She had kissed him back. They must have both fallen asleep for a while, because Trixie woke up with him leaning over her, his lips against her neck. She’d felt her skin burn where he touched her.

 She was jerked back to the present as her father reached for the controls of the heater on the dashboard. “Are you too hot?”

 Trixie shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s okay.” But it wasn’t, not anymore, not by a long shot.

 Daniel fiddled with the knob for another moment. This was the nightmare that sank its teeth into every parent’s neck. Your child is hurt. How quickly can you make it better?

 What if you can’t?

 Beneath the tires, he heard the name that he couldn’t get out of his head, not since the moment he’d found Trixie in the bathroom.

 Who did this to you?

 Jason. Jason Underhill.

 In a tornado of pure fury, Daniel had grabbed the first thing he could lay hold of - a soap dish - and hurled it into the bathroom mirror. Trixie had started shrieking, shaking so hard it took him five minutes to calm her down. He didn’t know who’d been more shocked at the outburst: Trixie, who’d never seen him like this, or Daniel himself, who’d forgotten. After that, he’d been careful which questions he asked his daughter. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to her; he was just afraid to hear her answer, and even more afraid he would again do the wrong thing. He had never learned the protocol for this. It went beyond comfort; it went beyond parenting. It meant transforming all the rage he felt right now - enough to breathe fire and blow out the windshield – into words that spread like balm, invisible comfort for wounds too broad to see.</p>

<p>Suddenly, Daniel braked hard. The logging truck in front of them was weaving over the median line of the divided highway. “He’s going to kill someone,” Daniel said, and Trixie thought, Let it be me. She felt numb from the waist down, a mermaid encased in ice. “Will Mom meet us there?”

 “I hope so, baby.”

 It was after her father had wrapped her in a blanket and rocked her and told her they were going to the hospital, when Trixie was still crying softly for her mother, that her father admitted Laura wasn’t home. But it’s three-thirty in the morning, Trixie had said. Where did she go? There had been a moment where the pain had stopped belonging to Trixie and started to belong to her father instead, but then he’d turned away to get her another blanket, and that was when Trixie realized she wasn’t the only casualty of the night.

 The logging truck veered sharply to the left. HOW AM i DOING?

 read the bumper sticker on its back door, the one that encouraged motorists to report reckless driving to an 800 number. I am doing fine, Daniel thought. I am hale and whole, and next to me the

 person I love most in this world has broken into a thousand pieces.

 Trixie watched the side of the logging truck as her father accelerated and passed it, holding down his horn. It sounded too loud for this hour of the morning. It seemed to rip the sky in half. She covered her ears, but even then she could still hear it, like a scream that sounded from inside.

 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.”</p>

<p>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 eleven and about to take a bubble bath. He had walked into the bathroom, thinking she was only brushing her teeth, and together they had stared at her blossoming body in the reflection of the mirror.

 After that, he was careful to knock on doors, to draw an invisible curtain of distance around her for privacy.</p>

When he was a kid in Alaska, he had met Yu’pik Eskimos who hated him on sight, because he was a kass’aq. It didn’t matter that he was six or seven, that he hadn’t been the particular Caucasian who had cheated that person out of land or reneged on a job or any of a hundred other grievances.All they saw was that Daniel was white, and by association, he was a magnet for their anger. He imagined, now, what it would be like to be the only male in the room during a sexual assault examination.

“Please, Daddy?”

Behind the fear in Trixie’s eyes was the understanding that even with this stranger, she would be alone, and she couldn’t risk that again. So Daniel took a deep breath and headed down the hall between Trixie and Janice. Inside the room, there was a gurney; he helped Trixie climb onto it. The doctor entered almost immediately, a small woman wearing scrubs and a white coat. “Hi, Trixie,” she said, and if she seemed surprised to see a father in the room, instead of a mother, she said nothing. She came right up to Trixie and squeezed her hand. “You’re already being very brave. All I’m going to ask you to do is keep that up.”

She handed a form to Daniel and asked him to sign it, explaining that because Trixie was a minor, a parent or guardian had to authorize the collection and release of information. She took Trixie’s blood pressure and pulse and made notes on her clipboard. Then she began to ask Trixie a series of questions.

What’s your address?

How old are you?

What day did the assault occur? What approximate time?

What was the gender of the perpetrator? The number of perpetrators?

Daniel felt a line of sweat break out under the collar of his shirt.

Have you douched, bathed, urinated, defecated since the assault?

Have you vomited, eaten or drunk, changed clothes, brushed your teeth?

He watched Trixie shake her head no to each of these. Each time before she spoke, she would glance at Daniel, as if he had the answer in his eyes.

Have you had consensual intercourse in the last five days?

Trixie froze, and this time, her gaze slid away from his. She murmured something inaudible. “Sorry,” the doctor said. “I didn’t quite get that?”

“This was the first time,” Trixie repeated.

Daniel felt the room swell and burst. He was vaguely aware of excusing himself, of Trixie’s face - a white oval that bled at the edges. He had to try twice before he could maneuver his fingers in a way that would open the latch of the door.

Outside, he balled his hand into a fist and struck it against the cinder-block wall. He pummeled the cement again and again. He did this even as the tears came and a nurse led him away, to wash the blood off his knuckles and to bandage the scrapes on his palm.

He did this until he knew Trixie wasn’t the only one hurting. Trixie wasn’t where everyone thought she was. She might have physically been in the examination room, but mentally she was floating, hovering in the top left corner of the ceiling, watching the doctor and that other woman minister to the poor, sad, broken girl who used to be her.

She wondered if they knew that their patient was a husk, a shell left behind by a snail because home didn’t fit anymore.

You’d think someone who’d been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside. Trixie watched herself step onto a sheet of white paper with stiff, jerky movements. She listened as Dr. Roth asked her to remove her clothes, explaining that there might be evidence on the fabric that the detectives could use. “Will I get them back?” Trixie heard herself say. “I’m afraid not,” the doctor answered.

“Your dad is going to run home and get you something to wear,” Janice added.

Trixie stared down at her mothers sheer blouse. She’s going to kill me, Trixie thought, and then she almost laughed - would her mother really be paying attention to the freaking blouse when she found out what had happened? With slow movements, Trixie mechanically unbuttoned the shirt and pulled it off. Too late, she remembered the Ace bandage around her wrist.

“What happened there?” Dr. Roth asked, gently touching the metal pins holding the wrap in place.

Trixie panicked. What would the doctor say if she knew Trixie had taken to carving her own arm up? Could she get thrown into a psych ward for that?

“Trixie,” Dr. Roth said, “are there bruises under there?” She looked down at her feet. “They’re more like cuts.” When Dr. Roth

began to unravel the bandage on her left wrist, Trixie didn’t fight her. She thought about what it would be like in an institution. If, in the aftermath of all this, it might not be such a bad thing to be sealed away from the real world and totally overmedicated.

Dr. Roth’s gloved hands skimmed over a cut, one so new that Trixie could see the skin still knitting together. “Did he use a knife?”

Trixie blinked. She was still so disconnected from her body that it took her a moment to understand what the doctor was implying, and another moment after that to understand that she had just been given a way out.

“I... I don’t think so,” Trixie said. “I think he scratched me when I was fighting.”

Dr. Roth wrote something down on her clipboard, as Trixie kept getting undressed. Her jeans came next, and then she stood shivering in her bra and panties. “Were you wearing that pair of underwear when it happened?” the doctor asked.

Trixie shook her head. She’d put them on, along with a big fat sanitary napkin, once she saw that she was bleeding. “I wasn’t wearing underwear,” Trixie murmured, and immediately she realized how much that made her sound like a slut. She glanced down at the floor, at the see-through blouse. Was that why it had happened?

“Low-rise jeans,” Janice commiserated, and Trixie nodded, grateful that she hadn’t been the one to have to explain.

Trixie couldn’t remember ever being so tired. The examination room was runny at the edges, like a breakfast egg that hadn’t been cooked quite long enough. Janice handed her a hospital johnny, which was just as good as being naked with the way it was hanging open in the back. “You can take a seat,” Dr. Roth said.

The blood samples were next. It was just like when they’d had to pair up in eighth-grade science to try to analyze their own blood type. Trixie had nearly passed out at the sight of the blood, and her teacher had sent her to the nurse to breathe into a paper bag for a half hour, and she was so mortified that she’d called her father and said she was sick even though physically she was feeling much better. She and her father had had a Monopoly tournament, and like always, Trixie bought Park Place and Boardwalk and set up hotels and creamed her father.

This time, though, when the needle went in, Trixie watched from above. She didn’t feel the prick, she didn’t feel woozy. She didn’t feel anything at all, of course, because it wasn’t her.

When Dr. Roth turned off the lights in the room, Janice stepped forward. “The doctor’s going to use a special light now, a Woods lamp. It won’t hurt.”

It could have been a thousand needles - Trixie knew she still wouldn’t feel it. But instead, this turned out to be like a tanning booth, except creepier. The light glowed ultraviolet, and when Trixie glanced down at her own bare body, it was covered with purple lines and blotches that hadn’t been visible before. Dr. Roth moistened a long cotton swab and touched it to a spot on her shoulder. She left it on the counter to air-dry, and as it did, Trixie watched her write on the paper sleeve that the swab had been packaged in:

Suspected saliva from right shoulder.

The doctor took swabs from the inside of her cheek and off her tongue. She gently combed Trixie’s hair over a paper towel, folding up the comb inside the towel when she was finished. Dr. Roth slipped another towel underneath her, using a different comb to work through her pubic hair. Trixie had to turn away - it was that embarrassing to watch.

“Almost done,” Janice murmured.

Dr. Roth pulled a pair of stirrups from the end of the examination table. “Have you ever been to a gynecologist, Trixie?”she asked.

Trixie had an appointment, scheduled for next February, with her mother’s doctor. It’s a health thing, her mother had assured her, which was just fine because Trixie wasn’t planning on discussing her sex life out loud, especially not with her mother.

Months ago, when the appointment had been made, Trixie hadn’t even ever kissed a guy.

“You’re going to feel a little pressure,” Dr. Roth said, folding Trixie’s legs into the stirrups, a human origami that left her stark and open.

In that instant, Trixie felt what was left of her spirit sinking down from where it had been watching near the ceiling, to take dark root in her beaten body. She could feel Janice’s hand stroking her arm, could feel the doctor’s rubber glove parting the heart of her. For the first time since she’d entered the hospital, she was completely, violently aware of who she was and what had been done to her.

There was cold steel, and a rasp of flesh. A push from the outside, as her body struggled to keep the speculum out. Trixie

tried to kick out with one foot, but she was being held down at the thighs and then there was pain and force and you are breaking me in two.

“Trixie,” Janice said fiercely. “Trixie, honey, stop fighting.

It’s okay. It’s just the doctor.”

Suddenly the door burst open and Trixie saw her mother, lion-eyed and determined. “Trixie,” Laura said, two syllables that broke in the center.

Now that Trixie could feel, she wished she couldn’t. The only thing worse than not feeling anything was feeling everything. She started shaking uncontrollably, an atom about to split beneath its own compounded weight; and then she found herself anchored in her mother’s embrace, their hearts beating hard against each other as the doctor and Janice offered to give them a moment of privacy.

“Where were you?” Trixie cried, an accusation and a question all at once. She started to sob so hard she could not catch her breath.

Laura’s hands were on the back of Trixie’s neck, in her hair, around the bound of her ribs. “I should have been home,” her mother said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Trixie wasn’t sure if her mother was apologizing, or just acknowledging her own errors. She should have been home. Maybe then Trixie wouldn’t have chanced lying about going to Zephyr’s; maybe she never would have had the opportunity to steal the sheer blouse. Maybe she would have spent the night in her own bed. Maybe the worst hurt she would have had to nurse was another razor stripe, a self-inflicted wound.

Her anger surprised her. Maybe none of this had been her mother’s fault, but Trixie pretended it was. Because a mother was supposed to protect her child. Because if Trixie was angry, there was no room left for being scared. Because if it was her mothers mistake, then it couldn’t be hers.

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’m Detective Mike Bartholemew. And I’d really like to speak to your daughter.”

Daniel had been inside the Bethel police station only once, when he’d chaperoned Trixie’s second-grade class there on a field trip. He remembered the quilt that hung in the lobby, stars sewn to spell out PROTECT AND SERVE, and the booking room, where the whole class had taken a collective grinning mug shot. He had not seen the conference room until this morning - a small, gray cubicle with a reverse mirrored window that some idiot contractor had put in backward, so that from inside, Daniel could see the traffic of cops in the hallway checking their reflections.

He focused on the winding wheels of the tape recorder. It was easier than concentrating on the words coming out of Trixie’s mouth, an exhaustive description of the previous night. She had already explained how, when she left home, she changed into a different outfit. How there was a posse of players from the hockey team

present when she arrived at Zephyr’s, and how, by the end of the evening, it was only the four of them.

One parent was allowed in with Trixie when she gave her statement. Because Laura had been at the hospital exam - or maybe because of what Daniel had said to her in the hall - she had decided that he should be the one to go. It was only after he was inside that he realized this was more of a trial than an advantage. He had to sit very still and listen to Trixie’s story in excruciating detail, smiling at her in encouragement and telling her she was doing great, when what he really wanted was to grab the detective and ask him why the hell he hadn’t locked up Jason Underhill yet.

He wondered how, in just an hour’s time, he’d regressed back to being the kind of person he’d been a lifetime ago - someone for whom feeling came before thought, for whom reason was a postscript. He wondered if this happened to all fathers: as their daughters grew up, they slid backward.

Bartholemew had brewed coffee. He’d brought in a box of tissues, which he put near Trixie, just in case. Daniel liked thinking that Bartholemew had been through this before. He liked knowing that someone had.

“What were you drinking?” the detective asked Trixie.

She was wearing the pink shirt and sweatpants that Daniel had brought, plus his coat. He’d forgotten to bring hers back, even when he went home again. “Coke,” Trixie said. “With rum.”

“Were you using any drugs?”

She looked down at the table and shook her head.

“Trixie,” the detective said. “You’re going to have to speak up.”

“No,” she answered.

“What happened next?”

Daniel listened to her describe a girl he didn’t know, one who lap-danced and played strip poker. Her voice flattened under the weight of her bad judgment. “After Zephyr went upstairs with Moss, I figured everyone was gone. I was going to go home, but I wanted to sit down for a minute, because I had a really bad headache. And it turned out Jason hadn’t left. He said he wanted to make sure I was all right. I started to cry.”

“Why?”

Her face contorted. “Because we broke up a couple of weeks ago.

And being that close to him again ... it hurt.”

Daniel’s head snapped up. “Broke up?”

Trixie turned at the same time the detective stopped the tape.

“Mr. Stone,” Bartholemew said, “I’m going to have to ask you to remain silent.” He nodded at Trixie to continue.

She let her gaze slide beneath the table. “We . .. we wound up kissing. I fell asleep for a little while, I guess, because when I woke up, we weren’t near the bathroom anymore ... we were on the carpet in the living room. I don’t remember how we got there. That was when he ... when he raped me.”

The last drink that Daniel had had was in 1991, the day before he convinced Laura that he was worth marrying. But before that, he’d had plenty of firsthand knowledge about the faulty reasoning and slurred decisions that swam at the bottom of a bottle. He’d had his share of mornings where he woke up in a house he could not recall arriving at. Trixie might not remember how she got into the living room, but Daniel could tell her exactly how it had happened.

Detective Bartholemew looked squarely at Trixie. “I know this is going to be difficult,” he said, “but I need you to tell me exactly what happened between you two. Like whether either of you removed any clothing. Or what parts of your body he touched. What you said to him and what he said to you. Things like that.”

Trixie fiddled with the zipper of Daniel’s battered leather jacket. “He tried to take off my shirt, but I didn’t want him to.

I told him that it was Zephyrs house and that I didn’t feel right fooling around there. He said I was breaking his heart. I felt bad after that, so I let him unhook my bra and touch me, you know. . .my breasts. He was kissing me the whole time, and that was the good part, the part I wanted, but then he put his hand down my pants. I tried to pull his hand away, but he was too strong.” Trixie swallowed. “He said, ‘Don’t tell me you don’t want this.’ “Daniel gripped the edge of the table so hard that he thought he would crack the plastic. He took a deep breath in through his mouth and held it. He thought of all the ways it would be possible to kill Jason Underhill.

“I tried to get away, but he’s bigger than I am, and he pushed me down again. It was like a game to him. He held my hands up over my head and he pulled down my pants. I said I wanted him to stop and he didn’t. And then,” Trixie said, stumbling over the words. “And then he pushed me down hard and he raped me.”

There was a bullet, Daniel thought, but that would be too easy.

“Had you ever had sex before?”

Trixie glanced at Daniel. “No,” she answered. “I started screaming, because it hurt so much. I tried to kick him. But when

I did, it hurt more, so I just stayed still and waited for it to be over.”

Drowning, Daniel thought. Slowly. In a sewer.

“Did your friend hear you screaming?” Detective Bartholemew asked.

“I guess not,” Trixie said. “There was music on, pretty loud.”

No . . . a rusty knife. A sharp cut to the gut. Daniel had read about men who’d had to live for days, watching their insides being eaten out by infection. “Did he use a condom?”

Trixie shook her head. “He pulled out before he finished. There was blood on the carpet, and on me, too. He was worried about that. He said he didn’t mean to hurt me.”

Maybe, Daniel mused, he would do all of these things to Jason Underhill. Twice.

“He got up and found a roll of paper towels so I could clean myself up. Then he took some rug cleaner from under the kitchen sink, and he scrubbed the spot on the carpet. He said we were lucky

it wasn’t ruined.”

And what about Trixie? What magical solution would take away the stain he’d left on her forever? “Mr. Stone?”

Daniel blinked, and he realized that he had become someone else for a moment - someone he hadn’t been for years - and that the detective had been speaking to him. “Sorry.”

“Could I see you outside?”

He followed Bartholemew into the hallway of the police station.

“Look,” the detective said, “I see this kind of thing a lot.”

This was news to Daniel. The last rape he could remember in their small town happened over a decade ago and was perpetrated by a hitch-hiker.

“A lot of girls think they’re ready to have sex . .. but then change their mind, after the fact.”

It took Daniel a minute to find his voice. “Are you saying ... that my daughter’s lying?”

“No. But I want you to understand that even if Trixie is willing to testify, you might not get the outcome you’re hoping for.”

 “She’s fourteen, for God’s sake,” Daniel said. “Kids younger than that are having sex. And according to the medical report, there wasn’t significant internal trauma.”

“She wasn’t hurt enough?”

“I’m just saying that given the details - the alcohol, the strip poker, the former relationship with Jason - rape could be a hard sell to a jury. The boy’s going to say it was consensual.”

Daniel clenched his jaw. “If a murder suspect told you he was innocent, would you just let him walk away?”

“It’s not quite the same”

“No, it’s not. Because the murder victim’s dead and can’t give you any information about what really happened. As opposed to my daughter, the one who’s inside there telling you exactly how she was raped, while you aren’t fucking listening to her.” He opened the door to the conference room to see Trixie with her arms folded on the table, her head resting on her hands.

“Can we go home?” she asked, groggy.

“Yes,” Daniel said. “The detective can call us if he needs anything else.” He anchored his arm around Trixie. They were halfway down the hall when Daniel turned around again to face Bartholemew. In the reflection of the backward mirror, he could see their faces, white ovals that hovered like ghosts. “You have any kids?” he asked.

The detective hesitated, then shook his head.

“I didn’t think so,” Daniel said, and shepherded Trixie through the door.

At home, Laura stripped the sheets off Trixie’s bed and remade it with fresh ones. She found a plaid flannel quilt in the cedar chest in the attic and used that, instead of Trixie’s usual quilt.

She picked up the clothes that were tossed on the floor and straightened the books on the nightstand and tried to turn the room into something that would not remind Trixie of yesterday.

At the last minute, Laura walked toward a shelf and pulled down the stuffed moose that Trixie had slept with until she was ten.

Bald in some spots and missing one eye, it had been retired, but Trixie hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to put it into a garage sale pile. Laura settled this squarely between the pillows, as if it might be just that easy to take Trixie back to childhood.

Then she hauled the laundry downstairs and began to stir it into the washing machine. It was while she was waiting for the barrel to fill with water that she spilled bleach on her skirt, one of her work skirts, part of an expensive suit. Laura watched the color leach from the wool, a scar in the shape of a tear. She swore, then tried to reverse the damage by holding the hem of the skirt under running water in the sink. Finally, defeated, she sank down in front of the humming belly of the Kenmore and burst into tears.

Had she been so busy keeping her own secret that she didn’t have the time or the inclination to dissolve Trixie’s? What if, instead of seeing Seth, Laura had been here every night? What if she’d quizzed her on her French vocabulary, or carried a cup of hot chocolate to her room, or invited her to sit on the couch and make fun of the hairstyles on an old sitcom? What if Laura had given Trixie a reason to stay home?

She knew, on some level, that it would not have worked that way. Just because Laura felt like playing ubermother did not mean Trixie would choose to join the game: At her age, a mother’s touch couldn’t compare to the brush of a boy’s hand down the valley of your spine. Laura forced herself to picture Jason Underhill’s face. He was a goodlooking boy - a tangle of black hair, aquamarine eyes, an athlete’s body. Everyone in Bethel knew him. Even Laura, who wasn’t a devotee of hockey, had seen Jason’s name splashed all over the sports pages of the newspaper. When Daniel had worried about an older boy dating Trixie, Laura had been the one to tell him to relax. She saw kids nearly that age every single day, and she knew that Jason was a catch. He was smart, polite, and crazy about Trixie, she’d told Daniel. What more could you want for your daughter’s first crush?

But now, when she thought of Jason Underhill, she considered how persuasive those blue eyes might be. How strong an athlete was. She started to twist her thinking, boring it deep as a screw, so that it would truly take hold.

If all the blame could be pinned on Jason Underhill, then it wasn’t Laura’s fault.

Trixie had been awake now for twenty-eight hours straight. Her eyes burned, and her head was too heavy, and her throat was coated with the residue of the story she’d been telling over and over.

Dr. Roth had given her a prescription for Xanax, telling her that no matter how exhausted Trixie was, she was most likely going to find it difficult to sleep, and that this was perfectly normal.

She had, finally, wonderfully, been able to take a shower. She stayed in long enough to use an entire bar of soap. She had tried to scrub down there, but she couldn’t get all the way inside where she still felt dirty. When the doctor had said there was no internal trauma, Trixie had nearly asked her to check again. For a moment, she’d wondered if she’d dreamed the whole thing, if it had never really happened.

“Hey,” her father said, poking his head into her bedroom door.

“You ought to be in bed.”

Trixie pulled back the covers - her mother had changed her sheets - and crawled inside. Before, getting into bed had been the highlight of her day; she’d always imagined it like some kind of cloud or gentle nest where she could just let go of all the stress of acting cool and looking perfect and saying the right things.

But now, it loomed like a torture device, a place where she’d close her eyes and have to replay what had happened over and over, like a closed-circuit TV.

Her mother had left her old stuffed moose on top of the pillows. Trixie squeezed it against her chest. “Daddy?” she asked.

“Can you tuck me in?”

He had to work at it, but he managed to smile. “Sure.”

When Trixie was little, her father had always left her a riddle to fall asleep on, and then he’d give her the answer at breakfast.

What gets bigger the more you take away from it? A hole. What’s black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when you throw it away? Charcoal.

“Could you maybe talk to me for a little while?” Trixie asked.

It wasn’t that she wanted to talk, really. It was that she didn’t want to be left alone in this room with only herself for company.

Trixie’s father smoothed back her hair. “Don’t tell me you’re not exhausted.”

Don’t tell me you don’t want this, Jason had said.

She suddenly remembered one of her father’s nighttime riddles:

The answer is yes, but what I mean is no. What is the question?

And the solution: Do you mind?

Her father notched the covers beneath her chin. “I’ll send Mom in to say good night,” he promised, and he reached over to turn off the lamp.

“Leave it on,” Trixie said, panicking. “Please.”

He stopped abruptly, his hand hovering in the air. Trixie stared at the bulb, until she couldn’t see anything but the kind of brilliant light everyone says comes for you when you’re about to die.

The absolute worst job, if you asked Mike Bartholemew, was having to go tell a parent that his or her kid had been in a fatal car crash or had committed suicide or OD’d. There just weren’t words to hold up that kind of pain, and the recipient of the news would stand there, staring at him, certain she’d heard wrong. The second absolute worst job, in his opinion, was dealing with rape victims. He couldn’t listen to any of their statements without feeling guilty for sharing the same gender as the perp. And even if he could collect enough evidence to merit a trial, and even if there was a conviction, you could bet it wouldn’t be for very long. In most cases, the victim was still in therapy when the rapist got done serving his sentence.

The thing that most people didn’t understand, if they weren’t in his line of work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone, forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

He climbed the stairs over the smoothie bar to the interim apartment he’d rented after the divorce, the one he swore he’d live in for only six months but that had turned out to be his home for six years. It wasn’t furnished - the less appealing it was, the easier Mike figured it would be to get motivated to leave it - but he had a futon that he usually left open as a bed, and a beanbag chair and a TV that he left running 24/7 so that Ernestine would have something to listen to when he was at work.

“Ernie?” he called out as soon as his keys turned in the lock.

“I’m back.”

She wasn’t on the futon, where he’d left her when the call came in this morning. Mike stripped off his tie and walked toward the bathroom. He drew back the shower curtain to find the potbellied pig asleep in the bottom of the tub. “Miss me?” he asked.

The pig opened one eye and grunted.

“You know, the only reason I came home was to take you for a walk,” Mike said, but the pig had fallen back asleep.

He had a warrant in his pocket - Trixie’s statement, plus the presence of semen, was enough probable cause to arrest Jason Underhill. He even knew where the kid was, just like everyone in the town who was following the high school hockey team’s stellar exploits. But he had to come home first to let Ernie out. At least that’s what he’d told himself.

Do you have any kids? Daniel Stone had asked.

Mike turned off the television and sat in silence for a few moments. Then he went to the one closet in the apartment and pulled down a cardboard box.

Inside the box was a pillow from Mike’s daughter’s bed, one that he’d stuffed into an enormous plastic evidence bag. He broke the ziplocked seal and inhaled deeply. It hardly smelled like her anymore at all, in spite of the great care he had taken.

Suddenly, Ernestine came running. She skidded across the floor, scrambling over to the futon where Mike sat. Her snout went into the plastic bag with the pillow, and Mike wondered if she could scent something he couldn’t. The pig looked up at Mike.

“I know,” he said. “I miss her, too.”

Daniel sat in the kitchen with a bottle of sherry in front of him. He hated sherry, but it was the only liquid with alcoholic content in this house right now. He had already burned through half the bottle, and it was a large one, something Laura liked to use when she made stir-fry chicken. He didn’t feel drunk, though. He only felt like a failure.

Fatherhood was the entire foundation Daniel had reinvented himself upon. When he thought about being a parent, he saw a baby’s hand spread like a star on his chest. He saw the tightness between the kite and the spool of string that held it. Finding out that he’d fallen short of his responsibility for protecting his daughter made him wonder how he’d gone so long fooling himself into believing he had truly changed.

The part of himself that he’d thought he’d exorcised turned out to have been only lying in the shallow grave where old personalities went to be discarded. With the sherry lighting his way, Daniel could see that now. He could feel anger building like steam.

The new Daniel, the father Daniel, had answered the detective’s questions and trusted the police to do what they were supposed to, because that was the best way to ensure the safety of his child.

But the old Daniel... well, he never would have trusted anyone else to complete a job that rightfully belonged to him. He would have fought back in revenge, kicking and screaming. In fact, he often had.

Daniel stood up and shrugged on his jacket just as Laura walked into the kitchen. She took one look at the bottle of sherry on the table, and then at him. “You don’t drink.” Daniel stared at her. “Didn’t,” he corrected. “Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer her. He didn’t owe her an explanation. He didn’t owe anyone anything. This was not about payment, it was about payback.

Daniel opened the door and hurried out to his truck. Jason Underhill would be at the town rink, right now, getting dressed for the Saturday afternoon game.

Because Trixie asked, Laura waited for her to fall asleep. She came downstairs in time to see Daniel leave, and he didn’t have to tell her where he was headed. Even worse, Laura wasn’t sure she would have stopped him.

Biblical justice was antiquated, or so she had been taught. You couldn’t hack off the hand of a thief; you couldn’t stone a murderer to death. A more advanced society took care of its justice in a courtroom - something Laura had advocated until about five hours ago. A trial might be more civilized, but emotionally, it couldn’t possibly pack as much satisfaction.

She tried to imagine what Daniel might do if he found Jason, but she couldn’t. It had been so long since Daniel had been anything but quiet and mild-mannered that she had completely forgotten the shadow that had once clung to him, so dark and unpredictable that she’d had to come closer for a second glance. Laura felt the same way she had last Christmas when she’d hung one of Trixie’s baby shoes on the tree as an ornament: wistful, aware that her daughter had once been tiny enough to fit into this slipper but unable to hold that picture in her head along with the one in front of her eyes - a teenage Trixie dancing around the balsam in her bare feet, stringing white lights in her wake. She tried to sit down with a book, but she reread the same page four times. She turned on the television but could not find the humor in any canned jokes.

A moment later, she found herself at the computer, Googling the word rape.

There were 10,900,000 hits, and immediately that made Laura feel better. Strength in numbers: She was not the only mother who’d felt this way; Trixie was not the only victim. The Web sites rooted this godawful word, and all the suffocating aftershocks that hung from it like Spanish moss.

She started clicking: One out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or a completed rape in her lifetime, adding up to 17.7 million people.

Sixty-six percent of rape victims know their assailant.

Forty-eight percent are raped by a friend.

Twenty percent of rapes take place at the home of a friend, neighbor, or relative.

More than half occur within a mile of the victim’s home.

Eighty percent of rape victims are under age thirty. Girls

between ages sixteen and nineteen are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of sexual assault.

Sixty-one percent of rapes are not reported to the police. If a rape is reported, there’s a 50.8 percent chance that an arrest will be made. If an arrest is made, there’s an 80 percent chance of prosecution. If there’s a prosecution, there’s a 58 percent chance of felony conviction. If there’s a felony conviction, there’s a 69 percent chance that the rapist will actually spend time in jail. Of the 39 percent of rapes that are reported to police, then, there’s only a 16.3 percent chance that the rapist will wind up in prison. If you factor in all the unreported rapes, 94 percent of rapists walk free.

Laura stared at the screen, at the cursor blinking on one of the multiple percent signs. Trixie was one of these numbers now, one of these percents. She wondered how it was that she’d never truly studied this statistical symbol before: a figure split in two, a pair of empty circles on either side.

Daniel had to park far away from the entrance to the municipal rink, which wasn’t surprising on a Saturday afternoon. High school hockey games in Bethel, Maine, drew the same kind of crowds high school football did in Midwestern communities. There were girls standing in the lobby, fixing their lipstick in the reflection of the plate-glass windows, and toddlers weaving through the denim forest of grown-up legs. The grizzled man who sold hot dogs and nachos and Swiss Miss cocoa had taken up residence behind the kitchenette and was singing Motown as he ladled sauerkraut into a bun.

Daniel walked through the crowd as if he were invisible, staring at the proud parents and spirited students who had come to cheer on their hometown heroes. He followed the swell of the human tide through the double doors of the lobby, the ones that opened into the rink. He didn’t have a plan, really. What he wanted was to feel Jason Underhill’s flesh under his fists. To smack his head up against the wall and scare him into contrition.

Daniel was just about to swing inside the home team’s locker room when the door opened beneath his hand. He flattened himself up against the boards in time to see Detective Bartholemew leading Jason Underhill out. The kid was still wearing his hockey gear, in his stocking feet, carrying his skates in one hand. His face was flushed and his eyes were trained on the rubber mats on the floor.

The coach followed close behind, yelling, “If it’s just a chat, damn it, you could wait till after the game!”

Gradually, the people in the stands noticed Jason’s departure and grew quiet, unsure of what they were watching. One man - Jason’s father, presumably - pushed down from the bleachers and started running toward his son.

Daniel stood very still for a moment, certain that Bartholemew hadn’t seen him, until the detective turned back and looked him straight in the eye. By now the crowd was buzzing with speculation; the air around Daniel’s ears was pounding like a timpani . . . but for that moment, the two men existed in a vacuum, acknowledging each other with the smallest of nods and the quiet understanding that each of them would do what he had to.

“You went to the rink, didn’t you,” Laura said, as soon as Daniel walked through the door.

He nodded and busied himself with unzipping his coat, hanging it carefully on one of the pegs in the mudroom.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

Vengeance was a funny thing: You wanted the satisfaction of knowing it had occurred, but you never wanted to actually hear the words out loud, because then you’d have to admit to yourself that you’d wanted proof, and that somehow made you baser, less civilized. Daniel found himself staring at Laura as he sank to the stairs. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” he said quietly.

Just that quickly, this had become a different conversation, a train run off its course. Laura stepped back as if he’d struck her, and bright spots of color rose on her cheeks. “How long have you known?”

Daniel shrugged. “A while, I guess.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

He had asked himself the same question in the last few days a hundred times over. He’d pretended not to see all the late nights, the disconnections, because then he’d have been forced to make a choice: Could you really love someone who was capable of falling in love with somebody else?

But there had been a point in his relationship with Laura where Daniel had been irredeemable, and she had believed he could change. Did he owe her any less? And for that matter, if he let his anger and his shame get the best of him and threw her out of the house, wouldn’t he be acting on adrenaline, the way he used to when he lost control?

It was this simple: If he couldn’t forgive Laura - if he let himself be consumed by this - he was behaving like the kind of man he used to be.

But he did not have the words to say all this. “If I’d said something about it,” Daniel said, “then you would have told me it was true.”

“It’s over, if that means anything.”

He looked up at Laura, his gaze narrow. “Because of Trixie?”

“Before.” She moved across the brick floor, her arms folded across her chest, and stood in a shaft of fading light. “I broke it off the night that she . . . that Trixie . . .” Her sentence unraveled at its edge.

“Were you fucking him the night our daughter was raped?”

“Jesus, Daniel”

“Were you? Is that why you didn’t answer the phone when I was trying to tell you about Trixie?” A muscle tightened along the column of Daniel’s throat. “What’s his name, Laura? I think you owe me that much. I think I ought to know who you wanted when you stopped wanting me.”

Laura turned away from him. “I want to stop talking about this.”

Suddenly, Daniel was on his feet, pinning Laura against the wall, his body a fortress, his anger an electric current. He grabbed Laura’s upper arms and shook her so hard that her head snapped back and her eyes went wide with fear