The Tenth Circle Read online

It was when she went to throw the blotter out in the recycle bin that she saw the newspaper, the page open to the letter her parents had not wanted her to see.

  “If the town of Bethel was to pass judgment on this case,” Trixie read, “Jason Underhill would surely be found innocent.”

  What they hadn’t said, in that awful editorial letter, was that this town had already tried and judged the wrong person. She ran upstairs again, to her computer, and connected to the Internet. She looked up the Web page for the Portland Press Herald and started to type a rebuttal letter.

  To Whom It May Concern, Trixie wrote.

  I know it is the policy of your paper to keep victims who are minors anonymous. But I’m one of those minors, and instead of having people guess, I want them to know my name.

  She thought of a dozen other girls who might read this, girls who had been too scared to tell anyone what had happened to them. Or the dozen girls who had told someone and who could read this and find the courage they needed to get through one more day of the hell that was high school. She thought of the boys who would think twice before taking something that wasn’t theirs.

  My name is Trixie Stone, she typed.

  She watched the letters quiver on the page; she read the spaces between the words-all of which reminded her that she was a coward. Then she hit the delete button.

  The phone rang just as Laura walked into the kitchen. By the time she’d picked up, so had Daniel on an upstairs connection. “I’m looking for Laura Stone,” the caller said, and she dropped the glass she was holding into the sink.

  “I’ve got it,” Laura said. She waited for Daniel to hang up.

  “I miss you,” Seth replied.

  She didn’t answer right away; she couldn’t. What if she hadn’t picked up the phone? Would Seth have started chatting up Daniel? Would he have introduced himself? “Do not ever call here again,” Laura whispered.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Her heart was beating so hard she could barely hear her own voice. “I can’t.”

  “Please. Laura. It’s important.”

  Daniel walked into the kitchen and poured himself some water. “Please take me off your call list,” Laura said, and she hung up.

  In retrospect Laura realized that she’d dated Daniel through osmosis, taking a little of his recklessness and making it part of herself. She broke up with Walter and began sleeping through classes. She started smoking. She peppered Daniel with questions about the past he wouldn’t discuss. She learned how her own body could be an instrument, how Daniel could play a symphony over her skin.

  Then she found out she was pregnant.

  At first, she thought that the reason she didn’t tell Daniel was because she feared he’d run. Gradually, though, she realized that she hadn’t told Daniel because she was the one considering flight. Reality kicked at Laura with a vengeance, now that responsibility had caught up to her. At twenty-four years old, what was she doing staying up all night to bet on cockfights in the basement of a tenement? What good would it be in the long run if she could lay claim to finding the best tequila over the border but her doctoral thesis was dead in the water? It had been one thing to flirt with the dark side; it was another thing entirely to set down roots there.

  Parents didn’t take their baby trolling the streets after midnight. They didn’t live out of the back of a car. They couldn’t buy formula and cereal and clothes with the happenstance cash that dribbled in from sketches done here and there. Although Daniel could currently pull Laura like a tide to the moon, she couldn’t imagine them together ten years from now. She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.

  When Laura broke up with Daniel, she convinced herself she was doing both of them a favor. She did not mention the baby, although she had known all along she would keep it. Sometimes she’d find herself losing hours at a time, wondering if her child would have the same pale wolf-eyes as its father. She threw out her cigarettes and started wearing sweater sets again and driving with her seat belt fastened. She folded Daniel neatly away in her mind and pretended not to think about him.

  A few months later, Laura came home to find Daniel waiting at her condo. He took one look at her maternity top and then, furious, grabbed her by her upper arms. “How could you not tell me about this?”

  Laura panicked, wondering if she’d misinterpreted the jagged edge of his personality all along. What if he wasn’t just wild, but truly dangerous? “I figured it was best if-”

  “What were you going to tell the baby?” Daniel said. “About me?”

  “I…hadn’t gotten that far.”

  Laura watched him carefully. Daniel had turned into someone she couldn’t quite recognize. This wasn’t just some Bad Boy out to buck the system-this was someone so deeply upset that he’d forgotten to cover the scars.

  He sank down onto the front steps. “My mother told me that my dad died before I was born. But when I was eleven, the mail plane brought a letter addressed to me.” Daniel glanced up. “You don’t get money from ghosts.”

  Laura crouched down beside him.

  “The postmarks were always different, but after that first letter he’d send cash every month. He never talked about why he wasn’t there, with us. He’d talk about what the salt mountains looked like in Utah, or how cold the Mississippi River was when you stepped into it barefoot. He said that one day he’d take me to all those places, so I could see for myself,” Daniel said. “I waited for years, you know, and he never came to get me.”

  He turned to Laura. “My mother said she’d lied because she thought it would be easier to hear that my father was dead than to hear he hadn’t wanted a family. I don’t want our baby to have a father like that.”

  “Daniel,” she confessed, “I’m not sure if I want our baby to have a father like you.”

  He reared back, as if he’d been slapped. Slowly, he got to his feet and walked away.

  Laura spent the next week crying. Then one morning, when she went out to get the newspaper, she found Daniel asleep on the front steps of her condo. He stood up, and she could not stop staring: His shoulder-length hair had been cut military-short; he was wearing khaki pants and a blue oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He held out a stub of paper. “It’s the check I just deposited,” Daniel explained. “I got a job working at Atomic Comics. They gave me a week’s salary in advance.”

  Laura listened, her resolve cracking wide open. What if she was not the only one who had been fascinated by a personality different from her own? What if all the time that she’d been absorbing Daniel’s wildness, he’d been looking to her for redemption?

  What if love wasn’t the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

  “I don’t have enough cash yet,” Daniel continued, “but when I do, I’m going to take art courses at the community college.” He reached for Laura, so that their child was balanced between them. “Please,” he whispered. “What if that baby’s the best part of me?”

  “You don’t want to do this,” Laura said, even as she moved closer to him. “You’ll hate me one day, for ruining your life.”

  “My life was ruined a long time ago,” Daniel said.” And I’ll never hate you.”

  They got married at the city hall, and Daniel was completely true to his word. He quit smoking and drinking, cold turkey. He came to every OB appointment. Four months later, when Trixie was born, he doted over her as if she were made of sunlight. While Laura taught undergrads during the day, Daniel played with Trixie in the park and at the zoo. At night, he took classes and began doing freelance graphic art, before working for Marvel. He followed Laura from a teaching position in San Diego to one at Marquette to the current one in Maine. He had dinner waiting when she came home from lecturing; he stuffed caricatures of Trixie as SuperBaby in the pockets of her briefcase; he never forgot her birthday. He was, in fact, so perfect that she wondered if the wild in Daniel had only been an act to attract her. But then she would remember the strangest things out of the blue: a night when Daniel