The Tenth Circle Read online

Laura folded her arms around Trixie so tight that there was no room for doubt between them. “We’ll get through this,” she promised.

  “I know,” Trixie answered.

  They were both lying, and Trixie thought maybe that was the way it would be, now. In the wake of a disaster, the last thing you needed to do was set off another bomb; instead, you walked through the rubble and told yourself that it wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. Trixie bit down on her lip. After tonight, she couldn’t be a kid anymore. After tonight, there was no more room in her life for honesty.

  Daniel was supremely grateful to have been given a job. “She needs a change of clothes,” Janice had said. He was worried about not getting back in time before Trixie was ready, but Janice promised that they would be a while yet.

  He drove back home from the hospital as quickly as he’d driven to it, just in case.

  By the time he reached Bethel, morning had cracked wide open. He drove by the hockey rink and watched it belch out a steady stream of tiny Mites, each followed by a parent-Sherpa lugging an outsized gear bag. He passed an old man skating down the ice of his driveway in his bedroom slippers, out to grab the newspaper. He wove around the parked rigs of hunters culling the woods for winter deer.

  His own house had been left unlocked in the hurry to leave it. The light on the stove hood-the one he’d kept on last night in case Laura came home late-was still burning, although there was enough sunshine to flood the entire kitchen. Daniel turned it off and then headed upstairs to Trixie’s room.

  Years ago, when she’d told him she wanted to fly like the men and women in his comic book drawings, he had given her a sky in which to do it. Trixie’s walls and ceiling were covered with clouds; the hardwood floors were an ethereal cirrus swirl. Somehow, as Trixie got older, she hadn’t outgrown the murals. They seemed to compliment her, a girl too vibrant to be contained by walls. But right now, the clouds that had once seemed so liberating made Daniel feel like he was falling. He anchored himself by holding on to the furniture, weaving from bed to dresser to closet.

  He tried to remember what Trixie liked to wear on weekends when it was snowing, when the single event on the docket was to read the Sunday paper and doze on the couch, but the only outfit he could picture was the one she had been dressed in when he’d found her last night. Gilding the lily, that’s what Laura had called it when Trixie and Zephyr got into her makeup drawer as kids and then paraded downstairs looking like the worst prostitutes in the Combat Zone. Once, he remembered, they’d come with their mouths pale as corpses and asked Laura why she had white lipstick. That’s not lipstick, she’d said, laughing, that’s concealer. It hides zits and dark circles, all the things you don’t want people to see. Trixie had only shaken her head: But why wouldn’t you want people to see your lips?

  Daniel opened a dresser drawer and pulled out a bell-sleeved shirt that was tiny enough to have fit Trixie when she was eight. Had she ever worn this in public?

  He sank down onto the floor, holding the shirt, wondering if all this had been his own fault. He’d forbidden Trixie to buy certain clothes, like the pants she had had on last night, in fact, and that she must have purchased and hidden from him. You saw outfits like those in fashion magazines, outfits so revealing they bordered on porn, in Daniel’s opinion. Women glanced at those photo spreads and wished they looked that way, men glanced at them and wished for women who looked that way, and the sad reality was that most of those models were not women at all, but girls about Trixie’s age.

  Girls who might wear something to a party thinking it was sexy, without considering what it would mean if a guy thought that too.

  He had assumed that a kid who slept with stuffed animals would not also be wearing a thong, but now it occurred to Daniel that long before any comic book penciler had conceived of Copycat or The Changeling or Mystique, shape-shifters existed in the form of teenage girls. One minute you might find your daughter borrowing a cookie sheet to go sledding in the backyard, and the next she’d be online IMing a boy. One minute she’d lean over to kiss you good night, the next she’d tell you she hated you and couldn’t wait to go away to college. One minute she’d be putting on her mother’s makeup, the next she’d be buying her own. Trixie had morphed back and forth between childhood and adolescence so easily that the line between them had gone blurry, so indistinct that Daniel had simply given up trying for a clearer vision.

  He dug way into the back of one of Trixie’s drawers and pulled out a pair of shapeless fleece sweatpants, then a long-sleeved pink T-shirt. With his eyes closed, he fished in her underwear drawer for panties and a bra. As he hurried back to the hospital, he remembered a game he and Trixie used to play when they were stuck in traffic at the Maine tolls, trying to come up with a superhero power for every letter of the alphabet. Amphibious, bulletproof, clairvoyant. Danger sensitive, electromagnetic. Flight. Glow-in-the-dark. Heat vision. Invincibility.

  Jumping over tall buildings. Kevlar skin. Laser sight. Mind control. Never-ending life. Omniscience.

  Pyrokinesis. Quick reflexes. Regeneration. Superhuman strength. Telepathy.

  Underwater breathing. Vanishing. Weather control. X-ray vision. Yelling loud.

  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