What if he was?
6
I t was late enough in December that all the radio stations played only Christmas carols. Trixie?s hiding place was directly over the driver?s seat, in the little jut of the box truck that sat over the cab. She had seen the truck at the dairy farm just past the high school athletic fields. With the doors wide open and no one around, she had climbed inside and hidden in that upper nook, drawing hay over herself for camouflage.
They?d loaded two calves into the truck-not down in the bottom, like Trixie had figured, but nearly on top of her in the narrow space where she was curled. This way, she supposed, they wouldn?t stand up during the trip. Once they?d started under way, Trixie had poked her head out from the straw and looked at one calf. It had eyes as large as planets, and when she held out her finger, the calf sucked hard on it.
At the next stop, another farm not ten minutes down the road, an enormous Holstein limped up the ramp into the back of the truck. It stared right at Trixie and mooed. ?Damn shame,? the trucker said, as the farmer shoved the cow from behind.
?Ayuh, she went down on some ice,? he said. ?In you go, now.? Then the door swung shut and everything went black.
She didn?t know where they were headed and didn?t particularly care. Prior to this, the farthest Trixie had ever been by herself was the Mall of Maine. She wondered if her father was looking for her yet. She wished she could phone him and tell him she was all right-but under the circumstances, she couldn?t call. She might never.
She lay down on one calf?s smooth side. It smelled of grass and grain and daylight, and with every breath, she felt herself rising and falling. She wondered why the cows were in transit. Maybe they were going to a new farm for Christmas. Or to be part of a Nativity play. She pictured the doors swinging open and farmhands in crisp overalls coming to lift down the calves. They would find Trixie and would give her fresh milk and homemade ice cream and they wouldn?t even think to ask her how she?d wound up in the back of a livestock truck.
In a way, it was a mystery to Trixie, too. She had seen the detective at Jason?s funeral, although he thought he?d been hiding. And then, when everyone thought she was asleep, she?d stood on the balcony and heard what he?d said to her father.
Enough to know that she had to get out of there.
She was, in a way, a little proud of herself. Who knew that she?d be able to run away without a car, with only two hundred bucks in her pocket? She?d never considered herself to be the kind of person who was cool in the face of crisis-and yet, you never knew what you were capable of until you arrived at that given moment. Life was just a whole string of spots where you continued to surprise yourself.
She must have fallen asleep for a while, sandwiched between the knobby knees and globe bellies of the two calves, but when the truck stopped again they struggled to stand-impossible in that cramped space. Below them, the cow began to bellow, one low note that ricocheted. There was the sound of a seal being breached, a mighty creak, and then the doors to the back of the truck swung open.
Trixie blinked into the light and saw what she hadn?t earlier: The cow had a lesion on her right foreleg, one that made it buckle beneath her. The Holstein calves on either side of her were males, no good for producing milk. She peered out the double doors and squinted so that she could read the sign at the end of the driveway: LaRue and Sons Beef, Berlin, NH.
This was not a petting zoo or Old MacDonald?s Farm, as Trixie had imagined. This was a slaughterhouse.
She scrambled down from her ledge, startling the animals-not to mention the truck driver who was unhooking the tether of the cow-and took off like a shot down the long gravel driveway. Trixie ran until her lungs were on fire, until she had reached what passed for a town, with a Burger King and a gas station. The Burger King made her think of the calves, which made her think that she was going to be a vegetarian, if she ever got through the other side of this nightmare.
Suddenly, there was a siren. Trixie went still as stone, her eyes trained on the circling blue lights of the advancing police cruiser.
The car went screaming past her, on to someone else?s emergency.
Wiping her hand across her mouth, Trixie took a deep breath and started to walk.
?She?s gone,? Daniel Stone said, frantic.
Bartholemew?s eyes narrowed. ?Gone??
He followed Stone upstairs and stood in the doorway of Trixie?s room, which looked as if a bomb had cut a swath through its middle. ?I don?t know where she is,? Stone said, his voice breaking. ?I don?t know when she left.?
It took Bartholemew less than a second to determine that this wasn?t a lie. In the first place, Stone had been out of his sight for less than a minute, hardly long enough to tip off his daughter that she was under suspicion. In the second place, Daniel Stone seemed just as surprised as Bartholemew was to find Trixie missing, and he was skating the knife edge of panic.
For only a heartbeat, Bartholemew let himself wonder why a teenage girl who had nothing to hide would suddenly disappear. But in the next breath, he remembered what it felt like to discover that your daughter was not where you?d thought she was, and he switched gears. ?When did you last see her??
?Before she went to take a nap?about three-thirty??
The detective took a notepad out of his pocket. ?What was she wearing??
?I?m not sure. She probably changed after the funeral.?
?Have you got a recent photo??
Bartholemew followed Stone downstairs again, watching him run a finger along the vertebrae of books on a living room shelf, finally pulling down an eighth-grade yearbook from Bethel Middle School. He turned pages until they fell open to the S?s. A folio of snapshots-a 5-by-7 and some wallet-sized-spilled out. ?We never got around to framing them,? Stone murmured.
In the photographs, Trixie?s smiling face repeated like an Andy Warhol print. The girl in the picture had long red hair held back with clips. Her smile was just a little too wide, and a tooth in front was crooked. The girl in that picture had never been raped. Maybe she had never even been kissed.
Bartholemew had to pry the pictures of Trixie from her father?s hand. Both men were painfully aware that Stone was struggling not to break down. The tears you shed over a child were not the same as any others. They burned your throat and your corneas. They left you blind.
Daniel Stone stared at him. ?She didn?t do anything wrong.?
?Sit tight,? Bartholemew replied, aware that it was not an answer. ?I?ll find her.?
The last lecture Laura gave before Christmas vacation was about the half-life of transgression. ?Are there any sins Dante left out?? Laura asked. ?Or any really bad modern-day behaviors that weren?t around in the year 1300??
One girl nodded. ?Drug addiction. There?s, like, no bolgia for crackheads.?
?It?s the same as gluttony,? a second student said. ?Addiction?s addiction. It doesn?t matter what the substance is.?
?Cannibalism??
?Nope, Dante?s got that in there,? Laura said. ?Count Uggolino. He lumps it in with bestiality.?
?Driving to endanger??
?Filippo drives his horses recklessly. Early Italian road rage.? Laura glanced around the silent hall. ?Maybe the question we need to ask isn?t whether there?s any fresh twenty-first-century sin?but whether the people who define sin have changed, because of the times.?
?Well, the world?s completely different,? a student pointed out.
?Sure, but look at how it?s still the same. Avarice, cowardice, depravity, a need to control other people-these have all been around forever. Maybe nowadays a pedophile will start a kiddie-porn site instead of flashing in the subway tunnels, or a murderer will choose to use an electric chain saw to kill, instead of his bare hands?Technology helps us be more creative in the way we sin, but it doesn?t mean that the basic sin is different.?
A boy
shook his head. ?Seems like there ought to be a whole different circle for someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, you know??
?Or the people who come up with reality TV shows,? someone else interjected, and the class laughed.
?It?s sort of interesting,? Laura said, ?to think that Dante wouldn?t have put Jeffrey Dahmer as deep in hell as he would Macbeth. Why is that??
?Because the skivviest thing you can do is be disloyal to someone. Macbeth killed his own king, man. That would be like Eminem taking down Dr. Dre.?
The student was, at a literal level, correct. In the Inferno, sins of passion and despair weren?t nearly as damning as sins of treachery. Sinners in the upper circles of hell were guilty of indulging their own appetites, but without malice toward others. Sinners in the middle levels of hell had committed acts of violence toward themselves or others. The deepest level of hell, though, was reserved for fraud-what Dante felt was the worst sin of all. There was betrayal to family-those who killed kin. There was betrayal to country-for the double agents and spies of the world. There was betrayal to benefactor-Judas, Brutus, Cassius, and Lucifer, all of whom had turned against their mentors.
?Does Dante?s hierarchy still work?? Laura asked. ?Or do you think that in our world, the order of the damned should be shaken up??
?I think it?s worse to keep someone?s head in your freezer than to sell national security secrets to the Chinese,? a girl said, ?but that?s just me.?
Another student shook her head. ?I don?t get why being unfaithful to your king is worse than being unfaithful to your husband. If you have an affair, you wind up only in the second level of hell. That?s, like, getting off easy.?
?Nice choice of words,? the kid beside her joked.
?It?s about intention,? a student added. ?Like manslaughter versus murder. It?s almost as if you do something in the heat of the moment, Dante excuses you. But if you?ve got this whole premeditated scheme going on, you?re in deep trouble.?
In that moment, although she?d been a professor for this particular course-even this particular class topic-for a decade, Laura realized that there was a sin that Dante had left out, one that belonged in the very deepest pit of hell. If the worst sin of all was betraying others, then what about people who lied to themselves?
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 long-sleeved 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 remover on Mrs. S?s bedroom bureau, not when Trixie failed her math test, not even when they were caught sneaking cigarettes in Trixie?s garage. It was against human nature to be that calm, like he was some kind of Stepford dad who couldn?t be provoked. Take Zephyr?s own mother, for example. Zephyr had once found her hurling all of their dinner plates against the backyard fence, when she found out that this loser she was dating was two-timing her. Zephyr and her mom had screaming matches. In fact, her mother had been the one to teach her the best curse words.
On the other hand, Trixie had learned them from Zephyr. Zephyr had even tried to lure Trixie into objectionable behaviors simply for the purpose of trying to get a rise out of Mr. Stone, but nothing had ever worked. He was like some kind of soap opera actor whose tragic story line you fell madly for: beautiful to look at, but all the same, you knew what you were seeing wasn?t all it was cracked up to be.
Today, though, something was different. Mr. Stone couldn?t concentrate; even as he grilled Zephyr, his eyes kept darting around. He was so far from the even-keeled, friendly father figure she?d envied her whole life that if Zephyr didn?t know better, she would have assumed it wasn?t Daniel Stone standing across from her at all.