It took Jason a half hour to saw through the duct tape with his keys. When he could pull his arms forward again, the blood burned as it circulated, a severe pain that overtook the numbness caused by the cold. He stumbled to his feet, running toward the spot where Stone had made him leave the truck, praying it was still there.

The only clothes he had were in his hockey equipment bag, so he wound up dressing in a jersey and his padded pants. He kept expecting to be ambushed again at any moment. His hands shook so badh that it took four tries to get the key into the ignition.

He drove to the police station, thinking only that there was no way he was going to let Trixie’s father get away with something like this. But as he pulled into the parking lot, he heard Daniel Stone’s voice in his head again: Tell anyone, he’d said, and I’ll kill you. Frankly, Jason could believe it. There had been something in the man’s eyes - something inhuman - that made Jason think he was capable of anything.

He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t see the pedestrian walking across the parking lot. As Jason braked hard, the car lurched forward and stopped. Detective Bartholemew, the same man who’d arrested Jason, stood with one hand on the hood of his car, staring him down. And suddenly Jason remembered what the judge had said at the arraignment: If Jason had any contact whatsoever with Trixie Stone or her family, he’d be shipped off to the juvenile detention facility. He was already accused of rape.

If he reported what had happened to the cops, would they even believe him? What if they confronted Daniel Stone . . . and he insisted it had been Jason who approached him? The detective walked to the driver’s side of the car. “Mr.

Underhill,” he said. “What brings you here?” “I... I thought I might be getting a flat,” he managed.

The detective walked around the vehicle. “Doesn’t look that way.” He leaned closer to the car; Jason could see him doing a quick visual assessment. “Anything else I can help you with?” It was all right there, caught behind the fence of his teeth: He dragged me off, he tied me up, he threatened me. But Jason found himself shaking his head. “No, thanks,” he said. He put the car into gear and drove at snail speed out of the parking lot, aware of Bartholemew’s gaze following him.

In that moment, Jason made the decision to tell no one what happened: not his buddies, not his parents, not his lawyer. Not the police. He was too damn scared that telling the truth, in this case, would severely backfire on him.

He found himself wondering: Had Trixie felt that, too? The way drunks kept a bottle of gin hidden in the toilet tank, and addicts tucked an emergency hit in the hem of a threadbare old coat, Daniel kept a pad and a pen in his car. In the parking lot of the hospital, he sketched. Instead of his comic book hero, however, he started penciling his daughter. He drew her when she was only minutes old, rolled into a blanket like sushi. He drew her taking her first steps. He froze moments - the birthday when she made him spaghetti for breakfast; the school play where she fell off the stage into the audience; the high-rise hotel they visited, where they spent hours pushing all the elevator buttons to see if the floors looked an> different.

When his hand cramped so badly that he couldn’t sketch another line, Daniel gathered up the pictures and got out of the car, heading toward Trixie’s room.

Shadows reached across the bed like the fingers of a giant.

Trixie had fallen asleep again; in a chair beside her, Laura dozed too. For a moment he stared at the two of them. No question about it: Trixie had been cut from the same cloth as her mother. It was more than just their coloring: Sometimes she’d toss him a glance or an expression that reminded him of Laura years ago. He’d wondered if the reason he loved Trixie so damn much was that, through her, he got to fall in love with his wife all over again.

He crouched down in front of Laura. The movement of the air against her skin made her stir, and her eyes opened and locked onto Daniel’s. For a fraction of a second, she started to smile, having forgotten where she was, and what had happened to her daughter, and what had gone wrong between the two of them. Daniel found his hands closing into fists, as if he could catch that moment before it disappeared entirely.

She glanced over at Trixie, making sure she was still asleep.

“Where were you?” Daniel certainly couldn’t tell her the truth. “Driving.”

He took off his coat and began to lay the sketches he’d done over the pale green blanket on the hospital bed. There was Trixie sliding into his lap the day Daniel got the phone call about his mothers death, asking, If everyone died, would the world just stop? Trixie holding a caterpillar, wondering whether it was a boy or a girl. Trixie pushing his hand away as he brushed a tear off her cheek, and saying, Don’t wipe off my feelings.

“When did you do these?” Laura whispered.

“Today.”

“But there are so many . . .”

Daniel didn’t answer. He knew no words big enough to explain to Trixie how much he loved her, so instead, he wanted her to wake up covered with memories.

He wanted to remember why he could not afford to let go.

It was from his friend Cane that Daniel learned language was a force to be reckoned with. Like most Yup’ik Eskimos, Cane lived by three rules. The first was that thoughts and deeds were inextricably linked. How many times had Cane’s grandfather explained that you couldn’t properly butcher a moose while you were yammering about which girl in the fifth grade had to mail-order for an honest-to-God bra? You had to keep the thought of the moose in your mind, so that you’d make way for them to come back to you another time, during another hunt.

The second rule was that individual thoughts were less important than the collective knowledge of the elders - in other words, do whatever you’re told and stop complaining.

But it was the third rule that was the hardest for Daniel to understand: the idea that words were so powerful they had the ability to change someone else’s mind .. . even if they remained unspoken. That was why, when the Moravian church moved into the bush and the Reverend told the Yupiit they had to leave fish camp on a Sunday to attend services about Jesus, they agreed, without ever having any real intention of going. What the reverend saw as a blatant lie, the Yup’ik Eskimos saw as a measure of respect: They liked the reverend to much to tell him he was wrong; instead, they just acquiesced and pretended otherwise. It was this rule, ultimately, that divided Daniel and Cane.

“Today’s going to be a good day for hunting,” Cane would tell Daniel, and Daniel would agree. But the next day Cane would go off with his grandfather for caribou and never ask Daniel to join them. It took years for Daniel to get up the nerve to ask Cane why he wasn’t invited. “But I do invite you,” he said, confused. “Every time.”

Daniel’s mother tried to explain it to him: Cane never would have come right out and asked Daniel to go hunting, because Daniel might have had other plans. It would be disrespectful to issue a formal invitation, because simply putting the words out into the world might cause Daniel to change his mind about what he wanted to do the next day, and Cane liked Daniel too much to risk that.

When you are thirteen, though, cultural differences hardly matter.

What you feel is every minute of the Saturday you spend by yourself, wishing you’d been asked to tag along. What you notice is the loneliness.

Daniel started to isolate himself, because it hurt less than being pushed away. He never really considered that a Yup’ik boy who couldn’t ask him to come hunting might have even more difficulty asking Daniel what he’d done to make him angry. Within two years’ time, Daniel had taken to occupying himself - vandalizing the school building and getting drunk and stealing snow machines. Cane was just someone Daniel used to know.

It wasn’t until a year later, when Daniel was standing over Cane’s body in the gymnasium and his hands were covered with Cane’s blood, that he realized the Yupiit had been right all along. One word might have changed everything. One word might have spread like fire.

One word might have saved them both.

Could you pinpoint the very moment when your life began to fall apart? For Laura, it seemed like each instance she found had an antecedent. Trixie’s rape. Her own affair with Seth. Her unexpected pregnancy. The decision she made to find Daniel after he drew her. The first time she laid eyes on him and knew that everything else she saw from then on would no longer look the same. Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.

It was easier for Laura to find the moment Trixie’s life had been ruined. It all started, and ended, with Jason Underhill. If she’d never met him, if she’d never dated him, none of this would have happened. Not the rape, not the cutting, not even the suicide attempt. Laura had given it serious thought today: Jason was to blame for all of it. He had been the root of Trixie’s deceptions; he had been the reason Laura hadn’t been able to see her own daughter clearly.

She lay alone in bed, wide awake. Sleep was out of the question, with Trixie still at the hospital. The doctors had assured Laura that Trixie would be watched like a hawk, that if all was well, they could bring her home tomorrow - but that didn’t keep Laura from wondering if she was comfortable, if there was a nurse taking care of her right now.

Daniel wasn’t asleep either. She had been listening to his footsteps downstairs, moving like open-ended questions. But now she heard him heading upstairs. A moment later he stood by the side of the bed. “Are you still up?” he whispered.

“I was never asleep.”

“Can I... can I ask you something?” She kept her eyes trained on the ceiling. “Okay.”

“Are you afraid?” “Of what?” “Forgetting?” Laura understood what he was trying to say. Although talking about what had happened to Trixie was the hardest thing in the world, they had to do it. If they didn’t, they ran the risk of losing - by comparison - the memory of who Trixie used to be.

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

It was why, even when they weren’t actively discussing it, the word rape hung like smoke over all of their heads. It was why, even as they were making polite conversation, every other thought in Laura’s and Daniel’s heads was unfaithful.

“Daniel,” Laura admitted, “I’m afraid all the time.”

He sank to his knees, and it took her a moment to realize that he was crying. She could not remember ever seeing Daniel cry - he used to say that he’d used up his allotment of tears as a kid.

Laura sat up in bed, the covers falling away from her. She put her hands on Daniel’s bowed head and stroked his hair. “Sssh,” she said, and she drew him up onto the bed and into her arms.

At first it was about comfort: Laura being able to give; Daniel softening under her hands. But then Laura felt the air move like liquid as Daniel’s body pressed against hers, desperate, his actions full of now and need. She felt her pulse jump under his fingers, as she fell back in time, remembering him like this years ago, and herself reacting. Then just as abruptly as Daniel had begun, he stopped. In the dark, she could see only the shine of his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, backing away. “Don’t be,” she said, and she reached for him.

It was all Daniel needed to let loose the last thread of restraint.

He laid siege to Laura; he took no quarter. He scratched her skin and bit her throat. He reached for her hands and pinned them over her head. “Look at me,” he demanded, until her eyes flew open and locked on his. “Look at me,” he said again, and he drove himself into her.

Daniel waited until she was underneath him, writhing, poised for each moment when he came into her. As his arms anchored her closer, she threw back her head and let herself break apart.

She felt Daniel’s hesitation, and his glorious, reckless fall.

As his sweat cooled on her own body, Laura traced a message over Daniel’s right shoulder blade. S-O-R-R-Y, she wrote, even though she knew that the truths that sneak up behind a person are the ones he’s most likely to miss.

Once, the Yupiit say, there was a man who was always quarreling with his wife. They fought over everything. The wife said her husband was lazy. The husband said his wife only wanted to sleep with other men. Finally, the wife went to a shaman in the village and begged to be changed into another creature. Anything but a woman, she said.

The shaman turned her into a raven. She flew off and built a nest, where she mated with other ravens. But every night, she found herself flying back to the village. Now, ravens can’t come inside dwellings, so she would sit on the roof and hope to catch a glimpse of her husband. She’d think of reasons for him to come outside.

One night, he stepped through the entry and stood under the stars. Oh, she thought, how lovely you are.

The words fell into her husbands outstretched hands, and just like that, the raven turned back into a woman. Just like that, the man wanted her once again to be his wife.

The next morning, a chill snaked its way into the house. Daniel found his teeth chattering as he headed downstairs to make a pot of coffee. He put a call in to the hospital: Trixie had had a good night.

Well. So had he. His mistake had been in not admitting just how much had gone wrong between him and Laura. Maybe you had to scrape the bottom before you could push your way back to the surface.

He was bent over the fireplace, feeding kindling to the paper he’d read, when Laura came downstairs wearing a sweater over her flannel pajamas. Her hair was sticking up in the back, and her cheeks were still flushed with a dream. “Morning,” she murmured, and she slipped by him to pour herself a glass of orange juice.

Daniel waited for her to say something about the previous night. to admit that things had changed between them, but Laura wouldn’t even look him in the eye. Immediately, his boldness faded. What if this spiderweb connection they’d made last night was not, as he thought, a first step . . . but a mistake? What if the whole time she’s been with Daniel, she’d wished she wasn’t? “The hospital says we can get Trixie at nine,” he said neutrally.

At news of Trixie, Laura turned. “How is she?” “Great.”

“Great? She tried to kill herself yesterday.”

Daniel sat back on his heels. “Well. . . compared to yesterday then ... I guess she is doing pretty damn great.”

Laura looked down at the counter. “Maybe that’s true for all of us,” she said.

Her face was red, and Daniel realized she wasn’t embarrassed but nervous. He stood up and walked into the kitchen until he was standing beside her. Sometime between when they had gone to bed last night and the sun coming up this morning, the world had shifted beneath them. It wasn’t what they had said to each other but what they hadn’t: that forgiving and forgetting were fused together - flip sides of the same coin - and yet they couldn’t both exist at the saim time. Choosing one meant that you sacrificed seeing the other.

Daniel slipped his arm around Laura’s waist and felt her shiver. “Cold out,” she said.

“Brutal.”

“Did you hear anything about weather like this?” Daniel faced her. “I don’t think anyone predicted it.”

He opened his arms, and Laura moved into them, her eyes closing as she leaned against him. “I guess these things happen,” she replied, as a rogue burst of sparks rose up the chimney.

You could not walk out of the hospital, for insurance reasons.

 

If you tripped before you crossed the threshold, you might sue. However, if you chose to throw yourself in front of a car the minute you stepped outside, no one would give a damn. Trixie was thinking about it.

 She’d already had to sit down with a shrink this morning, and apparently she was going to have to do that twice a week for the next five forevers, too, all because she had seen a brass ring in the bathroom and had tried to grab it. It didn’t matter if, like Janice the rape counselor, these sessions could eventually wind up in court. She had to attend them, or she had to stay in the hospital on the psych floor with a roommate who ate her own hair.

She was going to have to take medicine, too - under the watchful eye of her parents, who would actually check the sides of her mouth and under her tongue to make sure she didn’t fake swallowing. Since arriving at the hospital this morning, her mother was trying so hard to smile that Trixie expected her face to crack, and her father kept asking her if she needed anything.

Yeah, she felt like answering. A life.

Trixie seesawed between wishing everyone would leave her alone and wondering why everyone treated her like a leper. Even when that stupid psychiatrist had been sitting across from her, asking things like, Do you think you’re in danger of wanting to kill yourself right now? she felt like she was watching the whole scene from a balcony, and it was a comedy. She kept expecting the girl who played her to say something smart, like, Why yes, thanks, I would like to kill myself right now. .. but I’ll restrain myself until the audience is gone. Instead, she watched the actress who was really her fold like a fortune cookie and burst into tears.

What Trixie wanted, most of all, was what she couldn’t have - to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.

She survived the ride home by closing her eyes almost immediately and pretending she’d fallen asleep. Instead, she listened to the conversation between her parents in the front seat: Do you think it’s normal, the way her voice sounds? How do you mean? You know. Like most of the notes are missing.

Maybe it’s the medicine.

They said that would take a few weeks to kick in.

Then how are we supposed to keep her safe in the meantime? Trixie almost would have felt sorry for her parents if she wasn’t so sure that they’d brought this on themselves. After all, her mother didn’t have to open the bathroom door yesterday.

She felt the truth that she’d been hiding, like an after-dinner mint that might last for ages, if you were careful enough; the truth that she hadn’t told the shrink or the doctors or her parents, no matter how much they tried to pull it out of her. She would swallow it whole before she spit it out loud.

Trixie made a big show of stretching and yawning as they approached the turn to their street. Her mother turned around, that Halloween-mask smile still on her face. “You’re awake!”

Her father glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “You need anything?”

Trixie turned and stared out the window. Maybe she had died, after all. And this was hell.

Just about when Trixie decided things couldn’t get any worse, the car turned into the driveway and she saw Zephyr waiting. The last conversation they’d had wasn’t one that invited future chats, and it had left Trixie feeling like she’d been quarantined from the rest of the earth. But right now, Zephyr was the one who looked nervous.

Zephyr knocked on the window. “Um, Mrs. Stone. I, was kind of, you know, hoping to talk to Trixie.”

Her mother frowned. “I don’t really think that now’s the best time . . .”

“Laura,” her father interrupted, and he glanced at Trixie in the rearview mirror: It’s up to you.

Trixie got out of the backseat. She hunched her shoulders, so that her wrists were even more hidden by the sleeves of her coat.

“Hey,” she said cautiously.

Zephyr looked the way Trixie had felt for the past twenty-four hours - like she was completely made up of tears and trying to hold some semblance of human form together before someone noticed that she was actually just a puddle. She followed Trixie into the house, up to her bedroom. There was one terrifying moment when Trixie passed the bathroom - had anyone cleaned up since yesterday? But the door was closed, and she fled into her own room before she had to think about it anymore. “Are you okay?” Zephyr said. Trixie wasn’t about to fall for the false sympathy routine.

“Who dared you?”

“What?”

“Are you, like, supposed to come back with a lock of my hair to prove you got close? Oh, that’s right, I don’t have any hair. I cut it off when I started to go psycho.”

Zephyr swallowed. “I heard you almost died.”

Almost doesn’t count, Trixie’s father used to say. Except in horseshoes and hand grenades.

What about in rape cases? “Do you almost care?” Trixie said.

Suddenly Zephyr’s face crumpled. “I’ve been a total asshole. I was mad at you, because I thought you planned this whole revenge thing for Jason and didn’t trust me enough to tell me . . .”

“I never . . .”

“No, wait, let me finish,” Zephyr said. “And I was mad at you for that night, when Moss paid more attention to you than to me. I wanted to get back at you, so I said . . . I said what they all were saying. But then I heard that you were in the hospital and I kept thinking about how awful it would have been if you ... if you, you know, before I had a chance to tell you I believe you.”

Her face crumpled, “I feel like this was all my fault. I’d do anything to make it up to you.

There was no way to tell whether Zephyr was telling the truth and even if she was, that didn’t mean Trixie trusted her anymore.

There was every chance that Zephyr was going to run to Moss and Jason and the rest of the hockey team and regale them with tales of the freak. But then again . . . maybe she wasn’t; maybe the reason Zephyr was here had nothing to do with guilt or her mom telling her to be here but simply because she remembered, like Trixie did, that once when they were five they had been the only two people in the world who knew that fairies lived inside the kitchen cabinets and hid under the pots and pans when you opened the doors.

Trixie looked at her. “Do you want to know how I did it?”

Zephyr nodded, drawn forward.

She slowly pulled the tape that sealed the bandage around her wrist and unraveled the gauze until the wound was visible: gaping and saw-edged, angry.

“Wow,” Zephyr breathed. “That is sick. Did it hurt?”

Trixie shook her head.

“Did you see lights or angels or, like, God?”

Trixie thought about it, hard. The last thing she could remember was the rusted edge of the radiator, which she focused on before blacking out. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Figures,” Zephyr sighed, and then she looked at Trixie and grinned.

Trixie felt like smiling back. For the first time in a long time when she told her brain to do it, it actually worked.

Three days after Trixie tried to kill herself, Daniel and Laura found themselves in Marita Soorenstad’s office, with Trixie between them Detective Bartholemew was seated to their left, and behind the desk the DA was ripping open a Pixy Stix. “Help yourselves,” she said, and then she turned to Trixie. “I’m certainly glad to see you’re with us. From what I understand, that wasn’t a sure thing a few days ago.”

Daniel reached over and took his daughter’s hand. It felt like ice. “Trixie’s feeling much better.”

“For how long?” the district attorney asked, folding her hands on the desk. “I don’t mean to sound insensitive, Mr. Stone, but the only thing consistent in this case so far has been the lack of consistency.”

Laura shook her head. “I don’t understand ...”

“As a prosecutor, my job is to present facts to a jury that make it possible for them to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that your daughter was the victim of a rape perpetrated by Jason Underhill. However, the facts I’m presenting are the ones that your daughter presented to us. And that means our case is only as good as the information she’s provided me with and as strong as the picture she paints on the stand.”

Daniel felt his jaw tighten. “I’d think that when a girl tries to kill herself, it’s a pretty good indicator that she’s suffering from trauma.”

“Either that, or mental instability.”

“So, you just give up?” Laura said, incredulous. “You don’t try a case if you think it’s going to be a tough sell?”

“I never said that, Mrs. Stone. But I do have an ethical obligation not to bring a case to court if even I’m unsure a crime happened.”

“You’ve got evidence,” Daniel said. “That rape kit.”

“Yes. The same rape kit that allowed a laboratory to find evidence of semen in Trixie’s mouth, when by her own statement she did not have oral sex that night. On the other hand, Jason Underhill says that the intercourse was consensual . . . and was both oral and vaginal.” The DA turned over a page in a file.

“According to Trixie, she screamed no while she was being raped but said that her friend Zephyr wouldn’t have been able to hear her over the music. Yet according to other witnesses, no music was playing during the time of the assault.”

“They’re all lying,” Daniel said.

Marita stared at him. “Or Trixie is. She lied to you about going to her friend’s house for a quiet sleepover that night. She lied about losing her virginity the night of the assault...”

“What?” Laura said, her jaw dropping, and at that moment Daniel remembered he’d never told her what the detective had said. Had he forgotten, or had he intended to forget all along? “she lied to the ER physician about the cuts on her wrist, some of which were made long before that Friday night,” Marita continued. “Which begs the question: What else is Trixie lying about?”

“I want to speak to your boss,” Laura demanded.

“My boss will tell you that I have a hundred other cases to prosecute that could be commanding my attention. I don’t have time for a victim who’s crying wolf.”

Daniel couldn’t look at Trixie. If he did, he thought he might break down. Where he’d grown up, a Yup’ik boy who cried wolf would simply turn into that animal forever. His relatives would say he had it coming. He’d spend the rest of his life watching his old family through yellow eyes, from a distance.

Daniel turned to the detective, who’d been doing a good job of trying to blend into the 1970s paneling. “Tell her about the photo.”

“He already has,” Marita said. “And I’m going to have my hands full trying to keep that out of the courtroom as it is.”

“It’s a perfect example of how Trixie’s being victimized . . .”

“It doesn’t tell us anything about the night of the assault . .

. except that Trixie wasn’t a choirgirl before it happened.”

“Will you all just shut up!” At the sound of Trixie’s voice, all eyes turned. “I’m here, in case you hadn’t noticed. So can you all stop talking about me like I’m not?”

“By all means, Trixie, we’d love to hear what you have to say.

Today.”

Trixie swallowed. “I didn’t mean to lie.”

“You’re admitting you did?” the district attorney replied.

“There were so many . . . holes. I didn’t think anyone would believe what happened if I couldn’t remember the whole story.” She pulled her sleeves down farther over her wrists. Daniel had noticed her doing that in the past few days, and every time it made his heart pleat. “I remember going to Zephyr’s, and all the people who were there. I didn’t know most of them. A bunch of the girls were playing Rainbow”

“Rainbow?” Daniel said.

Trixie began to pick at the hem of her coat. “It’s where everyone gets a different shade of lipstick, and the boys . . .

you know, you go off with them .. .” She shook her head.

“The one with the most colorful penis at the end of the night wins,” Marita said flatly. “Is that about right?”

Daniel heard Laura’s intake of breath as Trixie nodded. “That’s it,” she whispered. “I didn’t do it, though. I thought I could - I wanted to make Jason jealous - but I couldn’t. Everyone went home after that, except for Jason and Moss and me and Zephyr, and that’s when we started playing poker. Moss took the picture of me, and Jason got mad at him, and that’s when it all goes blank. I know I was in the bathroom when he found me, but I can’t remember how we got to the living room. I can’t remember anything, really, until he was on top of me. I thought if I waited long enough, it would all come back. But it hasn’t.”

The district attorney and the detective exchanged a glance.

“Are you saying,” Marita clarified, “that you woke up to find him having intercourse with you?”

Trixie nodded.

“Do you remember any other details?”

“I had a really bad headache. I thought maybe he’d slammed my head on the floor or something.”

Bartholemew walked toward the district attorney. He stood behind her shoulder, flipping over the contents of the file until he reached a certain page and pointed. “The ER doc noted a seemingly dissociated mental state. And during her initial interview at the PD, she was unresponsive.”

“Mike,” the district attorney said, “give me a break.” “If it’s true, it would turn this into gross sexual assault,” Bartholemew pressed. “And all of the inconsistencies in Trixie’s story would actually work to the prosecution’s advantage.”

“We’d need proof. Date rape drugs stay in the bloodstream for only seventy-two hours, tops.”

Bartholemew lifted a lab report out of the file folder. “Good thing you’ve got a sample, then, from six hours post.”

Daniel was utterly lost. “What are you talking about?” The prosecutor turned. “Right now, this case is being tried as a juvenile sexually assaulting a juvenile. That changes, however, if the assault is committed either while Trixie was unconscious, or if she was given a substance that impaired her ability to appraise or control the sexual act. In that case, by law, Jason Underhill would have to be tried as an adult.”

“Are you saying Trixie was drugged?” Daniel said. The district attorney fixed her gaze on Trixie. “Either that,” she replied, “or your daughter is trying to dig herself out of yet another hole.”

“Special K, Vitamin K, Kit Kat, Blind Squid, Cat Valium, Purple . . . it’s got a dozen names on the street,” Venice Prudhomme said, peeling off a pair of latex gloves and throwing them in the trash at Bartholemew’s feet. “Ketamine’s a nonbarbiturate, rapid-acting anesthetic used on both animals and humans . . . it’s also allegedly a sexual stimulant. Kids like it as a club drug because, molecularly, it’s very similar to angel dust - PCP. It produces a dissociative state, making them feel like their minds are separate from their bodies. We’re talking hallucinations . . . amnesia.”

Mike had begged Venice to run the test at the state lab, in spite of a two-month backlog of cases. He’d promised, in return, a pair of club-level Bruins tickets. Venice was a single mom with a hockey-crazy son, a woman who didn’t get paid enough to spend $85 per ticket; he knew she wouldn’t be able to turn down the offer.

Where he was going to actually get two club-level Bruins tickets on his own salary, though, remained to be seen.

So far, Trixie had tested negative for GHB and Rohypnol, the two most common date rape drugs. At this point, Mike was close to conceding that Trixie had, again, duped them. He watched the computer screen, an incomprehensible run of numbers. “Who’s dealing ketamine in Bethel, Maine?” he asked rhetorically.

“It’s fully legal when it’s Ketaset and sold to vets as a liquid. In that form, it’s easy to use as a date rape drug. It’s odorless and tasteless. You slip it into a girl’s drink, and she’s knocked out in less than a minute. For the next few hours, she’s numb and willing ... and best of all, she won’t remember what happened.” As the computer spit out the last analysis, Venice scanned it. “You say your victim’s been lying to you?”

“Enough to make me wish I was working for the defense,” Mike replied.

She pulled a highlighter from her towering nest of braids and drew a yellow line across a field of results - a positive flag for ketamine. “Keep your day job,” Venice replied. “Trixie Stone was telling the truth.”

There were not, as most people believed, a hundred different words for snow. Boil down the roots of the Yup’ik language, and you’d only have fifteen: - qanuk (snowflake), kanevvluk (fine snow), natquik (drifting snow), nevluk (clinging snow), qanikcaq (snow on the ground), muruaneq (soft, deep snow on the ground), qetrar (crust on top of snow), nutaryuk (fresh fallen snow), qanisqineq (snow floating on water), qengaruk (snowbank), utvak (snow block), navcaq (snow cornice), pirta (snowstorm), cellallir (blizzard), andpirrelvag (severely storming).

When it came to snow, Daniel thought in Yup’ik. He’d look out the window and one of these words, or its derivatives, would pop into his mind ahead of the English. There were snows here in Maine, though, that didn’t have equivalent terms in Alaska. Like a nor’easter. Or the kind of snow that landed like goose down, during mud season. Or the ice storm that made the needles on the pines look like they were fashioned out of crystal.

Times like those, Daniel’s mind would simply go blank. Like now: There had to be a term for the kind of storm that he knew was going to be the first real measurable snow of the season. The flakes were the size of a toddler’s fist and falling so fast that it seemed there was a rip in the seam of the gunmetal sky. It had snowed in October and November, but not like this. This was the sort of storm that would cause school superintendents to cancel afternoon basketball games, and create long lines at the Goodyear store; this was the kind of storm that made out-of-town drivers pull over on the highway and forced housewives to buy an extra gallon of milk.

It was the kind of snow that came so fast, it caught you unaware. You hadn’t yet taken the shovels down from the attic where you’d put them last May; you didn’t get a chance to cover the trembling rhododendrons with their ridiculous wooden tepees.

It was the kind of snow, Daniel realized, where you didn’t have time to put away the errant rake and the clippers you’d used to trim back the blackberry bushes, so you’d find yourself walking in circles, hoping you might trip over them before the blades rusted for good. But you never did. Instead, you were bound to lose the things you’d been careless with, and your punishment was not seeing them again until the spring.

Trixie couldn’t remember the last time she went out to play in the snow. When she was a kid, her father used to build a luge in the backyard that she’d slide down on a tube, but at some point it was no longer cool to look like a total spaz when she tipped over, and she’d traded her rubber-tread Sorels for fashionable stacked-heel boots.

She couldn’t find her snow boots - they were buried under too much stuff in the closet. Instead, she borrowed her mother’s, still drying in the mudroom, now that her mom had canceled her afternoon lecture in the wake of the storm. Trixie wrapped a scarf around her neck and jammed a hat onto her head that said DRAMA QUEEN across the front in red script. She pulled on a pair of her father’s ski mittens and headed outside.

It was what her mother used to call snowman snow - the kind damp enough to stick together. Trixie packed it into a ball.

She started to roll it across the lawn like a bandage, leaving behind a long brown tongue of matted grass.

After a while, she surveyed the damage. The yard looked like a crazy quilt, white stripes bordering triangles and squares made of lawn. Taking another handful of snow, Trixie began to roll a second snowball, and a third. A few minutes later, she was standing in the middle of them, wondering how they’d gotten so big so fast. There was no way she would be able to lift one onto the other. How had she managed to build a snowman when she was little? Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe someone else had always done it for her.

Suddenly the door opened and her mother was standing there, screaming her name and trying to see through the flakes still coming down. She looked frantic, and it took Trixie a moment to understand: Her mother didn’t know she’d come outside; her mother was still worried she’d kill herself.

“Over here,” Trixie said.

Not that death-by-blizzard was a bad idea. When Trixie was tiny, she used to dig a hideout in the mountain of snow left behind by the plow. She called it her igloo, even though her father had told her that Eskimos in America did not and never had lived in those. But then she read a newspaper article about a kid in Charlotte, Vermont, who had done the same exact thing and the roof had collapsed on his head and smothered him before his parents even knew he was missing, and she never did it again.

Her mother walked outside and immediately sank ankle-deep in snow. She was wearing Trixie’s boots, which she must have dug out of the closet wreckage after Trixie had commandeered her own Sorels. “You want help?” her mother asked.

Trixie didn’t. If she’d wanted help, she would have invited someone outside with her in the first place. But she couldn’t for the life of her imagine how she was going to get that stupid belly on top of the snowman’s base. “All right,” she conceded.

Her mother got on one side of the ball and pushed, while Trixie tried to pull it from the front. Even together, they couldn’t budge the weight. “Welcome to the Fourth Circle,” her mother said, laughing.

Trixie fell onto her butt on the snow. Leave it to her mother to turn this into a classics lesson.

“You’ve got your tightwads on one side and your greedy folks on the other,” her mother said. “They shove boulders at each other for all eternity.”

“I was kind of hoping to finish this up before then.”

Her mother turned. “Why, Trixie Stone. Was that a joke?”

Since coming home from the hospital, there had been precious few of those in the household. When a television sitcom came on, the channel was immediately changed. When you felt a smile coming on, you squelched it. Feeling happy didn’t seem particularly appropriate, not with everything that had gone on lately. It was as if, Trixie thought, they were all waiting for someone to wave a magic wand and say, It’s okay, now. Carry on.

What if she was the one who was supposed to wave that wand? Her mother began to sculpt a snow ramp. Trixie fell into place beside her, pushing the middle snowball higher and higher until it tipped onto the bigger base. She packed snow between the seams.

Then she lifted the head and perched it at the very top.

Her mother clapped... just as snowman listed and fell. His head rolled into one of the basement window gutters; his midsection cracked like an egg. Only the massive base sphere remained intact.

Frustrated, Trixie slapped a snowball against the side of it.

Her mother watched and then packed her own snowball. Within seconds they were both firing shots at the boulder until it cleaved down the center, until it succumbed to the assault and lay between them in fat iceberg chunks.

By then, Trixie was lying on her back, panting. She had not felt .. . . well, this normal . . . in some time. It occurred to her that had things ended differently a week ago, she might not be doing any of this. She’d been so focused on what she had wanted to get away from in this world she forgot to consider what she might miss.

When you die, you don’t get to catch snowflakes on your tongue.

You don’t get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can’t lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can’t suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.

Trixie stared up at the dizzy flakes. “I’m kind of glad.”

“About what?”

“That it didn’t.. . you know ... work out.”

She felt her mother’s hand reach over to grab her own. Their mittens were both soaked.

They’d go inside, stick their clothes inside the dryer. Ten minutes later, they’d be good as new.

Because of the storm, hockey practice had been canceled. Jason came home after school, as per the conditions of his bail, and holed himself up in his bedroom listening to the White Stripes on his iPod. He closed his eyes and executed mental passes to Moss, wrist shots and slapshots and pucks that hit the top shelf.

One day, people would be talking about him, and not just because of this rape case. They’d say things like, Oh, Jason Underhill, we always knew he’d make it. They’d put up a replica jersey of his over the mirror behind the town bar, with his name facing out, and the Bruins games would take precedence over any other programming on the one TV mounted in the corner.

Jason had a lot of work cut out ahead of him, but he could do it. A year or two postgrad, then some college hockey, and maybe he’d even be like Hugh Jessiman at Dartmouth and get signed in the first round of the NHL draft. Coach had told Jason that he’d never seen a forward with as much natural talent as Jason. He’d said that if you wanted something bad enough, all you had to learn was how to go out and take it.

He was living out his fantasy for the hundredth time when the door to his room burst open. Jason’s father strode in, fuming, and yanked the iPod’s headphones out of Jason’s ears. “What the hell?”

Jason said, sitting up.

“You want to tell me what you left out the first time? You want to tell me where you got the goddamned drugs?”

“I don’t do drugs,” Jason said. “Why would I do something that’s going to screw up my game?”

“Oh, I believe you,” his father said, sarcastic. “I believe you didn’t take any of those drugs yourself.”

The conversation was spinning back and forth in directions Jason couldn’t follow. “Then why are you flipping out?”

“Because Dutch Oosterhaus called me at work to discuss a little lab report he got today. The one they did on Trixie Stone’s blood that proves someone knocked her out by slipping her a drug.”

Heat climbed the ladder of Jason’s spine.

“You know what else Dutch told me? Now that drugs are in the picture, the prosecutor’s got enough evidence to try you as an adult.”

“I didn’t . . .”

A vein pulsed in his father’s temple. “You threw it all away, Jason. You fucking threw it all away for a small-town whore.”

“I didn’t drug her. I didn’t rape her. She must have fooled around with that blood sample, because ... because .,.” Jason’s voice dropped off. “Jesus Christ... you don’t believe me.”

“No one does,” his father said, weary. He reached into his back pocket for a letter that had already been opened and passed it to Jason before leaving the room.

Jason sank down onto his bed. The letter was embossed with a return address for Bethel Academy; the name of the hockey coach had been scrawled above it in pen. He began to read: In lieu of recent circumstances . . . withdrawing its initial offer of a scholarship for a postgraduate year. . . sure you understand our position and its reflection on the academy.

The letter dropped from his hands, fluttering to land on the carpet. The iPod, without its headphones, glowed a mute blue. Who would have imagined that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence? Jason buried his face in his hands and, for the first time since all this had begun, started to cry.

Once the storm had stopped and the streets were cleared, the storekeepers in Bethel came out to shovel their walkways and talk about how lucky they were that this latest blizzard hadn’t caused the town manager to cancel the annual Winterfest.

It was always held the Friday before Christmas and was a direct ploy to boost the local economy. Main Street was blocked off by the spinning blue lights of police cars. Shops stayed open late, and hot cider was served for free in the inn. Christmas lights winked like fireflies in the bare branches of the trees. Some enterprising farmer carted in a sickly looking reindeer and set up portable fencing around it: a North Pole petting zoo. The bookstore owner, dressed as Santa, arrived at seven o’clock and stayed as long as it took to hear the holiday requests of all the children waiting in line.

This year, in an effort to connect local sports heroes to the community, the square in front of the town offices had been sealed and flooded to create a makeshift ice rink. The Ice CaBabes, a local cornpetitive figure-skating team, had done an exhibition routine earlier that evening. Now the championship Bethel High School hockey team was slated to play pickup hockey with a local group of Boy Scouts.

After everything that had happened, Jason hadn’t planned to go until Coach called up and said he had an obligation to the team.

What Coach hadn’t done, however, was specify in what condition Jason had to arrive. It was a fifteen-minute ride downtown, and he drank a fifth of his dad’s Jack Daniel’s on the way.

Moss was already on the ice when Jason sat down on a bench and pulled out his skates. “You’re late,” Moss said.

Jason double-knotted the laces, grabbed his stick, and shoved hard past Moss. “You here to talk or play hockey?” He skated so fast down the center of the rink that he had to slalom around some of the wobbling kids. Moss met him and they passed the puck in a series of complicated handoffs. On the sidelines, the parents cheered, thinking this was all part of the exhibition.

Coach called for a face-off, and Jason skated into position.

The kid he was opposing on the scout team came up as high as his hip. The puck was dropped, and the high school team let the kids win it. But Jason stick-checked the boy who was skating down the ice, stole the puck, and carried it down to the goal. He lifted it to the upper right corner of the net, where there was no chance of the tiny goalie being able to stop it. He pumped his stick in the air and looked around for his other teammates, but they were hanging back, and the crowd wasn’t cheering anymore. “Aren’t we supposed to score?” he yelled out, his words slurring. “Did the rules change here, too?”

Moss led Jason to the side of the rink. “Dude. It’s just pond hockey, and they’re just kids.”

Jason nodded, shook it off. They met for another face-off, and this time when the kids took the puck Jason skated backward slowly, making no move to go after it. Unused to playing without the boards, he tripped over the plastic edge of the rink liner and fell into the arms of the crowd. He noticed Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein’s face, and a half-dozen others from school.

“Sorry,” he muttered, staggering to his feet.

When he stepped onto the ice again, Jason headed for the puck, hip-checking a player to get him out of the way. Except this time, his opponent was half his size and a third of his weight, and went flying.

The boy banged into his goalie, who slid into the net in a heap, crying. Jason watched the kid’s father hurry onto the ice in his street shoes.

“What is wrong with you today?” Moss said, skating close.

“It was an accident,” Jason answered, and his friend reared back, smelling the alcohol.

“Coach is going to rip you a new asshole. Get out of here. I’ll cover for you.”

Jason stared at him.

“Go,” Moss said.

Jason took one last look at the boy and his father, then skated hard to the spot where he’d left his boots.

I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath: imagine for yourself what I became, deprived at once of both my life and death.

Laura read Lucifer’s lines in the last canto of the Inferno, then closed the book. Hands down, Lucifer was the most fascinating character in the poem: waist-deep in the lake of ice, with his three heads gnawing on a feast of sinners. Having once been an archangel, he certainly had the freedom of choice - in fact, it was what got him to pick a fight with God in the first place. So if Lucifer had willingly chosen his course, had he known beforehand that he was going to end up suffering? Did he think, on some level, that he deserved it? Did anyone, who was cast in the role opposite the hero? It occurred to Laura that she had sinned in every single circle. She’d committed adultery. She’d betrayed her benefactor - the university - by seducing a student. . . which could also be considered treachery, if you classified Seth as an innocent pawn in the game. She’d defied God by ignoring her wedding vows: She’d defied her family by distancing herself from Trixie when Trixie needed her most.

She’d lied to her husband, she’d been angry and wrathful, she’d sowed discord, and she’d been a fraudulent counselor to a student who came looking for a mentor and wound up with a lover. About the only thing Laura hadn’t done was kill someone. She reached behind her desk for an antique china human head she had found at a garage sale. It was smooth and white and divided into calligraphed subsections across the brain area: wit, glory, revenge, bliss.

Over the skull she’d put a headband sporting two red devil horns, a gift from a student one Halloween. Now she took the headband off and tried it on for size.

There was a knock on her door, and a moment later Seth stepped into her office. “Are those horns on your head,” he said, “or are you just happy to see me?”

I She yanked off the headband.

“Five minutes.” He closed the door, locked it. “You owe me that much.”

Relationships always sounded so physically painful: You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars? The problem with a marriage - or maybe its strength - was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later. If you weren’t, you wound up in your office with a boy fifteen years younger than you were, pouring his heart into your open hands.

All right. If she was going to be honest, she had loved the way Seth knew what an anapest was, and a canzone. She loved seeing their reflection in a pane of glass as they passed a storefront and being surprised every time. She loved playing Scrabble on a rainy afternoon when she should have been grading papers or attending a departmental meeting. But just because she had called in sick that day didn’t mean she wasn’t still a professor. Just because she abandoned her family didn’t mean she wasn’t still a wife, a mother. Her biggest sin, when you got right down to it, was forgetting all that in the first place.

“Seth,” she said, “I don’t know how to make this any easier.

But . . .”

She broke off, realizing the words she was about to say: But I love my husband. I always have.

“We need to talk,” Seth said quietly. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and tossed a rolled newspaper onto the table.

Laura had seen it. The front page chronicled the newly filed charge by the district attorney. Jason Underhill would be tried as an adult, due to the presence of date rape drugs in the victim’s bloodstream.

“Ketamine,” Seth said.

Laura blinked at him. From what the prosecutor had said, the drug found in Trixie’s system hadn’t even been one of the more popular date rape drugs. It hadn’t been listed in the newspaper, either. “How would you know that?”

Seth sat down on the edge of her desk. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said.

“I’m coming!” Trixie yelled through the open door, as her father honked the horn for the third time. Jesus. It wasn’t like she wanted to go into town right now, and it wasn’t her fault that the pizza cheese he was using to cook dinner had grown enough mold to be classified as an antibiotic. She hadn’t been doing anything earthshattering that she couldn’t interrupt, but it was the principle that was upsetting her; Neither parent felt comfortable letting Trixie out of sight.

She stomped into the first pair of boots she could find and headed outside to his idling truck. “Can’t we just have soup?”

Trixie said, slouching down in her seat, when what she really meant was: What will it take to make you trust me again? Her father put the truck into first gear to go down a long hill. “I know you want me to leave you home alone. But I hope you also know why I can’t do that.”

Trixie rolled her eyes toward the window. “Whatever.”

As they approached town, there was a glut of cars. People in bright parkas and scarves spilled across the street like a stream of confetti. Trixie felt her stomach turn over. “What’s the date?”

she murmured. She’d seen the signs all over school: ICE = NICE.

DON’T BE A SNOWFLAKECOME TO WINTERFEST.

Trixie shrank back in her seat as three girls she recognized from school came so close to the car they brushed the front bumper. Everyone came to the Winterfest. When she was little, her parents would take her to pat the sorry old reindeer idling near the camera store. She could remember seeing ordinary teachers and doctors and waitresses become Victorian carolers for a night. Last year, Trixie had been an elf along with Zephyr, the two of them wearing double layers of skating tights and handing out candy canes to the kids who sat on Santa’s lap.

This year, walking down Main Street would be totally different.

At first, no one would see her, because it was dark out. But then, someone would bump into her by accident. Sorry, they’d say, and then they’d realize who it was. They’d tap their friends. They would point. They’d lean close and whisper about how Trixie wasn’t wearing any makeup and how her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. Before she had made it to the other end of Main Street, their stares would have burned into the back of her coat like sunlight through a looking glass, starting a flash fire that reduced her to a pile of ashes.

“Daddy,” she said, “can’t we just go home?”

Her father glanced at her. He’d had to detour around Main Street and was now parked in a lot behind the grocery store.

Trixie could see he was weighing the cost of reaching his destination against Trixie’s extreme discomfort. . . and factoring in her suicide attempt to boot. “You stay in the car,” her father conceded. “I’ll be right back.”

Trixie nodded and watched him cross the parking lot. She closed her eyes and counted to fifty. She listened to the sound of her own pulse.

Yet as it turned out, what Trixie had thought she wanted most of all - being left alone - turned out to be absolutely terrifying. When the door of the car beside her slammed, she jumped. The headlights swept over her as the car backed out, and she ducked her face against the collar of her coat so that the driver couldn’t see.

Her father had been gone for three minutes when she started to really panic. It didn’t take much longer than that to buy some stupid cheese, did it? What if someone else came to this parking lot and saw her sitting there? How long before a crowd gathered, calling her a slut and a whore? Who would save her if they decided to pound on the windows, start a witch hunt, lynch her? She peered out the windshield. It would take fifteen seconds, tops, to make it to the door of the grocery store. By now her father would be in line. She might run into someone she knew there, but at least she wouldn’t be alone.

Trixie got out of the car and started to race across the parking lot. She could see the buttery windows of the grocery mart and the line of wire shopping carts shivering against its outer wall.

Someone was coming. She couldn’t see whether it was her father the figure seemed big enough, but the streetlamp was behind him, obscuring the features. If it was her father, he’d see her first, Trixie realized. And if it wasn’t her father, then she was going to move past the stranger at the speed of light.

But as Trixie broke into a sprint, she hit a patch of black ice and her feet gave out from underneath her. One leg twisted, and she could feel herself falling. The moment before her left hip struck the pavement, she was wrenched upright by the very person she’d been trying to avoid. “You okay?” he said, and she looked up to find Jason holding her upper arm.

He let go almost as quickly as he’d grabbed her. Trixie’s mother had said that Jason couldn’t come near her, couldn’t cross paths with her - if he did, he’d be shipped off to a juvenile detention center before the trial. But either her mother had been wrong or Jason had forgotten, because he shook off whatever fear had made him release her and began advancing on her instead. He smelled like a distillery, and his voice was raw. “What did you tell them? What are you trying to do to me?”

Trixie fought for breath. The cold was seeping through the back of her jeans and there was water in her boot where it had gone through the ice into a puddle. “I didn’t... I’m not...”

“You have to tell them the truth,” Jason begged. “They don’t believe me.”

This was news to Trixie and cut clean as a knife through her fear. If they didn’t believe Jason, and they didn’t believe her, who did they believe? He crouched in front of her, and that was all it took for Trixie to be whipped back to then. It was as if the rape was happening all over again, as if she couldn’t control a single inch of her own body.

“Trixie,” Jason said.

His hands on her thighs, as she tried to pull away.

“You have to.”

His body rising over hers, pinning her at the hips.

“Now.”

Now, he had said, throwing his head back as he putted out and spitted hot across her belly. Now, he had said, but by then it was already too late.

Trixie drew in a deep breath and screamed at the top of her lungs.

Suddenly Jason wasn’t leaning over her anymore. Trixie glanced up to see him wrestling, trying to dodge her father’s punches.

“Daddy!” she screamed. “Stop!”

Her father turned, bleeding from a split lip. “Trixie, get in the car.”

She didn’t get in the car. She scrambled away from their brawl and stood in the halo of the streetlamp, watching as her father - the same man who caught the spiders in her bedroom and carried them outside in a Dixie cup, the same man who had never in his life spanked her - pummeled Jason. She was horrified and fascinated all at once. It was like meeting someone she’d never seen before and finding out that all this time, he’d been living next door.

The sound of flesh smacking flesh reminded Trixie of the bluefish that got slapped hard against the docks in Portland by the fishermen, to still them before they were filleted. She covered her ears and looked down at the ground, at the plastic bag of shredded mozzarella that had fallen and been torn open under their boots during the fight.

“If you ever,” her father panted, “ever ...” He landed a punch to Jason’s gut. “. . . ever come near my daughter again . . .” A blow across the right jaw. “I will kill you.” But just as he reared back his hand to strike again, a car drove past the parking lot, illuminating everything.

The last man Daniel had beaten up had already been dead. In the high school gym in Akiak, Daniel had slammed Cane against the floor, although his head already had a bullet hole in it. He’d done it because he wanted Cane to tell him to stop. He’d wanted Cane to sit up and take a swing back