Cartwheel (18 page)

“Where are your parents?” Andrew found himself saying.

“Well, that’s truly the question at the heart of all human endeavor, isn’t it?” said Sebastien gaily. “Where, indeed. You’re a great thinker of our time—you tell me.”

Andrew spent a moment in incomprehension, then felt a dull club of remorse. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“
Pas du tout
. Can I get you a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“I trust you don’t object if I indulge?”

Andrew waved his hand in a vague gesture of permission giving and Sebastien LeCompte bowed his way into the kitchen. Andrew went to examine the mantel more closely. Next to the clock, in an odd thematic parallel to the tapestry, was a photograph of Sebastien with a murdered beast of some kind. Whatever it was had been shot near the heart, its wound wreathed by a ring of poppy-red blood. In the photo, Sebastien was even younger than he was now; his father—identical to Sebastien, theatrically swathed in various beige garments with compartments and buttons and bolts—had his arm around his son.

“You’re sure?” said Sebastien, returning with a greenish glass of something that could only be absinthe. “I could even pop over to the corner store and get—what? Beer?”

Andrew shook his head.

“So,” said Sebastien, sitting on one of the mounds and motioning to Andrew to do the same. “What was it that you wanted to discuss?”

Andrew selected a mound of his own. “Well,” he said, tentatively descending. “I understand that you and Lily were—friends.”

Andrew watched Sebastien fleetingly consider, and then reject, a sarcastic response. Instead, he looked at the ceiling and seemed to actually ponder the question for several long moments. “Yes,” he said finally. “I think that we probably were.”

“And you also knew the, ah. The deceased roommate. Katy.”

“Briefly.”

Andrew felt a contraction in his throat. “I am hoping you might help me understand what all of this is about. Why this is happening. Why they imagine Lily did this thing. Because it is outrageous, objectively. As I’m sure you agree. Objectively outrageous and unbelievable.”

Sebastien stood and went to the mantel. He traced his finger along the photograph, making a curlicue in the dust, then regarded his finger distastefully and wiped it on his trousers. “Well, Lily didn’t very much care for Katy, as I’m sure you’ve been made aware,” he said flatly.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Andrew. He swallowed, trying to unclench
his throat. “They weren’t close, maybe, but I don’t think there was any particular hostility there.”

“I trust you’ve read the emails? Or hasn’t cable news reached America yet? Anyway, they were quite a spectacle down here.”

Suddenly, Andrew wanted to snap this kid’s skinny neck; suddenly, Andrew thought he understood homicidal rage. “I think ‘spectacle’ is probably overstating it,” he said. “And, anyway, that’s just how she talked. It’s how many people talk. Many, many people say uncivil things about their friends in emails, and they are not arrested for it, because it’s not actually illegal—not even here, in fact: I’ve checked. Whatever she wrote about Katy, she didn’t mean anything by it. If you really spent any time with her, you’d know that.”

Sebastien tilted his head to one side. “She did have a very particular idiolect, of course.”

“Okay, look,” said Andrew, standing up. He had had enough of this. His family needed him—again? or finally? either way—and he was not going to let this cartoonish Cheshire cat of a child stop him from helping them. “Listen. You are going to tell me some things.”

Sebastien stared, and Andrew wondered how long it had been since he had received direct instructions of any sort.

“Tell me about the night Katy died,” Andrew ordered. “Lily was with you.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve talked to the police about this?”

“Briefly.”

“Do they think you might be involved?”

“Probably.”

“Why haven’t they arrested you?”

“I was not actually involved.” Sebastien looked down, and Andrew charitably allowed himself to consider the possibility that he might actually feel sorry for what he’d just said. Perhaps as penance, Sebastien continued—his voice a bit lower, a bit less theatrical, than it had been before. “There’s nothing to tell you about that night. Truly. Lily was here. We talked and had some cocktails. We went to sleep around
two. She went back to the Carrizos’ in the morning. She came back over here after finding Katy. Then she called the police.”

It was strange to listen to the boy speak so frankly—recalling events comprehensibly, constructing a linear narrative. The sun shifted, and two strips of cadmium midafternoon light fell onto the floor and across Sebastien’s face, catching his freckles and making him look innocent and heartbreakingly young.

“The police came pretty quickly and cordoned off the house,” said Sebastien. “They arrested her the next morning. I don’t have anything else I can tell you. I’m sorry.” He looked at his hands for a moment and then said, very quickly, “Do you think I could see her?”

For a moment, Andrew had wanted very much to suspect this boy. It was as though the universe was shoving Sebastien at him—here was a man, involved with two women, living right next door to both of them—and what a gift it would have been to have such an obvious answer. But now Andrew was confronted with the reality that believing in Sebastien’s guilt would mean the beginning of believing in Lily’s. And that was unthinkable.

“I can’t imagine they’ll allow that,” Andrew said gently.

“Could I write her a letter?”

“Maybe.”

There was a silence. “I’m sorry,” Sebastien said finally, in that harsh, too-flat voice, and then he said it again. And then Andrew’s feeling flipped over again, and he wondered, with a judder of suspicion that made all other suspicions seem shallow, just what it was that Sebastien was so sorry for.

“For what?” said Andrew. He looked around the place—its garish loneliness, its ghoulish ornateness—and he looked again at Sebastien: that goofy hair, that unreasonable outfit, that too-young face that shifted from guile to guilelessness with the movement of the sun. Andrew did not know why Lily liked Sebastien LeCompte, but he had to accept that she did—perhaps she even loved him. And one explanation for all of this trouble was that Lily was protecting this boy, against all reason, out of some strange sense of martyrdom or infallibility or perhaps
something else altogether that Andrew might never begin to guess.

“What are you so sorry for?” said Andrew again meanly.

“I am sorry,” said Sebastien, “for your absolutely abominable luck.”

When Andrew returned to the hotel, Anna was staring listlessly out the window. The movie had ended and the screen had become a vivid aquarium blue, but she hadn’t turned it off.

“Whatcha up to, Old Sport?” said Andrew.

Anna stared at him dully, unsurprised, though she’d made no move when he entered the room. Andrew suddenly wanted to go to her and take her bony shoulders in his arms. He wanted to curl up around her body and whisper “Hush,” even though it was unlikely that Anna would ever require anyone to tell her to hush.

“Dad,” she said. Even the way she said “Dad” sounded to Andrew like a kind of grudging concession. “Is Lily going to be okay?”

Andrew sat down on the edge of the bed and patted Anna’s shoulder. “We are going to do everything we can for her.”

“Jesus.” Anna’s voice was astringent. She stood up. “ ‘We’re going to do everything we can for her’? You’re such an irredeemable pessimist.”

From the mouth of someone so young, the phrase “irredeemable pessimist” sounded rehearsed, obsessed over. Possibly, Andrew thought nervously, inherited. Or even worse, therapeutically processed. Andrew gave Anna what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

“I think she’s got as good a shot as we could hope for,” he said. Andrew had watched his child die. He was well beyond considerations of pessimism or optimism. But he did not want Anna to be, and he did not want her to have to understand. “I think the lawyers are terrific,” he said. “And, of course, she’s innocent. So we’ve got that going for us.”

A shiver went across Anna’s jaw. “Of course,” she said. Her eyes were like bolts. She hated that he’d said it, maybe because it was so obvious. But then, Andrew wasn’t above stating the obvious. He was the parent. More than anything, perhaps, that was his job.

“Once,” said Anna, “just once, could you tell me that everything is going to be okay?”

Andrew nodded. “I could. I could tell you that. And it might be. That’s certainly what we all are hoping and working for. But you’re an adult now. And this might be a very long haul. And I want you to be prepared for anything.”

“Do we? Do we eternally have to be prepared for anything?”

“It seems that we do, often enough.”

Anna turned and faced the window. The light caught her flyaway hair, and she looked frenzied and, Andrew thought, angelic. His daughter. His one daughter, living and free. “I’m sorry, Old Sport,” he said.

“I hate that you call me that, you know.”

“I—you what? I didn’t know that.”

“You wouldn’t have.”

“You really hate it? It makes me feel ironical and literary.”

“That is
exactly
why.”

Andrew felt stung in a nearly physical way. He thought inexplicably of those furry little creatures in Australia, the ones with the vestigial, frighteningly nonmammalian stingers. “You could have told me,” he said.

“Well, I just did.” Anna stomped over to her suitcase and produced a plastic bag. Platypuses, that was what those animals were. “I bought these things for Lily,” she said, pulling out soap, toilet paper, tampons. Shampoo with cursive writing on it. A razor.

“Where did you get all that stuff?” said Andrew. “Did you go out?”

“For Christ’s sake, Dad. No. I went to the little store in the lobby.”

“They’re not going to let her have the razor.”

“Okay,” said Anna, putting the razor back in the bag. “Fine. But we need to get her these other things. She needs them.”

“We can’t get back there until Thursday, sweetie.” Was he going to have to call her “sweetie” from now on? Surely that was worse.

“She needs them,” Anna said again.

“I know,” said Andrew. “But she’ll manage. She’s been managing
already.” He heard his own voice and realized he was angry. He wished he had gotten the things for Lily himself—even though it did not matter, not really. They could not see her until Thursday, anyway, and so it could not make a difference whether the things were purchased today or three days from now. And yet there was something galling about Anna having done it; Andrew imagined her walking into that lobby, flushed with exercise, meting out her foreign currency (saved from her various jobs, and then exchanged at a loss in the airport), and then selecting the best versions of whatever it was she thought Lily might need. All of this, all of this, was the job of a parent. In its unsentimental practicality it was, perhaps, the job of a father. It did not matter—of course it did not matter. And yet there was so little that could be done for Lily. Andrew couldn’t help but feel it was ungenerous of Anna to do it all herself.

“You don’t understand,” said Anna, and Andrew heard the strange timbre in her voice that used to mean tears. She coughed herself into a more serious register. “You don’t understand anything about it.”

About what? he wanted to ask. About not being able to get what you wanted? Even the narrow-minded narcissism of children should be able to accommodate enough generosity toward their parents for Anna to understand that this was not true—probably not in anyone’s case, and certainly not in his.

“We’ll get her the things she needs, Anna,” he said. The things you need and do not get and nevertheless manage to survive without—were those things ever really
needs
? If somebody’s need was vast, and eternally unmet, and nonfatal, had what seemed necessary really only been desirous? After Janie died, everyone was always asking Andrew if he was okay, and he never knew what to say. Because what, really, was on the other side of okay? When you stopped being okay, you were just okay in a worse and different way.

“We’ll get them to her just as soon as we can,” he said.

Anna nodded seriously.

“You were very good to think of them,” said Andrew. He hoped he sounded as tired as he felt.

“Well,” said Anna, and her voice was stronger, the voice of an adult or a pragmatist. “It was the least I could do.”

The next morning Maureen arrived.

Andrew had tracked her flight online in the hotel’s business center, calculating how long it would take her to find her luggage and hail a taxi and traverse the city’s allegedly Parisian boulevards. He waited until he thought she’d probably checked in to the hotel, then forced himself to wait ninety minutes more. Finally, he got in the elevator and rode down a floor—to room 408, which was, he figured, nearly directly below his own—and knocked on her door.

She appeared after a moment. “Hello, Maureen,” said Andrew. He wanted to tell her she looked great, though the tone seemed off, and, anyway, she didn’t. Her hair was messy—probably from sleeping thrashily on the plane—and under her eyes were two bluish pits of exhaustion. He tried to detect if she was thinner than usual; he couldn’t tell.

“Hello, dear,” said Maureen. She always called him something sweet and absolving and fond, and he always called her “Maureen.” Andrew wasn’t sure what this meant about who wanted or expected more from their postdivorce relationship, or who’d summoned greater depths of humanity or charity in their dealings, but he suspected that they’d both staked some kind of bet on their own way of doing things and he now felt fully committed to his own. They hugged with elaborate formality, which they always did, although Andrew never quite knew why. After everything they had been through together, they should slump against each other now like brothers, or puppies, or soldiers, or mental patients; the proximity of their bodies should be utterly meaningless. And yet a crisp distance had grown up between them, vinelike and intricate, and when Andrew touched Maureen, feeling the forbidding landscape of her clavicle through her T-shirt, he sensed the assertion of a new strangeness. She smelled like the airplane, vaguely clinical and foreign, nothing like her smell from their marriage—he remembered
the faint chivelike scent of her body underneath some rose perfume she had that always made him sneeze.