Trixie watched the side of the logging truck as her father accelerated and passed it, holding down his horn. It sounded too loud for this hour of the morning. It seemed to rip the sky in half. She covered her ears, but even then she could still hear it, like a scream that started from inside.
Weaving back into the right-hand lane of the highway, Daniel stole a glance at Trixie across the front seat. She was curled into a ball. Her face was pale. Her hands were hidden in her sleeves. Daniel bet she didn’t even know she was crying.
She’d forgotten her coat, and Daniel realized this was his fault. He should have reminded her. He should have brought one of his own.
Trixie could feel the weight of her father’s worry. Who knew that the words you never got around to saying could settle so heavy? Suddenly, she remembered a blown-glass candy dish she had broken when she was eleven, an heirloom that had belonged to her mother’s grandmother. She had gathered all the pieces and had glued them together seamlessly—and she still hadn’t been able to fool her mother. She imagined the same would be true, now, of herself.
If this had been an ordinary day, Daniel thought, he would have been getting Trixie up for school about now. He’d yell at her when she spent too much time in the bathroom doing her hair and tell her she was going to be late. He’d put a cereal bowl out for her on the breakfast table, and she’d fill it with Life.
From the moment it was over until the moment she entered her own home, Trixie had said only two words, uttered as she got out of his car. Thank you.
Daniel watched the logging truck recede in his rearview mirror. Danger came in different packages, at different points in a lifetime. There were grapes and marbles and other choking hazards. There were trees too tall for climbing. There were matches and scooters and kitchen knives left lying on the counter. Daniel had obsessed about the day Trixie would be able to drive. He could teach her how to be the most defensive driver on the planet, but he couldn’t vouch for the moron truckers who hadn’t slept for three days, who might run a red light. He couldn’t keep the drunk from having one more before he got behind the wheel of his car to head home.
Out the passenger window, Trixie watched the scenery stream by without registering a single image. She couldn’t stop wondering: If she had not kissed him back, would it never have happened?
• • •
The phone rang ten times in Laura’s office, a room the size of a walk-in closet, but Daniel couldn’t seem to hang up. He had tried everything, everywhere. Laura was not answering the phone in the office; she was not at home; her cell automatically rolled over to the voice message system. She had disconnected herself, on purpose.
Daniel had made excuses for his wife on his own behalf, but he couldn’t make them for Trixie’s sake. Because for the first time in his life, he didn’t think he could be everything his daughter needed right now.
He cursed out loud and called Laura’s office again to leave a message. “It’s Daniel. It’s four in the morning. I’ve got Trixie at Stephens Memorial, in the ER. She was . . . she was raped last night.” He hesitated. “Please come.”
• • •
Trixie wondered if this was what it felt like to be shot. If, even after the bullet went through flesh and bone, you would look down at yourself with detachment, assessing the damage, as if it wasn’t you who had been hit but someone else you were asked to appraise. She wondered if numbness qualified as a chronic ache.
Sitting here, waiting for her father to come back from the restroom, Trixie cataloged her surroundings: the squeak of the nurse’s white shoes, the urgent chatter of a crash cart being rolled across linoleum, the underwater-green cinder block of the walls and the amoeba shapes of the chairs where they had been told to wait. The smell of linen and metal and fear. The garland and stockings hung behind the triage nurse, the afterthought of a Christmas tree that sat next to the wire box holding patient charts. Trixie didn’t just notice all these things, she absorbed them, and she decided she was saturating herself with sensation to make up for the thirty minutes she had blocked out of her consciousness.
She realized, with a start, that she had already begun to divide her life into before and after.
• • •
Hi, you’ve reached Laura Stone, her voice said. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you.
Leave me.
I’ll get back to you.
Daniel hung up again and walked back inside the hospital, where cell phones were prohibited. But when he got back to the waiting area, Trixie was gone. He approached the triage n
urse. “Which room is my daughter in? Trixie Stone?”
The nurse glanced up. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stone. I know she’s a priority case, but we’re short staffed and—”
“She hasn’t been called in yet?” Daniel said. “Then where is she?” He knew he shouldn’t have left her alone, knew even as she was nodding at him when she asked if she’d be all right by herself for a moment that she hadn’t heard him at all. Backing away from the horseshoe desk, he started through the double doors of the ER, calling Trixie’s name.
“Sir,” the nurse said, getting to her feet, “you can’t go in there!”
“Trixie?” Daniel yelled, as patients stared at him from the spaces between privacy curtains, their faces pale or bloodied or weak. “Trixie!”
An orderly grabbed his arm; he shook the massive man off. He turned a corner, smacking into a resident in her ghost-white coat before he came to a dead end. Whirling about, he continued to call out for Trixie, and then—in the interstitial space between the letters of her name—he heard Trixie calling for him.
He followed the thread of her voice through the maze of corridors and finally saw her. “I’m right here,” he said, and she turned to him and burst into tears.
“I got lost,” she sobbed against his chest. “I couldn’t breathe. They were staring.”
“Who was?”
“All the people in the waiting room. They were wondering what was wrong with me.”
Daniel took both of her hands. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said, that first lie a fissure crack in his heart.
A woman wearing a trowel’s layer of cosmetics approached. “Trixie Stone?” she said. “My name’s Janice. I’m a sexual assault advocate. I’m here to answer questions for you and your family, and to help you understand what’s going to be happening.”
Daniel couldn’t get past the makeup. If this woman had been called in for Trixie, how much time had been lost applying those false eyelashes, that glittery blush? How much faster might she have come?
“First things first,” Janice said, her eyes on Trixie. “This wasn’t your fault.”
