unconscious? Had Trixie been suicidal before? Did Laura know where the razor blade had come from? Laura answered each of these, but they didn't ask the question she was expecting, the one she didn't have a response for: What if Jason Underhill wasn't the biggest threat to Trixie?
What if that was Trixie herself?
* * *
Trixie had been doing this for a while. Not in-your-face suicide attempts but recreational cutting. Ironically, the doctors said, that might have been what saved her. Most girls who cut did so horizontally across the wrist, in light little lines. Today, Trixie had cut a deeper slash, but in the same direction. People who meant business or who knew better, killed themselves by cutting vertically, which
meant they'd bleed out faster.
Either way, if Laura hadn't gone in when she did, they probably would have been standing over their daughter's grave instead of her
hospital bed.
The lights were turned off in the room, and there was a glowing red clamp on one of Trixie's fingers, keeping tabs on her oxygen levels. Someone - a nurse? - had put Trixie in a hospital gown. Daniel had no idea what had happened to her clothes. Did they get saved as evidence, like the ones she had been wearing the night she was raped? As proof of a girl who desperately wanted to trade in her title of survivor?
“Did you know?” Laura asked softly, her voice reaching through the dark.
Daniel looked up at her. All he could see was the shine of her eyes. “No.”
“Do you think we should have?”
She wasn't blaming him; that note wasn't in her voice. She was asking if there had been clues missed, trails ignored. She was trying to pinpoint the moment that it all started to disintegrate. Daniel knew there was no answer to that. It was like a trapeze act: How could you really tell at what second the acrobat pushed away, at what moment the anchor let go? You couldn't, and that was that. You made your deductions from the outcome: a successful landing or a spiraling fall. “I think Trixie was doing her best to make sure we didn't know.”
He had a sudden memory of Trixie dressed as a bunch of grapes for Halloween one year. She was five and had been so excited about
the costume - they'd spent a month making papier-mache globes in
the basement and painting them purple - but when the time came to
trick-or-treat, she refused to get dressed.
It was dark outside, there were trolling monsters and witches plenty of reasons, in short, that a kid might get cold feet. Trix, he had asked, what are you scared of?
How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I don't look like me?
Laura's head was bent over her folded hands, and her lips were moving. She didn't go to church anymore, but she'd been raised Catholic. Daniel had never been particularly religious. Growing up,
he and his mother hadn't gone to church, although most of their neighbors had. The Yupiit got Christianity from the Moravian church, and it had stuck fast. For an Eskimo, it wasn't inconsistent
to believe both that Jesus was his Savior, and that a seal's soul lived
in its bladder until a hunter returned it to the sea. Laura brushed Trixie's hair off her face. “Dante believed God punished suicides by trapping the person's spirit in a tree trunk. On Judgment Day, they were the only sinners who didn't get their souls back, because they tried to get rid of them once before.”
Daniel knew this, actually. It was one of the few points of Laura's research that intrigued him. It had always struck him as ironic that in the Yup'ik villages, where there was such an epidemic of teen suicide, there weren't any trees.
Just then, Trixie stirred. Daniel watched her as the unfamiliar room came into focus. Her eyes widened, hopeful, and then dimmed with disappointment as she realized that in spite of her best intentions, she was still here.
Laura crawled onto the bed, holding Trixie tight. She was whispering to Trixie, words that Daniel wished came as easily to him. But he didn't have Lauras facility with language; he could not keep Trixie safe with promises. All he'd ever been able to do was repaint the world for her, until it became a place she wanted to be.
Daniel stayed long enough to watch Trixie reach for Laura, grab on with a sure, strong hold. Then he slipped out of the hospital room, moving past nurses and orderlies and patients who were too blind to witness the metamorphosis happening before their eyes. This is what Daniel bought:
Work gloves and a roll of duct tape.
A pack of rags.
Matches.
A fisherman's fillet knife.
He drove thirty miles away, to a different town, and he paid in cash.
He was determined that there would be no evidence left behind. It would be his word against Daniel's, and as Daniel was learning, that meant a victim would not win.
* * *
Jason found that the only time of day his mind was truly occupied
was during hockey practice. He simply gave himself over to the game, cutting hard and skating fast and stick- handling with surety
