The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

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  Trixie had gone AWOL. She couldn’t say why she felt guilty about this, especially since it wasn’t like she was really supposed to be working the Tuluksak checkpoint in the first place. She ran beside Willie in the dark, small puffs of her breath leaving a dissipating trail.

  As promised, Willie had come back to the school, although Trixie hadn’t really expected him to. She had planned to leave his coat behind with one of the volunteers when she got ready to leave—whenever and toward wherever that would be. But Willie had arrived while Trixie was still babysitting Joseph. He’d knelt down on the other side of the snoring old man and shook his head. He knew Joseph—apparently everyone did in an eight-village radius, since Joseph didn’t discriminate when it came to where he’d go on a bender. The Yupiit called him Kingurauten—Too Late—Joseph because he’d promised a woman he’d return, only to turn up a week after she’d died.

  Willie had come to invite Trixie to steam. She didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded heavenly after shivering for nearly two days straight. She’d followed Willie, tiptoeing past Joseph, past the sleeping Jesuit Volunteers, and out the front door of the school.

  They ran. The night was spread like icing over the dome of the sky; stars kept falling at Trixie’s feet. It was hard to tell if it was the uncovered beauty of this place that took her breath away, or the seize of the cold. Willie slowed when they came to a narrow road lined with tiny homes. “Are we going to your house?” Trixie asked.

  “No, my dad’s there, and when I left he was drinking. We’re going to my cousin’s. He was having a steam with some of his buddies, but they’re leaving for a city league basketball game downriver.”

  Several dogs that were chained up outside houses started to bark. Willie fumbled for her hand, probably to get her to move faster, but if that was the intent it didn’t work. Everything slowed inside Trixie: her heartbeat, her breathing, her blood.

  Although Janice had tried to tell her otherwise, Trixie had believed she would never want another guy to lay hands on her again. But when Willie touched her, she couldn’t really remember what it had felt like to touch Jason. It was almost as if one canceled out the other. She knew this: Willie’s skin was smoother than Jason’s. His hand was closer to hers in size. The muscles in his forearms weren’t thick, the product of a million slap shots—they were lean and ropy, almost sculpted. It made no sense, given their upbringings, but she had this weird feeling that she and Willie were equals, that neither of them was in control, because they were both so skittish in each other’s company.

  They stopped behind one of the houses. Through the buttery light of the windows, Trixie could see a sparse living room, a single couch, and a few young men putting on their coats and boots. “Come on,” Willie said, and he tugged her away.

  He opened the door to a wooden shack not much bigger than an outhouse. It was divided into two rooms—they had entered the larger one; the other room lay through the closed door directly ahead of Trixie. Once the sound of his cousin’s snow machine winnowed away, Willie shrugged out of his coat and boots, gesturing to Trixie to do the same. “The good news is, my cousin already did all the hard work tonight—hauling water and chopping wood. He built this maqi a few years ago.”

  “What do you do in it?”

  Willie grinned, and in the dark his teeth gleamed. “Sweat,” he said. “A lot. The men usually go in first, because they can handle the real heat. Women go in later.”

  “Then how come we’re here together?” Trixie asked.

  Willie ducked his head. She knew he was blushing, even if she couldn’t see it.

  “I bet you take girls here all the time,” she said, but she was only half joking, waiting for his answer.

  “I’ve never been with a girl in the steam before,” Willie said, and then he shucked off his skirt. Trixie closed her eyes, but not before she saw the bright white flash of his underwear.

  He opened a door and disappeared inside the adjoining room. Trixie waited for him to come back, but he didn’t. She heard the hiss of rising steam.

  She stared at the wooden door, wondering what was on the other side. Was he trying to show her how tough he was, by taking the real heat? What did he mean when he said that he hadn’t been with a girl in the steam before? Did he take them other places, or was that an invitation for her to follow? She felt like she had fallen into one of her father’s comic book universes, where what you said was not what you meant, and vice versa.

  Hesitantly, Trixie pulled off her shirt. The action—and Willie’s proximity—immediately made her think about playing strip poker the night of Zephyr’s party. But nobody was watching this time; there were no rules to the game; no one was telling her what she had to do. It was entirely different, she realized, when the choice was up to her.

  If she went in there in her bra and panties, that was just like wearing a bikini, wasn’t it?

  She shivered only a moment before she opened the stunted door and crawled inside.

  The heat slammed into her, a solid wall. It wasn’t just heat. It was a sauna and a steam room and a bonfire all rolled together, and then ratcheted up a notch. The floor beneath her bare feet was slick plywood. She couldn’t see, because of all the steam.

  As the clouds drifted, she could make out a fifty-five-gallon oil drum on its side with a fire burning hot in its belly. Rocks were nestled in birdcage wire on top, and a metal container of water sat beside it. Willie was hunkered down on the plywood, his knees drawn up to his chest, his skin red and blotched.

  He didn’t say anything when he saw her, and Trixie understood why—if she opened her mouth, surely her throat would burst into flame. He wasn’t wearing anything, but the region between his thighs was only a shadow, and somehow, she was the one who felt overdressed. She sat down beside him—in that small a space there wasn’t much choice—and felt him wrapping something around her head. A rag, she realized, that had been dipped in water, to cover her ears and keep them from burning. When he knotted it, the skin of his upper arm stuck to hers.

  The orange light that spilled through the cracks in the stove door illuminated Willie. His silhouette glowed, lean and feline; at that moment, Trixie wouldn’t have been surprised to see him turn into a panther. Willie reached for a ladle, a wooden stick wired to a soup can. He dipped it into the bucket of water, pouring more over the rocks and causing a fresh cloud of steam to fill the chamber. When he settled down beside Trixie, his hand was so close to hers on the plywood that their pinkies touched.

  It hurt, almost past the point of pain. The room had a pulse, and breathing was nearly impossible. Heat rose off Trixie’s skin in the shape of her soul. Perspiration ran down her back and between her legs: her entire body, crying.

  When Trixie’s lungs were about to explode, she ran through the door into the cold room again. She sat down on the floor, warmth rolling off her in waves, just as Willie burst in with a towel wrapped around his waist. He sank down beside her and passed her a jug.

  Trixie drank it without even knowing what was inside. The water cooled the lining of her throat. She passed the jug to Willie, who tipped his head back against the wall and drank deeply, the knot of his Adam’s apple following each swallow. He turned to her, grinning. “Crazy, huh?”

  She found herself laughing, too. “Totally.”

  Willie leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. “I always kind of figured that’s what Florida’s like.”

  “Florida? It’s nothing like this.”

  “You’ve been to Florida?” Willie asked, intrigued.

  “Yeah. It’s just, you know, another state.”

  “I’d like to see an orange growing on a tree. I’d pretty much like to see anything that’s somewhere other than here.” He turned to her. “What did you do when you went to Florida?”

  It was so long ago, Trixie had to think for a moment. “We went to Cape Canaveral. And Disney World.”

  Willie started picking at the wooden floor. “I bet you fit in there.”