by Jodi Picoult
The thing that most people didn’t understand, if they weren’t in his line of work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone, forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.
He climbed the stairs over the smoothie bar to the interim apartment he’d rented after the divorce, the one he swore he’d live in for only six months but that had turned out to be his home for six years. It wasn’t furnished—the less appealing it was, the easier Mike figured it would be to get motivated to leave it—but he had a futon that he usually left open as a bed, and a beanbag chair and a TV that he left running 24/7 so that Ernestine would have something to listen to when he was at work.
“Ernie?” he called out as soon as his keys turned in the lock. “I’m back.”
She wasn’t on the futon, where he’d left her when the call came in this morning. Mike stripped off his tie and walked toward the bathroom. He drew back the shower curtain to find the potbellied pig asleep in the bottom of the tub. “Miss me?” he asked.
The pig opened one eye and grunted.
“You know, the only reason I came home was to take you for a walk,” Mike said, but the pig had fallen back asleep.
He had a warrant in his pocket—Trixie’s statement, plus the presence of semen, was enough probable cause to arrest Jason Underhill. He even knew where the kid was, just like everyone in the town who was following the high school hockey team’s stellar exploits. But he had to come home first to let Ernie out. At least that’s what he’d told himself.
Do you have any kids? Daniel Stone had asked.
Mike turned off the television and sat in silence for a few moments. Then he went to the one closet in the apartment and pulled down a cardboard box.
Inside the box was a pillow from Mike’s daughter’s bed, one that he’d stuffed into an enormous plastic evidence bag. He broke the ziplocked seal and inhaled deeply. It hardly smelled like her anymore at all, in spite of the great care he had taken.
Suddenly, Ernestine came running. She skidded across the floor, scrambling over to the futon where Mike sat. Her snout went into the plastic bag with the pillow, and Mike wondered if she could scent something he couldn’t. The pig looked up at Mike.
“I know,” he said. “I miss her, too.”
• • •
Daniel sat in the kitchen with a bottle of sherry in front of him. He hated sherry, but it was the only liquid with alcoholic content in this house right now. He had already burned through half the bottle, and it was a large one, something Laura liked to use when she made stir-fry chicken. He didn’t feel drunk, though. He only felt like a failure.
Fatherhood was the entire foundation Daniel had reinvented himself upon. When he thought about being a parent, he saw a baby’s hand spread like a star on his chest. He saw the tightness between the kite and the spool of string that held it. Finding out that he’d fallen short of his responsibility for protecting his daughter made him wonder how he’d gone so long fooling himself into believing he had truly changed.
The part of himself that he’d thought he’d exorcised turned out to have been only lying in the shallow grave where old personalities went to be discarded. With the sherry lighting his way, Daniel could see that now. He could feel anger building like steam.
The new Daniel, the father Daniel, had answered the detective’s questions and trusted the police to do what they were supposed to, because that was the best way to ensure the safety of his child. But the old Daniel . . . well, he never would have trusted anyone else to complete a job that rightfully belonged to him. He would have fought back in revenge, kicking and screaming.
In fact, he often had.
Daniel stood up and shrugged on his jacket just as Laura walked into the kitchen. She took one look at the bottle of sherry on the table, and then at him. “You don’t drink.”
Daniel stared at her. “Didn’t,” he corrected.
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer her. He didn’t owe her an explanation. He didn’t owe anyone anything. This was not about payment, it was about payback.
Daniel opened the door and hurried out to his truck. Jason Underhill would be at the town rink, right now, getting dressed for the Saturday afternoon game.
• • •
Because Trixie asked, Laura waited for her to fall asleep. She came downstairs in time to see Daniel leave, and he didn’t have to tell her where he was headed. Even worse, Laura wasn’t sure she would have stopped him.
Biblical justice was antiquated, or so she had been taught. You couldn’t hack off the hand of a thief; you couldn’t stone a murderer to death. A more advanced society took care of its justice in a courtroom—something Laura had advocated until about five hours ago. A trial might be more civilized, but emotionally, it couldn’t possibly pack as much satisfaction.
She tried to imagine what Daniel might do if he found Jason, but she couldn’t. It had been so long since Daniel had been anything but quiet and mild-mannered that she had completely forgotten the shadow that had once clung to him, so dark and unpredictable that she’d had to come closer for a second glance. Laura felt the same way she had last Christmas when she’d hung one of Trixie’s baby shoes on the tree as an ornament: wistful, aware that her daughter had once been tiny enough to fit into this slipper but unable to hold that picture in her head along with the one in front of her eyes—a teenage Trixie dancing around the balsam in her bare feet, stringing white lights in her wake.
She tried to sit down with a book, but she reread the same page four times. She turned on the television but could not find the humor in any canned jokes.
A moment later, she found herself at the computer, Googling the word rape.
There were 10,900,000 hits, and immediately that made Laura feel better. Strength in numbers: She was not the only mother who’d felt this way; Trixie was not the only victim. The Web sites rooted this godawful word, and all the suffocating aftershocks that hung from it like Spanish moss.
She started clicking: One out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or a completed rape in her lifetime, adding up to 17.7 million people.
Sixty-six percent of rape victims know their assailant. Forty-eight percent are raped by a friend.
Twenty percent of rapes take place at the home of a friend, neighbor, or relative.
More than half occur within a mile of the victim’s home.
Eighty percent of rape victims are under age thirty. Girls between ages sixteen and nineteen are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of sexual assault.
Sixty-one percent of rapes are not reported to the police. If a rape is reported, there’s a 50.8 percent chance that an arrest will be made. If an arrest is made, there’s an 80 percent chance of prosecution. If there’s a prosecution, there’s a 58 percent chance of felony conviction. If there’s a felony conviction, there’s a 69 percent chance that the rapist will actually spend time in jail. Of the 39 percent of rapes that are reported to police, then, there’s only a 16.3 percent chance that the rapist will wind up in prison. If you factor in all the unreported rapes, 94 percent of rapists walk free.
Laura stared at the screen, at the cursor blinking on one of the multiple percent signs. Trixie was one of these numbers now, one of these percents. She wondered how it was that she’d never truly studied this statistical symbol before: a figure split in two, a pair of empty circles on either side.
• • •
Daniel had to park far away from the entrance to the municipal rink, which wasn’t surprising on a Saturday afternoon. High school hockey games in Bethel, Maine, drew the same kind of crowds high school football did in Midwestern communities. There were girls standing in the lobby, fixing their lipstick in the reflection of the plate-glass windows, and toddlers weaving through the denim forest of grown-up legs. The grizzled man who sold hot dogs and nachos and Swiss Miss cocoa had taken up residence behind the kitchen
ette and was singing Motown as he ladled sauerkraut into a bun.
Daniel walked through the crowd as if he were invisible, staring at the proud parents and spirited students who had come to cheer on their hometown heroes. He followed the swell of the human tide through the double doors of the lobby, the ones that opened into the rink. He didn’t have a plan, really. What he wanted was to feel Jason Underhill’s flesh under his fists. To smack his head up against the wall and scare him into contrition.
Daniel was just about to swing inside the home team’s locker room when the door opened beneath his hand. He flattened himself up against the boards in time to see Detective Bartholemew leading Jason Underhill out. The kid was still wearing his hockey gear, in his stocking feet, carrying his skates in one hand. His face was flushed and his eyes were trained on the rubber mats on the floor. The coach followed close behind, yelling, “If it’s just a chat, damn it, you could wait till after the game!”
Gradually, the people in the stands noticed Jason’s departure and grew quiet, unsure of what they were watching. One man—Jason’s father, presumably—pushed down from the bleachers and started running toward his son.
Daniel stood very still for a moment, certain that Bartholemew hadn’t seen him, until the detective turned back and looked him straight in the eye. By now the crowd was buzzing with speculation; the air around Daniel’s ears was pounding like a timpani—but for that moment, the two men existed in a vacuum, acknowledging each other with the smallest of nods and the quiet understanding that each of them would do what he had to.
• • •
“You went to the rink, didn’t you,” Laura said, as soon as Daniel stepped through the door.
He nodded and busied himself with unzipping his coat, hanging it carefully on one of the pegs in the mudroom.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
Vengeance was a funny thing: You wanted the satisfaction of knowing it had occurred, but you never wanted to actually hear the words out loud, because then you’d have to admit to yourself that you’d wanted proof, and that somehow made you baser, less civilized. Daniel found himself staring at Laura as he sank to the stairs. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” he said quietly.
Just that quickly, this had become a different conversation, a train run off its course. Laura stepped back as if he’d struck her, and bright spots of color rose on her cheeks. “How long have you known?”
Daniel shrugged. “A while, I guess.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
He had asked himself the same question in the last few days a hundred times over. He’d pretended not to see all the late nights, the disconnections, because then he’d have been forced to make a choice: Could you really love someone who was capable of falling in love with somebody else?
But there had been a point in his relationship with Laura where Daniel had been irredeemable, and she had believed he could change. Did he owe her any less? And for that matter, if he let his anger and his shame get the best of him and threw her out of the house, wouldn’t he be acting on adrenaline, the way he used to when he lost control?
It was this simple: If he couldn’t forgive Laura—if he let himself be consumed by this—he was behaving like the kind of man he used to be.
But he did not have the words to say all this. “If I’d said something about it,” Daniel said, “then you would have told me it was true.”
“It’s over, if that means anything.”
He looked up at Laura, his gaze narrow. “Because of Trixie?”
“Before.” She moved across the brick floor, her arms folded across her chest, and stood in a shaft of fading light. “I broke it off the night that she . . . that Trixie . . .” Her sentence unraveled at its edge.
“Were you fucking him the night our daughter was raped?”
“Jesus, Daniel—”
“Were you? Is that why you didn’t answer the phone when I was trying to tell you about Trixie?” A muscle tightened along the column of Daniel’s throat. “What’s his name, Laura? I think you owe me that much. I think I ought to know who you wanted when you stopped wanting me.”
Laura turned away from him. “I want to stop talking about this.”
Suddenly, Daniel was on his feet, pinning Laura against the wall, his body a fortress, his anger an electric current. He grabbed Laura’s upper arms and shook her so hard that her head snapped back and her eyes went wide with fear. He threw her own words back at her: “What you want,” he said, his voice raw. “What you want?”
Then Laura shoved at him, stronger than he’d given her credit for being. She circled him, never losing eye contact, a lion tamer unwilling to turn her back on the beast. It was enough to bring Daniel to his senses. He stared down at his hands—the ones that had seized her—as if they belonged to someone else.
In that instant, he was standing again in the spring bog behind the school in Akiak, striped with mud and blood, holding his fists high. During the fight, he’d broken two ribs, he had lost a tooth, he had opened a gash over his left eye. He was weaving, but he wasn’t about to give in to the pain. Who else, Daniel had challenged, until one by one, their hot black gazes fell to the ground like stones.
Shaken, Daniel tried to shove the violence back from wherever it had spilled, but it was like repacking a parachute—part of it trailed between him and Laura, a reminder that the next time he jumped off that cliff of emotion, he might not wind up safe. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.”
Laura bowed her head, but not before he saw the tears in her eyes. “Oh, Daniel,” she said. “Me too.”
• • •
Trixie slept through Jason Underhill’s unofficial interrogation in the lobby of the hockey rink, and the moment shortly thereafter when he was officially taken into custody. She slept while the secretary at the police department took her lunch break and called her husband on the phone to tell him who’d been booked not ten minutes before. She slept as that man told his coworkers at the paper mill that Bethel might not win the Maine State hockey championship after all, and why. She was still sleeping when one of the millworkers had a beer on the way home that night with his brother, a reporter for the Augusta Tribune, who made a few phone calls and found out that a warrant had indeed been sworn out that morning, charging a minor with gross sexual assault. She slept while the reporter phoned the Bethel PD pretending to be the father of a girl who’d been in earlier that day to give a statement, asking if he’d left a hat behind. “No, Mr. Stone,” the secretary had said, “but I’ll call you if it turns up.”
Trixie continued to sleep while the story was filed, while it was printed. She stayed asleep while the paper was bound with string and sent off in newspaper vans, tossed from the windows of the delivery boys’ ratty Hondas. She was asleep still the next morning when everyone in Bethel read the front page. But by then, they already knew why Jason Underhill had been summoned away from a Bethel High School hockey game the previous day. They knew that Roy Underhill had hired his son a Portland lawyer and was telling anyone who’d listen that his son had been framed. And even though the article was ethical enough never to refer to her by name, everyone knew that it was Trixie Stone, still asleep, who had set this tragedy in motion.
• • •
Because Jason was seventeen, the district court judge was sitting as a juvenile judge. And because Jason was seventeen, the courtroom was closed to spectators. Jason was wearing the brand-new blazer and tie his mother had bought him for college interviews. He’d gotten a haircut. His attorney had made sure of that, said sometimes a judge’s decisions could hinge on something as frivolous as whether or not he could see your eyes.
Dutch Oosterhaus, his lawyer, was so smooth that every now and then Jason was tempted to look at the floor as he walked by, to see if he’d left a slick trail. He wore shoes that squeaked and the kind of shirts that required cuff links. But his father said Dutch was the best in the state and that he’d be able to make t
his mess go away.
Jason didn’t know what the hell Trixie was trying to pull. They had been going at it, full force—consensual, Dutch called it. If that was how she communicated no, then it was a foreign language Jason had never learned.
And yet. Jason tried to hide the way his hands were shaking under the table. He tried to look confident and maybe a little bit pissed off, when in fact he was so scared he felt like he could throw up at any moment.
The district attorney made him think of a shark. She had a wide, flat face and blond hair that was nearly white, but it was the teeth that did it—they were pointy and large and looked like they’d be happy to rip into a person. Her name was Marita Soorenstad, and she had a brother who’d been a legend about ten years ago on the Bethel hockey team, although it hadn’t seemed to soften her any toward Jason himself. “Your Honor,” she said, “although the State isn’t asking for the defendant to be held at a detention facility, there are several conditions we’d ask for. We’d like to make sure that he has no contact with the victim or her family. We’d prefer that he enter a drug and alcohol treatment program. With the exception of the academic school day, the State would like to request that the defendant not be allowed to leave his house—which would include attending sporting events.”
The judge was an older man with a bad comb-over. “I’m going to pick and choose the conditions of release, Mr. Underhill. If you violate any of them, you’re going to be locked up in Portland. You understand?”
Jason swallowed hard and nodded.
“You are not to have any contact with the victim or her family. You are to be in bed, alone, by ten P.M. You will steer clear of alcohol and drugs, and will begin mandatory substance abuse counseling. But as for the State’s request for house arrest . . . I’m disinclined to agree to that. No need to ruin the Buccaneers’ chance for a repeat state championship when there will be plenty of other people around the rink in a supervisory context.” He closed the folder. “We’re adjourned.”
