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Lily was careful to stay out of the house until her usual hour. When she returned, she found Katy in the living room, watching cartoons. Lily halted at the door and considered turning around—but then she’d be out later than Beatriz expected her to be, and she didn’t want to risk that. Instead, she paused in front of the living room.
“Hey,” she said. “What are you watching?”
“I don’t know,” said Katy. Next to her sat an economics textbook with an uncapped pen as a bookmark. “It’s totally surreal. I turned it on like an hour ago and I can’t turn away. How was work?”
Lily had been anxious about seeing Katy and had expected to feel something moving gingerly between them now, but Katy sounded nonchalant.
“Fine,” said Lily. “You know.” On the screen, a talking rodent with crazed eyes was doing somersaults. “This is a weird show.”
“Yeah. It kind of makes me wonder why I ever stopped watching cartoons. I guess because I went to middle school.”
“Age is really no object.” Lily walked over to the sofa, still holding her purse. She didn’t want to leave it unattended in the house—Beatriz probably had drug-sniffing dogs in her employ. “A lot of my friends watch them all the time.”
“Like, currently?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Lily, sitting down. “They think it’s hilarious.”
“Our generation has such a weird thing with little-kid stuff,” said Katy after a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“Like coloring books and ironic T-shirts with dinosaurs and stuff”
“I guess. It’s premature nostalgia.”
“Do you ever feel that way, though?”
“What way?”
“Like you could go back to some time that’s passed? Like you catch yourself thinking, why don’t I go there anymore, and why don’t I see those people and attend those parties, and then you remember it’s because that life is gone? And that you can’t?”
Lily nodded, even though she wasn’t sure she ever did feel that way, exactly. Under the regime of Maureen and Andrew, there had been no confusion about which way life was headed, or what its ultimate destination would be. Still, Lily had never heard Katy say anything like this before, and she wanted to offer something in return.
“Maybe it’s because when we’re kids we don’t really believe time only moves forward,” she said. “And then you learn it does, but you never really get your head around it.”
“You think that’s it?” said Katy.
“Yeah.” The red muskrat bopped manically on the screen. “Maybe.” It sounded like it could be true, and so maybe it was. After all, you hadn’t told a child a story until you had retold a child that story; children awoke to sentience in their lives with fables and fairy tales already familiar, and maybe this meant that the first stories they heard never felt like linear narratives at all—maybe they were more like rituals, passion plays, establishing a sense of life as recurrent and recursive, a sense that everything that happens is somehow always happening. “Like you know how when you’re a little kid you really think you live in a story?” said Lily.
“I don’t know,” said Katy doubtfully. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, man,” said Lily. “I really, really felt that way. I totally thought I lived in a story. I was really pretty confused about it, actually. I was always thinking, here’s the part where this happens.”
“Where what happens?”
“Well, like.” Lily thought for a moment. “Like this time that my parents got a man to dress up as Winnie-the-Pooh and show up on the porch for my fifth birthday, for example.”
“That sounds terrifying.”
“It wasn’t, though! That’s the thing—I wasn’t terrified at all. I think I’d seen so many movies about ordinary children’s lives turning magical that I saw it as basically my birthright.” It was true: Lily remembered it vividly. When she’d seen Pooh coming up the walkway, she’d clasped her hands together in a gesture of such hushed, old lady-ish happiness that Andrew and Maureen had laughed and taken her picture. “Who’s that?” Maureen had said, her voice suspiciously girlish, the way it always was when she was telling children lies—it was a tone that Lily had half-noticed even then, though she’d merely registered it as the voice that Maureen used when something incredibly special was happening. But what Maureen and Andrew hadn’t known—what they never had known—was that Lily was not actually surprised. She wasn’t surprised at all. In that picture, what she was thinking was: This is it. It’s finally happening. This is the part where the magic starts.
“It sounds like you’ve got really good parents,” said Katy.
“I do,” said Lily, surprising herself with the force of her sincerity. “I really, really do.”
The next day, Lily left the house at the usual time. She had promised herself she would end things with Sebastien that day, but she found she was stalling—watching the shifting trapezoids of birds against the sky, feeling a pleasantly lonesome wanderlust. The rain had left the chestnut smell of waterlogged leaves in the air. Lily was enjoying this brief purgatorial reprieve; she could afford, she figured, one more day of it. And so she rode the Subte to the end of the line and back; she stalked the parameters of the zoo, which was closed since it was a Sunday. No matter, thought Lily; after all, half the fun of a zoo was smelling it! She laughed out loud, rounded a corner, and saw a booth with a fat red pay phone at its center.
She flitted her fingers through her pockets and smiled when she found coins. Who would she call? Maybe Anna. As soon as she thought of her sister, Lily felt a violent longing, which was weird, and she actually dialed most of Anna’s number before hanging up. Anna was busy, after all; Anna wasn’t good on the telephone; Anna, it went without saying, would never have lost a job of any sort, even one as dumb as Lily’s. Most of all, maybe, Anna was a grown-up, and sometimes Lily wished she weren’t. But there was nothing to be done about it: Anna simply wasn’t the same little girl who’d helped Lily try to contact Janie’s ghost on a Ouija board—a plan endlessly discussed and then, finally, one summer night, thick with humidity and black magic, attempted—and who had, when the indicator began to move, wet her pants.
Before she’d decided whether she wanted to talk to him, Lily found she’d called Andrew. The phone rang three, four, five times, and Lily was surprised by how relieved she felt when he finally answered. “Hello?” he said.
“Hey, Andrew. It’s me.”
“Thank God. You see that many digits, you have to assume it’s Interpol.”
Lily paused to let him know that, if they were in the same room, she’d be rolling her eyes.
“How’s it going down there, kid?” he said.
“Pretty good,” said Lily. “But listen, I have a serious question for you.” Now she would have to think of one.
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Not that serious. Don’t worry.” Lily tapped her thumb against the bottom of the phone. “Do you like your job?” she said finally.
“What a question,” said Andrew. “What’s with these getting-to-know-your-parents probes lately? Is my dean hiring you to spy on me? Have you joined a twelve-step program of some kind?”
“Not yet!” said Lily. “Well, do you?”
Andrew exhaled heavily. “I suppose,” he said. “It’s interesting, anyway.”
“Is it, though?” said Lily, finding an angle. “Is it still interesting? I mean, do you still feel like you learn things from it?”
On the other end of the line, Lily could hear Andrew consider; one thing that was nice about old Andrew was that he actually thought about it when you asked him a question.
“Well,” he said finally. “I learn what your generation thinks about things, anyway. And I do like watching them learn, which I guess is a kind of learning.”
Lily sighed. She felt bad for her parents sometimes; everything good that would ever happen to them
pretty much already had. The arithmetic of their lives was complete. It was wonderful, of course, to have things to lose—but from now on, that was all they would ever do.
“You’re always telling me how great your generation is,” Andrew was saying. “Tell me one great thing.”
“We’re better with technology.”
“Well, hallelujah.”
“We’re less racist.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one.” Andrew paused. “Lily Pad? Are you all right?”
Andrew hadn’t called her Lily Pad in forever; it was a name dating back to her cradle years, when he’d made up nonsense songs for her: Lily Pad, Lily Pad, stop your crying, don’t be sad! Lily Pad, Lily Pad, go to sleep, don’t make Mom mad! Lily Pad, Lily Pad, cease to fuss, be kind to Dad! Lily had liked the nickname when she was very small. But it had turned mortifying in her preadolescent years, when the word “pad”—along with most other words, people, and events—could send her into paroxysms of humiliation, and she had begged Andrew to abandon it.
“I’m all right,” she said, hoping she sounded stoic.
“You sound down. You sound like your mother.”
“Do I? Nah. Just a little tired.”
“Well, get some sleep, why don’t you?” There was a momentary lilt in Andrew’s voice, and Lily thought for a fraction of a moment that he might actually be about to sing to her. It seemed possible, at least, that he was considering it. If he was, however, he must also have been considering how viciously Lily was likely to mock him for it, and so he restrained himself. Lily had trained him well. There was something a little sad about that, maybe.
“I love you, Dad,” said Lily, with feeling.
“I love you, Lily!” said Andrew, sounding startled. “I love you very, very much.”
Lily returned to the Carrizos’ house at her usual hour and caught herself half-hoping to find Katy watching television when she got there. Lily could almost imagine this becoming a nightly ritual—something sweet and arbitrary and inexplicable, something she’d remember fondly in the years to come. But tonight, Katy was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was Beatriz, sitting at the kitchen counter with a glass of water and a newspaper, and when Lily walked through the door she looked up, her mouth already forming that most beloved phrase of hers. “Where were you?” she said.
“At my job,” said Lily wonderingly. She set down her bag slowly and stretched, hoping she looked appropriately tired.
“I thought you lost your job.”
“What?” Lily found herself picking her bag back up, perhaps out of a sense that she might need to be prepared to flee at any moment.
“I thought you were fired,” said Beatriz.
“Where did you hear that?” Lily was mystified. Had Javier Aguirre called up the Carrizos to tattle on her? What would possibly provoke him to do that?
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad about the job, Lily.” Beatriz began folding up the newspaper. Lily could not believe that there were still people who knew how to do this. “But I do need to know where you are, especially at night, and I can’t have you lying to me about it. I am responsible for you.”
No, it could not have been Javier. He didn’t have the Carrizos’ number; Lily didn’t think she’d ever even mentioned their names to him; and anyway, it would make no sense for him to do something like that—it was too overly vindictive, too overly engaged. Too overly concerned, in a way. So how did they know? Did they have eyes and ears all over town? Who were these people, anyway?
Beatriz put her hand on Lily’s shoulder. “Lily,” she said. “Look. I understand that you’re embarrassed.”
This was something that Lily herself might have admitted if Beatriz had waited a moment longer. But it was unendurable to be told you’d embarrassed yourself; there was something too presumptuous about having your shame taken for granted. And so Lily found herself ducking Beatriz’s hand and running to her room, where she lay on the bed and, horrifyingly, began to sob. She told herself to stop it immediately. She told herself that in acting this way she was losing her grip on all the finely threaded claims on adulthood she’d only just begun to establish. But this thought only made her sob harder, and eventually Lily gave in to the sobbing, and—out of the same impulse that made you want to wreck something completely once it was wrecked only a little—she let it get louder and messier than even she felt was really necessary.
The next day, the Carrizos left for their nephew’s baptism, and Katy went off somewhere with her even-tempered lady friends. To celebrate, Lily cut her classes and spent the day skulking around the house. Beyond opening one of Katy’s drawers to check her bra size (32B—Lily was not sure what she was going to do with this information), Lily behaved herself. She flopped carelessly on the sofa just because she could. She picked up the phone’s receiver and then set it back down. She rifled through the kitchen cabinets and inspected Beatriz’s incomprehensible cooking gadgets. But she opened no private drawers belonging to the Carrizos—Beatriz probably had everything booby-trapped, anyhow—nor did she brook the grim border of their bedroom door. She enjoyed only the meager proprietary feeling that came from washing her own dish, from changing the television to a new channel. Left to her own devices, Lily actually was fairly trustworthy—but, she thought bitterly, nobody would ever know it.
When evening fell, Lily began the walk across the driveway toward Sebastien’s, dragging her feet on the grass. She had told him she’d be over at seven-thirty and was already late; she could not possibly put it off any longer, she knew. And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself—the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all, at least for Lily. In her life so far, Lily had managed to remember with stunning clarity every truly painful conversation she had ever had; they ran through her head like incantations, like important speeches memorized during childhood (Lily wished she could still remember speeches—why was it that nothing could be tattooed onto your brain like something written there against your will when you were young?). The coming conversation with Sebastien would be no different, Lily knew, and she did not relish the thought of it replaying in her head for a lifetime—the scene made somehow grimmer and more ludicrous, both, by its setting in that ridiculous room, before that awful tapestry, which, she now thought meanly, Sebastien had probably commissioned to be made to look threadbare.
Across the yard, Sebastien’s house grew larger and larger, and then it was upon her. Lily stood for a moment on the porch, feeling, over her sadness, that strange flutter of excitement that often came to her in darker moments. It was a sense of detached curiosity and potential energy; a feeling that here before her was an important event she might witness, an important mystery she might solve, an important challenge she might rise to meet. This sensation had been with Lily from the first missteps of her childhood—she remembered it from the time she’d killed the banana slug, and the time she’d accidentally made Maureen cry over Janie—but it had had more sinister incarnations, too. It had been with Lily the time Anna had broken her ankle doing gymnastics in the living room; it had been there when she sat in her sixth-grade classroom and listened to the teacher try to explain what had just happened to the buildings in New York City.
Lily raised her hand to the knocker. Standing here now, undeniably, it was with her again—the same feeling as when she’d sat among her subdued classmates (sixth graders being too young to know what to be scared of or sad for and too old to fall into reflexive hysterics regardless); the same feeling as when she’d raced up the stairs and into the hallway and dialed 911 while Anna screamed in the background. Alongside the terror and the rabid sort of mania there was also something like elation. It was the elation of jumping off a bridge, perhaps—the momentary delirium you’d feel in the free fall—but whatever it was, it was with her now, as she knocked on Sebastien LeCompte’s door for the last time and heard him moving toward the door. Here we go. This is it. Lily closed her
eyes. Someday we’ll all be dead, but we are not dead yet. She held her breath. And something is finally happening.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
February
By the last night, the night Katy died, Sebastien already knew it was over.
Lily appeared at his door at nearly eight o’clock—late—and he took her coolly into his arms. He could smell the baseness of bleach, the dried beer spilled on her shoes, something skunk-cabbagey in her hair—now that she worked, Lily always smelled like the world. She submitted to his embrace with the resignation of a person who has already planned to take away something enormous, and so has no trouble giving something trifling.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, even though she must have known that he would never have remarked on it. She sounded too careful, too kind; he could hear in her voice the magnanimousness of the already decided. Sebastien had so little of her, he knew; he always had. Still, what could he do? He had to proceed as usual. He had to act as though what was clearly happening was not.
“Are you?” Sebastien was exhausting even himself now. “I never notice Newtonian time, myself.”
Lily nodded vacantly—he had to think: tolerantly—and wiggled away from him, kicking off her shoes. Sebastien would not fritter their last moments with indignity and anxiety, he decided. He would not paw at her and beg for her love and stroke her hair and say, What’s wrong, my love, what’s wrong, what’s wrong? He was his parents’ son, after all. If there was anything he could endure, it was solitude. If there was anything he could endure, it was abandonment. If there was anything he could endure, it was everything.
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