Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  “No,” said Anna. There was a wavering in her face, but not her voice.

  “Not one?”

  “No.” This time she sounded angry. “She hated people hurting animals. She hated aggression of all sorts. She was a vegetarian in high school. She hated that picture of Sebastien and that dead animal. She even talked about it after she dumped him.”

  After she dumped him. There was a millisecond-long flicker in Anna’s eyes as she heard her sentence land. And Eduardo understood, all at once, that Anna had made a mistake, and that she knew it was a mistake, and that she could not tell whether Eduardo had noticed it, or whether it mattered if he had. Lily and Sebastien had broken up the night Katy died. And Lily had spoken with Anna, apparently, that same night. Eduardo took a sip of his coffee, finally letting Anna look away.

  “I’ve seen that picture of his,” said Eduardo. “Gruesome.” He opened a sugar packet with his thumbnail and took some time shaking it sloppily into his cup. “What did you say to Lily about it?” He would not ask her to report what Lily had said, only to reflect on what she, Anna, had advised. He would not let her know what kind of a mistake it was—he would show her neither its nature nor its size.

  “Well,” said Anna carefully. “I didn’t actually talk to her.”

  “Ah.” Eduardo nodded. It was a voicemail, then. Lily’s emails had been scoured, of course, along with the calls she’d made from her cell phone; all of that was chronicled and accounted for, and there was no communication to Anna and the United States on the night Katy Kellers was killed. But it would seem Lily had called Anna from somewhere else—Sebastien’s landline, perhaps—and, unbelievably, it would seem she had left a message. Eduardo felt a flutter in his chest, a little scherzo of near laughter. He clenched it back. “So why did she call you, do you think?” he said lazily, stirring his coffee. His best maneuver, now as always, was projecting a sense that his grip on facts was vague.

  “She was upset,” said Anna.

  Eduardo probed his spoon further into the cup, scraping it against the granular sludge of sugar on the bottom. It made sharp little belllike sounds against the porcelain, which seemed somehow louder than they should have in the empty café. “She seems like she’d be a tough person to console,” Eduardo said to his coffee. “Under any circumstances.”

  “I guess that’s why I didn’t answer,” said Anna. She blinked when the spoon hit the cup.

  “Well, that’s understandable,” said Eduardo, motioning to the waitress for the check. “To tell you the truth,” he said, and this time he actually was, “I’m not sure I would have, either.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  March

  Andrew awoke to Maureen’s lunging toward a ringing phone.

  “Hello?” she said. She’d been startled into the gulping shock that always accompanied her sudden awakenings, and hadn’t yet managed to sand down the rough edges of panic in her voice. This, Andrew knew, had nothing to do with Lily’s situation; this was long-standing, possibly endemic. Maureen would sound this way at home, at one p.m., on a Sunday, with a telemarketer.

  “Lawyer,” she mouthed. She’d become comically disheveled during their nap, another classic characteristic. I want to know where you went and what you did and whether you took pictures, Andrew used to say to her in the mornings. It was one of the many small things about her that Andrew had neither particularly treasured nor particularly disliked and so had not, until this moment, particularly remembered.

  “I see,” said Maureen. Her face, Andrew noticed, was blanking. “Oh, God.” Andrew raised his eyebrows. “Okay. Yes. We’ll be there. We’re on our way.” She hung up.

  “What?” he said.

  She shook her head. “Lily has done something incredibly stupid.”

  Oh, something else? Andrew wanted to say. His mood was still fossilized from the mirth of the morning; he sat up straighter in order to shake it off. He said, again, “What?”

  Maureen ran her fingers through her hair. “She’s said some really stupid, incriminating things.”

  “What things? To whom?”

  “To Anna, I guess. On the phone. There was a voicemail.”

  “What? When?”

  “That night. There was a voicemail. We need to get Anna.”

  “Okay,” said Andrew. He stood up, pulled on his pants, and began walking to the closed door of the other bedroom.

  “What are you doing?” said Maureen, as he knocked. “She’s in your room,” she said, as he said, “Isn’t she in here?” Maureen’s look was floundering, and Andrew could see that Maureen knew Anna was not there but was willing to check anyway, because she would not want to be too confident about what was or was not possible anymore.

  “I mean, isn’t she in your room?” said Maureen.

  And instead of saying no, Andrew said, “We’ll go look.”

  Outside, the sky was high domed, impossibly distant. Andrew had an image of it floating farther and farther away from them—perhaps in forgetfulness, perhaps in disgust, perhaps in total indifference. The sky seemed suddenly like a child’s balloon, like something you could lose if you weren’t careful or weren’t paying attention.

  Anna had not been in the room.

  In the taxi, Andrew squeezed Maureen’s hand lightly, and she squeezed back. Their refusal to console each other was their way of offering consolation; they were so far past reassurances. For this, and maybe for only this, Andrew was grateful.

  When they reached Tribunales, Ojeda and Velazquez were already standing outside the office building, waiting. Andrew could see the flare of one of their cigarettes and he wondered pointlessly which one of them smoked. Behind them was another figure—Andrew saw a sheet of russet hair, the severe right angle of a substantial jaw, looking like cast silver in the early afternoon light.

  “Oh my God,” Maureen breathed, and he knew that she was seeing Lily. The possibility that this person actually was Lily was low—for one thing, Andrew realized, this person had hair—and yet it held them there for a moment, as they rose and got out of the car, seeming to move against some sort of aquatic resistance, like the density that fills the atmosphere when you’re running from terror in a dream.

  “It’s Anna,” said Andrew.

  “Of course it is,” said Maureen. And Andrew knew, with a seam of certainty that opened within him like an old scar, that they were doomed, once again.

  Anna began running toward them. “Mom,” she said. “Dad.” Her running was smooth and intentional and competent, even though she was crying—truly, she was her mother’s daughter. Even so, Andrew could feel the doom in the air around him. He could have reached out, he was sure, and fluttered his fingers through it. “I’m sorry,” said Anna. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Sebastien is sleeping, said Lily’s voice on the tape. Eduardo could hear in her voice a desperate treble—something he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard in their conversations, or even in any of the other recordings.

  I just came back, she said. I just—what’s wrong with me?

  Anna’s iPhone was, of course, subpoenaed; the relevant message was, of course, retrieved. This only took half an afternoon, since the voicemail, though deleted, had been helpfully stored in the iPhone’s deleted messages vault. Eduardo listened to it over and over, of course—first alone, many times, and then with the person who would need to try to explain it.

  Jesus. I don’t know what I did.

  Lily sounded hazy on the tape; altered, no doubt. But this line meant she’d been in possession of her faculties, mental and moral, and that she’d known she’d committed a hideous wrong. She’d known it enough, after all, to call her sister and sob about it. And you could hear in her voice that she really was sorry for whatever it was she had done. Nothing, nothing, could be more damning than that.

  Once more, Eduardo restarted the message; once more, Lily’s voice filled the room. Once more, she said, Sebastien is sleeping.

  Eduardo looked across the table at Sebastien L
eCompte. His face was ashen. Eduardo glanced down at his notepad and began to form the obvious questions.

  Sebastien sat across from Eduardo Campos, waiting to be made to listen again to Lily’s voicemail. Its content, as Campos was once more explaining, had raised some new issues.

  “Lily says quite clearly that you are sleeping in the other room,” said Campos. “As you can hear.”

  All around Sebastien, everything was white and unreal. He swallowed.

  “You told me that you were with Lily all night,” said Campos. His hair was glistening with an indecipherable sheen—either sweat or gel, Sebastien couldn’t tell. “But the tape tells me that, in fact, she left. You’d lied about that.”

  This was true, and yet Sebastien felt his brain cleave with a dizzying shock at the accusation. Why? It must be because he’d told the story so many times that he’d begun to remember it the way he told it. This had happened to him sometimes as a child—he’d embellish a story slightly and then eventually lose track of which narrative zigzags were real and which had been added later for flourish. Now—confronted with the evidence of Lily’s departure, bludgeoned by the memory of that night—Sebastien felt almost as surprised as he would have if he’d been told something he actually hadn’t known.

  “I don’t think so, no,” he said shakily.

  “That’s all on tape, too, as, of course, you realize. This isn’t a question of you convincing me my memory is fuzzy. It isn’t, as it happens, but you don’t have to take my word for it. You can take your own.”

  Campos hit a button, and now Sebastien’s own awful voice filled the room, telling of how he had spent the entire night with Lily, how she had stayed beside him, how he was sure of it. Sebastien felt a surge of distaste for the person speaking—it was automatic and instantaneous, like a bias he knew better than to indulge but could not help feeling, for a brief panicked second, before his superego roused itself for policing. Who was that person? Did he think he sounded unconcerned? Did he think he sounded relaxed? Did he think he sounded like he had any control over the situation—any control, even, over himself? Sebastien was sad for that kid. He was disgusted with that kid. Most of all, he was very sorry that he was now going to have to clean up that kid’s mistakes.

  “But it was only a moment,” said Sebastien. His guilt was unending, stereoscopic. His guilt was like a pain so great that you stop believing it’s coming from you at all and start believing that it’s coming from the universe; it was no longer within him, it was around him. You knew this, he told himself. Remember? You knew all of this already.

  “I mean, I’m not a mathematician,” said Sebastien. “I’m not Euclid.” Even as he spoke, he could hear the weakness of what he was saying—he could hear the shrillness of his indignation, the overstatement of his scoffing. “But that voicemail is, what? Thirty seconds? Are you saying she was, like, stabbing Katy while she was listening to Anna’s outgoing message? Or, like, in between sentences? Or what?”

  Eduardo Campos leaned forward. He smelled medicinal, so it must be gel in his hair. Sebastien didn’t really need to have it explained to him, but still Eduardo did—more patiently than Sebastien himself would have, if their places had been reversed. “The problem,” he said—and he really made it sound like a problem, he made it sound like it was both of their problems, like it was everyone’s problem—“is that there’s nothing besides you accounting for Lily that night. Your word is all we have.”

  Sebastien’s word, Campos did not seem to think he needed to mention again, was already dubious. And with the voicemail, it had been rendered null in its entirety.

  “Okay, yes. As we’ve both learned, I was wrong.” Sebastien bent his head slightly, giving Campos a moment to appreciate this concession. “But that’s not really the question. The question you’re really after has nothing to do with whether I was right or wrong about that one particular moment. The question is what she did when she was out of the house. What, realistically, she could have done. If she even left the house at all. And so you’re going to tell people that she stepped out for a brief midnight murder, as one does, and then slipped back in to call her sister back in college before climbing into bed and sleeping the rest of the night next to me? Because I woke up at some point in the early morning and she was asleep next to me. And, okay, I get that you’re thinking that I’m not trustworthy and so who cares. But without showering? She didn’t use the shower. She came back from a little light impulsive murder spree and didn’t even shower? Don’t you have a way of checking that?”

  “We do.” Now Campos’s expression was actually gentle. Sebastien could see that he had begun to understand that Sebastien’s confusion wasn’t genuine—that it was desperate, delusional, that he was constructing the kind of convoluted narrative people invented to make the real seem less real. “And we could have,” said Campos, “if you’d been honest with us from the beginning. But, as you undoubtedly realized even as you were speaking, we cannot now go back in time and establish whether Lily Hayes took a shower in your house several weeks ago. Alas.”

  Sebastien’s mouth flooded with a tannic taste. He was beginning to realize how minor the points of dispute here were; he was beginning to see that you did not build up good credit by getting most of the story right. And, frankly, he did not question the correctness of this. It didn’t matter whether he was a liar in general, or whether the bulk of what he’d told everybody had been true. At the end of the day, he’d lied for Lily, which meant he was willing to lie for Lily, which was the only relevant fact about him in relation to this case, and possibly the only relevant fact about him in general.

  “She broke up with me that night, you know. That could have been what she was talking to Anna about.”

  “When?”

  “When she talks about the mistake.”

  “It could have been,” said Eduardo agreeably. “But we certainly have no reason to think that. Did she seem to feel that breaking up with you had been a terrible mistake?”

  Sebastien said nothing.

  “Look,” said Eduardo, putting his hands on the table in that oddly supplicating gesture of his. “I’m not going to tell you that being honest is your best way to help Lily. I know I’ve been saying that to you for a while, and whether you believed it or not, it was once actually true. But I’m not going to say it now, because I’m not convinced that it’s true anymore. I don’t think you can help Lily at this point. All I know for sure is that you can still hurt her. You have hurt her with this lie. You have hurt her as much as Lily has hurt herself. Because now we do not know anything with certainty.”

  And then Sebastien listened while Campos listed all the things that they could no longer know with certainty. Had Lily and Sebastien actually smoked weed together? (Because she had smoked weed with somebody.) Had they actually watched Lost in Translation? It was baffling to Sebastien, this extension of rigorous skepticism toward all the mundane things—was this the kind of movie Sebastien usually watched, and was this the amount of alcohol that Lily usually drank, and why would she have come over and spent so much time with him anyway if she was only planning on ending things afterward? Come to think of it, had Lily really even been there at all that night? As Sebastien listened, he could feel the entirety of the night unravel—he watched it erase, all the mistakes disappearing, beginning with Katy’s death and ending with Lily’s breaking up with him, or maybe the two things vanishing simultaneously, until none of it had ever happened, none of it had ever happened at all.

  Or maybe, Sebastien thought, this was too ambitious. Maybe he needed a more modest request; maybe he needed only to erase Anna. He imagined Anna not coming to see him. In his mind, he unspoke their conversation, unknocked the door, undrove the taxi back to the hotel where Lily and Anna’s parents were sleeping, then woke them up.

  Eduardo Campos had stopped speaking. Sebastien felt a great cistern of grief inside him. It would swallow him whole one day; one day, he knew, he would drown in it. Sometimes he wished he could walk
toward it with stones in his pockets and get the whole thing over with.

  “Here,” said Campos, handing Sebastien a telephone. “I assume your parents had a lawyer.”

  “Seriously, what the fuck?” Andrew said to Maureen on the drive back to the hotel. It was evening, and the taxi’s headlights briefly spangled the wall of the jail. Anna had had to stay behind to talk to the lawyers.

  “Maybe we should all just go home.”

  Maureen did not answer.

  Anna’s iPhone had been subpoenaed that afternoon; the incriminating voicemail had been produced. Anna had deleted it but apparently not deleted it enough somehow, a fact that Andrew vacillated between attributing to Anna’s technological ineptitude and to some subconscious desire of hers to do violence to her sister. He could not bear to think seriously about which was really likelier. On the message, Lily’s voice had been strange—though not strange in the same way as on the 911 call, which she would make only twelve hours later. In her call to Anna, Lily’s voice was faraway and hoarse, and too relaxed somehow. It was almost unrecognizable to Andrew, and he’d nearly said this—he’d nearly challenged the idea that it was Lily’s voice at all—but then he’d stopped himself. He was learning.

  In the message, Lily sobbed weakly. She lamented the fate of the dead animal in Sebastien’s picture; she warbled about a mistake she had made. It was not a confession, of course—it meant nothing, less than nothing. The mistakes Lily had made in her life were so heartbreakingly minor that Andrew was not sure she would even remember them when she grew up. And yet the time of the call was within the span during which the pathologists posited that Katy had died, and Anna—curiously—had seen fit to withhold the message. It was not certain that the fact of the withholding, per se, would be allowed in court. But it was certain that Anna would now have to testify—about what she’d felt when she first heard the message, and about what she’d later feared it might have meant.