The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  As he pulled Trixie into his arms and felt her unspool, Daniel understood: The law was not going to protect his daughter, which meant that he had to.

  “I couldn’t tell them,” Trixie sobbed. “You were standing right there.”

  That was when Daniel remembered: When the doctor asked Trixie if she’d ever had intercourse before, he’d still been in the examination room.

  Her voice was small, the truth curled tight as a snail. “I didn’t want you to be mad at me. And I thought if I told the doctor that Jason and I had already done it, she wouldn’t believe I got raped. But it could still happen, couldn’t it, Daddy? Just because I said yes before doesn’t mean I couldn’t say no this time . . .?” She convulsed against him, crying hard.

  You signed no contract to become a parent, but the responsibilities were written in invisible ink. There was a point when you had to support your child, even if no one else would. It was your job to rebuild the bridge, even if your child was the one who burned it in the first place. So maybe Trixie had danced around the truth. Maybe she had been drinking. Maybe she had been flirting at the party. But if Trixie said she had been raped, then Daniel would swear by it.

  “Baby,” he said, “I believe you.”

  • • •

  A few mornings later, when Daniel was out at the dump, Laura heard the doorbell ring. But by the time she reached the hallway to answer it, Trixie was already there. She stood in her flannel pajama bottoms and T-shirt, staring at a man standing on the porch.

  Seth was wearing work boots and a fleece vest and looked as if he hadn’t slept in several days. He was looking at Trixie with confusion, as if he couldn’t quite place her. When he saw Laura approach, he immediately started to speak. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he began, but she cut him off.

  She touched Trixie’s shoulder. “Go upstairs,” she said firmly, and Trixie bolted like a rabbit. Then Laura turned to Seth again. “I cannot believe you had the nerve to come to my house.”

  “There’s something you need to know—”

  “I know that I can’t see you anymore,” Laura said. She was shaking, partly with fear, partly because of Seth’s proximity. It had been easier to convince herself that this was over when he wasn’t standing in front of her. “Don’t do this to me,” she whispered, and she closed the door.

  Laura rested against it for a second, eyes closed. What if Daniel had not been at the dump, if he’d opened the door, instead of Trixie? Would he have recognized Seth on sight, simply by the way his face changed when he looked at Laura? Would he have gone for Seth’s throat?

  If they’d fought, she’d have sided with the victim. But which man was that?

  Gathering her composure, Laura walked up the stairs toward Trixie’s room. She wasn’t sure what Trixie knew, or even what she suspected. Surely she had noticed that her parents barely spoke these days, that her father had taken to sleeping on the couch. She had to wonder why, the night of the rape, Laura had been staying overnight in her office. But if Trixie had questions, she’d kept them to herself. It was as if she instinctively understood what Laura was only just figuring out: Once you admitted to a mistake, it grew exponentially, until there was no way to get it back under wraps.

  Laura was tempted to pretend that Seth was a Fuller Brush salesman or any other stranger but decided she would take her cues from Trixie herself. Laura opened the door to find Trixie pulling a shirt over her head. “That guy,” she said, her face hidden. “What was he doing here?”

  Well.

  Laura sat down on the bed. “He wasn’t here because of you. I mean, he’s not a reporter or anything like that. And he’s not coming back. Ever.” She sighed. “I wish I didn’t have to have this conversation.”

  Trixie’s head popped through the neck of the shirt. “What?”

  “It’s finished, completely, one hundred percent. Your father knows, and we’re trying . . . well, we’re trying to figure this out. I screwed up, Trixie,” Laura said, choking over the words. “I wish I could take it back, but I can’t.”

  She realized that Trixie was staring at her, the same way she used to gaze hard at a math problem she simply couldn’t puzzle into an answer. “You mean . . . you and him . . .”

  Laura nodded. “Yeah.”

  Trixie ducked her head. “Did you guys ever talk about me?”

  “He knew you existed. He knew I was married.”

  “I can’t believe you’d do this to Daddy,” Trixie said, her voice rising. “He’s, like, my age. That’s disgusting.”

  Laura’s jaw clenched. Trixie deserved to have this moment of rage; it was owed to her as part of Laura’s reparation. But that didn’t make it any easier.

  “I wasn’t thinking, Trixie—”

  “Yeah, because you were too busy being a slut.”

  Laura raised her palm, coming just short of slapping Trixie across the face. Her hand shook inches away from Trixie’s cheek, rendering both of them speechless for a moment. “No,” Laura breathed. “Neither of us should do something we won’t be able to take back.”

  She stared Trixie down, until the fury dissolved and the tears came. Laura drew Trixie into her arms, rocked her. “Are you and Daddy going to get a divorce?” Her voice was small, childlike.

  “I hope not,” Laura said.

  “Did you . . . love him?”

  She closed her eyes and imagined Seth’s poetry, placed word by word onto her own tongue, a gourmet meal mixed with rhythm and description. She felt the immediacy of a single moment, when unlocking a door took too long, when buttons were popped instead of slipped open.

  But here was Trixie, who had nursed with her hand fisted in Laura’s hair. Trixie, who sucked her thumb until she was ten but only when no one could see. Trixie, who believed that the wind could sing and that you could learn the songs if you just listened carefully enough. Trixie, who was the proof that at one time, she and Daniel had achieved perfection together.

  Laura pressed her lips against her daughter’s temple. “I loved you more,” she said.

  She had nearly turned her back once on this family. Had she really been stupid enough to come close to doing it again? She was crying just as hard as Trixie was now, to the point where it was impossible to tell which one of them was clinging to the other. Laura felt, in that moment, like the survivor of the train wreck, the woman who steps outside the smoking wreckage to realize that her arms and legs still work, that she has somehow come through a catastrophe unscathed.

  Laura buried her face in the curve of her daughter’s neck. It was possible she’d been wrong on several counts. It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.

  • • •

  The first place it appeared was on the screen at the school library computer terminal where you could look books up by their Dewey decimal number. From there, it spread to the twenty iBooks and ten iMacs in the computer lab, while the ninth-graders were in the middle of taking their typing skills test. Within five more minutes, it was on the monitor of the desk of the school nurse.

  Trixie was in an elective, School Newspaper, when it happened. Although her parents had tried to talk her out of going to school, it turned out to be the lesser of two evils. Home was supposed to be a safe place, but had become a minefield full of explosions waiting to happen. School, she already knew, wouldn’t be comfortable at all. And right now, she really needed to function in a world where nothing took her by surprise.

  In class, Trixie was sitting beside a girl named Felice with acne and beaver breath, the only one who would volunteer these days to be her partner. They were using desktop-publishing software to move columns of text about the losing basketball team, when the computer blue-screened. “Mr. Watford,” Felice called out. “I think we crashed . . .”

  The teacher came over, reaching between the girls to hit Control-Alt-Delete a few times, but the machine wouldn’t reboot. “Hmm,” he said. “Why don’t you two edit the advice column by hand in