The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Trixie glanced at her. “You don’t even know what happened.”

  “I know that no one deserves to be raped, no matter who she is and what she’s been doing,” Janice said. “Have you taken a shower yet?”

  Daniel wondered how on earth she could even think this. Trixie was still wearing the same torn blouse, had the same raccoon circles of mascara under her eyes. She had wanted to shower—that was why, when he’d found her, she was in the bathroom—but Daniel knew enough to keep her from doing it. Evidence. The word had swum in his mind like a shark.

  “What about the police?” Daniel heard, and he was stunned to realize he’d been the one to say it.

  Janice turned. “The hospital automatically reports any sexual assault of a minor to the police,” she said. “Whether or not Trixie wants to press charges is up to her.”

  She will press charges against that son of a bitch, Daniel thought, even if I have to talk her into it.

  And on the heels of that: If he forced Trixie to do something she didn’t want to, then how was he any different from Jason Underhill?

  As Janice outlined the specifics of the upcoming examination, Trixie shook her head and folded her arms around herself. “I want to go home,” she said, in the smallest of voices. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You need to see a doctor, Trixie. I’ll stay with you, the whole time.” She turned to Daniel. “Is there a Mrs. Stone . . .?”

  Excellent question, Daniel thought, before he could remember not to. “She’s on her way,” he said. Maybe this was not even a lie by now.

  Trixie grabbed onto his arm. “What about my father? Can he come in with me?”

  Janice looked from Daniel to Trixie and then back again. “It’s a pelvic exam,” she said delicately.

  The last time Daniel had seen Trixie naked, she had been eleven and about to take a bubble bath. He had walked into the bathroom, thinking she was only brushing her teeth, and together they had stared at her blossoming body in the reflection of the mirror. After that, he was careful to knock on doors, to draw an invisible curtain of distance around her for privacy.

  When he was a kid in Alaska, he had met Yu’pik Eskimos who hated him on sight, because he was a kass’aq. It didn’t matter that he was six or seven, that he hadn’t been the particular Caucasian who had cheated that person out of land or reneged on a job or any of a hundred other grievances. All they saw was that Daniel was white, and by association, he was a magnet for their anger. He imagined, now, what it would be like to be the only male in the room during a sexual assault examination.

  “Please, Daddy?”

  Behind the fear in Trixie’s eyes was the understanding that even with this stranger, she would be alone, and she couldn’t risk that again. So Daniel took a deep breath and headed down the hall between Trixie and Janice. Inside the room, there was a gurney; he helped Trixie climb onto it. The doctor entered almost immediately, a small woman wearing scrubs and a white coat. “Hi, Trixie,” she said, and if she seemed surprised to see a father in the room, instead of a mother, she said nothing. She came right up to Trixie and squeezed her hand. “You’re already being very brave. All I’m going to ask you to do is keep that up.”

  She handed a form to Daniel and asked him to sign it, explaining that because Trixie was a minor, a parent or guardian had to authorize the collection and release of information. She took Trixie’s blood pressure and pulse and made notes on her clipboard. Then she began to ask Trixie a series of questions.

  What’s your address?

  How old are you?

  What day did the assault occur? What approximate time?

  What was the gender of the perpetrator? The number of perpetrators?

  Daniel felt a line of sweat break out under the collar of his shirt.

  Have you douched, bathed, urinated, defecated since the assault?

  Have you vomited, eaten or drunk, changed clothes, brushed your teeth?

  He watched Trixie shake her head no to each of these. Each time before she spoke, she would glance at Daniel, as if he had the answer in his eyes.

  Have you had consensual intercourse in the last five days?

  Trixie froze, and this time, her gaze slid away from his. She murmured something inaudible. “Sorry,” the doctor said. “I didn’t quite get that?”

  “This was the first time,” Trixie repeated.

  Daniel felt the room swell and burst. He was vaguely aware of excusing himself, of Trixie’s face—a white oval that bled at the edges. He had to try twice before he could maneuver his fingers in a way that would open the latch of the door.

  Outside, he balled his hand into a fist and struck it against the cinder-block wall. He pummeled the cement again and again. He did this even as the tears came and a nurse led him away, to wash the blood off his knuckles and to bandage the scrapes on his palm. He did this until he knew Trixie wasn’t the only one hurting.

  • • •

  Trixie wasn’t where everyone thought she was. She might have physically been in the examination room, but mentally she was floating, hovering in the top left corner of the ceiling, watching the doctor and that other woman minister to the poor, sad, broken girl who used to be her.

  She wondered if they knew that their patient was a husk, a shell left behind by a snail because home didn’t fit anymore. You’d think someone who’d been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside. Trixie watched herself step onto a sheet of white paper with stiff, jerky movements. She listened as Dr. Roth asked her to remove her clothes, explaining that there might be evidence on the fabric that the detectives could use. “Will I get them back?” Trixie heard herself say.

  “I’m afraid not,” the doctor answered.

  “Your dad is going to run home and get you something to wear,” Janice added.

  Trixie stared down at her mother’s sheer blouse. She’s going to kill me, Trixie thought, and then she almost laughed—would her mother really be paying attention to the freaking blouse when she found out what had happened? With slow movements, Trixie mechanically unbuttoned the shirt and pulled it off. Too late, she remembered the Ace bandage around her wrist.

  “What happened there?” Dr. Roth asked, gently touching the metal pins holding the wrap in place.

  Trixie panicked. What would the doctor say if she knew Trixie had taken to carving her own arm up? Could she get thrown into a psych ward for that?

  “Trixie,” Dr. Roth said, “are there bruises under there?”

  She looked down at her feet. “They’re more like cuts.”

  When Dr. Roth began to unravel the bandage on her left wrist, Trixie didn’t fight her. She thought about what it would be like in an institution. If, in the aftermath of all this, it might not be such a bad thing to be sealed away from the real world and totally over-medicated.

  Dr. Roth’s gloved hands skimmed over a cut, one so new that Trixie could see the skin still knitting together. “Did he use a knife?”

  Trixie blinked. She was still so disconnected from her body that it took her a moment to understand what the doctor was implying, and another moment after that to understand that she had just been given a way out.

  “I . . . I don’t think so,” Trixie said. “I think he scratched me when I was fighting.”

  Dr. Roth wrote something down on her clipboard, as Trixie kept getting undressed. Her jeans came next, and then she stood shivering in her bra and panties. “Were you wearing that pair of underwear when it happened?” the doctor asked.

  Trixie shook her head. She’d put them on, along with a big fat sanitary napkin, once she saw that she was bleeding. “I wasn’t wearing underwear,” Trixie murmured, and immediately she realized how much that made her sound like a slut. She glanced down at the floor, at the see-through blouse. Was that why it had happened?

  “Low-rise jeans,” Janice commiserated, and Trixie nodded, grateful that she hadn’t been the one to have to explain.

  Trixie couldn’t
remember ever being so tired. The examination room was runny at the edges, like a breakfast egg that hadn’t been cooked quite long enough. Janice handed her a hospital johnny, which was just as good as being naked with the way it was hanging open in the back. “You can take a seat,” Dr. Roth said.

  The blood samples were next. It was just like when they’d had to pair up in eighth-grade science to try to analyze their own blood type. Trixie had nearly passed out at the sight of the blood, and her teacher had sent her to the nurse to breathe into a paper bag for a half hour, and she was so mortified that she’d called her father and said she was sick even though physically she was feeling much better. She and her father had had a Monopoly tournament, and like always, Trixie bought Park Place and Boardwalk and set up hotels and creamed her father.

  This time, though, when the needle went in, Trixie watched from above. She didn’t feel the prick, she didn’t feel woozy. She didn’t feel anything at all, of course, because it wasn’t her.

  When Dr. Roth turned off the lights in the room, Janice stepped forward. “The doctor’s going to use a special light now, a Woods lamp. It won’t hurt.”

  It could have been a thousand needles—Trixie knew she still wouldn’t feel it. But instead, this turned out to be like a tanning booth, except creepier. The light glowed ultraviolet, and when Trixie glanced down at her own bare body, it was covered with purple lines and blotches that hadn’t been visible before. Dr. Roth moistened a long cotton swab and touched it to a spot on her shoulder. She left it on the counter to air-dry, and as it did, Trixie watched her write on the paper sleeve that the swab had been packaged in: Suspected saliva from right shoulder.

  The doctor took swabs from the inside of her cheek and off her tongue. She gently combed Trixie’s hair over a paper towel, folding up the comb inside the towel when she was finished. Dr. Roth slipped another towel underneath her, using a different comb to work through her pubic hair. Trixie had to turn away—it was that embarrassing to watch. “Almost done,” Janice murmured.

  Dr. Roth pulled a pair of stirrups from the end of the examination table. “Have you ever been to a gynecologist, Trixie?” she asked.

  Trixie had an appointment, scheduled for next February, with her mother’s doctor. It’s a health thing, her mother had assured her, which was just fine because Trixie wasn’t planning on discussing her sex life out loud, especially not with her mother. Months ago, when the appointment had been made, Trixie hadn’t even ever kissed a guy.

  “You’re going to feel a little pressure,” Dr. Roth said, folding Trixie’s legs into the stirrups, a human origami that left her stark and open.

  In that instant, Trixie felt what was left of her spirit sinking down from where it had been watching near the ceiling, to take dark root in her beaten body. She could feel Janice’s hand stroking her arm, could feel the doctor’s rubber glove parting the heart of her. For the first time since she’d entered the hospital, she was completely, violently aware of who she was and what had been done to her.

  There was cold steel, and a rasp of flesh. A push from the outside, as her body struggled to keep the speculum out. Trixie tried to kick out with one foot, but she was being held down at the thighs and then there was pain and force and you are breaking me in two.

  “Trixie,” Janice said fiercely. “Trixie, honey, stop fighting. It’s okay. It’s just the doctor.”

  Suddenly the door burst open and Trixie saw her mother, lion-eyed and determined. “Trixie,” Laura said, two syllables that broke in the center.

  Now that Trixie could feel, she wished she couldn’t. The only thing worse than not feeling anything was feeling everything. She started shaking uncontrollably, an atom about to split beneath its own compounded weight; and then she found herself anchored in her mother’s embrace, their hearts beating hard against each other as the doctor and Janice offered to give them a moment of privacy.

  “Where were you?” Trixie cried, an accusation and a question all at once. She started to sob so hard she could not catch her breath.

  Laura’s hands were on the back of Trixie’s neck, in her hair, around the bound of her ribs. “I should have been home,” her mother said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Trixie wasn’t sure if her mother was apologizing, or just acknowledging her own errors. She should have been home. Maybe then Trixie wouldn’t have chanced lying about going to Zephyr’s; maybe she never would have had the opportunity to steal the sheer blouse. Maybe she would have spent the night in her own bed. Maybe the worst hurt she would have had to nurse was another razor stripe, a self-inflicted wound.

  Her anger surprised her. Maybe none of this had been her mother’s fault, but Trixie pretended it was. Because a mother was supposed to protect her child. Because if Trixie was angry, there was no room left for being scared. Because if it was her mother’s mistake, then it couldn’t be hers.

  Laura folded her arms around Trixie so tight that there was no room for doubt between them. “We’ll get through this,” she promised.

  “I know,” Trixie answered.

  They were both lying, and Trixie thought maybe that was the way it would be, now. In the wake of a disaster, the last thing you needed to do was set off another bomb; instead, you walked through the rubble and told yourself that it wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. Trixie bit down on her lip. After tonight, she couldn’t be a kid anymore. After tonight, there was no more room in her life for honesty.

  • • •

  Daniel was supremely grateful to have been given a job. “She needs a change of clothes,” Janice had said. He was worried about not getting back in time before Trixie was ready, but Janice promised that they would be a while yet.

  He drove back home from the hospital as quickly as he’d driven to it, just in case.

  By the time he reached Bethel, morning had cracked wide open. He drove by the hockey rink and watched it belch out a steady stream of tiny Mites, each followed by a parent-Sherpa lugging an outsized gear bag. He passed an old man skating down the ice of his driveway in his bedroom slippers, out to grab the newspaper. He wove around the parked rigs of hunters culling the woods for winter deer.

  His own house had been left unlocked in the hurry to leave it. The light on the stove hood—the one he’d kept on last night in case Laura came home late—was still burning, although there was enough sunshine to flood the entire kitchen. Daniel turned it off and then headed upstairs to Trixie’s room.

  Years ago, when she’d told him she wanted to fly like the men and women in his comic book drawings, he had given her a sky in which to do it. Trixie’s walls and ceiling were covered with clouds; the hardwood floors were an ethereal cirrus swirl. Somehow, as Trixie got older, she hadn’t outgrown the murals. They seemed to compliment her, a girl too vibrant to be contained by walls. But right now, the clouds that had once seemed so liberating made Daniel feel like he was falling. He anchored himself by holding on to the furniture, weaving from bed to dresser to closet.

  He tried to remember what Trixie liked to wear on weekends when it was snowing, when the single event on the docket was to read the Sunday paper and doze on the couch, but the only outfit he could picture was the one she had been dressed in when he’d found her last night. Gilding the lily, that’s what Laura had called it when Trixie and Zephyr got into her makeup drawer as kids and then paraded downstairs looking like the worst prostitutes in the Combat Zone. Once, he remembered, they’d come with their mouths pale as corpses and asked Laura why she had white lipstick. That’s not lipstick, she’d said, laughing, that’s concealer. It hides zits and dark circles, all the things you don’t want people to see. Trixie had only shaken her head: But why wouldn’t you want people to see your lips?

  Daniel opened a dresser drawer and pulled out a bell-sleeved shirt that was tiny enough to have fit Trixie when she was eight. Had she ever worn this in public?

  He sank down onto the floor, holding the shirt, wondering if all this had been his own fault. He’d forbidden Trixie to
buy certain clothes, like the pants she had had on last night, in fact, and that she must have purchased and hidden from him. You saw outfits like those in fashion magazines, outfits so revealing they bordered on porn, in Daniel’s opinion. Women glanced at those photo spreads and wished they looked that way, men glanced at them and wished for women who looked that way, and the sad reality was that most of those models were not women at all, but girls about Trixie’s age.

  Girls who might wear something to a party thinking it was sexy, without considering what it would mean if a guy thought that too.

  He had assumed that a kid who slept with stuffed animals would not also be wearing a thong, but now it occurred to Daniel that long before any comic book penciler had conceived of Copycat or The Changeling or Mystique, shape-shifters existed in the form of teenage girls. One minute you might find your daughter borrowing a cookie sheet to go sledding in the backyard, and the next she’d be online IMing a boy. One minute she’d lean over to kiss you good night, the next she’d tell you she hated you and couldn’t wait to go away to college. One minute she’d be putting on her mother’s makeup, the next she’d be buying her own. Trixie had morphed back and forth between childhood and adolescence so easily that the line between them had gone blurry, so indistinct that Daniel had simply given up trying for a clearer vision.

  He dug way into the back of one of Trixie’s drawers and pulled out a pair of shapeless fleece sweatpants, then a long-sleeved pink T-shirt. With his eyes closed, he fished in her underwear drawer for panties and a bra. As he hurried back to the hospital, he remembered a game he and Trixie used to play when they were stuck in traffic at the Maine tolls, trying to come up with a superhero power for every letter of the alphabet. Amphibious, bulletproof, clairvoyant. Danger sensitive, electromagnetic. Flight. Glow-in-the-dark. Heat vision. Invincibility.

  Jumping over tall buildings. Kevlar skin. Laser sight. Mind control. Never-ending life. Omniscience.

  Pyrokinesis. Quick reflexes. Regeneration. Superhuman strength. Telepathy.

  Underwater breathing. Vanishing. Weather control. X-ray vision. Yelling loud.