by Jodi Picoult
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 to the type of person she’d avoided her whole life. She looked at Daniel Stone and didn’t see a man whose hair was too long and who hadn’t shaved in days, whose T-shirt was threadbare underneath his battered jacket, whose fingertips were stained with nicotine and ink. Instead, she saw who she might have been if she hadn’t made the conscious choice to be someone else.
“You like poetry,” Daniel said, picking up the thread of conversation.
“Well, Ashbery’s okay. But if you’ve read Rumi—” She broke off, realizing that what she really should have said, in response, was Yes. “I guess you probably didn’t invite me here to talk about poetry.”
“It’s all bullshit to me, but I like the way your eyes look when you talk about it.”
Laura put a little more distance between them, as much as she could while sitting on a bar stool.
“Don’t you want to know why I invited you here?” Daniel asked.
She nodded and forgot to breathe.
“Because I knew you were smart enough to find the invitation. Because your hair’s got all the colors of fire.” He reached out and put his hand on her chin, trailing it down her throat. “Because when I touched you here the other night, I wanted to taste you.”
Before she realized what he was doing, Laura found herself in his arms, with his mouth moving hot across hers. On his breath, there were traces of alcohol and cigarettes and seclusion.
Shoving him away, she stumbled off her bar stool. “What are you doing?”
“What you came here for,” Daniel said.
The other men at the bar were whistling. Laura felt her face burn. “I don’t know why I came here,” she said, and she started to walk toward the door.
“Because of everything we have in common,” Daniel called out.
She couldn’t simply let that one pass. Turning around, she said, “Believe me. We don’t have anything in common.”
“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 daughter’s 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 confiscated. 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 sexual 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 oolong, Sleepytime, and orange pekoe. Darjeeling, rooibos, and sencha. Dragon Well, macha, gunpowder, jasmine, Keemun. Lap
sang souchong and Assam: 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 Trixie’s 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?”
Trixie’s 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 rescued. 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 imagined a loser who only had to whip off his glasses and step into a phone booth to morph into a paragon of manliness, a world where the geek got the girl at the end. The public, reeling from the Depression, embraced Superman, who took them away from a bleak reality.
Daniel’s first comic book had been about leaving, too. It had grown from a Yup’ik story about a hunter who stupidly set out alone and speared a walrus. The hunter knew he couldn’t haul it in by himself, yet if he didn’t let go of the rope it would drag him down and kill him. The hunter decided to release the line, but his hands had frozen into position and he was pulled underwater. Instead of drowning, though, he sank to the bottom of the sea and beca
me a walrus himself.
Daniel started to draw the comic book at recess one day, after he was kept inside because he’d punched a kid who teased him for his blue eyes. He’d absently picked up a pencil and drew a figure that started in the sea—all flippers and tusks—and evolved toward shore to standing position, gradually developing the arms and legs and face of a man. He drew and he drew, watching his hero break away from his village in a way that Daniel couldn’t himself.
He couldn’t seem to escape these days, either. In the wake of Trixie’s rape, Daniel had gotten precious little drawing done. At this point, the only way he would make his deadline was if he stayed awake 24/7 and managed to magically add a few hours to each day. He hadn’t called Marvel, though, to break the bad news. Explaining why he had been otherwise occupied would somehow make what had happened to Trixie more concrete.
When the phone rang at seven-thirty A.M., Daniel grabbed for it. Trixie was not going to school today, and Daniel wanted her to stay blessedly unconscious for as long as humanly possible. “You got something to tell me?” the voice on the other end demanded.
Daniel broke out in a cold sweat. “Paulie,” he said. “What’s up?”
Paulie Goldman was Daniel’s longtime editor, and a legend. Known for his ever-present cigar and red bow tie, he’d been a crony of all the great men in the business: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko. These days, he’d be just as likely to be found grabbing a Reuben at his favorite corner deli with Alan Moore, Todd McFarlane, or Neil Gaiman.
It had been Paulie who’d jumped all over Daniel’s idea to bring a graphic novel back to former comic book fans who were now adults, and to let Daniel not only pencil the art but also write a story line that might appeal to them. He’d gotten Marvel on board, although they were leery at first. Like all publishers, trying something that hadn’t been done before was considered anathema—unless you succeeded, in which case you were called revolutionary. But given the marketing that Marvel had put behind the Wildclaw series, to miss a deadline would be catastrophic.
