The Tenth Circle Read online

  Trixie had once seen a science fiction movie that suggested we all had doppelgängers, we just couldn’t ever run into them because our worlds would collide. It was like that, now that her father had come to rescue her. Just this morning, walking back with Willie from the maqi, she had entertained the thought of what it would be like to stay in Tuluksak. Maybe they needed someone to be a teaching assistant. Maybe she could move in with one of Willie’s cousins. But with her father’s arrival, the world had jarred to a stop. He didn’t fit here, and neither did she.

  She had told him her secret: that she was a liar. Not just about being a virgin and playing Rainbow…but even more. She’d never said no to Jason that night, although she’d told the DA she had.

  And the drugs?

  She was the one who’d brought them.

  She hadn’t realized, at the time, that the guy at the college who sold pot to the high school kids was sleeping with her mother. She’d gone to buy some for Zephyr’s party, in the hopes that she could take the edge off. If she was going to be as wild as Zephyr planned for her to be, she needed a little pharmaceutical help.

  Seth was out of pot, but Special K was supposed to be like Ecstasy. It would make you lose control.

  Which, in a completely different way, she had.

  This much wasn’t a lie: She hadn’t taken it that night, not on purpose. She and Zephyr had planned to get high together, but it was a real drug, not pot, and at the last minute, Trixie had chickened out. She’d forgotten about it, until the DA brought up the fact that she might have had a drug in her system. Trixie didn’t really know what Zephyr had done with the vial: if she’d used it herself, if she’d left it sitting on the kitchen counter, if someone else at the party had found it first. She couldn’t say for a fact that Jason had slipped it into her drink. She’d had so much to drink that night-half-empty cans of Coke left lying around, screwdrivers with the ice cubes melting-it was possible that Jason had had nothing to do with it at all.

  Trixie hadn’t known that adding drugs into the legal mix would mean Jason was tried as an adult. She hadn’t been looking to ruin his life. She’d only wanted a way to salvage her own.

  It was not a coincidence, Trixie thought, that no and know sounded the same. You were supposed to be able to say the magic word, and that was enough to make your wishes-or lack of them-crystal clear. But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why, then, didn’t a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against a chest speak just as loudly? Why did you have to actually say the word no for it to be rape?

  That one word, spoken or not, didn’t make Jason any less guilty of taking something Trixie hadn’t wanted to give. It didn’t make her any less foolish. All it did was draw a line in the sand, so that the people who hadn’t been there to witness it-Moss and Zephyr, her parents, the police, the district attorney-could take sides.

  But somewhere along the line, it also made her realize that she couldn’t blame Jason, not entirely, for what had happened.

  She had thought of what it would be like when the trial started, when it was a hundred times worse than it was now, and Jason’s lawyer would get up in court and paint Trixie as a complete slut and a liar. She had wondered how long it would be before she just gave in and admitted they were right. She’d started to hate herself, and one night, when the dark had folded itself around Trixie like the wings of a heron, she wished that Jason Underhill would drop dead. It was just a secret, silent thought, and she knew better than anyone at this point that what was not said aloud didn’t count. But then one thing led to another: Jason was charged as an adult, not a minor. Jason ran into her at the Winterfest. And then, before she knew it, her wish had come true.

  Trixie knew the police were looking for her. We’ll take care of it, her father kept saying. But Jason was dead, and it was her fault. Nothing she said now-or didn’t say-was going to bring him back.

  She wondered if she would be sent to jail in Jason’s place, and if it would be horrible there, like you saw in the movies, or if it would be full of people like Trixie, people who understood that there were some mistakes you never got to erase.

  While her father explained to the Jesuit Volunteers that they were about to lose a fake staff member, Trixie sat in the truck and cried. She had thought that by now, she would have been bone dry, a husk, but the tears didn’t ever stop. All she had wanted was for something to feel right again in her life, and instead, everything had gone impossibly wrong.

  There was a knock at the window of the truck, and she looked up to see Willie, his fingers stuck in a bowl of something pink. He scooped out a bit with his middle and index fingers as she unrolled the window.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She wiped her eyes. “Hey.”

  “You okay?”

  Trixie started to nod, but she was so sick of lying. “Not so much,” she admitted.

  It was nice, the way Willie didn’t even try to say something to make her feel better. He just let her sadness stand. “That’s your dad?” he asked.

  She nodded. She wanted to explain everything to Willie, but she didn’t know how. As far as Willie had been concerned, she was a Jesuit Volunteer, one who had been stranded by the storm. With him, she had not been a rape victim or a murder suspect. How did you tell someone that you weren’t the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you’d meant the things you’d said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie?

  He held out the dish. “Want some?”

  “What is it?”

  “Akutaq. Eskimo ice cream.” Trixie dipped her finger in. It wasn’t Ben & Jerry’s, but it wasn’t bad-berries and sugar, mixed with something she couldn’t recognize.

  “Seal oil and shortening,” Willie said, and she wasn’t in the least surprised that he could read her mind.

  He looked down at her through the window. “If I ever get to Florida, maybe you could meet me there.”

  Trixie didn’t know what was going to happen to her tomorrow, much less after that. But she found that in spite of everything that had happened, she still had the capacity to pretend, to think her future might be something it never actually would. “That would be cool,” she said softly.

  “Do you live nearby?”

  “Give or take fifteen hundred miles,” Trixie said, and when Willie smiled a little, so did she.

  Suddenly Trixie wanted to tell someone the truth-all of it. She wanted to start from the beginning, and if she could make just one person believe her, at least it was a start. She lifted her face to Willie’s. “At home, I was raped by a guy I thought I loved,” Trixie said, because that was what it was to her and always would be. Semantics didn’t matter when you were bleeding between your legs, when you felt like you’d been broken from the inside out, when free will was taken away from you.

  “Is that why you ran away?”

  Trixie shook her head. “He’s dead.”

  Willie didn’t ask her if she was responsible. He just nodded, his breath hanging on the air like lace. “I guess sometimes,” he said, “that’s the way it works.”

  It was bingo night at the village council offices, and Laura had been left alone in the tiny house. She had read every Tundra Drums newspaper twice, even the ones stacked in the entryway for disposal. She’d watched television until her eyes hurt.

  She found herself wondering what kind of person would choose to live in a place like this, where conversation seemed abnormal and where even the sunlight stayed away. What had brought Daniel’s mother here?

  Like Annette Stone, Laura was a teacher. She knew you could change the world one student at a time. But how long would you be willing to sacrifice your own child’s happiness for everyone else’s?

  Maybe she hadn’t wanted to leave. Daniel had told Laura about his wandering father. There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future. Laura understood how you might spend your whole life waiting for that kind of man to come back.

  It was a choice Daniel’s mother