The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Of what?”

  “Forgetting?”

  Laura understood what he was trying to say. Although talking about what had happened to Trixie was the hardest thing in the world, they had to do it. If they didn’t, they ran the risk of losing—by comparison—the memory of who Trixie used to be.

  It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

  It was why, even when they weren’t actively discussing it, the word rape hung like smoke over all of their heads. It was why, even as they were making polite conversation, every other thought in Laura’s and Daniel’s heads was unfaithful.

  “Daniel,” Laura admitted, “I’m afraid all the time.”

  He sank to his knees, and it took her a moment to realize that he was crying. She could not remember ever seeing Daniel cry—he used to say that he’d used up his allotment of tears as a kid. Laura sat up in bed, the covers falling away from her. She put her hands on Daniel’s bowed head and stroked his hair. “Sssh,” she said, and she drew him up onto the bed and into her arms.

  At first it was about comfort: Laura being able to give; Daniel softening under her hands. But then Laura felt the air move like liquid as Daniel’s body pressed against hers, desperate, his actions full of now and need. She felt her pulse jump under his fingers, as she fell back in time, remembering him like this years ago, and herself reacting. Then just as abruptly as Daniel had begun, he stopped. In the dark, she could see only the shine of his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, backing away.

  “Don’t be,” she said, and she reached for him.

  It was all Daniel needed to let loose the last thread of restraint. He laid siege to Laura; he took no quarter. He scratched her skin and bit her throat. He reached for her hands and pinned them over her head. “Look at me,” he demanded, until her eyes flew open and locked on his. “Look at me,” he said again, and he drove himself into her.

  Daniel waited until she was underneath him, writhing, poised for each moment when he came into her. As his arms anchored her closer, she threw back her head and let herself break apart. She felt Daniel’s hesitation, and his glorious, reckless fall.

  As his sweat cooled on her own body, Laura traced a message over Daniel’s right shoulder blade. S-O-R-R-Y, she wrote, even though she knew that the truths that sneak up behind a person are the ones he’s most likely to miss.

  • • •

  Once, the Yupiit say, there was a man who was always quarreling with his wife. They fought over everything. The wife said her husband was lazy. The husband said his wife only wanted to sleep with other men. Finally, the wife went to a shaman in the village and begged to be changed into another creature. Anything but a woman, she said.

  The shaman turned her into a raven. She flew off and built a nest, where she mated with other ravens. But every night, she found herself flying back to the village. Now, ravens can’t come inside dwellings, so she would sit on the roof and hope to catch a glimpse of her husband. She’d think of reasons for him to come outside.

  One night, he stepped through the entry and stood under the stars. Oh, she thought, how lovely you are.

  The words fell into her husband’s outstretched hands, and just like that, the raven turned back into a woman. Just like that, the man wanted her once again to be his wife.

  • • •

  The next morning, a chill snaked its way into the house. Daniel found his teeth chattering as he headed downstairs to make a pot of coffee. He put a call in to the hospital: Trixie had had a good night.

  Well. So had he. His mistake had been in not admitting just how much had gone wrong between him and Laura. Maybe you had to scrape the bottom before you could push your way back to the surface.

  He was bent over the fireplace, feeding kindling to the paper he’d lit, when Laura came downstairs wearing a sweater over her flannel pajamas. Her hair was sticking up in the back, and her cheeks were still flushed with a dream. “Morning,” she murmured, and she slipped by him to pour herself a glass of orange juice.

  Daniel waited for her to say something about the previous night, to admit that things had changed between them, but Laura wouldn’t even look him in the eye. Immediately, his boldness faded. What if this spiderweb connection they’d made last night was not, as he’d thought, a first step . . . but a mistake? What if the whole time she’d been with Daniel, she’d wished she wasn’t? “The hospital says we can get Trixie at nine,” he said neutrally.

  At news of Trixie, Laura turned. “How is she?”

  “Great.”

  “Great? She tried to kill herself yesterday.”

  Daniel sat back on his heels. “Well . . . compared to yesterday, then . . . I guess she is doing pretty damn great.”

  Laura looked down at the counter. “Maybe that’s true for all of us,” she said.

  Her face was red, and Daniel realized she wasn’t embarrassed but nervous. He stood up and walked into the kitchen until he was standing beside her. Sometime between when they had gone to bed last night and the sun coming up this morning, the world had shifted beneath them. It wasn’t what they had said to each other but what they hadn’t: that forgiving and forgetting were fused together—flip sides of the same coin—and yet they couldn’t both exist at the same time. Choosing one meant that you sacrificed seeing the other.

  Daniel slipped his arm around Laura’s waist and felt her shiver. “Cold out,” she said.

  “Brutal.”

  “Did you hear anything about weather like this?”

  Daniel faced her. “I don’t think anyone predicted it.”

  He opened his arms, and Laura moved into them, her eyes closing as she leaned against him. “I guess these things happen,” she replied, as a rogue burst of sparks rose up the chimney.

  • • •

  You could not walk out of the hospital, for insurance reasons. If you tripped before you crossed the threshold, you might sue. However, if you chose to throw yourself in front of a car the minute you stepped outside, no one would give a damn.

  Trixie was thinking about it.

  She’d already had to sit down with a shrink this morning, and apparently she was going to have to do that twice a week for the next five forevers, too, all because she had seen a brass ring in the bathroom and had tried to grab it. It didn’t matter if, like Janice the rape counselor, these sessions could eventually wind up in court. She had to attend them, or she had to stay in the hospital on the psych floor with a roommate who ate her own hair. She was going to have to take medicine, too—under the watchful eye of her parents, who would actually check the sides of her mouth and under her tongue to make sure she didn’t fake swallowing. Since arriving at the hospital this morning, her mother was trying so hard to smile that Trixie expected her face to crack, and her father kept asking her if she needed anything. Yeah, she felt like answering. A life.

  Trixie seesawed between wishing everyone would leave her alone and wondering why everyone treated her like a leper. Even when that stupid psychiatrist had been sitting across from her, asking things like, Do you think you’re in danger of wanting to kill yourself right now? she felt like she was watching the whole scene from a balcony, and it was a comedy. She kept expecting the girl who played her to say something smart, like, Why yes, thanks, I would like to kill myself right now . . . but I’ll restrain myself until the audience is gone. Instead, she watched the actress who was really her fold like a fortune cookie and burst into tears.

  What Trixie wanted, most of all, was what she couldn’t have—to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.

  She survived the ride home by closing her eyes almost immediately and pretending she’d fallen asleep. Instead, she listened to the conversation between her pare