The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Trixie?” her father said. “Is that you?”

  8

  In the middle of the Alaskan tundra, staring at a daughter he could barely recognize, Daniel thought back to the moment he’d known that everything between him and Trixie was bound to change.

  It was, like so many of those minutes between a father and a little girl, unremarkable. The season might have been summertime, or it could have been fall. They might have been bundled up in winter coats, or wearing flip-flops. They could have been heading to make a deposit at the bank, or leaving the bookstore. What stuck in Daniel’s mind was the street—a busy one, in the middle of town—and the fact that he was walking down it with Trixie, holding her hand.

  She was seven. Her hair was French-braided—badly, he’d never quite gotten the hang of that—and she was trying not to walk on the breaks in the sidewalk. They reached the intersection, and like always, Daniel reached for Trixie’s hand.

  She very deliberately slipped it free and stepped away from him before she looked both ways and crossed by herself.

  It was a hairline crack, one you might never have noticed, except for the fact that it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon between them. A child’s job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?

  This time, instead of a busy street, Trixie had crossed an entire country by herself. She stood in front of Daniel, bundled in an oversized canvas coat, with a wool cap pulled over her head. Beside her was a Yup’ik boy with hair that kept falling into his eyes.

  Daniel didn’t know what was more shocking: seeing a girl he’d once carried on his shoulders and tucked into bed and wondering if she’d committed murder, or realizing that he’d hide in the Alaskan bush with Trixie for the rest of his life if that was what it took to keep her from being arrested.

  “Daddy . . .?” Trixie launched herself into his arms.

  Daniel felt a shudder work down his spine; relief, when you came right down to it, was not all that different from fear. “You,” he said to the boy who stood a distance apart, watching them with a guarded expression. “Who are you?”

  “Willie Moses.”

  “Can I borrow your rig?” Daniel tossed him the keys to the snow-go, a trade.

  The boy looked at Trixie as if he was about to speak, but then he dropped his gaze and walked to the snow machine. Daniel heard the lion’s growl of its engine, and the high-pitched whine as it sped away, and then led Trixie to the truck. Like most Alaskan vehicles, this one would never have passed inspection in the lower forty-eight. It was rusted clean through on the side panels; its speedometer was stuck at 88 mph, and first gear didn’t work at all. But the light over the rearview mirror did, and Daniel turned that on to scrutinize his daughter.

  With the exception of dark circles under her eyes, she seemed to be all right. Daniel reached up and pulled off her wool cap, revealing a sleek cap of black hair. “Oh,” she said when his eyes widened. “I forgot about that.”

  Daniel slid across the bench seat and pulled her into his arms. God, was there anything more solid, more right, than knowing your child was where she ought to be? “Trixie,” he said, “you scared the hell out of me.”

  He felt her grab a fistful of his coat. He had a thousand questions for her, but one sprang to the surface first, the one that he couldn’t help but ask. “Why here?”

  “Because,” Trixie murmured, “you said it’s where people disappear.”

  Daniel drew away from her slowly. “Why did you want to?”

  Her eyes filled with tears, until finally one spilled over and ran to the point of her chin. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Daniel held on to her, as her thin body started to shake. “I didn’t do what everyone thinks . . .”

  Daniel threw his head back and winged a prayer to a God he’d never quite believed in: Thank you.

  “I wanted him back. I didn’t really want to fool around like Zephyr told me to, but I was willing to do anything if it got things back to the way it was before Jason broke up with me.” She swallowed hard. “When everyone left, he was so nice at first, I thought maybe it had worked. But then everything started happening so fast. I wanted to talk, and he didn’t. When he started . . . when we started . . .” She took a ragged breath. “He said that this was exactly what he needed—a friend with benefits. And that’s how I realized that he didn’t want me back. He just wanted me for fifteen minutes.”

  Daniel didn’t move. Surely if he did, he’d shatter.

  “I tried to get away, but I couldn’t. It felt like I was underwater, like when I told my arms and legs to move, they didn’t work fast enough, strong enough. He thought it was a game, me fighting just a little bit, like I was still playing hard to get. He pinned me down and . . .” Trixie’s skin was flushed and damp. “He said, Don’t tell me you don’t want this.” She looked up at Daniel in the halo of the overhead light. “And I . . . I didn’t.”

  • • •

  Trixie had once seen a science fiction movie that suggested we all had doppelgängers, we just couldn’t ever run into them because our worlds would collide. It was like that, now that her father had come to rescue her. Just this morning, walking back with Willie from the maqi, she had entertained the thought of what it would be like to stay in Tuluksak. Maybe they needed someone to be a teaching assistant. Maybe she could move in with one of Willie’s cousins. But with her father’s arrival, the world had jarred to a stop. He didn’t fit here, and neither did she.

  She had told him her secret: that she was a liar. Not just about being a virgin and playing Rainbow . . . but even more. She’d never said no to Jason that night, although she’d told the DA she had.

  And the drugs?

  She was the one who’d brought them.

  She hadn’t realized, at the time, that the guy at the college who sold pot to the high school kids was sleeping with her mother. She’d gone to buy some for Zephyr’s party, in the hopes that she could take the edge off. If she was going to be as wild as Zephyr planned for her to be, she needed a little pharmaceutical help.

  Seth was out of pot, but Special K was supposed to be like Ecstasy. It would make you lose control.

  Which, in a completely different way, she had.

  This much wasn’t a lie: She hadn’t taken it that night, not on purpose. She and Zephyr had planned to get high together, but it was a real drug, not pot, and at the last minute, Trixie had chickened out. She’d forgotten about it, until the DA brought up the fact that she might have had a drug in her system. Trixie didn’t really know what Zephyr had done with the vial: if she’d used it herself, if she’d left it sitting on the kitchen counter, if someone else at the party had found it first. She couldn’t say for a fact that Jason had slipped it into her drink. She’d had so much to drink that night—half-empty cans of Coke left lying around, screwdrivers with the ice cubes melting—it was possible that Jason had had nothing to do with it at all.

  Trixie hadn’t known that adding drugs into the legal mix would mean Jason was tried as an adult. She hadn’t been looking to ruin his life. She’d only wanted a way to salvage her own.

  It was not a coincidence, Trixie thought, that no and know sounded the same. You were supposed to be able to say the magic word, and that was enough to make your wishes—or lack of them—crystal clear. But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why, then, didn’t a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against a chest speak just as loudly? Why did you have to actually say the word no for it to be rape?

  That one word, spoken or not, didn’t make Jason any less guilty of taking something Trixie hadn’t wanted to give. It didn’t make her any less foolish. All it did was draw a line in the sand, so that the people who hadn’t been there to witness it—Moss and Zephyr, her parents, the police, the district attorney—could take sides.

  But somewhere along the line, it also made her realize that she couldn’