The Tenth Circle Read online

“Nothing happened,” Daniel said softly, putting his arms around her.

  Laura-who always seemed to know the right thing to do and the right thing to say-was at a complete loss. She wrapped her arms around Daniel’s waist and burst into tears. He led her into the darkened hallway and closed Trixie’s bedroom door so that she wouldn’t be disturbed. “She’s home,” he said, forcing a smile, even though he could see the scrapes on his knuckles, could feel the bruises that bloomed beneath his skin. “That’s all that counts.”

  The next morning, Daniel assessed the damage in the bathroom mirror. His lip was split; he had a shiner on his right temple; the knuckles of his right hand were swollen and raw. But that inventory didn’t even begin to address the harm done to his relationship with his daughter. Because she’d fallen asleep, exhausted, Daniel still hadn’t had the chance to explain what had happened to him last night, what beast he’d turned into.

  He washed his face and toweled it dry. How did you go about explaining to your daughter-the victim of a rape, for God’s sake-that violence in a man was like energy: transformed, but never destroyed? How did you tell a girl who was trying so hard to start fresh that you couldn’t ever obliterate your past?

  It was going to be one of those days when the temperature didn’t climb above zero. He could tell, just by the bone-deep chill of the floorboards on his bare feet when he went downstairs and the way the icicles pointed like arrows from the outside overhang of the kitchen window. Trixie was standing at the refrigerator, wearing flannel pajama bottoms, a T-shirt that had gone missing from Daniel’s own dresser, and a blue bathrobe that no longer fit. Her wrists and hands stuck out too far from the sleeves as she reached for the orange juice.

  Laura glanced up from the table, where she was poring intently over the newspaper-looking, Daniel assumed, for a story about his brawl with Jason last night. “Morning,” Daniel said hesitantly. Their eyes met, and they passed an entire conversation without speaking a word: How is she? Did she say anything? Do I treat this as an ordinary day? Do I pretend last night never happened?

  Daniel cleared his throat. “Trixie…we have to talk.”

  Trixie didn’t look at him. She unscrewed the Tropicana and began to pour some into a glass. “We’re out of orange juice,” she said.

  The telephone rang. Laura stood up to answer it and carried the receiver into the living room that adjoined the kitchen.

  Daniel sank down into the seat his wife had vacated and watched Trixie at the counter. He loved her, and in return she’d trusted him-and her reward was to see him turn into an animal before her eyes. It wasn’t all that different, really, from what she must have experienced during the rape-and that alone was enough to make Daniel hate himself.

  Laura came back into the room and hung up the phone. She moved stiffly, her features frozen.

  “Who was it?” Daniel asked.

  Laura shook her head, covered her hand with her mouth.

  “Laura,” he pressed.

  “Jason Underhill committed suicide last night,” she whispered.

  Trixie shook the empty container. “We’re out of orange juice,” she repeated.

 

  In the bathroom, Trixie ran the hot water for fifteen minutes before she stepped into the shower, letting the small space fill with enough steam that she wouldn’t have to see her reflection in the mirror. The news had taken up residence in their house, and now, in the aftermath, nobody seemed to know what to do. Her mother had slipped out of the kitchen like a ghost. Her father sank down at the table with his head in his hands, his eyes squeezed shut. Distracted, he didn’t notice when Trixie left. Neither parent was around to see her disappear into her bathroom or to ask her to leave the door wide open, as they had for the past week, so that they could check up on her.

  What would be the point?

  There would be no rape trial anymore. There was no need to make sure she didn’t wind up in a mental hospital before she took the stand as a witness. She could go as crazy as she wanted to. She could secure herself a berth in a psych ward for the next thirty years, every minute of which she could spend thinking about what she’d done.

  There was one Bic razor hidden away. It had fallen behind a crack in the sink cabinet and Trixie made sure to keep it there, in case of emergency. Now she fished for it and set it on the counter. She smacked it hard with a plastic bottle of bath gel, until the pink caddy cracked and the blade slipped out. She ran the tip of her finger over the edge, felt the skin peel back in an onion fold.

  She thought about what it used to feel like when Jason kissed her, and she’d breathe in air that he’d breathed a moment before. She tried to imagine what it was like to not breathe anymore, ever. She thought of his head snapping back when her father hit him, of the last words he had said to her.

  Trixie pulled off her pajamas and stepped into the shower. She crouched in the tub and let the water sluice over her. She cried great, damp, gray sobs that no one could hear over the roar of the plumbing, and she carved at her arm-not to kill herself, because she didn’t deserve such an easy way out-just to release some of the pain before it exploded inside her. She cut three lines and a circle, inside the crook of her elbow:

  NO.

  Blood swirled pink between her feet. She looked down at her tattoo. Then she lifted the blade and slashed hatch marks through the letters, a grid of gashes, until not even Trixie could remember what she’d been trying to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  5

  W hen Jason Underhill’s ghost showed up that night, Trixie was expecting him. He was transparent and white faced, with a gash in the back of his skull. She stared through him and pretended not to notice that he had materialized out of nowhere.

  He was the first person Trixie knew who’d died. Technically, that wasn’t quite accurate-her grandmother had died in Alaska when Trixie was four, but Trixie had never met her. She remembered her father sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone still in his hand even though the person on the other end had hung up, and silence landing on the house like a fat black crow.

  Jason kept glancing at the ground, as if he needed to keep track of his footsteps. Trixie tried not to look at the bruises on his face or the blood on his collar. “I’m not scared of you,” she said, although she was not telling the truth. “You can’t do anything to me.” She wondered if ghosts had the powers of superheroes, if they could see through linen and flannel to spot her legs shaking, if they could swallow her words and spit her lie back out like a bullet.

  Jason leaned so close that his hand went right through Trixie. It felt like winter. He was able to draw her forward, as if he were magnetic and she had dissolved into a thousand metal filings. Pulling her upright in her bed, he kissed her full on the mouth. He tasted of dark soil and muddy currents. I’m not through with you, Jason vowed, and then he disappeared bit by bit, the pressure against her lips the last thing to go.

  Afterward, Trixie lay in bed, shaking. She thought about the bitter cold that had taken up residence under her breastbone, like a second heart made of ice. She thought about what Jason had said and wondered why he’d had to die before he felt the same way she had felt about him all along.

  Mike Bartholemew crouched in front of the boot prints that led up to the railing of the bridge from which Jason had jumped, a cryptic choreography of the boy’s last steps. Placing a ruler next to the best boot print, he took a digital photo. Then he lifted an aerosol can and sprayed light layers of red wax over the area. The wax froze the snow, so that when he took the mixture of dental stone and water he’d prepared to make a cast, it wouldn’t melt any of the ridge details.

  While he waited for his cast to dry, he hiked down the slippery bank to the spot being combed by crime scene investigators. In his own tenure as a detective, he’d presided over two suicides in this very spot, one of the few in Bethel where you could actually fall far enough to do serious damage.

  Jason Underhill had landed o