“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.