There should have been a tenth circle, a tiny spot the size of the head of a pin, with room for infinite masses. It would be overcrowded with professors who hid in ivy-covered towers instead of facing their broken families. With little girls who had grown up overnight. With husbands who didn't speak of their past but instead poured it out onto a blank white page. With women who pretended they could be the wife of one and the lover of another and keep the two selves distinct. With anyone who told himself he was living the perfect life, despite all evidence to the contrary. A voice swam toward her. “Professor Stone? Are you okay?” Laura focused on the girl in the front row who'd asked the question. “No,” she said quietly. “I'm not. You can all... you can all go home a little early for vacation.”
As the students disbanded, delighted with this windfall, Laura gathered her briefcase and her coat. She walked to the parking lot, got into her car, and began to drive.
The women who wrote “Annie's Mailbox” were wrong, Laura realized. Just because you didn't speak the facts out loud didn't erase their existence. Silence was just a quieter way to lie. She knew where she was headed, but before she got there, her cell phone rang. “It's Trixie,” Daniel said, and suddenly what he had to say was far more important than what she did.
* * *
Santa's Village in Jefferson, New Hampshire, was full of lies. There were transplanted reindeer languishing in a fake barn and phony elves hammering in a workshop and a counterfeit Santa sitting on a throne with a bazillion kids lined up to tell him what they wanted on the big day. There were parents pretending this was totally real, even the animatronic Rudolph. And then there was Trixie herself, trying to act like she was normal, when in fact she was the biggest liar of all.
Trixie watched a little girl climb onto Fake Santa's lap and pull his beard so hard that it ripped off. You'd think that a kid, even one
so young, would get suspicious, but it never worked that way. People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was in front of their eyes.
That's why she was here, wasn't it?
As a kid, of course, Trixie had believed in Santa. For years, Zephyr - who was half Jewish and fully practical - pointed out the discrepancies to Trixie: How could Santa be in both Filene's and the BonTon at the same time? If he really was Santa, shouldn't he know what she wanted without having to ask? Trixie wished she could round up the kids in this building and save them, like Holden Caulfield in the last book she'd read for English. Reality check, she would say. Santa's a phony. Your parents lied to you. And, she might add, they'll do it again. Her own parents had said she was beautiful, when in fact she was all angles and bowlegs. They'd promised that she'd find her Prince Charming, but he'd dumped Trixie. They said if she came home by her curfew and picked up her room and held up her end of the bargain, they'd keep her safe - yet look at what had happened.
She stepped out from behind a fir tree that belched Christmas carols and glanced around to see if anyone was watching her. In a way, it would have been easier to get caught. It was hard to look over your shoulder every other second, expecting to be recognized. She'd worried that the truck driver who'd given her a lift would radio her whereabouts to the state police. She'd been sure that the man selling tickets at Santa's Village had glanced down to compare her face to the one on a Wanted poster.
Trixie slipped into the bathroom, where she splashed water on her face and tried to take deep, even, social-disaster-avoidance breaths, the way she'd done in science class when they were dissecting a frog and she was sure she would throw up on her lab partner. She pretended to have something in her eye and squinted into the mirror until she was the only person left in the restroom.
Then Trixie stuck her head under the faucet. It was the kind you
had to push down to get the water going, so she had to keep pounding the knob for a continuous stream. She took off her sweatshirt and wrapped it around her hair, then went into a stall and sat on the toilet, shivering in her T-shirt while she rummaged through her backpack.
She'd bought the dye at Wal-Mart when the trucker stopped for cigarettes. The color was called Night in Shining Armor, but it looked plain old black to Trixie. She opened the box and read the instructions.
With any luck no one would think it weird that she was sitting in the bathroom for thirty minutes. Then again, no one else should be in the bathroom for thirty minutes. Trixie slipped on the plastic gloves and mixed the dye with the peroxide, shook, and squirted the solution onto her hair. She rubbed it around a little and pulled the plastic bag over her scalp.
Was she supposed to dye her eyebrows, too? Was that even possible?
She and Zephyr used to talk about how you could be an adult way before you hit twenty-one. The age wasn't as important as the milestones: taking a trip sans parents, buying beer without getting carded, having sex. She wished she could tell Zeph that it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.
Trixie wondered if, like her father, she'd never go back home again. She wondered how big the world was, really, when you crossed it, instead of traced it with your finger on a map. A little rivulet of liquid ran down her neck; she smeared it with a finger before it reached the collar of her shirt. The dye came away as dark as motor oil. For just a moment she pretended she was bleeding. It would be no surprise to her if inside she'd gone as black as everyone suspected.
* * *
Daniel parked in front of the wide-eyed windows of the toy store and watched Zephyr hand some bills and small change back to an elderly woman. Zephyr's hair was in braids, and she was wearing two longsleeved shirts, one layered over the next, as if she'd planned to be cold no matter what. Through the shadows and the stream of the glass, it was almost possible to pretend that she was Trixie.
There was no way Daniel planned to sit inside his house and wait for the police to find Trixie and bully an explanation out of her. To that end, the minute Bartholemew had gone - and Daniel checked to make sure he wasn't just lurking at the end of the block - Daniel had begun to consider what he knew about Trixie that the cops didn't. Where she might go, whom she might trust. Right now, there were precious few people who fell into that category.
The customer left the store, and Zephyr noticed him waiting outside. “Hey, Mr. S,” she said, waving.
She wore purple nail polish on her fingers. It was the same color Trixie had been wearing this morning; Daniel realized that they must have put it on together the last time Zephyr was over at the house. Just seeing it on Zephyr, when he so badly wanted to see it on Trixie, made it hard to breathe.
Zephyr was looking over his shoulder. “Is Trixie with you?” Daniel tried to shake his head, but somewhere between the thought and the action the intent vanished. He stared at the girl who knew his daughter maybe better than he'd ever known her himself, as much as it hurt to admit it. “Zephyr,” he said, “have you got a minute?”
* * *
For an old guy, Daniel Stone was hot. Zephyr had even said that to Trixie once or twice, although it totally freaked her out, what with him being her father and everything. But beyond that, Mr. Stone had always fascinated Zephyr. In all the years she'd known Trixie, she had never seen him lose his temper. Not when they spilled nail polish