“Have you been drinking?” said Anna. In the moonlight, her hair looked nearly gray, and Andrew thought he could almost see her as she would someday look—in some future unimaginably far, that Andrew would never live to witness.
“Excuse me, have you been drinking?” he said. “Just where the hell have you been?”
“I’m nineteen years old,” said Anna, standing up. She was shorter than Andrew by a good three inches, but her litheness and youth conspired to make him feel towered over. “You can’t keep me locked up here. I’m not the one in jail.” She hiccupped.
“You can’t just take off like that. This is a dangerous city.” Andrew’s voice was shaking. “Do you know how worried I was?”
“Afraid someone will kill me?”
“Christ, Anna. Yes. Obviously. Among other things.” Andrew wanted to go to her and take her in his arms, but he could not bear the thought of her shrugging him off.
“Other things? What other things?” said Anna. “Like that I’ll kill someone, maybe?”
“Stop it,” said Andrew, with volume. Anna looked surprised. Because Andrew normally spoke so gently, nobody ever remembered that he had a voice that carried when he wanted it to.
“Dad.” Anna wobbled again. “Would you still love her if she did it?”
“Stop it,” said Andrew again. “Sit down.”
She did.
“Take off your shoes,” said Andrew, even though he didn’t know why he was telling her to do this. She wouldn’t run off again without her shoes, maybe. Or maybe she would. Maybe he had no idea what his daughters would or wouldn’t do. Maybe Andrew just wanted to tell Anna to do something and watch her actually do it. “Hand them to me,” he ordered.
She did. Andrew was feeling marginally more under control. “Okay then,” he said. “I’m going to get us some water.”
Andrew went to the bathroom and ran the water until it was cold. In the mirror, the skin around his eyes and mouth were furrowed; his teeth, he could see, were yellowing by the day. It was very clear to Andrew that he was older now than he had ever, ever been before; worse, he strongly suspected that, from now on, he was only going to get older still.
Back in the room, Anna was sitting on the bed. Andrew handed her a glass of water, then drank his own in one gulp. He wiped his mouth. “She didn’t do it,” he said.
“I know.” Anna looked into her water balefully. “But what if she had?”
“That’s not a useful thing to think about.”
“Everything’s useful to think about. That’s a direct quote from you. You have actually literally said that.”
“Well, not this.”
“Hypotheticals. You always say you truck in hypotheticals.”
“Anna—”
“Counterfactuals, right? That’s your word. So what if she did it? What if she had done it?”
“Stop it.”
“Or what if I did? What if I did something terrible?”
Andrew squinted into his glass. He remembered when Anna and Lily were small and terrified of their nightmares and would come crawling into bed with Andrew and Maureen to make them promise not to die. Andrew had never been inclined to promise this, since, in fact, he and Maureen would someday die, and the best of all possible outcomes was that Anna and Lily would have to watch them do it. And Andrew had imagined some future reckoning, some kind of confrontation (though when this would occur exactly, he was unclear) when Anna and Lily would point at him with accusing fingers and go back to the videotape and say Look, you promised not to die, and look, you did die. You promised not to and you did. Lying to them about this most irreducible fact seemed to Andrew an unforgivable deceit—he was giving them the wrong idea about absolutely everything if he gave them the wrong idea about this.
But Maureen had not agreed. She felt that the children were children, and that they needed a promise in order to sleep at night—on this one particular night, the wind shivering through the white pine trees outside their windows, their sheets vaguely redolent of lavender—and that by the time Maureen and Andrew died the children would be grown and with children of their own and they would understand the lie, and would look back and forgive them.
And so Andrew and Maureen had promised: They had looked their two living children in the eyes and promised not to die. And Andrew remembered how this had assuaged Anna—how, sleepy with relief, she had tugged at her ear and grabbed her stuffed rabbit, Honey Bunny, by one felt foot and dragged him up the stairs—but how Lily had remained awake, staring at them with her fierce agate eyes, saying, “That’s not true. I know that you can’t promise that. I know that that isn’t true.”
Andrew made a decision. “You wouldn’t do something terrible,” he said to Anna. “You couldn’t do something terrible. But if you did, I’d always love you. That’s our job.” Probably, this wasn’t a lie. Probably, he would still love her. This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own.
Anna looked at him hard, and for a moment Andrew saw her as a child, yawning and pacified, swinging her rabbit from her hand, turning around to pad up the stairs. And then the look changed, hardening into something brittle and unyielding and wise, something that could know things that Andrew didn’t know, that Andrew might never know.
“No,” she said finally. “You wouldn’t.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
February
The day after her birthday, Lily awoke to a bright dawn. Preposterously pink light streamed in through the windows; it was like waking up in the middle of a conch shell, and Lily felt a sense of emergency—apocalypse, war, alien invasion—before realizing that this was only a sunrise. This happened every morning; every morning she was bathed briefly in this otherworldly light, and she was never even awake for it. She propped herself up on her elbows. It was strange, maybe a little violating, that the room could turn this color without her noticing. She popped her head over the side of the bed to look at Katy, feeling, as she did so, the first ominous heave of what she knew would be a daylong hangover. Below her, Katy was composed, even in sleep. At the sight of her, the whole of the previous evening came back to Lily, and she remembered that she was going to have to break up with Sebastien. She lay back down.
Lily was sorry she had to end things with Sebastien, but she saw no alternative; she was outmaneuvered, and to do nothing now would only make her a chump. Lily didn’t know how she’d gotten herself into a situation where being a chump was even possible—being, as she was, about as committed to transparency and low-stress, drama-free entanglements as a person could be—but there it was. Lily hadn’t asked anything from Sebastien—she hadn’t even wanted anything, really: She hadn’t required him to make any promises, she hadn’t put him in a position where he’d need to tell her any lies. The fact that he’d treated her poorly anyway could only mean that he’d wanted to.
Lily rolled over and stifled a groan. She’d been childish, she saw now; she’d wanted everyone to be liberated and generous with one another, and somewhere along the way, she’d started believing that that meant people actually would be. Why had she believed this? Was it because she’d watched too many reruns of Friends growing up? In which everyone jumped in and out of bed with one another but no one got hurt and the truly sacred, eponymous relationship—friendship—remained intact? Or maybe Lily’s problem was her parents’ fault; perhaps it was some kind of inherited naïveté. Maybe it stemmed from Maureen and Andrew’s allegedly hippie-ish youth (though the only supporting evidence for this characterization was Maureen’s claim that she’d gone barefoot for the entire summer of 1971), or maybe it somehow came from Andrew’s outmoded, overly sanguine scholarly worldview—all the end-of-history-Francis-Fukuyama shit he’d committed to twenty years ago and now had to wearily, disingenuously maintain in article after article. Lily did not know. All she knew was that she was going to admit it
when she was wrong. It was true that in her generation people didn’t have to be cruel and deceitful in order to get what they wanted—unless being cruel and deceitful was what they wanted, in which case they had a whole new vista of opportunity to be that way. Whenever Lily herself had juggled dates, she had done it because she really liked a few men at once—she wanted to talk about politics with one of them and she wanted to talk about music with another and with a third she wanted to go on playful midnight adventures to search for free furniture on the street when the first of the month came and everybody moved out of their apartments. And in this spirit, Lily had done new things: She went to a rally for a union, even though she’d always found labor issues terribly dull; she found a child’s abandoned skunk piñata on the street and kept it in her dorm for half a year; she attended a concert of an intolerable band whose music was like the forceful overthrowing of the concept of music, and after a while she found herself dancing, actually dancing, even though she still didn’t like the songs. The reason Lily didn’t want a boyfriend was because she actually cared for all of these men. They were all her friends, and Lily’s friends mattered to her; she was not in love with any of them, but she would have given any one of them a kidney. She understood now that this was not how Sebastien felt about her. A situation like theirs arose not because a man liked too many women, but because he hated too many.
Lily was, she realized, monstrously thirsty. She padded down the ladder and went to the bathroom to guzzle water directly from the faucet. When she stood up, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and startled. What was wrong with her face? Her eyes were raccooned with makeup, of course, but that wasn’t it. Last night Lily had thought she looked a bit fierce—masquerading semi-convincingly as the kind of girl that she was secretly intimidated by—and normally in the mornings after a night out she just looked goofy, like a person whose Halloween costume had fallen apart because they were having too much fun at the party. What was it that looked different now? Lily leaned closer and studied her face. Recently, faint sickle-shaped lines had appeared around her mouth; Lily had known, on some level, that these were wrinkles—fetal wrinkles, proto-wrinkles, whatever—but still she’d regarded them up until now as temporary blemishes, something she might yet grow out of, like acne. She pulled away from the mirror. The lines were barely visible, but they were there, and they were, she realized, part of the reason she looked different: She looked older. Not old, of course—but old enough to seem a little less victorious in sloppiness, like a person whose immaculate beauty has faded enough that their stern glasses finally really do look dowdy. In the morning light—makeup smeared, hair disastrous—Lily didn’t seem like a person whose costume was unimportant. She seemed like a person whose costume was very important indeed. Lily bent and scrubbed her face, leaving black streaks on the hand towel, then furiously scrubbed at that until the motion stopped her. She threw the towel helplessly in the hamper, trying not to think about who might find it, and retreated back down the hallway.
The sun was still coiling around the bedroom, gathering itself up into corners, as Lily climbed back into bed. There was a ray of light on her pillow. Maybe it wasn’t violating at all, the way the light snuck in like this—maybe it was lovely. It meant that there could be beauty, benevolent and unasked for and all around you, even if you didn’t know it. There was something bittersweet about this, but perhaps there was also something hopeful. Soon enough, Lily would be on the other side of breaking up with Sebastien. And soon enough, Lily would be awake early enough for this light; she vowed to remember it, to set an alarm to gratefully greet it. But not today. Today, she was tired. And so Lily lay back down—deliciously, guiltily, with the decadent weariness of the newly old—and sank back into sleep.
When Lily woke again, it was ludicrously late, the light outside her window already aging. Sleeping into the afternoon always gave Lily a dreadful feeling—as though she’d wasted an entire life, not only part of a day—and she bolted upright. She looked at the clock and scoffed. It was almost three-thirty. There was a real possibility she was going to be late for work.
Ten minutes later Lily was racing along Avenida Cabildo; above her, the skies were opening up into an uncharacteristic late afternoon rain, contributing to her general sense of persecution. She arrived at Fuego soaking wet but only five minutes late. Javier was sitting at the end of the bar poring over some papers. He shot Lily a subtle smirk. She ducked her head and hurried to grab her apron, trying to look diligent and humble. But when she glanced back in Javier’s direction, she saw that he was motioning her over to him. This felt ominous, though Lily reminded herself that absolutely everything today felt ominous. She walked to the end of the bar.
“Hey, Javier,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Feeling okay today, Lily?”
She laughed ruefully and bobbled her hand back and forth. “Not too bad. A little tired.”
“Well, don’t worry about that. You can go home now.”
“What?” Lily gestured toward the break room, where the schedule was posted on the wall. “I’m on the schedule for tonight.”
“I know, Lily,” said Javier. “But it’s not working out.”
“What?” Lily felt like she’d bitten on a blade. “Why?”
“I expect my customers to make scenes, not my waitresses.”
“What?” Had Lily made a scene? Maybe, by very, very puritan standards, she had. “But it was my birthday,” she said, inanely.
“Well, your birthday present is you got to make a scene,” said Javier. “Happy birthday. Now you’re fired.”
“But I mean, I wasn’t even working. I mean, I was off the clock.”
“Yes. It was a favor for you.”
“Doesn’t that mean I was just a customer? So I get to make a scene, too?” Lily laughed lightly, but Javier did not.
“Really, Lily, did you actually like this job? Did you think you were any good at it?”
Actually, yes: Lily had thought she was good at it. She’d thought she was okay at it, at any rate, and getting better. She’d thought that the customers and the other staff liked her. They laughed and jovially caroused whenever she came around, anyway, and she’d always thought that this was good-natured, maybe even fond. But just like things with Beatriz, and Sebastien, and all men, and possibly all things and all people, Lily saw now that perhaps there had been a different, more menacing undercurrent to all of this teasing—something she hadn’t detected, or had willfully mistranslated, in order to be happy. “I did like this job,” said Lily. “I do like it.”
Javier’s face softened a bit, and he said, “Well, I’m sorry, Lily. But I know you don’t actually need this job.”
“I’ve never been fired before.”
“Have you ever worked before?”
At this, shamefully, Lily’s eyes filled with tears. Why did everybody always want to think the worst of her? “Of course,” she said emphatically, and waited a moment to see if this might earn her a reprieve. When she saw it wasn’t going to, she told Javier she’d go clean out her locker.
A few minutes later, armed with her water bottle, book, and street shoes, Lily walked out into the already diminishing day. The rain had stopped. She really never had been fired before; it had been years and years, in fact, since she’d been in any kind of trouble at all, if you didn’t count Beatriz’s scoldings. She was still shaky from the conversation’s blunt smash of adrenaline—so much like the brief narcotizing energy that comes, when you’re hurt, just fractionally earlier than pain.
“Hey.”
Lily turned. It was Ignacio the Tortoise, leaning up against the side of a dumpster. Lily flashed to the image she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—of Ignacio and Katy, his hands on her ass, flashing in the strobe lights. Lily had wanted to ask Katy about it last night, but she’d been so drunk that she couldn’t be certain, and now that she and Katy had finally fought and reached a delicate, tentative peace, she wasn’t sure she’d want to reopen the issue.
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“Hey,” said Lily. “I just got fired.”
Ignacio shook his head. “Bad luck,” he said. Lily could smell the pungent stink of weed. He must have just been smoking.
“I guess. Hey.” Lily felt suddenly bold. She was already a derelict employee—she might as well be a minor criminal, too. “Can I buy any of that from you?”
Ignacio raised his eyebrows in an expression of amusement. “Of course,” he said. “You want a baggie?”
“Um, I guess so.”
Ignacio began reaching into his backpack.
“Oh, now?” said Lily.
Ignacio looked around the empty alleyway. “You want to do it later?”
“No, no,” said Lily. “Now is great.”
Ignacio nodded and produced a small plastic bag with a few black rosettes in it. “For you, forty pesos,” he said. Lily was hoping he would hurry. “A discount. Since you’ve had a rough day.”
Lily found a damp fifty-peso bill in her purse, then handed it to Ignacio and grabbed the baggie. Sweat was breaking out on her back, and she scurried away from him without taking any of the change. “Thanks,” she called behind her, as she walked out of the alleyway and into the street.
“Hey,” said Ignacio. “Anytime.”
Lily turned onto the street and immediately nearly ran into a woman with an army of tiny dogs trotting alongside her. The dogs were so small that their heads bobbed savagely at the pace they were going; the smallest dog’s eyes were white with cataracts that shone like mother-of-pearl.
“Permiso,” Lily muttered. The woman gave her a look and walked away.
Lily would not tell Sebastien about the firing, she decided, as she headed toward the Subte. She would not tell Sebastien, or Katy, or Beatriz, or anyone. She could not bear to. And anyway, she could probably find a use for the freedom of nights with nowhere to go and no one to answer to. Lily’s awareness of the baggie in her purse was contracting and relenting like a pulse. She had nothing in mind, particularly; no plans or schemes or mischief or, beyond Katy and Sebastien, really any friends. But whatever you did was simply more your own when no one else knew you were doing it. In front of Lily, a scarp of periwinkle dusk was falling over the streets. Around her, the bars were just beginning to rouse to life. And out in the city she might find anything, anything at all, except someone who was waiting for her.
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