The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Behind him, Jason could hear his mother weeping. Dutch started packing up his files and stepped across the aisle to speak to the Shark. Jason thought of Trixie, kissing him first that night at Zephyr’s. He thought of Trixie hours before that, sobbing in his car, saying that without him, her life was over.

  Had she been planning, even then, to end his?

  • • •

  Two days after being sexually assaulted, Trixie felt her life crack, unequally, along the fault line of the rape. The old Trixie Stone used to be a person who dreamed of flying and wanted, when she got old enough, to jump out of a plane and try it. The new Trixie couldn’t even sleep with the light off. The old Trixie liked wearing T-shirts that hugged her tight; the new Trixie went to her father’s dresser for a sweatshirt that she could hide beneath. The old Trixie sometimes showered twice a day, so that she could smell like the pear soap that her mother always put in her Christmas stocking. The new Trixie felt dirty, no matter how many times she scrubbed herself. The old Trixie felt like part of a group. The new Trixie felt alone, even when she was surrounded by people. The old Trixie would have taken one look at the new Trixie and dismissed her as a total loser.

  There was a knock on her door. That was new, too—her father used to just stick his head in, but even he’d become sensitive to the fact that she jumped at her own shadow. “Hey,” he said. “You feel up to company?”

  She didn’t, but she nodded, thinking he meant himself, until he pushed the door wider and she saw that woman Janice, the sexual assault advocate who’d been at the hospital with her. She was wearing a sweater with a jack-o’-lantern on it, although it was closer to Christmas, and enough eyeshadow to cover a battalion of super-models. “Oh,” Trixie said. “It’s you.”

  She sounded rude, and there was something about that that made a little spark flare under her heart. Being a bitch felt surprisingly good, a careful compromise that nearly made up for the fact that she couldn’t ever be herself again.

  “I’ll just, um, let you two talk,” Trixie’s father said, and even though she tried to send him silent urgent messages with her eyes to keep him from leaving her alone with this woman, he couldn’t hear her SOS.

  “So,” Janice said, after he closed the door. “How are you holding up?”

  Trixie shrugged. How had she not noticed at the hospital how much this woman’s voice annoyed her? Like a Zen canary.

  “I guess you’re still sort of overwhelmed. That’s perfectly normal.”

  “Normal,” Trixie repeated sarcastically. “Yeah, that’s exactly how I’d describe myself right now.”

  “Normal’s relative,” Janice said.

  If it was relative, Trixie thought, then it was the crazy uncle that nobody could stand to be around at family functions, the one who talked about himself in the third person and ate only blue foods and whom everyone else made fun of on the way home.

  “It’s a whole bunch of baby steps. You’ll get there.”

  For the past forty-eight hours, Trixie had felt like she was swimming underwater. She would hear people talking and it might as well have been Croatian for all that she could understand the words. When it got to be too quiet, she was sure that she heard Jason’s voice, soft as smoke, curling into her ear.

  “It gets a little easier every day,” Janice said, and Trixie all of a sudden hated her with a passion. What the hell did Janice know? She wasn’t sitting here, so tired that the insides of her bones ached. She didn’t understand how even right now, Trixie wished she could fall asleep, because the only thing she had to look forward to was the five seconds when she woke up in the morning and hadn’t remembered everything, yet.

  “Sometimes it helps to get it all out,” Janice suggested. “Play an instrument. Scream in the shower. Write it all down in a journal.”

  The last thing Trixie wanted to do was write about what had happened, unless she got to burn it when she was done.

  “Lots of women find it helpful to join a survivors’ group . . .”

  “So we can all sit around and talk about how we feel like shit?” Trixie exploded. Suddenly she wanted Janice to crawl back from whatever hole good Samaritans came from. She didn’t want to make believe that she had a snowball’s chance in hell of fitting back into her room, her life, this world. “You know,” she said, “this has been real, but I think I’d rather contemplate suicide or something fun like that. I don’t need you checking up on me.”

  “Trixie—”

  “You have no idea what I feel like,” Trixie shouted. “So don’t stand here and pretend we’re in this together. You weren’t there that night. That was just me.”

  Janice stepped forward, until she was close enough for Trixie to touch. “It was 1972 and I was fifteen. I was walking home and I took a shortcut through the elementary school playground. There was a man there and he said he’d lost his dog. He wanted to know if I’d help him look. When I was underneath the slide, he knocked me down and raped me.”

  Trixie stared at her, speechless.

  “He kept me there for three hours. The whole time, all I could think about was how I used to play there after school. The boys and the girls always kept to separate sides of the jungle gym. We used to dare each other. We’d run up to the boys’ side, and then back to safety.”

  Trixie looked down at her feet. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Baby steps,” Janice said.

  • • •

  That weekend, Laura learned that there are no cosmic referees. Time-outs do not get called, not even when your world has taken a blow that renders you senseless. The dishwasher still needs to be emptied and the hamper overflows with dirty clothes and the high school buddy you haven’t spoken to in six months calls to catch up, not realizing that you cannot tell her what’s been going on in your life without breaking down. The twelve students in your class section still expect you to show up on Monday morning.

  Laura had anticipated hunkering down with Trixie, protecting her while she licked her wounds. However, Trixie wanted to be by herself, and that left Laura wandering a house that was really Daniel’s domain. They were still dancing around each other, a careful choreography that involved leaving a room the moment he entered, lest they have to truly communicate.

  “I’m going to take a leave of absence from the college,” she had told Daniel on Sunday, when he was reading the newspaper. But hours later, when they were lying on opposite sides of the bed—that tremendous elephant of the affair snug between them—he had brought it up again. “Maybe you shouldn’t,” he said.

  She had looked at him carefully, not sure what he was trying to imply. Did he not want her around 24/7, because it was too uncomfortable? Did he think she cared more about her career than her daughter?

  “Maybe it will help Trixie,” he added, “if she sees that it’s business as usual.”

  Laura had looked up at the ceiling, at a watermark in the shape of a penguin. “What if she needs me?”

  “Then I’ll call you,” Daniel replied coolly. “And you can come right home.”

  His words were a slap—the last time he’d called her, she hadn’t answered.

  The next morning, she fished for a pair of stockings and one of her work skirts. She packed a breakfast she could eat in the car and she left Trixie a note. As she drove, she became aware of how the more distance she put between herself and her home, the lighter she felt—until by the time she reached the gates of the college, she was certain that the only thing anchoring her was her seat belt.

  When Laura arrived at her classroom, the students were already clustered around the table, involved in a heated discussion. She’d missed this easy understanding of who she was, where she belonged, the comfort of intellectual sparring. Snippets of the conversation bled into the hallway. I heard from my cousin, who goes to the high school . . . crucified . . . had it coming. For a moment Laura hesitated outside the door, wondering how she could have been naïve enough to believe this horrible thing had happened to Trixie, when i