The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Zero gravity.

  Nowhere in that list was the power to keep your child from growing up. If a superhero couldn’t do it, how could any ordinary man?

  • • •

  There was a knock on the examination room door. “It’s Daniel Stone,” Laura heard. “I, um, have Trixie’s clothes.”

  Before Janice could reach the door, Laura opened it. She took in Daniel’s disheveled hair, the shadow of beard on his face, the storm behind his eyes, and thought for a moment she had fallen backward fifteen years.

  “You’re here,” he said.

  “I got the message on my cell.” She took the stack of clothing from his hands and carried it over to Trixie. “I’m just going to talk to Daddy for a minute,” Laura said, and as she moved away, Janice stepped forward to take her place.

  Daniel was waiting outside the door for Laura. “Jason did this?” she turned to him, fever in her eyes. “I want him caught. I want him punished.”

  “Take a number.” Daniel ran a hand down his face. “How is she?”

  “Nearly finished.” Laura leaned against the wall beside him, a foot of space separating them.

  “But how is she?” Daniel repeated.

  “Lucky. The doctor said there wasn’t any internal injury.”

  “Wasn’t she . . . she was bleeding.”

  “Only a tiny bit. It’s stopped now.” Laura glanced up at Daniel. “You never told me she was sleeping at Zephyr’s last night.”

  “She got invited after you left.”

  “Did you call Zephyr’s mother to—”

  “No,” Daniel interrupted. “And you wouldn’t have, either. She’s gone to Zephyr’s a hundred times before.” His eyes flashed. “If you’re going to accuse me of something, Laura, just do it.”

  “I’m not accusing you—”

  “People in glass houses,” Daniel murmured.

  “What?”

  He moved away from the wall and approached her, backing her into a corner. “Why didn’t you answer when I called your office?”

  Excuses rose inside Laura like bubbles: I was in the restroom. I had taken a sleeping pill. I accidentally turned the ringer off. “I don’t think now is the time—”

  “If this isn’t the time,” Daniel said, his voice aching, “maybe you could give me a number at least. A place I can reach you, you know, in case Trixie gets raped again.”

  Laura stood perfectly still, immobilized by equal parts shame and anger. She thought of the deepest level of hell, the lake of ice that only froze harder the more you tried to work yourself free.

  “Excuse me?”

  Grateful for a distraction, Laura turned toward the voice. A tall, sad-eyed man with sandy hair stood behind her, a man who’d most likely heard every word between her and Daniel. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt. I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Stone?”

  “That’s us,” Laura said. In name, at least.

  The man held out a badge. “I’m Detective Mike Bartholemew. And I’d really like to speak to your daughter.”

  • • •

  Daniel had been inside the Bethel police station only once, when he’d chaperoned Trixie’s second-grade class there on a field trip. He remembered the quilt that hung in the lobby, stars sewn to spell out PROTECT AND SERVE, and the booking room, where the whole class had taken a collective grinning mug shot. He had not seen the conference room until this morning—a small, gray cubicle with a reverse mirrored window that some idiot contractor had put in backward, so that from inside, Daniel could see the traffic of cops in the hallway checking their reflections.

  He focused on the winding wheels of the tape recorder. It was easier than concentrating on the words coming out of Trixie’s mouth, an exhaustive description of the previous night. She had already explained how, when she left home, she changed into a different outfit. How there was a posse of players from the hockey team present when she arrived at Zephyr’s, and how, by the end of the evening, it was only the four of them.

  One parent was allowed in with Trixie when she gave her statement. Because Laura had been at the hospital exam—or maybe because of what Daniel had said to her in the hall—she had decided that he should be the one to go. It was only after he was inside that he realized this was more of a trial than an advantage. He had to sit very still and listen to Trixie’s story in excruciating detail, smiling at her in encouragement and telling her she was doing great, when what he really wanted was to grab the detective and ask him why the hell he hadn’t locked up Jason Underhill yet.

  He wondered how, in just an hour’s time, he’d regressed back to being the kind of person he’d been a lifetime ago—someone for whom feeling came before thought, for whom reason was a postscript. He wondered if this happened to all fathers: as their daughters grew up, they slid backward.

  Bartholemew had brewed coffee. He’d brought in a box of tissues, which he put near Trixie, just in case. Daniel liked thinking that Bartholemew had been through this before. He liked knowing that someone had.

  “What were you drinking?” the detective asked Trixie.

  She was wearing the pink shirt and sweatpants that Daniel had brought, plus his coat. He’d forgotten to bring hers back, even when he went home again. “Coke,” Trixie said. “With rum.”

  “Were you using any drugs?”

  She looked down at the table and shook her head.

  “Trixie,” the detective said. “You’re going to have to speak up.”

  “No,” she answered.

  “What happened next?”

  Daniel listened to her describe a girl he didn’t know, one who lap-danced and played strip poker. Her voice flattened under the weight of her bad judgment. “After Zephyr went upstairs with Moss, I figured everyone was gone. I was going to go home, but I wanted to sit down for a minute, because I had a really bad headache. And it turned out Jason hadn’t left. He said he wanted to make sure I was all right. I started to cry.”

  “Why?”

  Her face contorted. “Because we broke up a couple of weeks ago. And being that close to him again . . . it hurt.”

  Daniel’s head snapped up. “Broke up?”

  Trixie turned at the same time the detective stopped the tape. “Mr. Stone,” Bartholemew said, “I’m going to have to ask you to remain silent.” He nodded at Trixie to continue.

  She let her gaze slide beneath the table. “We . . . we wound up kissing. I fell asleep for a little while, I guess, because when I woke up, we weren’t near the bathroom anymore . . . we were on the carpet in the living room. I don’t remember how we got there. That was when he . . . when he raped me.”

  The last drink that Daniel had had was in 1991, the day before he convinced Laura that he was worth marrying. But before that, he’d had plenty of firsthand knowledge about the faulty reasoning and slurred decisions that swam at the bottom of a bottle. He’d had his share of mornings where he woke up in a house he could not recall arriving at. Trixie might not remember how she got into the living room, but Daniel could tell her exactly how it had happened.

  Detective Bartholemew looked squarely at Trixie. “I know this is going to be difficult,” he said, “but I need you to tell me exactly what happened between you two. Like whether either of you removed any clothing. Or what parts of your body he touched. What you said to him and what he said to you. Things like that.”

  Trixie fiddled with the zipper of Daniel’s battered leather jacket. “He tried to take off my shirt, but I didn’t want him to. I told him that it was Zephyr’s house and that I didn’t feel right fooling around there. He said I was breaking his heart. I felt bad after that, so I let him unhook my bra and touch me, you know . . . my breasts. He was kissing me the whole time, and that was the good part, the part I wanted, but then he put his hand down my pants. I tried to pull his hand away, but he was too strong.” Trixie swallowed. “He said, ‘Don’t tell me you don’t want this.’”

  Daniel gripped the edge of the table so hard that he thought he would crac