The Tenth Circle Read online

Laura’s breathing caught. “No.”

  “I picture him with you, and I don’t even know what he looks like.”

  “It was a mistake, Daniel-”

  “Mistakes are something that happen by accident. You didn’t walk out the door one morning and fall into some guy’s bed. You thought about it, for a while. You made that choice.”

  The truth had scorched Daniel’s throat, and he found himself breathing hard.

  “I made the choice to end it, too. To come back.”

  “Am I supposed to thank you for that?” He flung an arm across his eyes, better to be blind.

  Laura’s profile was cast in silver. “Do you…do you want me to move out?”

  He had thought about it. There was a part of him that did not want to see her in the bathroom brushing her teeth, or setting the kettle on the stove. It was too ordinary, a mirage of a marriage. But there was another part of him that no longer remembered who he used to be without Laura. In fact, it was because of her that he’d become the kind of man he now was. It was like any other dual dynamic that was part and parcel of his art: You couldn’t have strength without weakness; you couldn’t have light without dark; you couldn’t have love without loss. “I don’t think it would be good for Trixie if you left right now,” Daniel said finally.

  Laura rolled over to face him. “What about you? Would it be good for you?”

  Daniel stared at her. Laura had been inked onto his life, as indelible as any tattoo. It wouldn’t matter if she was physically present or not; he would carry her with him forever. Trixie was proof of that. But he’d folded enough loads of laundry during Oprah and Dr. Phil to know how infidelity worked. Betrayal was a stone beneath the mattress of the bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you’d never forget?

  When Daniel didn’t respond to her, Laura rolled onto her back. “Do you hate me?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes I hate myself, too.”

  Daniel pretended that he could hear Trixie’s breathing, even and untroubled, through the bedroom wall. “Was it really so bad? The two of us?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “Then why did you do it?”

  For a long time, she did not answer. Daniel assumed she’d fallen asleep. But then her voice pricked on the edges of the stars strung outside the window. “Because,” she said, “he reminded me of you.”

  Trixie knew that at the slightest provocation, she could stand up and walk out of class and head down to the office for refuge without any teacher even blinking. She had been given her father’s cell phone. Call me anytime, he said, and I will be there before you hang up. She had stumbled through an awkward conversation with the school principal, who phoned to tell her that he would certainly do his best to make Bethel High a haven of safety for her. To that end, she was no longer taking psych with Jason; she had an independent study instead in the library. She could write a report on anything. Right now, she was thinking of a topic: Girls Who Would Rather Disappear.

  “I’m sure that Zephyr and your other friends will be happy to see you,” her father said. Neither of them mentioned that Zephyr hadn’t called, not once, to see how she was doing. Trixie tried to convince herself that was because Zephyr felt guilty, with the fight they’d had and what had happened afterward as a direct result. She didn’t explain to her father that she didn’t really have any other friends in the ninth grade. She’d been too busy filling her world with Jason to maintain old relationships, or to bother starting new ones.

  “What if I’ve changed my mind?” Trixie asked softly.

  Her father looked at her. “Then I’ll take you home. It’s that easy, Trix.”

  She glanced out the car window. It was snowing, a fine fat-flaked dusting that hung in the trees and softened the edges of the landscape. The cold seeped through the stocking cap she wore-who knew her hair had actually kept her so warm? She kept forgetting she’d cut it all off in all the smallest ways: when she looked in the mirror and got the shock of her life, when she tried to pull a long nonexistent ponytail out from beneath the collar of her coat. To be honest, she looked horrible-the short cap of hair made her eyes look even bigger and more anxious; the severity of the cut was better suited to a boy-but Trixie liked it. If people were going to stare, she wanted to know it was because she looked different, not because she was different.

  The gates of the school came into view through the windshield wipers, the student parking lot to the right. Under the cover of snow, the cars looked like a sea of beached whales. She wondered which one was Jason’s. She imagined him inside the building already, where he’d been for two whole days longer than her, sowing the seeds of his side of the story that by now, surely, had grown into a thicket.

  Her father pulled to the curb. “I’ll walk you in,” he said.

  All live wires inside Trixie tripped. Could there be anything that screamed out loser! more than a rape victim who had to be walked into school by her daddy? “I can do it myself,” she insisted, but when she went to unbuckle her seat belt she found that her mind couldn’t make her fingers do the work they needed to.

  Suddenly she felt her father’s hands on the fastenings, the harness coming free. “If you want to go home,” he said gently, “that’s okay.”

  Trixie nodded, hating the tears that welled at the base of her throat. “I know.”

  It was stupid to be scared. What could possibly happen inside that school that was any worse than what already had? But you could reason with yourself all day and still have butterflies in your stomach.

  “When I was growing up in the village,” Trixie’s father said, “the place we lived was haunted.”

  Trixie blinked. She could count on one hand the number of times in her life that her father had talked about growing up in Alaska. There were certain remnants of his childhood that labeled him as different-like the way, if it got too loud, he’d have to leave the room, and the obsession he had with conserving water even though they had an endless supply through their home well. Trixie knew this much: Her father had been the only white boy in a native Yup’ik Eskimo village called Akiak. His mother, who raised him by herself, had taught school there. He had left Alaska when he was eighteen, and he swore he’d never go back.

  “Our house was attached to the school. The last person who’d lived in it was the old principal, who’d hanged himself from a beam in the kitchen. Everyone knew about it. Sometimes, in the school, the audiovisual equipment would turn on even when it was unplugged. Or the basketballs lying on the floor of the gym would start to bounce by themselves. In our house, drawers would fly open every now and then, and sometimes you could smell aftershave, out of nowhere.” Trixie’s father looked up at her. “The Yupiit are afraid of ghosts. Sometimes, in school, I’d see kids spit into the air, to check if the ghost was close enough to steal their saliva. Or they’d walk around the building three times so that the ghost couldn’t follow them back to their own homes.”

  He shrugged. “The thing is…I was the white kid. I talked funny and I looked funny and I got picked on for that on a daily basis. I was terrified of that ghost just like they were, but I never let anyone know it. That way, I knew they might call me a lot of awful names…but one of them wasn’t coward.”

  “Jason’s not a ghost,” Trixie said quietly.

  Her father tugged her hat down over her ears. His eyes were so dark she could see herself shining in them. “Well, then,” he said, “I guess you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

 

  Daniel nearly ran after Trixie as she navigated the slippery sidewalk up to the front of the school. What if he was wrong about this? What if Janice and the doctors and everyone else didn’t know how cruel teenagers could be? What if Trixie came home even more devastated?

  Trixie walked with her head down, bracing against the cold. Her green jacket was a stain against the snow. She didn’t turn back to look at him.

  When she was little, Daniel had always waited for Trixie to enter the school building before he drove away. The