“And then she took that awful job at the club, meeting God knows what sorts of people. She started coming back even later. I’d lie awake waiting to hear her come in. I was so afraid of having to call her parents and say that something had happened to her. Funny, I never worried about anything happening to Katy.” A little fork of wrinkles appeared on Beatriz’s chin. “And then she got fired from her job and lied about it.”
“She did?”
Beatriz nodded and bit her lip. The fork on her chin deepened.
“Do you know why she was fired?” said Eduardo.
“No, but I also can’t imagine why they hired her in the first place. She could barely find the kitchen sink at our house.”
“That’s very helpful,” said Eduardo, making a note on his pad. “Was there anything else?”
Beatriz covered her mouth and nodded.
“What happened?” said Eduardo. Between them, the air felt heavy, salt rimmed; Eduardo could smell the cilantro edge of her sweat, the tang of an insistent perfume. He should not be attracted to her, of course, given his role and hers. What was troubling was that he actually wasn’t.
“She—laughed—at my husband’s depression,” said Beatriz finally.
“She laughed at it?” Eduardo did not blink. His own depression was a thing with claws and teeth and eyes, its own set of tics and preoccupations and prejudices, its own entire integrated personality. The trick to not killing yourself was to convince yourself, every single day, that your departure from the world would have a devastating effect on absolutely everyone around you, despite consistent evidence to the contrary.
“Yes. She’d seen my husband in a state of extreme—depression—” Beatriz looked at her lap. “He was drunk, I mean. And when I spoke to Lily about it, she laughed.”
Eduardo nodded again. “Nervously, perhaps?”
“That was another thing about her. She was never nervous. She was oddly flat. Her—what?”
“Her affect?”
“Right. Her affect was flat.”
Eduardo leaned forward. “This next question I’m going to ask you is not the most important question,” he said. “Even though I’m asking it last.”
“Okay.”
“Did you ever think she could do something like this?”
Beatriz frowned. “Well, no,” she said finally. “I have to say no. I didn’t.”
“Thank you, Señora,” said Eduardo. “This has been very helpful.”
Beatriz looked up, and Eduardo saw that she was tearful. “Should we move?” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“How long are the police going to need the house?”
Eduardo poured her another glass of water. “You’d want to ask the police about that. Quite a while, I should think.”
“People drive by and honk at all hours of the night. It’s awful. I don’t know how we’re going to live there again.”
“Maybe you can’t.”
“But we’ll never be able to sell it.”
Eduardo pressed his thumb against his glass. “This case is probably going to get quite a bit of attention, you know,” he said. “If Lily Hayes is formally charged. That will help with the sale.”
Beatriz gaped. “You mean, you think someone is going to want to buy the house because of what happened?”
Eduardo looked at her wearily. “I have seen it happen before, Señora.”
Beatriz shook her head. Behind her, the light coming through the window was hemorrhagic. The little gold cross on her chest winked in the sun. “I can’t imagine anyone would be horrible enough to do that,” she said.
And Eduardo told her that, in his professional experience, there was someone horrible enough to do almost anything.
On Friday, the police brought in Lily Hayes’s camera. And finally, Eduardo was sure.
Everything he really needed to know was in the pictures. In the pictures, the ease with which Lily Hayes floated through the universe was ruinously apparent; there simply was not a frisson of friction between her desires and their arrival. Arise, world! she seemed to say. Part, seas! Reveal yourself, Buenos Aires, and let me take your picture! On the camera was a picture of a woman with a blood-colored lesion on her face, clearly taken on the sly. There was a picture of a tiny pantsless boy. There was a picture of Lily Hayes herself, giving an exaggerated thumbs-up as she points to her bug bites. Here, Eduardo saw, was a person without humility. And Eduardo believed that humility, more than anything, was the basis for morality. Goodness begins when the Buberian I/it shifts to the ethically accountable I/thou; it begins with the belief that you do not have a monopoly on consciousness—that you are not, in fact, the only person who exists. And here is Lily Hayes, standing in front of the Basílica Nuestra Señora de Luján, her prodigious bosom spilling out over a too-tight tank top. She is nearly aglow with the light of her narcissism. Does she notice that all the other women are modestly dressed, that their heads are covered? She either does not notice, or she does not care. A person who does not notice is silly. A person who does not care is dangerous. And when Eduardo looked at Lily Hayes’s photos, he could see which kind of person she was. For whatever other qualities she had, Lily Hayes was not unobservant. She noticed everything; the pictures attested to this. Here she is noticing the wings of a dragonfly, and here she is noticing the dew on a guava fruit, and here she is noticing the hilarious discrepancy between an enormous sign advertising COMIDA VEGETARIANA alongside the butchered hide of some unfortunate ungulate, glistening in the sun. What Lily Hayes noticed was gratingly predictable, perhaps, but she did notice. So Eduardo had to conclude—tentatively, of course—that what she didn’t do was care.
That afternoon, Eduardo submitted his request to schedule the hearing before the instructor judge. He felt he had enough to say.
CHAPTER THREE
January
Lily had lately come to two conclusions: one, we will all be dead one day; and two, we are not dead yet.
It was possible she had always known the first thing. In Lily’s family, the winter—all winter, every winter, even these twenty-four years later—was hallowed, depressive ground, everyone tiptoeing around the memory of Janie, the daughter who had died in the winter two years before Lily was born. In the photo on the mantel, Janie was square jawed and sensible faced, like Lily and Anna; you could tell she would have grown up passably pretty if she’d ever learned not to look so severe. But in the picture Janie is only two years old, and riding a rocking horse is taking all of her attention, and anyway she will be dead in a year so you can’t blame the kid for not having a sense of humor. Lily had looked at that picture countless times, and more than wishing that Janie had lived—though she wished that, too, of course she wished that—she wished that Janie had been a boy, or that she herself had been a boy, because losing that first daughter had really ruined her parents for daughters.
Lily’s childhood had been, accordingly, criminally tedious: all happiness scrupulously prescreened, all sorrow decidedly offstage. She and Anna had coasted along, passively reactive to the most benign of benign stimuli—roller-skating parties, two trips to Disney World, craft projects at their school (which was a public school but was in a terrific neighborhood and thus tremendously well resourced). Visits to Janie’s grave were firmly linked to holidays, primarily oriented around all of the objects involved (the selection of flowers, the placement of balloons, the clearing away of dead grass), and always felt about as scripted and dispassionate as a congressional filibuster. Perhaps not coincidentally, Andrew and Maureen’s divorce, when it finally came, achieved what must have been a level of truly world-record-shattering tepidness: After years of existing in a collective state of medicated and vacant life-tolerance, they merely drifted off into separate ethers, and that was that. They were, essentially, zombies. Both Anna and Lily agreed on this—though Anna tended to think their zombie state was forgivable and understandable and Lily tended to think that life was short and that, yes, a terrible thing had happened, but
that terrible thing had happened long, long ago and one day everyone would be dead and nobody would get any extra points for having hated life so much. Because Andrew and Maureen did hate life, really: They were just always very polite to it.
So yes, Lily was familiar with the concept of mortality. What was newer, maybe, was this acute sense of awareness, of aliveness, of gratitude. It was Argentina that had given it to her. The feeling had started on the airplane, when the rust-colored light wheeled through the windows, illuminating the blond hairs on the arm of the flight attendant as she poured the wine, and Lily felt her life beginning to open. She’d grinned idiotically right through losing money at a criminal exchange rate at EZE, right through a startlingly pungent Subte ride, and right through the first day and a half with the host family, the Carrizos. The Carrizos were perfect: Carlos was in real estate and Beatriz stayed at home, though she dressed well and always seemed busy, and they were both charming and, crucially, gently incurious about Lily’s whereabouts. They understood English, but Beatriz pretended not to, so Lily got to practice her Spanish whenever they spoke, which she loved. She loved, as it happened, almost everything. She loved her room, which was small and sunny, even though it was in the basement, and had a bunk bed with bright green sheets. She loved the huge, sagging house next door, which just had to be haunted. She loved the chorizo sandwich—with its smoky-tasting egg and salty, seeping cheese—that you could buy and eat on the street. She loved her academic schedule—a Wednesday morning political philosophy seminar, a creative writing independent study project, and a midday Spanish-language class that was widely viewed as optional. And most of all, maybe, she loved how close the Carrizos lived to Avenida Cabildo, where you could catch a bus to anywhere in the city. Already, Lily could feel herself expanding to fill the new space the world had afforded her; already, Middlebury was turning back into the collection of catalog snapshots it once had been—explosively autumnal trees, international relations textbooks, laughing groups of friends of improbable and, as it turned out, wholly unrepresentative racial compositions. Everything about Lily’s life there—Harold the economist, and those awful Hawaiian parties thrown by the coed social houses, and the hissing of the radiator in her formal logic class, and her articulate, bespectacled women’s studies classmates, doomed to eternally debate gender versus equity feminism—began to seem less real. All of that was the detritus of a shallow, conscripted life; all of that had merely been preparation for this: getting off a plane in a new country, in a new hemisphere, and emerging from the chrysalis of academia to fly off into the bald, stunning sky of reality. For a day and a half, Lily was thrilled. For a day and a half, Lily was free. And then Katy arrived.
Katy was Katy Kellers, the roommate. The informational email Lily had received from the program in December had revealed only that Katy attended UCLA and studied international finance, and this second fact, in particular, had left Lily unprepared for how distressingly beautiful Katy would be. Katy Kellers, it turned out, had dusky blond hair and preposterously even teeth and eyes that seemed somehow more dimensional than was normal. The day she arrived she wore a tight-fitting brown turtleneck—the kind of thing that could only flatter someone who ran very long distances recreationally (Lily had gone shopping with Anna often enough to know)—and, even after fourteen hours on a plane, did not appear to be the slightest bit tired.
“You’re Katy?” said Lily, holding out her hand.
Katy’s hand felt exactly like it looked. “And you’re Lily,” she said, and smiled. Those teeth! Lily was going to have a hard time getting over those teeth. Lily’s own mangled teeth had been hammered into relative normalcy by a series of truly gruesome procedures during high school (this was why she’d experimented sexually so much early in college, she’d explained to Anna once—because her teeth had been so bad for so long that her self-esteem had taken a while to iron itself out). Lily’s teeth were fine now, but not like Katy’s. Katy’s teeth were like the Platonic ideal of teeth.
Katy bent to unzip her suitcase and began rifling through a polychrome array of sweaters. The most feminine muscles Lily had ever seen toggled in her arms.
“So,” said Lily, climbing to the top of the bunk bed. “What brings you here?”
“Here?”
Lily swung her legs out over the side. “To Buenos Aires.”
Katy shrugged. “I wanted to go to Barcelona—actually, I was supposed to go with my boyfriend, we were supposed to go together, but then—”
“You broke up?”
Katy bit her lip—actually bit her lip! “We broke up, right, and so I decided to go somewhere else.”
“And by then all the other programs were full.”
“Well,” said Katy. “Not exactly. I could have gone to Senegal.”
“Oh,” said Lily.
Katy brushed her bangs with her fingers, even though they didn’t really need brushing.
“Yeah,” said Lily. “I mean, I think that’s why it’s hard to really commit to one person at our age. I was seeing a couple of people last semester, but nothing really serious, so I was sort of free to do whatever I wanted.”
Lily had made a philosophical decision during sophomore year to refer to her dates in gender-neutral pronouns as much as possible, in solidarity with the gay rights movement. As it happened, all of her sexual partners (four to eight, depending on how conventionally one was defining the act) had thus far been male, but she wasn’t narrow-minded. She’d always imagined she might kiss a girl before college was out. She knew it was cliché, but one couldn’t always avoid being cliché. She was twenty, she was a double major in philosophy and women’s studies, and this much she’d learned the hard way.
“Right,” said Katy vaguely.
“Well, one person, mostly,” said Lily. “His name was Harold. He studied economics. I can’t believe I dated someone named Harold. I had sexual intercourse with someone named Harold. He’s twenty-one years old, can you imagine?” Katy’s eyes were flattening, maybe, a little. She zipped her suitcase back up, even though she hadn’t finished unpacking. “What was your boyfriend’s name?” said Lily.
“Anton.”
“Anton, see?” Lily sat on the bed. “Now that’s a name.”
“I really loved him.” Katy breathed in quickly, and Lily was afraid, for a brief, harrowing moment, that she might cry. It was too soon, it was far too soon, for this conversation.
“Well, sure,” said Lily soothingly. She swung her feet back onto the bed and tucked them under herself. “Are you guys still friends?”
“No,” said Katy uncomprehendingly. “We’ll never be friends.”
“No?” This was a matter of some interest to Lily; when she and Harold had broken up, they had solemnly vowed to stay friends. And why wouldn’t they? They were both young and resilient and had had their hearts broken two or three times already. But soon he’d taken up with a new girl—an accounting major, please!—who’d forbidden him ever to speak to Lily again. This she found crushing; she had very much wanted to stay friends with him, partly because being friends with ex-lovers seemed sophisticated and mature and continental, and partly because it seemed humane, and partly because she harbored a catastrophic fear of losing touch with anyone. It reminded her of death, and she was too easily reminded of death already. Then again, she knew that she had a more acute sense of the passage of time in general—and the swiftness of life, in particular—because of her dead sister, or almost-sister, or whatever. So she’d learned to forgive people their shortsightedness, and be happy for them that they’d lived the kinds of lives that would allow it.
“He cheated on me at a substance-free house party,” said Katy.
“Oh geez.” Lily whistled. “That’s bad. You definitely want substances involved in infidelity.”
Katy looked stricken. “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “I’m not sure that really matters.”
Lily tried to backpedal. “No, of course,” she said. “But I mean, I don’t know. I don’t reall
y think monogamy is natural for people our age, do you?”
Katy scratched her nose. Somehow this, even this, looked delicate, preordained. “Well,” she said. “I think maybe you can decide it is.”
Overall, Lily knew, the roommate situation could have been a whole lot worse. Katy was neat and polite and she quickly acquired a collection of reasonable girl friends with flatironed hair—none of whom were as beautiful as she was, but all of whom seemed about as nice—and went out with them almost every afternoon. Still, Lily couldn’t shake a feeling of deflating uneasiness—a kind of awkwardness, but with harder edges—whenever she was around Katy. Lily spent hours after classes ended drinking wine in cafés and reading Borges in Spanish, circling all the words she didn’t know, and when she returned to the Carrizos’ house at night—unhinged and awestruck, rapturous over the scope and beauty of the world—she’d sit down at the dinner table and Katy would say something like, “Lily, you have wine on your teeth.” And that would be that.
Still, Lily loved Buenos Aires; she loved to think of the vast meat of the world—ocean and Amazon and rain forests and drug wars—that separated her from everyone she had ever known. She couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for all of them, now that she was so happy. In her psychology class at Middlebury, Lily had once been assigned to write about birth order in her family and how she felt that she did or did not conform to the postulated birth order personality types discussed in class. Lily had written about how she was technically the oldest, and in some ways she felt like the oldest—she was maybe more adventurous than Anna—but in other ways, she felt like the middle child, because she certainly was lost in the shuffle between the needy poles of Anna (the baby) and dead Janie (also, perpetually, the baby), but in other ways, absent Janie only reconfirmed Lily’s status as oldest, because no first-time parents could be as paranoid or restrictive or dictatorial as second-time parents who’d lost their first. And Lily, of course, had had to break them down, remind them that not all colds were terminal illnesses, and not all broken curfews were catastrophes, and not all boys were rapists—you’re welcome, Anna!—and eventually they’d come to some mutual uncomfortable agreement that they were willing to let Lily have something like a life, though they didn’t have to like it.
Cartwheel Page 7