Cartwheel
Jennifer Dubois
Written with the riveting storytelling of authors like Emma Donoghue, Adam Johnson, Ann Patchett, and Curtis Sittenfeld, Cartwheel is a suspenseful and haunting novel of an American foreign exchange student arrested for murder, and a father trying to hold his family together.
When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colorful buildings, the street food, the handsome, elusive man next door. Her studious roommate Katy is a bit of a bore, but Lily didn’t come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans.
Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who’s asking. As the case takes shape—revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA—Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her: the media, her family, the man who loves her and the man who seeks her conviction. With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Cartwheel offers a prismatic investigation of the ways we decide what to see—and to believe—in one another and ourselves.
In Cartwheel, duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. No two readers will agree who Lily is and what happened to her roommate. Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how well we really know ourselves will linger well beyond.
A USA Today Pick for Biggest Books of the Fall • A Pick for The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2013
“A tabloid tragedy elevated to high art.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[A] compelling, carefully crafted, and, most importantly, satisfying novel.”
—Bustle
From Booklist
Starred Review
Lily Hayes, 21, is a study-abroad student in Buenos Aires. Her life seems fairly unexceptional until her roommate, Katy, is brutally murdered, and Lily, charged with the crime, is remanded to prison pending her trial. But is she guilty, and who is Lily, really? To find answers to these questions, the novel is told from multiple points of view—not only that of Lily but also that of her family; of sardonic Sebastien, the boy with whom she has been having an affair; and of the prosecutor in the case. In the process, it raises even more questions. What possible motive could Lily have had? Why, left momentarily alone after her first interrogation, did she turn a cartwheel? And has she, as her sister asserts, always been weird? In her skillful examination of these matters, the author does an excellent job of creating and maintaining a pervasive feeling of foreboding and suspense.
Sometimes bleak, duBois’ ambitious second novel is an acute psychological study of character that rises to the level of the philosophical, specifically the existential. In this it may not be for every reader, but fans of character-driven literary fiction will welcome its challenges. Though inspired by the Amanda Knox case, Cartwheel is very much its own individual work of the author’s creative imagination.
—Michael Cart
Jennifer duBois
CARTWHEEL
A NOVEL
To Justin
Note
Although the themes of this book were loosely inspired by the story of Amanda Knox, this is entirely a work of fiction. None of the characters are real. None of the events ever happened. Nothing in the book should be read as a factual statement about real-life events or people.
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
February
Andrew’s plane landed at EZE, as promised, at seven a.m. local time. Outside the window, the sun was a hideous orb, bleeding orange light through wavering heat. Andrew was still woozy from his two Valiums and two glasses of wine, the bare minimum that he needed to fly these days—to anywhere, for anything, though especially for here, for this. The irony of being a professor of international relations who was terrified of international travel was not lost on him (no irony was lost on him, ever), but it could not be helped. Neither could it be mitigated by the knowledge—always understood but now finally believed—that the things that go wrong are rarely the things you’ve thought to worry about.
Andrew patted Anna on the shoulder and she roused herself. He watched her forget and then remember what was happening. He was glad he didn’t have to remind her. She pulled her iPod headphones out of her ears, and Andrew caught snatches of some ambient, low-key music—the music of the day was so bloodless, he often thought: Didn’t these kids want anything, and weren’t they mad at anybody?—before she thumbed it quiet. Anna had endured the trip reasonably well—her sensible hair was limp in a ponytail; her nautical stripes, so favored by his students these days, were barely creased. She wore her competence lightly. She didn’t know how terrifying it was to him.
“Dad,” she said. “You need to blink.”
Andrew blinked, painfully.
“Does your corneal abrasion hurt?” she said.
“No,” he said. It always hurt. He had poked himself in the eye during class one day—while making a particularly vigorous point about Russian cyber-terrorism in Estonia—and he’d had to go to the ER for a local eyeball anesthetic. Now his eye hurt every morning, every flight, every time he was tired or stressed, which he always would be, now, for the foreseeable future.
“Will we see Lily today?” said Anna.
Andrew licked his lips. His eyeballs were so dry that he thought they might tear. The Argentina flights from the East Coast went only once a day, and only from D.C., and it was impossible to get to D.C. in less than seven hours, no matter how you looked at it. Andrew could not, he reminded himself, have gotten here any earlier. “Probably not today,” he said.
“Will Mom see her when she comes?”
“Hopefully.” Andrew’s voice cracked, and Anna looked at him, alarmed. “Hopefully,” he said again, to show her that the crack had been fatigue, not emotion.
Outside, it was summer, as Andrew had known—but secretly not entirely believed—that it would be. Anna shimmied out of her jacket, her nose crinkling at the smell of gasoline. Inside the airport, the terminal thrummed with travelers. Andrew offered to buy Anna a soda, then rescinded this offer when he spotted the newspaper outside the kiosk—he didn’t have much Spanish beyond what one absorbed through cultural osmosis and a general familiarity with Latinate words, but it was uncomfortably easy to get the gist of the headlines, whether he wanted to or not. Andrew wished desperately to keep Anna away from the newspapers. She knew the contours of the accusation, of course, but Andrew had managed—or thought he’d managed—to protect her from the worst of it. The coverage was only just beginning to leak over to the United States, anyway, and Andrew had spent long hours on the Internet looking for the stories: the depictions of Lily as hypersexual, unstable, amoral; the lurid intimations about her romantic jealousy and rage; the accounts of her smug and towering atheism. The fact that she hadn’t cried—not after Katy was killed and not during the interrogations, either (the Internet had harped on this so much that Andrew had found himself shouting “She’s not a crier! She’s just not a fucking crier!” into the computer). And finally, the worst, most militantly misunderstood information of all: the fact that a delivery truck driver had seen Lily running from the house with blood on her face the day after the murder. No matter that she’d been the one to find Katy; no matter that she’d been the one to kneel over her and try to administer brave and futile CPR. The news reporters weren’t bothering with that information, and Andrew didn’t expect them to start. He was beginning to understand what story they were trying to tell.
Announcing that the sodas would be better outside the airport, Andrew maneuvered Anna (rather deftly, he thought) toward baggage claim, where they waited for fifteen minutes in silence. In wrestling the suitc
ase off the conveyer belt, Andrew accidentally stomped on the foot of an androgynous teenager.
“Permiso,” he muttered to the teenager, who was wearing a T-shirt that said SORRY FOR PARTYING. Beside him, Andrew could feel Anna stiffen; Andrew liked to at least know how to apologize wherever he went, but Anna hated it when he tried to speak any language other than English. Two summers ago, in a different lifetime, Andrew had spent three months doing research in Bratislava—his area was emerging post-Soviet democracies, though his job got a little less interesting the more fully the democracies emerged—and afterward the girls had met him in Prague for a week of castles and bridges and beer. Anna had flinched every time he opened his mouth to deploy some phrase he remembered from his three semesters of college Czech. “Dad,” she’d said. “They speak English.” “Well, I speak Czech.” “No. You don’t.” “It’s polite to address people in the local language.” “No. It’s not.” And so on. Lily, on the other hand, had made him teach her as much Czech as he could, and had then thrown it around willy-nilly—mispronounced, absurd, chirping informal greetings at storekeepers who tended to smile at her, even though she was basically insulting them, because she was so obviously well-intentioned. Andrew used to imagine that Lily’s general goodwill, the buoyancy with which she addressed her life, was easily detectable by all people of the world, and that it would protect her. It seemed now that this was not the case.
In the taxi, Andrew and Anna passed fruit stands, dingy-looking bars, backfiring motorcycles. Through the hazy heat, Andrew saw barrios with squat, intersecting systems of housing; clotheslines shimmering with brightly colored clothes; the occasional corrugated tin roof winking astral-bright in the sun. The roads were medium-good; the infrastructure in general seemed decent. Out the window, Andrew saw satellite dishes wedged improbably between houses, looking like the detritus of abandoned spaceships. He saw a large compound, walled and razor-wired, manned by two security guards with walkie-talkies. He craned his neck to see if it was the prison, but it turned out to only be a housing development.
“Nothing’s open,” said Anna. She was looking out her own window and did not turn around.
“It’s Sunday,” said Andrew. “Very Catholic country.”
“It’s too bad that Latin America isn’t your area.”
Andrew stared at the back of Anna’s head. She had lately taken to making inscrutable declarative statements in studied neutral tones. Andrew desperately hoped that this was not the onset of irony.
“You might get some work done, I mean,” she said.
“I don’t know about that.” Andrew was suddenly nauseous, awash with their strange new calamity. There was, of course, no possibility that Lily had actually been involved in any of this; Andrew’s confidence on that point was part of what had made the situation seem, initially, not catastrophic. The accusation was so ghastly and so wild and so patently, transparently, ludicrous that he’d nearly laughed when he first heard of it. Not that there weren’t a few things he could imagine Lily getting justly arrested for. Before she had left, he and Maureen had had a series of sober conversations with her—about the harshness of Latin American drug laws, mostly, as well as the laxity of Latin American sexual safety standards. They’d sent her off with an enormous box of Trojans—industrial-sized, Andrew thought, issued for health clinics or music festivals, no doubt; a box that size could not possibly be intended for the use of a single human being. Andrew reeled to think of how much sex his daughter would have to have to run through all of them. Nevertheless, he had bravely and maturely had the conversation, alongside Maureen (such was their commitment to pragmatism! such was their commitment to co-parenting!), and then bravely and maturely sent Lily off with the box. And Andrew had worried about Lily constantly—he worried about her being kidnapped, trafficked, impregnated, sexually assaulted, afflicted with some horrible STD, arrested for marijuana use, converted to Catholicism, wooed by a long-lashed man with a Vespa. He worried she’d make too few friends, then he worried she’d make too many. He worried that her GPA would suffer. He worried about her bug bites. He worried so much that when there came a call from Maureen—on his work phone in the middle of the day, her voicemail left in a strangled half whisper—Andrew could taste metal in his mouth, so certain was he that something life altering had happened. And when he heard Lily was in jail, his mind flooded with grim visions of drug use and anti-Americanism and political points to be scored. He could imagine how she’d look to everyone (naïve, and entitled, no doubt), and he could easily imagine the incentive for punishing her harshly.
So when the accusation turned out not to be drugs—not drugs, or fare jumping on the metro (did Buenos Aires even have a metro?), or trespassing through someone’s field while looking at the stars, or any one of the countless thoughtless crimes that he could believe his daughter might have committed—Andrew was mostly relieved. An accusation of murder was outrageous to the point of being comic, and thus was no great threat.
Andrew had tried to communicate some of this feeling to Lily on the telephone, when she’d finally, finally, been allowed to call. “Don’t worry,” he had said, over the terrible connection. It seemed absolutely vital that Lily know she did not have to tell them she had not done it; her innocence and eventual acquittal must be the unspoken premises of all their interactions—to be referenced in passing, perhaps, but never formally declared. “I know,” he’d said. “We all know.” Mordantly, from a great distance, she’d said, “Know what?”
But now, in the overheated taxicab, with fragments of Buenos Aires flashing through the window, Andrew was beginning to wonder. He was beginning to wonder if this was indeed a catastrophe on the order of the others; he was beginning to wonder if it might join them, making a triad that would hold up his life like Roman columns. First—most importantly, most irreducibly—there was the death of Janie, their first daughter, at two and a half, from aplastic anemia. This was the tragedy that made all other tragedies pale, the template onto which all other grief was mapped. The divorce, comparatively, was a minor hiccup. Nobody had been surprised—not even he and Maureen had been surprised—though they had been disappointed, certainly, in their own lack of originality. And now there was this. It was all, Andrew thought, a little much for one lifetime—though he had to weigh it against his socioeconomic privilege, health, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality, American citizenship, etc., etc.; he’d been in academia long enough to know how far the scales were tipped in his favor, and how strenuously he must try at all times to acknowledge this, and how earnestly he must attempt to make his life an apology for its central accidents—and yet, and yet.
“Look,” said Anna. She pointed to a mansion—enormous, drowning in its own decadence, already receding behind them. “Is that where he lives, do you think?”
Andrew was not quite sure who he was—the rich boy with whom Lily had conducted a five-week-long romance, presumably—but he was resolved to answer firmly anyway. “No,” he said, tapping Anna’s shoulder and frowning at its boniness. He tapped his own for comparison. “How are you holding up, Old Sport?” he said. He’d started calling Anna “Old Sport” sometime during her adolescence, when it became quietly clear to him that she was his least favorite daughter.
“Okay,” she said dully. “I’m tired.”
“You can conk out at the hotel.”
“I have to run at the hotel.”
“Oh. Right.”
Anna was on the cross-country team at Colby—she wasn’t a star, but was known for her diligence—and she’d gone running every day for two years straight, even on holidays, even with the flu. There had been a local newspaper article about it. She had almost cried—and it was the only time she’d almost cried—when Andrew had told her that there was no fucking way she was going to be allowed to run outside on their trip. “Your sister is locked up for life, and you’re worried about getting your exercise? Priorities, please.” He had shouted it. It had been a terrible day with Peter Sulzicki, the lawyer. “You think
you’re going to run through the streets of that city? You’ll be kidnapped in five seconds flat. I don’t need another daughter arrested or dead.” Andrew wished immediately that he had not said this. To make it up to Anna, he had promised to find a hotel with a gym. But Andrew knew that this trip would break her streak, one way or another.
Poor Anna. She loved Lily, but she must have had the sense that Lily was always the one to be involved in spectacles, that Lily was the one for whom the rules were always bent. It was all the more unfair, then, that Andrew loved Lily more. Not much more—but no difference could be truly negligible when it came to the love of your children, since what it really meant was that he loved Anna less. This was only because Anna had such tough competition: Janie, precious Janie, was a tragedy, and Lily, cherished Lily, was a miracle. Anna, to her enduring misfortune, had only ever been a child.
Still, Andrew was filled with a lunge of tenderness for her now. “Hey,” he said, pulling at her ponytail.
“Dad, stop it.”
“I’ll order us some room service for when you get back. Something special. What’s the thing here? Steak?”
Anna gave him a flat stare. How could Andrew have produced a child whose face was unreadable to him? He’d made that face. “Well,” she said. “Since we’re going to be flying back and forth between here and home like every week for who knows how long, maybe you should be trying to save your money?”
She wasn’t wrong. Andrew tried not to think about how long all of the trouble with Lily might last, but he wasn’t kidding himself—even under the best of circumstances, it was probably going to last a very, very long time, and Andrew would no doubt be burning through his retirement fund to finance it. Though it was true he’d never particularly looked forward to retirement, especially now that he was alone: He imagined himself scraping along, scrambling eggs in his undershirt (he’d never learned to cook, and now he realized what an optimistic thing that was—it meant that he’d secretly believed he’d always be too busy to bother), watching the BBC at all hours of the day and night. This, exactly this, was what a life of the mind got you, give or take a 401(k) and some unnatural disasters.
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