Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  “I’ve never done a lot of this before.”

  On the third day after visiting Lily, while Anna was at the gym, Andrew went walking. He walked to bone-white cathedrals; he walked past houses with shrubbery growing onto them like stubble. There was dog shit everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and Andrew was impressed by the blithe acceptance of such—as though everyone had tacitly agreed that this was what the city was actually for. The sky was a pious robin’s-egg blue. Andrew thought of what it would be like to be dropped live out of an airplane, and then fall streaking through this gorgeous sky, the color of a bluebird or a crayon. He thought of what it might be like to be too terrified to scream.

  Andrew would have liked to be able to tell himself that they had all survived before, but the truth was, they hadn’t. Lily’s problem, he tried to remind himself, was entirely different from Janie’s—Lily’s situation was merely a function of a failure of rationality, a failure of communication. If Andrew could explain everything very slowly and carefully then all would be clear, and everyone would see that a mistake had been made. He didn’t have to stop an oncoming tsunami or apocalypse or terminal illness; he didn’t have to attract the attention or favor of a deity. All he had to do was describe, very clearly and persuasively, a true fact about the world: that his daughter had not killed anybody. Andrew was a professional explainer. To save Lily, he needed only to do better what he already did well. What could be simpler? What, in the end, could be easier? He should be glad to have such problems! There was no tumor in this daughter’s body, no knife against this daughter’s throat—only a handful of incorrect impressions deep in the minds of a few reactionary people. As threats go, these were not the worst.

  Andrew walked past another church. Etched into its exterior were saints, forever without perspective, their halos gleaming like pennies. The church was closed. Andrew stood outside the elaborate wrought-iron gates and held on.

  Anna came back at eleven and took a shower. In the afternoon, Andrew left her eating a room service sandwich and watching Sex and the City 2 on HBO, which he’d ordered for her even though she told him she’d already seen it and that it had made her a worse and more stupid person. Andrew had the hotel call him a taxi and gave the driver the address of Lily’s host family in Palermo. Sebastien LeCompte’s house, Lily’s emails had suggested, was right next door and enormous, and Andrew was hoping he wouldn’t be able to miss it.

  Some of the streets on the way to Palermo were questionable—Andrew saw jigsaw structures made of plywood; shifty-looking men wearing only their undershirts; shredded hunks of pork, roasting on spits in the sun and attracting bevies of jewel-winged flies—but after they crossed Figueroa Alcorta, he relaxed. Out one window loomed some sort of museum, ornate as a cupcake, and the houses grew bigger and better until they were garish and tacky and tricked out in the taste of the full-blown nouveau riche. Things got calmer and cleaner once the taxi crossed into Barrio Parque; Andrew began to feel that he was in a neighborhood inhabited by men who’d made modest fortunes honestly. Finally the taxi rounded a dusty corner and onto Lily’s street—Lily’s former street—and Andrew was once again relieved. The house that must be Sebastien LeCompte’s was unmistakable: It was right next door to the Carrizos’, and was, as promised, huge and shambling and unkempt, visibly driving down the prices of all the other real estate.

  Andrew couldn’t help craning his neck to look at Lily’s former house. It was nice, he was glad to see—he’d imagined open sewage, chickens in the yard, God knew what. Even so, what the lawyers had told him about the Carrizos did not sound reassuring. The Carrizos had certain attitudes about Lily, apparently—certain prejudices and suspicions—and Andrew certainly knew how grating she could be to people who didn’t already love her. He glanced again at the house, trying to see into the courtyard, then shivered and admonished himself for being ghoulish enough to look. He averted his gaze and pointed to Sebastien LeCompte’s mansion. The taxi driver eyed it skeptically.

  The house was indeed immense: For once in her life, Lily had not been hyperbolic in a postcard. Three stories of mullioned windows squatted beneath a roof that seemed to sag on one side, giving the whole house the look of a shrugging person in a buttoned waistcoat. A winding path led to an enormous door that, Andrew saw when he reached it, was carved and expensive but missing a doorknob. The knocker was a snarling stone creature; Andrew found himself involuntarily snarling right back at it. He could have put his fist through the door and into the house’s creepy interior. He did not do this. Instead, he knocked and took a few steps back. He was sweating. A warm and paltry wind kicked up and made him even warmer. He waited.

  The door opened, at long last, and a thin, extremely young man appeared. He had brown hair and startling eyes and was dressed in a garment Andrew couldn’t quite make sense of—was it a robe of some kind? A smoking jacket? Maybe, Andrew thought darkly, this boy was behind Lily’s smoking. “Buenos dias,” said Andrew, because he figured that this was the best way to start.

  Sebastien LeCompte did not appear surprised. He only smiled a distant smile, revealing a set of teeth that must have been very expensive. “Why, good day to you, too, sir,” he said. His accent was not what Andrew was expecting—it was nasally and harsh; the accent of British actors playing American. It did not match the outfit. “And what might you be selling?”

  “You speak English?”

  “I flatter myself that I do.”

  “Are you Sebastien LeCompte?”

  “I flatter myself that I am.”

  In her emails, Lily had referred to Sebastien LeCompte as a “man” she was “seeing,” phrasing that had seemed comical to Andrew at the time but that he’d clung to after her arrest—perhaps she was dating an adult, for once, someone who was reasonable and mature, someone who might actually be of some assistance to them now. This hope had diminished when he’d seen the security footage, and now, staring at Sebastien LeCompte in the flesh, Andrew could feel it almost disappear. What he was dealing with here was a boy: rail-thin, floppy-haired, tepid in his every gesture and glance, reflexively sardonic in his every utterance, the physical instantiation of his generation’s taste in music. Grow pulses, children! Andrew wanted to yell, but he did not. The world was lucky Andrew didn’t do half the things he thought of doing. Instead, Andrew extended his hand. He had to try—it was imperative that he try—to find out if there was any chance this boy could help them, in spite of himself.

  “I’m Andrew Hayes,” he said.

  At this, something happened to the kid’s face—he tilted it upward, and his eyebrows lifted almost imperceptibly. His nostrils flared. “Lily’s father.”

  “Yes. Lily’s father.” Andrew paused. He tried to take the edge off his voice, just in case. “You’ve heard about Lily, I’m sure?”

  Here, the kid seemed to recover himself. “Indeed,” he said, snapping upright. “Most improbable. Though our children do have a way of surprising us, don’t they?”

  Andrew did not know quite what to make of this, but he knew he did not like it. He took a step backward. “Who’s ‘us’?” he said.

  “No, no. I jest. I don’t think your lovely Lily had a hand in the slaying.”

  Andrew dragged his fingers through his hair, feeling the resolute stubbornness of his own skull. “I am hoping,” he said carefully, “that you can help me.”

  Sebastien looked at Andrew with placid eyes. “I am truly very sorry to hear that,” he said. Andrew couldn’t quite parse this one, either, but before he could ask for clarification Sebastien cleared his throat. “May I ask,” he said. The jaunty spin had dropped out of his voice. “How Lily is faring?”

  Andrew squinted. It seemed that the boy actually wanted to know. “Could I come in, maybe, and we could talk a bit?”

  “Where are my manners?” Sebastien stepped backward into the shadows of the house and gestured, with elaborate gallantry, for Andrew to join him.

  “Lily is horrible,” said Andrew, stepping inside. “Thanks
for asking. She’s absolutely horrible.”

  Sebastien’s reaction to this was obscured by the house’s strange endemic darkness. Andrew blinked and a labyrinthine, anachronistic living room appeared—there was an arabesque clock on the mantel; an ancient piano teetering nearby; several sheet-covered mounds that Andrew fervently hoped were furniture. In the corner, a multicolored, very outdated map covered a window; a ray of sunlight illuminated a bright green nonaligned India. Andrew pointed to it.

  “I thought the Soviet Union was done now,” he said.

  “Oh?” said Sebastien. “I hadn’t heard.”

  He sounded truly bereft. This interview, it was becoming clear, was going to demand a different kind of patience than Andrew had thought to bring. “It was in all the papers,” he said.

  Sebastien nodded gravely. “My decorating scheme is very passé, I’m afraid. If you don’t move things, it turns out, they don’t tend to move themselves. I suspect that’s why we still have all those Roman fora lying around willy-nilly.”

  Andrew half-nodded. He was faintly aware that it was probably unwise to keep obviously marveling at the house, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to stop. This was where his daughter’s boyfriend lived, and there was a cluster of chandelier pendants hanging from the ceiling, and Andrew was somehow positive that the entire room was cobwebby. On the mantel, Andrew could make out a collection of ancient liqueurs, a giant book that could only be the Bible, a vase with some flowers that looked like they had probably always been dead. On one wall was a tapestry—an actual tapestry, like something out of the national museum of a minor eastern European country. It was threadbare, of course, and depicting a hunt, of course: blue dogs harassing a red deer with anthropomorphic viciousness, the deer’s eyes white with terror. Good God, the morbid pageantry of it all! How had the world ever produced a person like this? Had he been left alone for his entire childhood in this collapsing house with nothing but Evelyn Waugh books to read? And why, oh why, had Lily slept with him? Now Andrew had to worry about her self-esteem, on top of everything else.

  “Where are your parents?” Andrew found himself saying.

  “Well, that’s truly the question at the heart of all human endeavor, isn’t it?” said Sebastien gaily. “Where, indeed. You’re a great thinker of our time—you tell me.”

  Andrew spent a moment in incomprehension, then felt a dull club of remorse. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Pas du tout. Can I get you a drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I trust you don’t object if I indulge?”

  Andrew waved his hand in a vague gesture of permission giving and Sebastien LeCompte bowed his way into the kitchen. Andrew went to examine the mantel more closely. Next to the clock, in an odd thematic parallel to the tapestry, was a photograph of Sebastien with a murdered beast of some kind. Whatever it was had been shot near the heart, its wound wreathed by a ring of poppy-red blood. In the photo, Sebastien was even younger than he was now; his father—identical to Sebastien, theatrically swathed in various beige garments with compartments and buttons and bolts—had his arm around his son.

  “You’re sure?” said Sebastien, returning with a greenish glass of something that could only be absinthe. “I could even pop over to the corner store and get—what? Beer?”

  Andrew shook his head.

  “So,” said Sebastien, sitting on one of the mounds and motioning to Andrew to do the same. “What was it that you wanted to discuss?”

  Andrew selected a mound of his own. “Well,” he said, tentatively descending. “I understand that you and Lily were—friends.”

  Andrew watched Sebastien fleetingly consider, and then reject, a sarcastic response. Instead, he looked at the ceiling and seemed to actually ponder the question for several long moments. “Yes,” he said finally. “I think that we probably were.”

  “And you also knew the, ah. The deceased roommate. Katy.”

  “Briefly.”

  Andrew felt a contraction in his throat. “I am hoping you might help me understand what all of this is about. Why this is happening. Why they imagine Lily did this thing. Because it is outrageous, objectively. As I’m sure you agree. Objectively outrageous and unbelievable.”

  Sebastien stood and went to the mantel. He traced his finger along the photograph, making a curlicue in the dust, then regarded his finger distastefully and wiped it on his trousers. “Well, Lily didn’t very much care for Katy, as I’m sure you’ve been made aware,” he said flatly.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Andrew. He swallowed, trying to unclench his throat. “They weren’t close, maybe, but I don’t think there was any particular hostility there.”

  “I trust you’ve read the emails? Or hasn’t cable news reached America yet? Anyway, they were quite a spectacle down here.”

  Suddenly, Andrew wanted to snap this kid’s skinny neck; suddenly, Andrew thought he understood homicidal rage. “I think ‘spectacle’ is probably overstating it,” he said. “And, anyway, that’s just how she talked. It’s how many people talk. Many, many people say uncivil things about their friends in emails, and they are not arrested for it, because it’s not actually illegal—not even here, in fact: I’ve checked. Whatever she wrote about Katy, she didn’t mean anything by it. If you really spent any time with her, you’d know that.”

  Sebastien tilted his head to one side. “She did have a very particular idiolect, of course.”

  “Okay, look,” said Andrew, standing up. He had had enough of this. His family needed him—again? or finally? either way—and he was not going to let this cartoonish Cheshire cat of a child stop him from helping them. “Listen. You are going to tell me some things.”

  Sebastien stared, and Andrew wondered how long it had been since he had received direct instructions of any sort.

  “Tell me about the night Katy died,” Andrew ordered. “Lily was with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve talked to the police about this?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Do they think you might be involved?”

  “Probably.”

  “Why haven’t they arrested you?”

  “I was not actually involved.” Sebastien looked down, and Andrew charitably allowed himself to consider the possibility that he might actually feel sorry for what he’d just said. Perhaps as penance, Sebastien continued—his voice a bit lower, a bit less theatrical, than it had been before. “There’s nothing to tell you about that night. Truly. Lily was here. We talked and had some cocktails. We went to sleep around two. She went back to the Carrizos’ in the morning. She came back over here after finding Katy. Then she called the police.”

  It was strange to listen to the boy speak so frankly—recalling events comprehensibly, constructing a linear narrative. The sun shifted, and two strips of cadmium midafternoon light fell onto the floor and across Sebastien’s face, catching his freckles and making him look innocent and heartbreakingly young.

  “The police came pretty quickly and cordoned off the house,” said Sebastien. “They arrested her the next morning. I don’t have anything else I can tell you. I’m sorry.” He looked at his hands for a moment and then said, very quickly, “Do you think I could see her?”

  For a moment, Andrew had wanted very much to suspect this boy. It was as though the universe was shoving Sebastien at him—here was a man, involved with two women, living right next door to both of them—and what a gift it would have been to have such an obvious answer. But now Andrew was confronted with the reality that believing in Sebastien’s guilt would mean the beginning of believing in Lily’s. And that was unthinkable.

  “I can’t imagine they’ll allow that,” Andrew said gently.

  “Could I write her a letter?”

  “Maybe.”

  There was a silence. “I’m sorry,” Sebastien said finally, in that harsh, too-flat voice, and then he said it again. And then Andrew’s feeling flipped over again, and he wondered, with a judder of su
spicion that made all other suspicions seem shallow, just what it was that Sebastien was so sorry for.

  “For what?” said Andrew. He looked around the place—its garish loneliness, its ghoulish ornateness—and he looked again at Sebastien: that goofy hair, that unreasonable outfit, that too-young face that shifted from guile to guilelessness with the movement of the sun. Andrew did not know why Lily liked Sebastien LeCompte, but he had to accept that she did—perhaps she even loved him. And one explanation for all of this trouble was that Lily was protecting this boy, against all reason, out of some strange sense of martyrdom or infallibility or perhaps something else altogether that Andrew might never begin to guess.

  “What are you so sorry for?” said Andrew again meanly.

  “I am sorry,” said Sebastien, “for your absolutely abominable luck.”

  When Andrew returned to the hotel, Anna was staring listlessly out the window. The movie had ended and the screen had become a vivid aquarium blue, but she hadn’t turned it off.

  “Whatcha up to, Old Sport?” said Andrew.

  Anna stared at him dully, unsurprised, though she’d made no move when he entered the room. Andrew suddenly wanted to go to her and take her bony shoulders in his arms. He wanted to curl up around her body and whisper “Hush,” even though it was unlikely that Anna would ever require anyone to tell her to hush.

  “Dad,” she said. Even the way she said “Dad” sounded to Andrew like a kind of grudging concession. “Is Lily going to be okay?”

  Andrew sat down on the edge of the bed and patted Anna’s shoulder. “We are going to do everything we can for her.”

  “Jesus.” Anna’s voice was astringent. She stood up. “ ‘We’re going to do everything we can for her’? You’re such an irredeemable pessimist.”

  From the mouth of someone so young, the phrase “irredeemable pessimist” sounded rehearsed, obsessed over. Possibly, Andrew thought nervously, inherited. Or even worse, therapeutically processed. Andrew gave Anna what he hoped was an encouraging smile.