The Tenth Circle Read online

“How?” Trixie asked.

  She could see him weighing his words for an example he was willing to offer out loud. “Well, for one thing, I ran away a lot.”

  Trixie had run away once, when she was little. She’d walked around the block twice and finally settled in the cool blue shadow beneath a hedgerow in her own backyard. Her father found her there less than an hour later. She expected him to get angry, but instead, he’d crawled underneath the bushes and sat beside her. He plucked a dozen of the red berries he was always telling her never to eat and mashed them in the palm of his hand. Then he’d painted a rose on her cheek and let her draw stripes across his own. He’d stayed there with her until the sun started to go down and then told her if she was still planning on running away, she might want to get a move on-even though they both knew that by that point, Trixie wasn’t going anywhere.

  “When I was twelve,” her father said, “I stole a boat and decided to head down to Quinhagak. There aren’t any roads leading to the tundra-you come and go by plane or boat. It was October, getting really cold, the end of fishing season. The boat motor quit working, and I started drifting into the Bering Sea. I had no food, only a few matches, and a little bit of gas-when all of a sudden I saw land. It was Nunivak Island, and if I missed it, the next stop was Russia.”

  Trixie raised a brow. “You are totally making this up.”

  “Swear to God. I paddled like crazy. And just when I realized I had a shot at reaching shore, I saw the breakers. If I made it to the island, the boat was going to get smashed. I duct-taped the gas tank to myself, so that when the boat busted up, I’d float.”

  This sounded like some extravagant survival flashback Trixie’s father would write for one of his comic book characters-she’d read dozens. All this time, she had assumed they were the products of his imagination. After all, those daring deeds hardly matched the father she’d grown up with. But what if he was the superhero? What if the world her father created daily-full of unbelievable feats and derring-do and harsh survival-wasn’t something he’d dreamed up but someplace he’d actually lived?

  She tried to imagine her father bobbing in the world’s roughest, coldest sea, struggling to make it to shore. She tried to picture that boy and then imagine him fully grown, a few nights ago, pummeling Jason. “What happened?” Trixie asked.

  “A Fish and Game guy who was taking one last look for the year spotted the fire I made after I washed up on the island and rescued me,” her father said. “I ran away one or two times each year after that, but I never managed to get very far. It’s like a black hole: People who go to the Alaskan bush disappear from the face of the earth.”

  “Why did you want to leave so badly?”

  Her father came up to the sink and wrung out the sponge. “There was nothing there for me.”

  “Then you weren’t really running away,” Trixie said. “You were running toward.”

  Her father, though, had stopped listening. He reached over to turn off the water in the sink and grasped her elbows, turning the insides of her arms up to the light.

  She’d forgotten about the Band-Aids, which had peeled off in the soapy water. She’d forgotten to not hike up her sleeves. In addition to the gash at her wrist, which had webbed itself with healing skin, her father could see the new cuts she’d made in the shower, the ones that climbed her forearm like a ladder.

  “Baby,” her father whispered, “what did you do?”

  Trixie’s cheeks burned. The only person who knew about her cutting was Janice the rape counselor, who’d been ordered out of the house by Trixie’s father a week ago. Trixie had been grateful for that one small cosmic favor: With Janice out of the picture, her secret could stay one. “It’s not what you think. I wasn’t trying to kill myself again. It just…it’s just…” She glanced down at the floor. “It’s how I run away.”

  When she finally gathered the courage to look up again, the expression on her father’s face nearly broke her. The monster she’d seen in the parking lot the other night was gone, replaced by the parent she’d trusted her whole life. Ashamed, she tried to pull away from his hold, but he wouldn’t let her. He waited until she tired herself out with her thrashing, the way he used to when she was a toddler. Then he wrapped his arms so tight around Trixie she could barely breathe. That was all it took: She began to cry like she had that morning in the shower, when she had heard about Jason.

  “I’m sorry,” Trixie sobbed into her father’s shirt. “I’m really sorry.”

  They stood together in the kitchen for what felt like hours, with soap bubbles rising around them and dishes as white as bones drying on the wire rack. It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us just did a better job of hiding it than others.

  Trixie imagined her father jumping into water so cold it stole his breath. She pictured him watching his boat break to pieces around him. She bet that if he’d been asked-even when he was sitting on that island, soaking wet and freezing-he’d tell you he would have done it all over again.

  Maybe she was more like her father than he thought.

  The secret recipe for Sorrow Pie had been passed down from Laura’s great-grandmother to her grandmother to her mother, and although she had no actual recollection of the transfer of information to herself, by the time she was eleven she knew the ingredients by heart, knew the careful procedure to make sure the crust didn’t burn and the carrots didn’t dissolve in the broth, and knew exactly how many bites it would take before the heaviness weighing on the diner’s heart disappeared. Laura knew that the shopping list in and of itself was nothing extraordinary: a chicken, four potatoes, leeks more white than green, pearl onions and whipping cream, bay leaves and basil. What made Sorrow Pie a force to be reckoned with was the way you might find the unlikely in any spoonful-a burst of cinnamon mixed with common pepper, lemon peel and vinegar sobering the crust-not to mention the ritual of preparation, which required the cook to back into the cupboard for her ingredients, to cut shortening only with the left hand, and, of course, to season the mixture with a tear of her own.

  Daniel was the one who usually cooked, but when desperate measures were called for, Laura would put on an apron and pull out her great-grandmother’s stoneware pie plate, the one that turned a different color each time it came out of an oven. She had baked Sorrow Pie for dinner the night Daniel got word of his mother’s death-a funeral he would not attend and a woman he had, to Laura’s knowledge, never cried for. She made Sorrow Pie the afternoon Trixie’s parakeet flew into a bathroom mirror and drowned in the toilet. She made it the morning after she’d first slept with Seth.

  Today, when she had gone to the grocery store to gather the ingredients, she found herself standing in the middle of the baking goods aisle with her mind blank. The recipe, which had always been as familiar to her as her own name, had been wiped out of her memory. She could not have said whether cardamom was part of the spice regimen, or if it was coriander. She completely forgot to buy eggs.

  It was no easier when Laura came home and took out a stew pot, only to find herself wondering what on earth she was supposed to put inside it. Frustrated, she made herself sit down at the kitchen table and write what she remembered of the recipe, aware that there were huge gaps and missing ingredients. Her mother, who’d died when Laura was twenty-two, had told her that writing the recipe down was a good way to have it stolen; Laura hated to think that this magic would end with her own carelessness.

  It was while she was staring at the blanks on the page that Trixie came downstairs. “What are you making?” she asked, surveying the hodgepodge of ingredients on the kitchen counter.

  “Sorrow Pie,” Laura answered.

  Trixie frowned. “You’re missing the vinegar. And the carrots. And half the spices.” She backed into the pantry and began to pull jars.

  “Not to mention the chicken.”

  The chicken. How had Laura forgotten that?

  Trixie took a mixing bowl out and began to measure the flour and baking powder for the crust. “You don’t have Alzheimer’s, do you?”

  Laura couldn’t remember ever teaching her dau