Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  “Jesus Christ, Dad. You’re trying to ply me with ice cream? I’m not nine.”

  “Anna, I’m sorry. You can’t go to the meeting. They only want to talk to me and your mom, anyway.” This was not technically true. Andrew marched Anna across the street to the ice cream stand. “Uno helado, por favor,” he said to the vendor, smiling brightly.

  “What flavor?”

  “Um. Chocolate, please.”

  “Why don’t you want me there, Dad?” said Anna. “Seriously. Tell me. Do you think you’re going to hear something you don’t want to in that conversation?”

  “Well, of course we will.” Andrew lowered his voice. He wished he didn’t have to know that the ice cream vendor spoke English. “It’s a gruesome thing that’s happened, and we’re going to hear all about it. And it’s happened to a girl only a few years older than you. Which is part of why it’s not a good idea for you to come along. This trip is upsetting enough for you already.” Andrew rifled in his pocket for change.

  “I know all that, Dad,” said Anna. “That’s not what I’m wondering.”

  “What then?” Andrew handed her the ice cream and was relieved when she took it.

  “I’m wondering if there’s something else we might hear that we don’t want to.” Anna sounded careful, and Andrew wondered fleetingly, uncomprehendingly, if she was talking about Lily’s sex life.

  “I don’t know, sweetie,” he said. He saw now that it was a mistake to have brought Anna here. It was too much; she was too young; her just-begun life with all of its own rich dramas and disappointments was being put completely on hold, and for what? “But please don’t worry.” He pulled Anna to him, and she allowed this, barely, holding her ice cream away from her body with exaggerated awkwardness. Andrew could never get over how tall Anna was, how substantial and lanky; her body had grown into its own authoritative spin on his genetics, like she was the product of some kind of unholy tinkering with recombinant DNA. The possibility that a child of his could grow to nearly his height, could one day live to outlive him, was nearly as unthinkable as the fact that such a creature could ever die. It was possible, Andrew realized with terror, that he needed Anna here. She had, after all, already done more for Lily than he, or anyone else, had been able to. But none of that was any excuse to let her stay.

  “Anna,” said Andrew, “do you think you’d like to go home?”

  “What?” She wriggled out of his embrace. Andrew had meant it as an offer, but he realized it had come out as a kind of threat.

  “We could get Uncle Phil to pick you up at the airport and drive you back up to Colby.”

  “I don’t want to go back.”

  “You’ll need to go back eventually.”

  “When Lily’s free. She needs me here now.”

  “Anna, look.” Maybe Andrew would just be honest. Maybe, for the first time in a long time, he’d just be direct. “I need you here. Lily needs you here. Your mom needs you here. But just because we all need you here does not mean you have to be here. And while we figure all of this out, Maureen and I need to be your parents. We are still your parents.”

  Anna was letting the ice cream melt onto her hand now, in a show of indifference either authentic or feigned. Andrew tugged off his backpack and started rummaging through it for the antibacterial hand wipes that he knew Maureen would have packed.

  “Do you understand, Anna?” Andrew found the wipes and marveled—for the millionth time—at Maureen’s somber resourcefulness, her capacity to predict and prepare for all manner of future disasters, large and small. “I want you here. I need you here. But there have to be limits. We have to protect Lily. We have to protect you. And what we need from you tomorrow is to stay in the hotel.”

  There was a sort of solar wavering in Anna’s expression, but then it seemed to downshift and she smiled. Andrew handed her the wipes and she licked the melted ice cream off her wrist. “Okay, Dad,” she said.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. Okay. Now, do you want to see about renting a kayak?”

  · · ·

  The next day, Maureen and Andrew rode in silence to Lomas de Zamora. Andrew clutched a paper bag with an egg sandwich for Lily; he’d just bought it and already it was leaking, turning the paper oily and translucent. At the jail, Maureen paid the driver with a twentypeso bill and Andrew was sure she’d get her change back in counterfeits, but he didn’t have the heart to comment on either of these things.

  In the waiting room, they sat. Maureen hadn’t been to the jail before, and Andrew was glad that he was able to direct her through the metal detector, to point her toward the bathroom, to show her that things were not as awful as she might have imagined they would be. They waited. Maureen pawed through her bag and produced her wallet. Poking out of the billfold, alongside receipts and her United Airlines boarding pass, Andrew saw the blue tip of her passport. He nudged her.

  “You shouldn’t carry that around,” he whispered.

  “I know,” she said apologetically.

  This was where Lily got it, no doubt—Andrew had never realized it before, but now it seemed obvious. Maureen had lost one child to death and another to incarceration, and yet here she was, breezing around town with her passport in her bag and accepting back fistfuls of cash as change without even holding them up to the light.

  “Do you want to read something that will break your heart?” said Maureen.

  “No,” said Andrew, because he was a little angry with her. “Not really.”

  Maureen ignored this—she understood that Andrew did want to see the thing that would break his heart, that he couldn’t bear not to see it now that it was on offer. She produced a journal from her overstuffed bag.

  “Flip to the page that’s paper-clipped,” she said, handing it to him.

  The paper inside the journal was creamy and expensive and lined with Lily’s handwriting, and Andrew realized with an anguished stab that Maureen (or Anna) had thought to buy Lily a notebook and a pen and had figured out how to get it to her. He read.

  Things I Will Do At Home:

  —eat a steak

  —volunteer at a nursing home

  —practice the oboe

  —get up early enough to watch the sunrise 4 x per year (one per season)

  —be nice to everyone

  —set up a fundraiser for Katy

  —apologize to Harold

  —apologize to Sebastien

  —apologize to Mom and Dad

  Andrew stared at the sheet—the clean white paper, the handwriting shaky (from what? he wondered. From malnutrition or terror? Or merely from years of Internet use?)—and his eyes filled with tears. He knew from much practice that the best thing to do now was to keep his eyes down and to open them very wide so as to prevent spillover. It was the line about being nice to everyone that really got to him. To Lily, this whole disaster must indeed seem the result of not being nice enough. She hadn’t killed anyone, but she’d written a few mean-spirited emails. And now she was in jail, those emails paraded around everywhere as evidence of her depravity. Of course she was promising to be good, promising to be a lamb, promising never to think a mean thought, or any thought, ever again, if only they would let her out.

  “ ‘Mom and Dad’?” said Andrew.

  “I know. Who knew?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “She had the lawyers mail it.”

  Andrew stared again at Lily’s handwriting. Something about it made him afraid of what she might look like this week; he didn’t like to admit it to himself, but he had some doubts about her internal resiliency. She wasn’t the fussiest of all possible middle-class children, of course. She’d always worked in college; in the summers, she worked more than full-time, refusing offers of financial help—this stemmed from some kind of confused and contradictory sense of self-sufficiency that accepted sizable government loans and even more sizable parental tuition payments and rejected all other forms of charity—and it was clear that she actually enjoyed reveli
ng in temporary, self-imposed poverty. Toward the end of her paycheck, Andrew knew, she ate mostly popcorn and hot dogs from her movie theater job. But all of this, of course, was because she’d had a childhood characterized by neither deprivation nor ostentatious wealth: a childhood in which modest desires were firmly affixed to what was actually possible. She did not know to regard the absence of comfort with fear—partly because she wasn’t particularly materialistic or entitled, but partly because she did not believe, not really, that such a state could ever truly be permanent. And that was entitled, Andrew saw now—that expectation of the universe’s benignity. Lily felt she did no wrong, and that this demanded that no wrong be done unto her. The simplicity of this thinking beggared belief. It was almost too perilously sad for Andrew to contemplate.

  A security guard finally appeared and led them down the hall, Maureen clutching Andrew’s hand. In the visiting room, Lily was sitting with her head down just where Andrew had left her the last time. He fought the image of her sitting there all week long, waiting for their return.

  Maureen went to Lily and gathered her up into her arms. “Mom,” Lily hiccupped, bending her head into Maureen’s lap. Andrew leaned over both of them and pecked Lily on the cheek. Her hair was in clumps, and she smelled of oil and dirty laundry. Andrew did not know whether this was defiance or despair, or which would be worse.

  “Sweetheart,” said Maureen. She gently cupped Lily’s head, as though she were a newborn—fragile, tender-fontanelled. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  This should have been the first thing Andrew had said when he’d visited. This should have been the first thing, not the last. Andrew patted Lily’s shoulder, then reached into his bag for the sandwich. “We brought you this,” he said. It was chorizo with egg—she’d loved this sandwich so much that she’d actually written home about it—and it had been Andrew’s idea to bring it to her. Lily lifted her head now and stared at the sandwich plaintively, as though she could not remember what one was supposed to do with such a thing.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” said Maureen.

  “I don’t know,” said Lily.

  “Why don’t you take a bite, and maybe you’ll find out that you are?” said Maureen. This was a trick of hers that Andrew remembered from when the girls were little and prone to low blood sugar—they’d run around and forget to eat and then they’d cry, and Maureen would have to coax them into taking bites of grilled cheese until they calmed down. Now Maureen handed Lily the sandwich, which she held limply for a moment before taking a tentative bite. She chewed for a very long time, as though she wasn’t producing enough saliva to get the job done. She held her hand over her mouth daintily—a strange affectation she’d picked up from someone at college, made odder now by her grubby hair and oily skin, as though she were some Grey Gardens–style fallen aristocrat. She’d never been a vain child, their Lily—she always had a grass stain on her overalls or an eyelash on her cheek or a bit of cookie in the corner of her mouth; she was forever picking up cats and dogs against their will and getting animal hair all over her clothes. But she’d always been basically clean, basically presentable. The way she looked now was not entirely like herself.

  Maureen must have been thinking the same thing, because she said, “Sweetie, here,” and began rummaging once more through her enormous bag. “I brought you a brush.”

  Lily stopped chewing but didn’t swallow. “Are you serious?”

  “I think it’d be a good idea to try to clean up a bit for the lawyers,” said Maureen.

  “Are you fucking serious?” There was a flaky bit of egg on Lily’s lip, or maybe it was a piece of dry skin. “You want me to brush my fucking hair? That’s what you’re worried about? That’s what your priorities are?”

  Andrew looked at Maureen. In the old days, Maureen had been very, very strict about language—one time Lily had sworn at her when she was on the phone with one of her friends, and Maureen had calmly unplugged it—but now her expression was pleading and subordinate. “Sweetheart,” she said.

  “Stop calling me that, okay? Just stop it. I’m an adult. If you’re old enough to have everyone think you killed someone, you’re old enough to have your fucking parents stop calling you fucking sweetheart.”

  “Everyone doesn’t think you killed someone,” said Maureen. “We all know you didn’t kill anyone. I just think it would be a very good idea for you to look like you haven’t. And like you haven’t given up on yourself entirely, either.”

  “Well, what if I have?” Lily snarled.

  “This is part of the problem,” Andrew ventured, and both Lily and Maureen turned to look at him like they were surprised he was still in the room.

  “What are you talking about?” said Lily. She didn’t even sound angry. He wasn’t the parent worth her anger.

  “Impressions matter, is all I’m saying, sweetheart.”

  Andrew was only reiterating what Maureen had literally just said, and so he could not understand why Lily and Maureen were both looking at him like he’d just now revealed himself to be the cruel man they’d always suspected he might be.

  “Are you joking?” Lily said, turning back to Maureen. “Are you two joking? Because you never used to have senses of humor.”

  “Okay, Lily,” said Maureen. “Okay.” She was making gentle curlicues on Lily’s back now, and somehow Lily was allowing this. Andrew flashed to an image of Lily at age three or four—it was summer, and she was sprawled out on the couch in tiny shorts, licking a bright blue Popsicle and singing along to the theme song of some wretchedly long-running soap opera while Maureen traced letters through her T-shirt. The light of that long-ago late afternoon was silvery through the picture windows; in the corner, the monitor crackled with the sounds of baby Anna, sighing in her red inscrutable dreams, and maybe all of them had thought for a moment then that their lives would turn out to be tolerable after all. I love you, Maureen wrote, over and over, long before Lily could know what the shapes she was making meant. I love you, I love you.

  “Okay, okay,” said Maureen, and Andrew saw that she was leaning over with the brush and taking it gently to Lily’s hair, and that Lily was not resisting. Andrew expected Maureen to say something—to coo a little, or offer something comforting, or in some way acknowledge that Lily was submitting where before she had defied—but she did not. She just kept brushing with one hand and stroking Lily’s back with the other, and slowly Lily’s hair returned to normalcy, and she began to look like a regular girl on a particularly bad day, but not necessarily in a particularly bad lifetime.

  Velazquez and Ojeda entered the room, and Maureen and Andrew stood up to greet them. Lily remained seated. Andrew did not like this new passivity of hers, this tolerance of manhandling and ordering and planning by others. The lawyers sat and spread manila folders out on the table. They did not coddle Lily, or tsk over her, or offer expressions of sympathy to anyone. Maybe this was because her situation was not as bad as some they’d seen, or maybe it was because it was much worse and they’d already entirely given up. Or maybe—and, Andrew had to think, most probably—it was just because the lawyers were absorbed in the particular details of their own lives, and were already looking forward to the dinners that waited for them at home.

  “Well,” said Ojeda. He was already sweating; his tie was tied too tightly and had the look of a purple silken snake throttling him about the neck. “The bottom line is that the DNA results are fairly good for us. First and most importantly, there’s DNA everywhere from a man—a man with a criminal record—who will now become the prosecution’s central suspect. He’s been arrested twice—once for drugs, once for trying to steal a car—and served nearly two years in prison. This is the man who committed this crime, and we can’t stress how significant it is to have him already identified.”

  Maureen and Andrew nodded. Lily’s head listed to the side, her expression grave and still.

  “Lily’s DNA was present in three places, however,” said Velazquez. “On the victim�
�s mouth, on a bra which may have belonged to the victim, and on the knife. Our first concern is with the knife.”

  “When you say ‘the knife,’ ” said Maureen, “you mean the one that was—used—in the crime?”

  “The murder weapon, yes.”

  “My DNA is on that?” said Lily in a small voice.

  “Well, it was a knife from the kitchen,” said Velazquez. He was looking at Maureen. “It was a communal knife. Beatriz Carrizo’s DNA is on it, too. And Lily surely had occasion to use it for cooking. Didn’t you, Lily?”

  “Sure.” Lily nodded and clasped her hands in her lap—a little prissily, Andrew thought. “I’m sure I did.”

  “Can you think of a specific time you might have used that knife for cooking?” said Ojeda.

  “In particular, can you think of a time when somebody might have seen you use that knife for cooking?” said Velazquez.

  Lily’s face paled, suddenly looking as fragile and ovoid as an egg. Andrew struggled to produce a memory, any memory, of Lily cooking anything, but he could not. Lily was notoriously and stridently indifferent to cooking. On Thanksgiving she’d stand around holding forth and drinking wine while Maureen basted the turkey, Maureen mashed the potatoes, Maureen chopped the squash. Maybe Lily would be given the occasional minor task—ferrying something from the counter to the table, polishing a glass, finding a ladle—but Andrew had never seen her voluntarily reach for a cooking gadget of any sort, and he seriously doubted she had recently taken an interest.

  “Well,” said Ojeda, “you don’t have to remember right this second.”

  “As for the victim’s body,” said Velazquez, “the fact that your DNA was on her mouth fits with your account of attempting CPR.”

  Andrew cleared his throat, and the whole table turned to peer at him. “Excuse me,” he said. “But shouldn’t that be pretty fatal to the prosecution’s case? That there’s DNA evidence that Lily tried to save Katy, just like she said she did?”