Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  He Googled “suicide” again and again, allowing himself each time to be moved anew by the automatic, impersonal concern of the Internet. It was so perfect in its abstraction, Sebastien thought. It was something like the Kantian categorical imperative, or the awesome callousness of nature, or the sort of nostalgic, flamboyant kindnesses that the United States very occasionally extended to its enemies: rebuilding postwar Germany, giving Osama bin Laden an Islamic ceremony before tossing his body into the sea.

  In a way, Eduardo was surprised to find, losing Maria again turned out to feel almost natural. Eduardo had known that after the case was over he would have a feeling of having reached the peak of his life, of looking over its edge, of knowing that soon night would fall, and that even sooner it would be time to turn around. Now that Maria was gone again, he found himself heading back down already—and it seemed a less frightening journey, somehow, though he did have to marvel at its swiftness.

  Her departure had been a catastrophe Eduardo had been drilling for most of his adult life. Her return had been, in the end, merely a kind of caesura between miseries. Or maybe not even that.

  And yet it was true that Eduardo had been sure about her once—surer than he had ever been about anything else, before or since.

  Over the months, Eduardo thought often of Lily Hayes’s time in prison—of how difficult it must be to be there after a life as short and easy as hers. She’d have to recall memories that she’d barely been present for at the time; she’d have to turn them over and over again in her mind, looking for new details and complexities. It would be like scrambling for the crumbs of meals you’d consumed without knowing you’d need to ration them. It would be like craning your neck to try to see something beyond a picture’s frame.

  A year after the conviction, Eduardo read in the paper that Sebastien LeCompte was having an estate sale, and he hired a man to go to it and buy the Steinway. All told, the purchase was approximately what he’d made on Lily Hayes’s conviction. He saw how this could be viewed as a kind of revenge, but really he meant it as a kind of penance—though not penance for the chance that he’d been wrong about Lily. Eduardo felt humility before that possibility, as before all other possibilities. He had done his best. He had made a good faith attempt at agency in this lifetime. This, and only this, was all that any of us could really do or know that we had done. Conceding the fallibility of your knowledge was only the first step: Given that, you had to proceed, you had to discern, you had to assess and evaluate and distinguish right from wrong, you had to sort out truth from falsehood (people might say they weren’t doing this, but, of course, they were doing this; they were acting on many layers of unexamined belief with every breath they took, with every moment they lived). And then, whatever you decided you believed, you had to act as though you really believed it. If you did not do this, you weren’t just a coward. If you did not do this, you were forfeiting something far bigger than bravery.

  After Lily’s sentencing, Sebastien was finally allowed to visit her in prison. He arrived to find her sitting at a table, smoking. Her hair was longer and seemed a different color—not just dirtier, but actually darker, somehow.

  “They say that stuff will kill you,” he said feebly.

  “God,” she said. “I hope something else gets to it first.”

  “Is your hair a different color?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “They say Marie Antoinette’s hair went white the night before she was executed.”

  Lily had once told Sebastien that he didn’t know what he meant when he talked, but this was not an accurate diagnosis. Usually he just didn’t care—he only wanted to sound clever, and there was a crystalline simplicity and directness in this, really, when you thought about it. But now he felt like he did care, he cared very much—he just didn’t know what he was trying to say. Whatever that was was off in some other galaxy, the kind that was so far away that by the time you got there you’d be dead.

  Lily shook her head. “That’s not how it works. It’s just that all her brown hair fell out.” She took a puff of her cigarette. There was an intense agitation in her movements now that Sebastien hadn’t noticed at the trial. “I can’t believe they let you in here.”

  “Well, at this point it’s the least they could do.”

  She gave him an unbelieving look. “I mean, I just can’t believe they think I’m so dumb that I would say anything to you.”

  “What?”

  “They’re recording this, you realize?” she said. “They’re trying to entrap me. They think you might help them do that.”

  Sebastien was not sure what his face was doing. Lily must understand that he’d lied for her, and been caught in that lie; she must understand that he had had no choice. But perhaps she loathed him for the lying anyway. Perhaps she thought he’d lied because he’d believed it was possible she had done it, or because he’d believed that other people would believe that it was possible. Perhaps she saw both of these things as betrayals. Or perhaps—and as soon as Sebastien thought of this possibility he felt its truth, like a truncheon to the soul—she really had no opinion on any of this.

  “Well not, you know, intentionally,” said Lily. There was a fluttery breathiness in her voice. “I don’t mean that. I just mean they think I’ll lose my head and forget where I am and suddenly remember I did things I didn’t do.”

  She was afraid to even name those things, Sebastien saw. She didn’t want to even give them a phrase, a recording of her voice stringing certain words together in a certain order, regardless of the context—such was the level of her distrust. Was this savviness (finally, belatedly)? Or just paranoia? Sebastien couldn’t tell. But either way, who could blame her? He remembered his paranoia the day he’d flown back to Buenos Aires after his parents’ death. His fear that day had not been limited to the plane ride; instead, his fear had extended nonsensically, ludicrously, both forward and backward in time, like some strange ivy that would climb toward either darkness or light. The fear had crept back into his trip’s beginnings: It was waiting for him behind a newspaper in South Station, where the clean sheets of light falling through the window always felt somehow Atlantic, oceanic, and the ashen seagulls outside made smudges against the concrete and the sky. And the fear had crept forward to the rest of the day: If the fear did not crash his plane, then it would follow him through security—after he disembarked and hailed a taxi and rode through his streets, his former streets—and into his childhood home, and into the rest of his life. The fear could be patient, after all. The fear had all the time in the world.

  “Are you losing it, Lily?” said Sebastien.

  There was a flash of reactionary, automatic hostility on her face that faded into pensiveness. “How would I know?” she said.

  “You don’t have to worry about it,” said Sebastien. “For obvious reasons, I’m not one to judge.” He put his hand on the table, making it available for her to hold. Lily stared at it emptily, with an expression of incurious incomprehension, and made no move to take it. And suddenly Sebastien could see how Lily’s sentence would go: how her previous life would turn to red, fetal memories; how her personality would liquidate. Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years. She would become obsessed with her cigarettes, with her minor grievances and feuds. Maureen and Andrew would keep coming, though less and less, and then they would die, one after another. Anna would keep coming, twice a year, at least; she would work for two years as an i-banker (there was no way that girl wasn’t heading for an MBA, classics major or no) until she married another i-banker and they would produce two long-limbed children back-to-back. She would never give up distance running, and she would never give up sending Lily the necessaries—even as the necessaries changed, year to year, and even as there were less and less of them.

  It would not matter. None of it would matter. Lily’s spirit would not be able to stop its own decay any more than her body would one day.

  “I’m sorry, you know,” Sebastien s
aid with feeling. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  Lily looked at him neutrally. “For what?”

  · · ·

  It was two years before the appeal went to court. When the decision came, the murder conviction was overturned; the obstruction of justice conviction—resulting from Lily’s lie about the marijuana—stood, with the sentence reduced to time served. On television, Andrew Hayes said, “Two years is a lifetime at her age. It’s a lifetime.” He looked drawn and aged. “She’s already missed being an entire person she would have been. That person is dead, just like Katy Kellers.”

  He got shit for the comparison, of course. Yet Eduardo thought that it probably was true—though he did not know for sure, since he had not argued the case. In fact, he had taken an extended sabbatical from the law. He went to Ravenna, Italy, to see the early Christian mosaics there, in indigo and jade. He admired the vivid simplicity of their colors, their ethics. Afterward, he walked outside and the moon above him was like a single opal in the sky.

  It was possible, of course, that Lily Hayes had been innocent. Of course it was possible; anything was possible. Embracing the chance of being right was incurring the risk of being wrong. Eduardo had accepted the same stakes as the soldier, the revolutionary, the reformer. He had known that any attempt at heroism may, in retrospect, be revealed to be villainous.

  He had gambled on virtue. He was at peace. He went to the karstic caves of Slovenia. He stood in ancient churches and listened for what he might hear.

  Sebastien began going outside.

  First, he went down to the river to think about the stars. He tilted his head back to look at the sky. He tried to see it the way Lily might see it, or the way she might have seen it once.

  We all had life sentences: You spent yours inside or out, but you had to spend it somewhere.

  Above him, Sebastien could almost see the slit eyes of lenticular galaxies. That sense of being observed—it was why people invented their gods. It was why he’d invented the Carrizos. And maybe this was all he’d be allowed to keep from Lily: a sense of her gaze, a slightly softer, more sympathetic one, following him through the years, her lids lowering and lowering until, finally, they closed.

  He would write her a letter one day, a long time from now, when everybody else had forgotten. I still know you didn’t do it, it would say. I know that. I know that. I know.

  And Lily would write back and say, I’m glad you know it. But you should also know this: I did not do it, but I might have. I did not do it, but I could have. I did not do it, but perhaps, in another lifetime, I did.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In some of its themes, Cartwheel draws inspiration from the case of Amanda Knox, the American foreign exchange student accused, convicted, and acquitted of murdering her roommate in Italy. I was fascinated by the idea of writing about a fictional character who serves as a blank slate onto which an array of interpretations—often inflected by issues of class and privilege, gender and religion, American entitlement and anti-American resentment—tend to be projected. The fictional Lily Hayes shares these broad and nebulous qualities with Amanda Knox; their similarities lie in the contradictory but confident judgments they animate in others.

  The eponymous cartwheel serves as a good example of the novel’s intention, as well as its relationship to reality. In the book, some view Lily Hayes’s interrogation room gymnastics as callous, others as benign, others as suspicious. These divided perceptions were initially inspired by the response to the cartwheel Amanda Knox was widely reported to have done during her interrogation—a cartwheel that, we now know, never actually occurred. This episode, I think, illustrates some of the central questions I wanted to explore in this novel—questions about how we decide what to believe, and what to keep believing—while also demonstrating part of why I needed a totally fictional realm to do this.

  In contemplating the possibility that this book could be mistaken as a narrative about—and judgment on—real-life people and events, I’ve come to appreciate how entirely my view of writing and reading fiction is based on a single moral premise: that the act of imagining the experiences of fictional people develops our sense of empathy, as well as our sense of humility, in regarding the experiences of real ones. To me, the fictional barrier around the characters in this book isn’t just a necessary prerequisite for trying (or even wanting) to write a novel about the fallibility of perception—it’s also fundamental to my notion of fiction’s ethical possibilities in the world. And so it is as a person, even more than as an author, that I ask readers to have no doubt as to whose story this is. In the real universe is a girl who never did a cartwheel. This novel is the story of a girl who did.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University’s Stegner Fellowship program—for the time, the life-changing sense of possibility, and most of all, the people, I will be forever grateful. For their feedback on this book, I am particularly indebted to my incredible teachers at Stanford, Adam Johnson, Elizabeth Tallent, and Tobias Wolff, as well as my tireless comrades-in-workshop: Josh Foster, Jon Hickey, Dana Kletter, Ryan McIlvain, Nina Schloesser, Maggie Shipstead, Justin Torres, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and some other guy I can’t remember. Many thanks also to Kate Sachs for the eventful early recon trip, as well as Adam Krause, Keija Kaarina Parssinen, and all of the terrifyingly smart members of the No-Name Writing Group for their incisive comments.

  Thanks to my wonderful agent, Henry Dunow, who is as indefatigable as he is patient. Thanks also to everyone at Random House: Susan Kamil, Laura Goldin, Erika Greber, and Caitlin McKenna; confirmed publicity sorceress Maria Braeckel; and especially my editor, David Ebershoff, for his remarkable insight and dedication.

  Most of all, thanks to Carolyn du Bois, for teaching me to see that truth is often complicated, and to Justin Perry, for making me believe that, once in a while, it is not.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JENNIFER DUBOIS’S A Partial History of Lost Causes was one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and O: The Oprah Magazine chose it as one of the ten best books of the year. DuBois was also named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 authors. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, duBois recently completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Originally from Massachusetts, she now lives in Texas.

  jennifer-dubois.com

  @jennifer_dubois

  By Jennifer duBois

  Cartwheel

  A Partial History of Lost Causes

  Advance praise for Cartwheel

  A USA Today Pick for Biggest Books of the Fall • A Pick for The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2013

  “In Cartwheel, Jennifer duBois begins with a familiar tabloid story and transforms it into something entirely new, vivid, and unforgettable. Her vision of a blundering criminal justice system and the ordinary, flawed people caught inside it rings true. And her voice—intelligent, humane, unsentimental—brings an entire world to life. Highly recommended.”

  —William Landay, New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob

  “An astonishing, breathtaking, and harrowing read.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “[DuBois] does an excellent job of creating and maintaining a pervasive feeling of foreboding and suspense…. An acute psychological study of character that rises to the level of the philosophical… Cartwheel* is very much its own individual work of the author’s creative imagination.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Jennifer duBois, a writer whose fierce intelligence is matched only by her deep humanity, hits us with a marvelous second novel that intertwines a gripping tale of murder abroad with an intimate story of family heartbreak. Every sentence crackles with wit and vision. Every page casts a spell.”

  —Maggie Shipstead, New York Times bestselling
author of Seating Arrangements

  “Cartwheel is so gripping, so fantastically evocative, that I could not, would not, put it down. Jennifer duBois is a writer of thrilling psychological precision. She dares to pause a moment, digging into the mess of crime and accusation, culture and personality, the known and unknown, and coming up with a sensational novel of profound depth.”

  —Justin Torres, New York Times bestselling author of We the Animals

  “Jennifer duBois’s Cartwheel seized my attention and held it in a white-knuckled grip until I found myself reluctantly and compulsively turning its final pages very late at night. It’s an addictive book that made me miss train stops and wouldn’t let me go to sleep until I’d read just one more chapter. And it’s so much more than just a ravenous page-turner—it’s a rumination on the bloodthirsty rubbernecking of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the bewitching powers of social media, and a scalpel-sharp dissection of innocence abroad, a book charged with a refreshing anger, but always empathic. Jennifer duBois has captured the sleazy leer of lurid crime and somehow twisted it into a work of art.”