“Lily and I spent the night here. As I have frequently said.”
“And what did you do?”
“We watched a movie.”
“What movie?”
“Are there no limits to your sadism? You people are really going to make me admit to this again?”
“What movie?”
“Lost in Translation. We watched Lost in Translation. If I’d known you were going to be locking her up the next day, if I’d known I would have to tell so many strangers about it, I would have been sure it was something more obscure.”
“And you fell asleep when?”
“Probably around four.”
“And you woke up when?”
“Around eleven.”
“And Lily was with you the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes.”
“Might she not have stepped out while you were asleep?”
“Not possible.”
“How do you know?”
“We sleep tangled in each other’s arms. Shared lucid dreams, sex every hour on the hour. Truly a cosmic connection we have.”
“I see.” Eduardo made another note, his pen scratching dryly. “And, given that connection, how do you imagine Lily felt about your liaison with Katy Kellers?”
Sebastien made a guttural sound, the dregs of what was probably supposed to be a disbelieving laugh. “Liaison?” he said. “Is that what they’re calling such things these days?”
Eduardo gritted his teeth but was careful to keep his lips slack. “Something shorter? A onetime incident, perhaps?”
“I suppose you’d call it a zero-time incident, if you’re really interested in crunching the numbers.” Sebastien’s voice now was something well beyond flat—it was polished, it was Simonized.
“You are saying you did not sleep with Katy Kellers?” said Eduardo.
“Goodness, you’re tedious.”
“Not once? That’s your statement?”
“Not once. Never. I am fairly sure I’d remember.”
“That’s not what Lily Hayes reported.”
“On this, and on this alone, I fear Lily Hayes is mistaken.”
Eduardo’s headache was moving from the flanks of his head into its center; it was burrowing down, settling into itself, getting ready for the long haul. Eduardo would not let it bleed onto his face. “You don’t have to lie to me,” he said, because of the headache. It was his first misstep.
Sebastien scoffed. “If I had anything to lie about, I would absolutely have to lie to you,” he said. “But as it happens, I don’t. And I did not have any kind of conjugal relations with the deceased. And I’m frankly appalled you’d even ask such a vulgar question.”
Eduardo pressed on. “Lily and Katy,” he said, “were seen having a fight at Fuego on the night of Lily’s birthday.”
At this, there was some little sub-physical twitch in Sebastien’s face, some kind of barely suppressed psychomotor agitation. Eduardo stared at Sebastien long enough to let him know he had seen it. He never commented on changes in facial expression during interviews—if he did, it would become clear to the interviewee how ephemeral such things were, how easy it was to dispute another person’s perception, how quickly two people’s interpretations of an event became equal and opposing forces and canceled each other out. Leaving facial clues obviously registered and pointedly unremarked upon made people feel that they had revealed something significant but as yet unutilized. This threw them off and edged them closer to actually saying something valuable, which, of course, was all that could ever actually matter.
“You’re telling me that it wasn’t you they were fighting about?” said Eduardo.
“I assure you it was not,” said Sebastien, recovering mastery over his face.
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. What do women fight about? Bra size? Sexual dominance? Competing predictions about the likely consequences of Mercosur’s limits on trade restrictions? I don’t know.”
“Tell me what you heard of it. Maybe the two of us can piece it together.”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“You weren’t at Fuego that night?”
“No.”
“You are telling me that you did not attend your own girlfriend’s birthday party?”
“As it happens, no.”
“We can check that, you know.”
“Modern police work is becoming so terrifyingly good.”
“Why did you stay away? Because it didn’t seem like a good idea to have to deal with Lily and Katy in the same room?”
Sebastien LeCompte raised his head. “I stayed away because I was not invited.” His voice had to be some new category of deadpan; it was his singular invention in this life, his sole contribution to this world.
“It doesn’t do you any good to lie to me about these sorts of things,” said Eduardo. This was actually true. The little lies could not possibly help.
“I marvel at your continued insistence on this point.”
“Why wouldn’t Lily Hayes—your girlfriend, the girl you were sleeping with—have invited you to her birthday party?”
“I think that’s probably a better question for Lily. Do let me know what you hear.” There was a fibrousness in Sebastien’s voice now, and Eduardo suddenly understood that he was not lying about this—and, though it might not be the only true thing he had said so far, it was the only true thing that actually meant anything to him. As such, it was a detail that would now need to be energetically pursued.
“That’s a pretty aggressive thing to do, wouldn’t you say?” said Eduardo. “To not invite your own boyfriend to your birthday?”
“Well, I might not say aggressive. It was certainly very emancipated of her. These twenty-first-century women, right?”
Eduardo knew by now that there was no tonal variation between sincerity and irony when Sebastien LeCompte talked, and he could tell that this strange speech characteristic—this sort of semantic monotone—was deep and ubiquitous and actually authentic to him, though, of course, perhaps somewhat amplified by the context of the interview. The implication of this was that even if Sebastien LeCompte was rarely serious, he was not absolutely always joking. Eduardo decided to try something new.
He leaned forward, then pulled back and shook his head a little and leaned forward again. “You know,” said Eduardo, making his voice sound confiding, conspiratorial, as though he were an actor who was tired of being in the same bad play as Sebastien and it wouldn’t hurt if they took a cigarette break backstage for a moment. “My wife is rather erratic, too.”
Sebastien’s eyebrows rose in studied amusement, but he said nothing.
“She gets angry at me every other day, and to be honest? I have no fucking clue what it’s about half the time. I truly do not. It’s a giant guessing game. Did you find that with Lily sometimes? No, it’s okay, you don’t have to answer that. Of course you did.” Eduardo almost added something like We’ve all seen her Facebook posts, after all, but he decided against it. Alluding to some widely known fact about Lily here might not be a bad idea—it might actually induce Sebastien to chuckle ruefully, naughtily—but referencing material that had been acquired in the course of the investigation could only snap Sebastien back away from Eduardo. If he’d bent to him at all already. Which, it was quite possible, he had not.
“But you know, Sebastien, the thing is, when my wife is angry with me and I have no fucking clue why and I have to guess—the thing is, sometimes I do actually guess right. If I really, really think about it. Maybe only a quarter of the time, but still, that’s not statistically insignificant, you know? So tell me. If you had to hazard a guess, why do you think Lily might have been angry with you that night?”
Still, Sebastien said nothing; his face was so blank that it did not even look like a blankness that was orchestrated to conceal. Eduardo would not have thought it was, if he hadn’t known better.
�
��And, of course, Lily was angry with you and Katy both,” said Eduardo. “We know that much. So that’s probably a clue. What might have made Lily angry with you and Katy at the same time?”
Still, on Sebastien’s face, an expression of total noninvolvement. It was not blatantly evasive—he did not look down, he did not look away, he did not fidget or blink too much or touch his hair. He sat with his hands curled lightly at his lap; his pose was one of total calm and attention and patience, as though he were the one awaiting the answers, not the other way around. He was pretty good at this, Eduardo thought. Maybe he should have gone into the family business.
“Well,” said Eduardo, standing up and handing Sebastien his card. “Think about it. Don’t worry. Sometimes it takes me a while to get it, too. But do get back to me with whatever you come up with.”
And at this, Sebastien—finally rousing from his fugue state and showing Eduardo to the door—responded that he assuredly, enthusiastically would.
Andrew and Maureen stood drinking on the hotel balcony and did not speak. A floor above them, in Andrew’s room, Anna was sleeping. Three miles away from them, in jail, Lily was waiting. Andrew and Maureen were sipping mini-bottles of vodka straight, letting the alcohol macerate their mouths. Across the street was an office building, dark except for a single room that glowed like an illuminated postage stamp. Above it, the stars were opalescent pinpricks, looking so cold and distant that Andrew couldn’t quite believe they were fire. It was not right that he could stand here and see these things when Lily could not. Once, years ago, while flying over the North Atlantic, Andrew had spotted an eerie pale dot in the black ocean below him. It had reminded him of that famous picture of the earth from space—tiny and luminous, like a glowing pearl in the void—which everyone had thought, for about thirty seconds, might bring world peace. Squinting at the dot, Andrew had thought it was an iceberg, or the reflection of the moon on a whale, or some heretofore undiscovered Arctic bioluminescence. Or maybe, he’d thought, just maybe, it was something else. Andrew was surprised at how ready he was to believe it might be something else—how ready he was, also, to keep quiet about it, to make it a secret between him and the universe. He’d been almost all the way to England before he realized it was only the reflection of the airplane.
The rest of the interview with the lawyers that afternoon had been repetitive and interminable. Andrew had tried to take notes but had eventually fallen into a fretful underlining of the notes he’d already taken. After the revelation of Lily’s drug purchase from Ignacio Toledo, nothing new was revealed; she’d stuck faithfully and reassuringly to her story about the day of the crime, and in its repeated tellings the narrative seemed to move from the specific to the archetypal—like a Bible verse or a Beatles song, it became too familiar to actually hear. Lily told the story so many times that Andrew nearly felt he was watching it unfold before him: He could almost see the ghostly shadow of stoned Sebastien LeCompte, he could almost hear the coppery yelping of the game shows that Lily had watched while Katy’s undiscovered body—good God—lay a floor below her in the basement.
By the time the lawyers finally left, Andrew and Maureen’s visit was over. Maureen had tried to persuade Lily to eat the rest of her sandwich, but she did not; they’d left it on a crusty pile on the table, even though Lily said that the guards would probably make her throw it away. Then they’d both kissed her on the cheek, and she’d clung to Maureen for longer than the security guards had liked, and then it was time—again—for them to leave her.
“Come on,” said Maureen, tugging on Andrew’s wrist. “Let’s go inside.”
Andrew followed her into the room, vodka between his forefinger and thumb, and shoved aside a pile of newspaper clippings so that he could sit on the bed. In the corner of one of the articles, he could see the edge of that awful picture of Lily from her own camera, standing in front of the church with the immodest décolletage and the too-bright smile. Andrew turned the newspaper over, and Maureen joined him on the bed. She smelled like moss and cedar and some new late-in-life perfume. She smelled mostly like a stranger.
Maureen sighed. “I can’t believe she lied about the drugs.”
“Well, she didn’t lie, I don’t think,” said Andrew. “Not really. She just didn’t volunteer that information.”
“She should have known better.”
“She’s scared. She’s with lawyers. She doesn’t know what to say.” Andrew ran his hand through his hair. “Anyway, it was just a little dope.”
“Just a little dope? Down here? Jesus Christ. Just a little dope would have been a big enough problem, even if she hadn’t happened to manage to buy it from a murderer.” Maureen sighed again and shook her head. “God. You know, I can’t even really let myself think about it, but it could have been her. It so, so easily could have been her, instead of Katy.”
“I know,” said Andrew. It was true. It could have been her. It had been her once. It had been Janie.
Maureen traced her pinkie along the rim of her vodka, then put it in her mouth. “Do you think I was unreasonable about her hair?”
“You weren’t wrong.”
“But do you think I was unreasonable?”
Andrew flashed again to that photo—the forbidding sobriety of the church, Lily’s bosom spilling out of that ridiculous tank top, which had probably cost her less than the equivalent of three U.S. dollars somewhere. Could she not afford a shirt containing enough fabric to actually cover herself? They would have bought her one! Didn’t she know that? Is that all it would have taken? Andrew shook his head. “It just might have been a little late, you know?”
“What do you mean?” Maureen’s voice was vinegary.
“I just mean,” Andrew said slowly. “It seems like there are things we should have talked to her about. In terms of how she presents herself. Probably a while ago.”
“Me, you mean.” Maureen was chewing audibly on her nail. The physiology of her anxiety was like a childhood language Andrew hadn’t known he still remembered until now.
“Us, I mean.”
Andrew did not know if this was really what they had done wrong—but clearly, they had done something wrong. And really, how could they not have? They had just been trying to keep it together, and Andrew was still proud of them—he would never stop being proud of them—for having managed as long as they had; in situations like theirs, it was usual to divorce much earlier. Right after Janie had died, of course, there’d been a moment when they’d teetered. Maureen’s mother had come to stay; she was rigid and humorless even under the best of circumstances, her face flat and white as a Japanese empress’s. The three of them moved through those days with the insensate numbness of creatures of the very deep sea: They were little translucent crabs scrabbling along near the volcanic vents, they were blind and mute and looming dumbo octopi. Maureen walked around with an expression of enduring, ferocious blankness, and Andrew had known she would not have noticed then if he’d let her drift away, or if he’d drifted away himself: into the geriatric Peace Corps, perhaps (they had a branch, he knew, for sufferers of late-onset idealism), or the arms of a younger, undestroyed woman. It was nearly unbelievable to Andrew now that they’d even bothered to bathe and dress, let alone hang on to their marriage for a time. He could see how an outsider might think they’d been saints, though, of course, that wasn’t true at all—they had, in fact, been utterly devoid of compassion for anyone besides Janie and each other (and, for a brief time right before the death, only Janie; and, for a brief time afterward, only themselves). Janie’s death was the monstrous planet around which everything else orbited. Even the other children at the hospital lived and died merely in relation to Janie; viewed in one light, the death of another child could seem like a harbinger of Janie’s departure, the hideous reality that made the more hideous potentiality more real; viewed in another, it could feel like dodging a bullet (and, as Churchill had said, there’s nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result). And if only a certain percenta
ge of children with X were doomed, and if child Y died, would that mean it was statistically more or less likely for Janie to die, too? Andrew and Maureen would actually talk about this. Maureen would point out that they were conflating probability with odds. Neither of them would point out that in the narcissism of their grief they had forgotten the other child, forgotten the other family—who were somewhere weeping, picking out a tiny gold-limned coffin. There was no other family, there were no other children. There was only Janie and Maureen and Andrew, at sea on a little boat, and all the continents of the world submerged.
How did they love each other again after that? How did they even look at each other? But they did, somehow they did, and there were the years of Lily and Anna: chubby hands, dandelion-down hair, adorable little pets—a tuxedo kitten who eventually grew to a murderous twenty pounds, a precious lop-eared dwarf bunny who transformed into a sexual predator overnight—and life had been livable, at least until the girls went to school. But once they did, the show was over: The stage lights dimmed, the orchestra was dismantled; the audience, drunk on their own lives, disappeared into the night. And Maureen and Andrew found themselves staring at each other, alone together at last.
Andrew nearly wanted to say some of these things to Maureen, but he looked down and found her in a shallow and hard-earned sleep. He rose, careful not to crinkle the newspapers, and turned out the light.
Andrew rode the elevator up one floor, then stood for a moment in the harsh yellow light of the soda dispenser, listening to the snorkeling of the ice machine, before walking back to his room. He dipped his key and watched the console flash green and opened the door.
Anna was not in the room.
She was not in the closet, not in either bedroom, not in the bathroom. Not, when Andrew went downstairs to check, at the gym. She had not been seen by the hotel concierge. Andrew headed back toward his room to put on his sneakers. He was not about to rouse Maureen from sleep to confess that he’d lost another daughter.
This time when he opened the door, Anna was sitting in the corner on the floor, long legs folded up around her as though she were a piece of obsolete video equipment. Andrew wavered in the doorway. “Where were you?” he said.
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