Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  At least Andrew could be grateful that he and Maureen had already spoken, and that they had agreed on so much. They had agreed that they would alert the State Department and contact the media; they had agreed that they would start a website and accept donations of frequent flier miles and, if it came to it, money. They had agreed to remortgage the house, though they had also agreed that they would most likely need to sell it eventually. (They had been keeping it ostensibly to minimize the disruptions in the lives of Anna and Lily, but for reasons both dreadful and benign this was a ship that had, decidedly, sailed.) They had also agreed that only one of them should go to Buenos Aires first: They both wanted to be there, of course, but it was wise to plan for the long term, and if they switched off weeks, Lily could always have a visitor. Andrew had insisted on going first because he knew that if Maureen did, Lily would want her to stay and stay. Maureen, in an act of extreme kindness, had agreed. The unspoken concession on Andrew’s part had been bringing Anna along. It was these sorts of small, practical generosities that had made the final eight benumbing years of their marriage endurable—when they’d soldiered on, producing Lily and Anna in rapid succession, insisting on each other’s survival. Their marriage had run on the inertia that keeps a moving object in motion, at least until the girls were in school. Then came a sense of sputtering, of hopeless decline, and Andrew had had the image—inapt, but recurring and intrusive—of a headless chicken that runs around for a bit before falling down dead.

  Andrew swallowed and tried to smile at Anna. “I think we can spring for it just this once, Old Sport,” he said.

  At the hotel, Anna took a shower and went off to run with wet hair. Andrew lay on the bed for seven minutes—he counted—and then sat up, opened his laptop, and began looking again through the photos Lily had sent him before all of this began. She’d taken a lot of pictures of fruit: guavas and bananas and weird melons that looked like hedgehogs. There was a picture of Lily standing in front of a church, and Andrew grimaced again at what she was wearing: a low-cut top, one of those cheap, flimsy things she bought at deep-discount clothes warehouses. All the women around her were dressed conservatively. Had she really not noticed? There was also a picture of Lily and the dead girl, Katy, who was as strikingly lovely here as everywhere—she was extraordinary, really, with ash blond hair and strangely depthless eyes. Her beauty was, of course, terrible news. (“This does not help,” Peter Sulzicki had said, tapping Katy’s face in the photograph. “This does not help at all.”) In the picture, Katy and Lily are laughing, drinking beers at a bar somewhere. They look friendly enough. But Andrew cringed when he thought of Lily’s emails and the things she’d written in them about Katy. “Katy thinks that punning is the highest form of humor.” “Everything about Katy is perfectly average, except her teeth.” “Can we talk about her name? Katy Kellers. What were her parents thinking? Was their dearest ambition that their daughter grow up to be a local TV anchorwoman?” The emails were already out there, of course—they’d been published in the local tabloids and helpfully reposted by what seemed like every blogger in the universe—and Andrew knew how bad they sounded. The dismissiveness and condescension wasn’t even the worst of it—the worst was the implied assertion that Lily must not be average if she could muster such disdain for the average. The irony of that was that Lily was indeed average, more or less—bright, of course, and curious, and a bit reckless, and possessed of an annoying tendency to try to bring philosophy to bear on daily life in rather purist and militant ways—but all that this added up to, essentially, was average for a decent young student at a decent New England college. Lily bounced through life with the sense she was discovering everything that existed for the first time—Nietzsche, or sex, or the possibility of a godless universe, or the entire continent of South America—and all that was fine, of course: She was twenty-one; she was allowed. It was maddening, then, the narrative that Lily somehow deviated so egregiously from the norm. She was typical, she was aggressively typical—all the more so if she didn’t quite know it yet.

  In one photo, Lily licks salt from her hand; in the next, she sucks on a lime. In another, she has climbed a hill somewhere and is making a gesture of mock victory. The next picture is of a three-legged dog. The next is a terrible shot of the dome of a cathedral, from straight below: White rays lace through the architecture; the cupola is ablaze with light. How could a twenty-one-year-old girl not take this photo? All of these photos. Andrew’s heart broke on their banality.

  He closed the computer and thought about what he needed to do next. Maureen would be calling soon. Tomorrow was the first meeting with the new lawyers. And at some point, Andrew wanted to go talk to Lily’s rich friend—Andrew recoiled from his own use of the term “friend” here. It was a euphemism borrowed from Maureen: She had insisted on introducing one of Lily’s unfortunate college boyfriends as her “friend,” over and over, until Lily finally flounced dramatically and said, right in front of a dinner party, “Mom, he’s my lover.” The guy here was named Sebastien LeCompte, which sounded to Andrew like the name of a high-end suit store—though he knew he shouldn’t complain: If the name hadn’t been exotic Lily would never have written it out in its entirety. And silly name or not, Sebastien LeCompte was the single most important person in the universe: He was the person Lily had been with on the night Katy Kellers was killed. Andrew needed to know exactly what he was planning on saying about that. Sebastien LeCompte himself had not been arrested—though perhaps he might still be, of course—and Maureen and Andrew careened around this fact obsessively, with little sense of how they should regard it. In various lights, it could appear promising (if Lily had been with this guy and the police weren’t even bothering to arrest him, perhaps they knew that the case was weak?) or terrifying (what might have he told the cops in order to avoid arrest?) or patently good (no sense in two innocent kids being thrown in jail?) or baldly unfair (if one innocent kid had to be thrown in jail, why the hell wasn’t it this asshole instead of their daughter?). Andrew needed the answers to these questions, and he needed them as soon as possible, and he was going to go find Sebastien LeCompte and get them.

  Andrew did not plan on mentioning any of this to Peter Sulzicki, the lawyer—although, to be technical, the only people he had specifically prohibited Andrew from contacting were the Kellerses. On this point, Peter Sulzicki had been emphatic. This was painful for Andrew, because he understood what the Kellerses were going through; he knew that losing a child was the single worst experience that life had to offer. Andrew did not know, of course, which way was harder—whether it was worse to lose a child when she was far away and you were sleeping, or when you were cupping her tiny head and feeling her delicate pulse go quiet. Not that Andrew had ever given up on working through the hierarchies of pain, teasing out the taxonomies of grief; he scorned people who were untouched by death, and he loathed people who shared experiences about their dying parents when he spoke of Janie (Who cares? he wanted to shout. This is the way of things!). The only people he truly respected were the ones whose pain was objectively, empirically, worse than his. There was a man in Connecticut, for example, who’d lost his entire family—wife and two daughters—in a home invasion. They were raped and set on fire. Andrew felt sorry for this man.

  And the Kellerses: Despite the details, their loss was, fundamentally, his. It pained him not to send a card, at the very least. And not reaching out to them would be even harder on Maureen, he knew; she had always been very into sending sympathy cards. It’s the ritual, she was always saying, swirling her cursive into a note destined for some barely known neighbor or long-forgotten aunt. It’s the acknowledgment. Love is expressed through pragmatism. It may be just a card, but it’s also the objective correlative of their loss.

  The objective correlative? Andrew would say. Maureen taught high school English. I thought we said not to take work home.

  The phone rang and Andrew put the computer on the floor. “Hey,” he said.

  “You made it,” sa
id Maureen.

  “So it would seem.”

  “How’s Anna?”

  “Running.”

  “Outside?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.”

  Talking to Maureen tended to lift Andrew’s spirits—this was not the typical experience of men speaking to their ex-wives, he realized, but then theirs had not been a typical divorce. In a way, Andrew often thought, the divorce had actually been deeply optimistic. Right after Janie died, all they’d cared about was stanching the hemorrhaging hole in the center of their lives; romantic love, or any of its shadowy iterations, was no longer a concern. So the fact that they realized, almost a decade on, that they weren’t dead to the world, that their sexual selves still existed, that the notion of an adult relationship that wasn’t irredeemably destroyed actually held appeal for both of them—well, this was a sign of progress, in a way. It was probably the most hopeful thing they’d done since having Lily; it gestured toward the idea that things could be better for them both. Though it was true that nobody else saw it that way, and that all of their mutual friends tended to treat Andrew like Oedipus with his eyes clawed out—his situation no less distressing just because fate had ordained it.

  “So,” said Maureen. “I have some not great news.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Andrew. Maureen was notoriously understated.

  “It looks like they were maybe sleeping with the same man.” Maureen inhaled; it sounded like she was breathing through her teeth. “And that maybe they had a fight about it.”

  “What?” Andrew stood up. “Who? That Sebastien character?”

  “It seems so.”

  Andrew walked into the bathroom and turned on the light. In the mirror, he looked abominable—flyaway hair, leaking red eyes. Coffee on his collar, though he couldn’t remember when he’d last had any. It seemed to Andrew that his eyes were sinking into his face; receding, somehow, like his hairline. Was this normal? His eye sockets were twin apses now, overshadowed by the dome of his forehead. “And they fought about it?” he said.

  Maureen coughed. “Yes,” she said. “Or anyway, they fought about something.”

  “How did they, ah, establish this?”

  “The fight? They’ve got half a dozen witnesses. It happened at that bar she worked at.”

  “And the other thing?”

  “Emails.”

  “Of course.” Andrew’s eyeball was throbbing. He took a tissue and dabbed at it. He didn’t know why his eyes were seeping quite so much; maybe he was having an allergic response to some South American tree, the relentless fecundity of this awful city. He wasn’t crying. Like his daughters, he was not a crier. “Was there anyone else?”

  “Down there, you mean?”

  “Yes. Or, I mean, at home, too. How many total, do you think?”

  “You’re asking me how many men did our daughter sleep with?”

  “Trust me. It will be relevant.”

  “Andrew. I don’t know.”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “I really do not know. You know how Lily is. I mean, there was this guy, obviously.”

  “Yes.” Andrew approached the mirror and put his eye right up against it. Up close his eye was comical and a bit spooky, with cirrus strands of bloodshot threading out from the pupil. He could see no clear evidence of damage. He could not believe that something invisible could hurt so much.

  “And the economist from Middlebury, of course.”

  “The economist?”

  “Andrew. You met him.”

  “Did I?” Andrew turned on the faucet and ran his hands under the water. He splashed his face. He slapped himself on the cheeks, lightly.

  “They dated for months. We had lunch at the Impudent Oyster. What are you doing over there?”

  “The Impotent Oyster? What a name for a restaurant.”

  “Impudent. Andrew. Don’t you remember? It was tremendously awkward for all of us.”

  A vague, repressed memory came to Andrew. Maureen had insisted on arguing with no one about IMF loans to Peru; she had jabbed her fork in the air to make a point. What lifetime was this, when they had all met prospective suitors together for lunch? When the biggest challenge was presenting a sufficiently united front? “Okay,” said Andrew. “Okay. So that’s two. And anyone else?”

  Andrew could hear Maureen thinking for a moment. “I imagine there were a few others,” she said finally.

  “I see.”

  “I mean, nothing outrageous, I’m sure.”

  “What’s outrageous?”

  “I just mean, she’s, you know. She’s of her generation. They have different ideas about sex.”

  “I thought our generation invented all the different ideas about sex,” said Andrew. He didn’t know if he really thought this, but it sounded like the kind of thing he might once have thought.

  “Well, sure,” said Maureen. “I just mean, you know. The girls now are like the boys. They sleep around. They expect not to be judged. I’m not saying I think it’s the right thing for her. I’m just saying it’s normal now.”

  “Right.” Andrew flipped off the bathroom light.

  “Not that the norm is what matters. I mean she could sleep with a hundred guys and it doesn’t mean she did this, right?”

  “Right.” Andrew walked to the bedroom and drew the curtains. He sat heavily on the bed.

  “Not that she slept with a hundred guys.”

  “What—fifty?”

  “Andrew!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what’s absurd.”

  “No. No. Of course not, no. Like, ten maybe. Like ten would be a very, very liberal estimate.”

  “I see.” Andrew sighed. “Didn’t you ever talk to her about this stuff?”

  “About sex? What do you mean? We both did.”

  “Well, I mean. About, I don’t know. About not having quite so much of it.”

  There was a dark pause. “Would you have talked to a son about that?”

  “No,” said Andrew reasonably. “Realistically, no. But then it matters more for her, doesn’t it? It doesn’t help our case.”

  “Well, yeah, her entire personality doesn’t help our case. It doesn’t mean I wish she didn’t have one.”

  Andrew closed his eyes. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t see it, the wound: why it didn’t appear against the backdrop of his swollen eyelid, lightning shaped, blood colored. “I really cannot believe this,” he said. He kept his eyes closed, afraid that if he opened them, he’d somehow see Maureen’s face. “Can you?”

  “Yes, actually,” said Maureen. All of a sudden, she sounded old. “You know, I’m not sure anything could ever really surprise me again.”

  Andrew spent the first full day in Buenos Aires learning that he could not see Lily until Thursday. On this, everyone—the police, the lawyer, the Internet—was firm. He could not see her until Thursday, and there was nothing to be done, even when Andrew snarled at the diplomatic representative from the U.S. embassy over the phone.

  “I need to see her today,” he said. He felt that if he spoke very slowly and clearly, this would be believed. He understood faintly that this was making him sound nearly sarcastic, but he did not care. Anna was taking a shower. She had spent the first twenty-four hours in Argentina showering, or running, or stretching mutely before that car-sized television, her face bruise colored and alien in its light. Andrew was trying to have all the worst phone conversations while she was gone.

  “I do understand, sir,” said the woman on the phone. She was professionally trained not to hear hostility. She also sounded about fourteen—Andrew pictured braces, he pictured a unicorn sweatshirt—and yet it was she, not Andrew, who had already visited Lily and was likely to visit her once more within the week. “But there’s nothing I can do.”

  “You personally, maybe. Sure. Maybe there’s nothing you personally can do.” Andrew was picturing an internationa
l embargo, a land invasion. He was picturing a coup d’état.

  “There is nothing more that the embassy can do, at this juncture,” said the woman. She was professionally trained to be firm. In theory, she was saying, the embassy was supposed to have been notified when Lily was detained, but in practice they often weren’t notified until the detainee was transferred to a prison. In this case, they’d been notified when Mr. Hayes’s wife—his ex-wife? excuse me, ex-wife—had called, the moment their offices opened, the morning after Lily’s arrest. The woman assured Andrew that nothing had been lost in this delay. Andrew thought he could detect a slight lisp in her speech, something a little messy around the sibilants; she had a voice, at any rate, that was altogether too sweetly girlish to be relaying such information. Lily was still in the police holding cell, the woman was explaining. The protocol was to move a detainee after forty-eight hours, but in practice detainees often stayed in the holding cells for months. The prisons were sometimes too crowded for a timely transfer, as was now the case.

  “How does she seem?” Andrew said.

  “She’s well.” The woman sounded careful. “Quite well.”

  Instead of yelling that “well” was a fucking relative term, Andrew let the woman explain to him that it usually took six to fourteen months for a trial to be arranged. Andrew had had this number quoted at him before, but he knew from Janie that getting mired in statistics, in averages, was the fastest way to despair. He also knew that there were plenty of slower ways.

  “She’s seen a lawyer?” said Andrew.