The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Today Daniel sat hunched at his drafting table, procrastinating. He twirled his mechanical pencil; he kneaded an eraser in his palm. He was having a hell of a time turning his main character into a hawk. He had gotten the wingspan right, but he couldn’t seem to humanize the face behind the bright eyes and beak.

  Daniel was a comic book penciler. While Laura had built up the academic credentials to land her a tenured position at Monroe College, he’d worked out of the home with Trixie at his feet as he drew filler chapters for DC Comics. His style got him noticed by Marvel, which asked him numerous times to come work in NYC on Ultimate X-Men, but Daniel put his family before his career. He did graphic art to pay the mortgage—logos and illustrations for corporate newsletters—until last year, just before his fortieth birthday, when Marvel signed him to work from home on a project all his own.

  He kept a picture of Trixie over his workspace—not just because he loved her, but because for this particular graphic novel—The Tenth Circle—she was his inspiration. Well, Trixie and Laura. Laura’s obsession with Dante had provided the bare-bones plot of the story; Trixie had provided the impetus. But it was Daniel who was responsible for creating his main character—Wildclaw—a hero that this industry had never seen.

  Historically, comics had been geared toward teenage boys. Daniel had pitched Marvel a different concept: a character designed for the demographic group of adults who had been weaned on comic books yet who now had the spending power they’d lacked as adolescents. Adults who wanted sneakers endorsed by Michael Jordan and watched news programs that looked like MTV segments and played Tetris on a Nintendo DS during their business-class flights. Adults who would immediately identify with Wildclaw’s alter ego, Duncan: a fortysomething father who knew that getting old was hell, who wanted to keep his family safe, whose powers controlled him, instead of the other way around.

  The narrative of the graphic novel followed Duncan, an ordinary father searching for his daughter, who had been kidnapped by the devil into Dante’s circles of hell. When provoked, through rage or fear, Duncan would morph into Wildclaw—literally becoming an animal. The catch was this: Power always involved a loss of humanity. If Duncan turned into a hawk or a bear or a wolf to elude a dangerous creature, a piece of him would stay that way. His biggest fear was that if and when he did find his missing daughter, she would no longer recognize who he’d become in order to save her.

  Daniel looked down at what he had on the page so far, and sighed. The problem wasn’t drawing the hawk—he could do that in his sleep—it was making sure the reader saw the human behind it. It was not new to have a hero who turned into an animal—but Daniel had come by the concept honestly. He’d grown up as the only white boy in a native Alaskan village where his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was simply gone. In Akiak, the Yupiit spoke freely of children who went to live with seals, of men who shared a home with black bears. One woman had married a dog and given birth to puppies, only to peel back the fur to see they were actually babies underneath. Animals were simply nonhuman people, with the same ability to make conscious decisions, and humanity simmered under their skins. You could see it in the way they sat together for meals, or fell in love, or grieved. And this went both ways: Sometimes, in a human, there would turn out to be a hidden bit of a beast.

  Daniel’s best and only friend in the village was a Yup’ik boy named Cane, whose grandfather had taken it upon himself to teach Daniel how to hunt and fish and everything else that his own father should have. For example, how after killing a rabbit, you had to be quiet, so that the animal’s spirit could visit. How at fish camp, you’d set the bones of the salmon free in the river, whispering Ataam taikina. Come back again.

  Daniel spent most of his childhood waiting to leave. He was a kass’aq, a white kid, and this was reason enough to be teased or bullied or beaten. By the time he was Trixie’s age, he was getting drunk, damaging property, and making sure the rest of the world knew better than to fuck with him. But when he wasn’t doing those things, he was drawing—characters who, against all odds, fought and won. Characters he hid in the margins of his schoolbooks and on the canvas of his bare palm. He drew to escape, and eventually, at age seventeen, he did.

  Once Daniel left Akiak, he never looked back. He learned how to stop using his fists, how to put rage on the page instead. He got a foothold in the comics industry. He never talked about his life in Alaska, and Trixie and Laura knew better than to ask. He became a typical suburban father who coached soccer and grilled burgers and mowed the lawn, a man you’d never expect had been accused of something so awful that he’d tried to outrun himself.

  Daniel squeezed the eraser he was kneading and completely rubbed out the hawk he’d been attempting to draw. Maybe if he started with Duncan-the-man, instead of Wildclaw-the-beast? He took his mechanical pencil and started sketching the loose ovals and scribbled joints that materialized into his unlikely hero. No spandex, no high boots, no half mask: Duncan’s habitual costume was a battered jacket, jeans, and sarcasm. Like Daniel, Duncan had shaggy dark hair and a dark complexion. Like Daniel, Duncan had a teenage daughter. And like Daniel, everything Duncan did or didn’t do was linked to a past that he refused to discuss.

  When you got right down to it, Daniel was secretly drawing himself.

  • • •

  Jason’s car was an old Volvo that had belonged to his grandmother before she died. The seats had been reupholstered in pink, her favorite color, by his grandfather for her eighty-fifth birthday. Jason had told Trixie he used to think about changing them back to their original flesh tone, but how could you mess with that kind of love?

  Hockey practice had ended fifteen minutes ago. Trixie waited in the cold, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her jacket, until Jason came out of the rink. His enormous hockey bag was slung over his shoulder, and he was laughing as he walked beside Moss.

  Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover-up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of the bum deals you kept getting, you hadn’t completely given up.

  When Jason noticed her, Trixie tried to pretend she didn’t see the look that ghosted over his face—regret, or maybe resignation. She concentrated instead on the fact that he was walking toward her alone. “Hey,” she said evenly. “Can you give me a ride home?”

  He hesitated, long enough for her to die inside all over again. Then he nodded and unlocked the car. She slid into the passenger seat while Jason stowed his gear, turned over the ignition, and blasted the heater. Trixie thought up a thousand questions—How was practice? Do you think it’ll snow again? Do you miss me?—but she couldn’t speak. It was too much, sitting there on the pink seats, just a foot away from Jason, the way she’d sat beside him in this car a hundred times before.

  He pulled out of the parking spot and cleared his throat. “You feeling better?”

  Than what? she thought.

  “You left psych this morning,” Jason reminded her.

  That class seemed like forever ago. Trixie tucked her hair behind her ear. “Yeah,” she said, and glanced down. Trixie thought of how she used to grasp the stick shift, so that when Jason reached for it, he would automatically be holding her hand. She slid her palm beneath her thigh and gripped the seat so she wouldn’t do anything stupid.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Jason said.

  “I wanted to ask you something.” Trixie took a deep breath for courage. “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like . . . like none of it mattered.”

  Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn’t been aware she was crying. “Trix,” he sighed, “it mattered.”

  By now, the tears were coming faster. “But I love you,”