The Tenth Circle Read online

Weaving back into the right-hand lane of the highway, Daniel stole a glance at Trixie across the front seat. She was curled into a ball. Her face was pale. Her hands were hidden in her sleeves. Daniel bet she didn’t even know she was crying.

  She’d forgotten her coat, and Daniel realized this was his fault. He should have reminded her. He should have brought one of his own.

  Trixie could feel the weight of her father’s worry. Who knew that the words you never got around to saying could settle so heavy? Suddenly, she remembered a blown-glass candy dish she had broken when she was eleven, an heirloom that had belonged to her mother’s grandmother. She had gathered all the pieces and had glued them together seamlessly-and she still hadn’t been able to fool her mother. She imagined the same would be true, now, of herself.

  If this had been an ordinary day, Daniel thought, he would have been getting Trixie up for school about now. He’d yell at her when she spent too much time in the bathroom doing her hair and tell her she was going to be late. He’d put a cereal bowl out for her on the breakfast table, and she’d fill it with Life.

  From the moment it was over until the moment she entered her own home, Trixie had said only two words, uttered as she got out of his car. Thank you.

  Daniel watched the logging truck recede in his rearview mirror. Danger came in different packages, at different points in a lifetime. There were grapes and marbles and other choking hazards. There were trees too tall for climbing. There were matches and scooters and kitchen knives left lying on the counter. Daniel had obsessed about the day Trixie would be able to drive. He could teach her how to be the most defensive driver on the planet, but he couldn’t vouch for the moron truckers who hadn’t slept for three days, who might run a red light. He couldn’t keep the drunk from having one more before he got behind the wheel of his car to head home.

  Out the passenger window, Trixie watched the scenery stream by without registering a single image. She couldn’t stop wondering: If she had not kissed him back, would it never have happened?

 

  The phone rang ten times in Laura’s office, a room the size of a walk-in closet, but Daniel couldn’t seem to hang up. He had tried everything, everywhere. Laura was not answering the phone in the office; she was not at home; her cell automatically rolled over to the voice message system. She had disconnected herself, on purpose.

  Daniel had made excuses for his wife on his own behalf, but he couldn’t make them for Trixie’s sake. Because for the first time in his life, he didn’t think he could be everything his daughter needed right now.

  He cursed out loud and called Laura’s office again to leave a message. “It’s Daniel. It’s four in the morning. I’ve got Trixie at Stephens Memorial, in the ER. She was…she was raped last night.” He hesitated. “Please come.”

  Trixie wondered if this was what it felt like to be shot. If, even after the bullet went through flesh and bone, you would look down at yourself with detachment, assessing the damage, as if it wasn’t you who had been hit but someone else you were asked to appraise. She wondered if numbness qualified as a chronic ache.

  Sitting here, waiting for her father to come back from the restroom, Trixie cataloged her surroundings: the squeak of the nurse’s white shoes, the urgent chatter of a crash cart being rolled across linoleum, the underwater-green cinder block of the walls and the amoeba shapes of the chairs where they had been told to wait. The smell of linen and metal and fear. The garland and stockings hung behind the triage nurse, the afterthought of a Christmas tree that sat next to the wire box holding patient charts. Trixie didn’t just notice all these things, she absorbed them, and she decided she was saturating herself with sensation to make up for the thirty minutes she had blocked out of her consciousness.

  She realized, with a start, that she had already begun to divide her life into before and after.

 

  Hi, you’ve reached Laura Stone, her voice said. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you.

  Leave me.

  I’ll get back to you.

  Daniel hung up again and walked back inside the hospital, where cell phones were prohibited. But when he got back to the waiting area, Trixie was gone. He approached the triage nurse. “Which room is my daughter in? Trixie Stone?”

  The nurse glanced up. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stone. I know she’s a priority case, but we’re short staffed and-”

  “She hasn’t been called in yet?” Daniel said. “Then where is she?” He knew he shouldn’t have left her alone, knew even as she was nodding at him when she asked if she’d be all right by herself for a moment that she hadn’t heard him at all. Backing away from the horseshoe desk, he started through the double doors of the ER, calling Trixie’s name.

  “Sir,” the nurse said, getting to her feet, “you can’t go in there!”

  “Trixie?” Daniel yelled, as patients stared at him from the spaces between privacy curtains, their faces pale or bloodied or weak. “Trixie!”

  An orderly grabbed his arm; he shook the massive man off. He turned a corner, smacking into a resident in her ghost-white coat before he came to a dead end. Whirling about, he continued to call out for Trixie, and then-in the interstitial space between the letters of her name-he heard Trixie calling for him.

  He followed the thread of her voice through the maze of corridors and finally saw her. “I’m right here,” he said, and she turned to him and burst into tears.

  “I got lost,” she sobbed against his chest. “I couldn’t breathe. They were staring.”

  “Who was?”

  “All the people in the waiting room. They were wondering what was wrong with me.”

  Daniel took both of her hands. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said, that first lie a fissure crack in his heart.

  A woman wearing a trowel’s layer of cosmetics approached. “Trixie Stone?” she said. “My name’s Janice. I’m a sexual assault advocate. I’m here to answer questions for you and your family, and to help you understand what’s going to be happening.”

  Daniel couldn’t get past the makeup. If this woman had been called in for Trixie, how much time had been lost applying those false eyelashes, that glittery blush? How much faster might she have come?

  “First things first,” Janice said, her eyes on Trixie. “This wasn’t your fault.”

  Trixie glanced at her. “You don’t even know what happened.”

  “I know that no one deserves to be raped, no matter who she is and what she’s been doing,” Janice said. “Have you taken a shower yet?”

  Daniel wondered how on earth she could even think this. Trixie was still wearing the same torn blouse, had the same raccoon circles of mascara under her eyes. She had wanted to shower-that was why, when he’d found her, she was in the bathroom-but Daniel knew enough to keep her from doing it. Evidence. The word had swum in his mind like a shark.

  “What about the police?” Daniel heard, and he was stunned to realize he’d been the one to say it.

  Janice turned. “The hospital automatically reports any sexual assault of a minor to the police,” she said. “Whether or not Trixie wants to press charges is up to her.”

  She will press charges against that son of a bitch, Daniel thought, even if I have to talk her into it.

  And on the heels of that: If he forced Trixie to do something she didn’t want to, then how was he any different from Jason Underhill?

  As Janice outlined the specifics of the upcoming examination, Trixie shook her head and folded her arms around herself. “I want to go home,” she said, in the smallest of voices. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You need to see a doctor, Trixie. I’ll stay with you, the whole time.” She turned to Daniel. “Is there a Mrs. Stone…?”

  Excellent question, Daniel thought, before he could remember not to. “She’s on her way,” he said. Maybe this was not even a lie by now.

  Trixie grabbed onto his arm. “What about my father? Can he come in with me?”

  Janice looked from Daniel to Trixie and then back again. “It’s a pelvic exam,” she said delicately.

  The last time Daniel had seen Trixie naked, she had been ele