Cartwheel (27 page)

Lily shook her head. “I never had a problem with Javier.”

“He did fire you, though.”

“For the party, yes.”

“I’ve heard you were having problems before that.”

Lily bolted upright. “Who said that?” she said. It would have been touching were it not so perverse: She actually still cared about how her job performance had been perceived.

“You dropped things, I understand. Your drawer came up short.”

“I was new!”

“You gave us this name, Javier Aguirre, and that has led us down the wrong track.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“But we’ve been on the right track all along, haven’t we, Lily?”

“All right,” said Velazquez, standing up. “That’s enough of this.”

At night, Eduardo listened to the recordings of his interviews with Lily, hoping to hear something new. It seemed to him that time had forked lately, that his life was running on parallel tracks. In every moment there was Maria: her smooth back, the aquiline sweep of her nose, the perfect and enduring certainty of her sleep. And in every moment, simultaneously, there was Lily; fragments of Eduardo’s conversations with her coursed through his consciousness likes tides.

You slept all day, you’re saying? And you didn’t think it was odd that Katy didn’t appear? Not even once? You didn’t think to look for her?

I did look for her. Jesus Christ. I found her!

Again and again, Eduardo listened. Again he pressed play, and again he was walking into the jail, his dress shoes squeaking against the floors, the sense of obdurate underlying filth everywhere made more potent by the astringent smell of cleanser all around him. In every moment, it seemed, he was staring at those same taupe walls, the light through the high windows above them alternately gray and dull or yolky and rapturous, depending on the time of day. In every moment, it seemed, he was standing underneath the enormous
PROHIBIDO FUMAR
sign, wishing he could have a cigarette, his head growing marginally lighter with either fury or discouragement or settled, piercing clarity.

But you didn’t think to look for her earlier
.

I thought she was asleep
.

On the tapes, Lily’s voice had a slight elusive lisp that Eduardo had never noticed in real life. And the tapes had other, less trivial secrets to reveal. Slowly, Lily’s connection to Ignacio Toledo was taking shape in Eduardo’s mind. At first, Ignacio Toledo did not seem to fit into Lily’s life. But once you looked closer—once you knew Lily Hayes like Eduardo did—you saw that, in fact, he did.

Most important, perhaps, he was the opposite of Sebastien LeCompte. Sebastien LeCompte was handsome, for a particular taste, as well as wealthy beyond imagining. But he was also, by all accounts, impossible: sphinxlike, maddeningly detached, forever circling around life and speech, both, in half-ironic, riddle-filled whirlpools. What better rebellion for someone like Lily than a night with a man who was none of these things—a man who was uncomplicatedly masculine, straightforwardly working class? This was the girl, after all, who’d taken photos of a pantsless boy, a deformed woman: a girl on a quest for authentic Argentinean grotesqueries, things she could do and see so that later she could tell about having seen and done them. Next to Sebastien LeCompte, Ignacio Toledo would seem completely real and more than a little dangerous.

Lily would not have known how dangerous, of course, when their night began. But then, she would begin the night not knowing how dangerous she herself could be. And so the evening would begin with a minor cruelty: her rage at the breakup with Sebastien and his involvement with Katy would lacquer over her smaller rage at being fired from Fuego, and she would go there to find Ignacio Toledo, the one person with whom she could exact revenge on everyone—Sebastien and Katy, Javier, even Beatriz Carrizo (who would surely have blanched at the thought of such a man in her house for tea, let alone for homicide)—all at once. It was masterfully efficient, really, even if Lily had not been entirely aware of what was impelling her moves that night, as Eduardo presumed she had not been—her motives were massed within the mammoth blue iceberg of her subconscious, looming undetected below the blind, white fragment of her thoughts. And so Lily would go to the club as it was closing, perhaps not quite knowing why, but feeling reckless and competent and bold. You look upset, Ignacio Toledo might say to her, and offer her a drink on the house. I’m not supposed to be here, she might say. He would raise his eyebrow and press a finger to his lips and say, I won’t tell.

From then on they would be coconspirators—first in a second drink, maybe, and then a third. Afterward they would leave the club,
and at some point Toledo would produce the paco—and although Lily did not take it (her drug tests revealed only marijuana), its nearness would give her a proxy shot of adrenaline, a mutinous thrill at witnessing something so much closer to real subversion than whatever was voguish among the high-achieving white children of Vermont. Eventually Ignacio Toledo would propose some plan for the evening, and Lily would agree to it. She probably hadn’t known him well—that much was probably true. But she’d wanted to have an adventure; she’d wanted to go out and explore the dark corners of the city. And, at this point in the evening, Ignacio Toledo probably still felt like something of a chaperone.

Eduardo did not doubt that they had not planned to kill Katy. The unflushed toilet alone made this clear. But they’d gone back to the house—drunk and high and wanting something from Katy that she would not give, or perhaps trying to give something to her that she would not take: drugs or sex or money (hers or, perhaps, the Carrizos’) or some combination thereof. And perhaps Katy had threatened to call the Carrizos, or perhaps the cops, and suddenly Lily—her aggression deformed by drugs, her inhibitions shattered by alcohol—felt all of her resentments surge forth into a rage. This violence was not inevitable for her; she was not a person who would have killed somebody eventually anyway, no matter what course her life took. But she had always been a person who
could
have killed somebody—as, in Eduardo’s experience, a terrifying number of people were. It was this potential, ultimately, that she’d brought to the crime. Ignacio Toledo brought the drugs, the criminal history—maybe even the idea, the initial spark of brutality that set that whole room ablaze. But Lily had brought the template: the latent sociopathy, the entitlement. And, in the end, she’d brought the opportunity. After all, she had provided the house—there was no sign of a break-in—and, in doing so, she had provided Katy.

Again and again, the tapes ended; again and again, Eduardo climbed into bed next to Maria. It was her return, he knew, that had enabled him to see the truth in Lily—that had given him the courage to keep looking until he saw it—without being blinded by the wrong
stories or paralyzed by their repetition. The television people were obsessed with Lily Hayes, as well as entirely convinced of her guilt. But it had become clear to Eduardo over the weeks that they were convinced for all the wrong reasons; their certainty might be correct, but it was essentially reactionary, unearned. The world did not know Lily like he did. Stills from the security footage were paraded alongside pictures from Lily’s own camera, and the TV was forever running images that were widely thought the worst: There was Lily at the church, her bosom spilling wildly; and there she was mid-kiss with Sebastien on the day of Katy’s death; and there she was in front of a condom display, her eyebrow raised into a bemused isosceles triangle, only a few hours later. Those photos were bad, of course. But, Eduardo thought, they were not as bad as the others, the ones that didn’t feature Lily herself—the woman with the blood blister, the small naked boy. That’s where the real Lily Hayes was—not as a subject of the photographs, but as their merciless off-stage director. It was too bad, Eduardo often thought, that the TV didn’t run
those
photos. But expecting the media to realize their significance would be like expecting a dog to look where you were pointing, instead of at your finger.

Whatever the quality of the world’s certainty, Eduardo still liked to imagine delivering the justice that it wanted—this was, of course, only human. And he knew that if Maria hadn’t returned to him, he could have drowned in the potential consequences of success, as well as the potential costs of failure. It was true that Eduardo had failed before. Not often, but occasionally—once quite notably, when an accused murderer and rapist, fully prosecuted in the media, had been let off because a junior policeman had behaved cavalierly with the crime scene semen. This had not been enough to disqualify the case in and of itself, but the fervor—the “zealotry,” a stern TV commentator had said—with which the DNA had been collected had meant that the most important piece of evidence had been disallowed in court. Eduardo’s arguments were worth nothing then. After the verdict, he had walked out of the courtroom and into a cluster of journalists punching away on their obnoxious little BlackBerrys, which they’d all
managed to buy before the shortage. Eduardo had been all over town looking for one—to Movistar in Palermo, to Claro in Recoleta—but to no avail, and so he had to walk all the way back to the office to begin sending the necessary apologetic emails.

And if Maria had not returned to him, Eduardo could imagine losing himself now under the weight of his fears, the shadow corollaries of his each and every hope. If she had never left him, in fact—if Eduardo had never known the pain of that loss—things could be even worse than that: He might have become consumed with worldly ambition, the wish to have this success propel him solidly into the professional realm he deserved to inhabit—the realm she deserved to have him inhabit—so that their lives might thrum, at last, to some sort of hazy, satisfying conclusion. But losing Maria and then getting her back again had given Eduardo a deeper vision of loss, just as Dostoyevsky’s mock executioners must have given him—as he rose, shaking, to find himself still alive—a keener understanding of the resurrection. Eduardo was wiser now, and he was able to look, and listen, and be ready for whatever he might learn.

All day? You thought she was asleep all day?

I was asleep
.

Eduardo’s certainty was no longer growing. But it was moving. It was shifting from his cerebellum to his gut: His hair pricked now when he heard Lily’s voice on the tapes. He did not yet know how the killing had transpired, exactly, or what strange combination of drugs and lust had fueled it. But now—when he looked at pictures of Lily’s oddly faraway expression, that strange flatness around her eyes—he was beginning to understand, more viscerally than he ever had before, that she really had done the thing he was saying she had.

You were asleep, or you thought she was asleep?

I don’t know. Both
.

You were simultaneously asleep and under the impression that Katy was asleep?

Their conversations threaded around so much that Eduardo would sometimes grow confused by their redundancies, their repetitions,
their minor adjustments in syntax; he’d feel himself getting lost in the sifting of relevant and irrelevant changes.

And then you attempted CPR
.

Yes
.

Had you ever performed CPR before?

No
.

Had you ever taken a class on how to perform CPR?

No
.

So tell me again exactly what you were trying to do?

And yet Eduardo persisted, letting Lily’s voice echo within him as he got ready in the mornings—staring into the chrome mirror with one eye closed, shaving incipient whiskers off his chin. Every day Eduardo looked the same, and yet there was a part of him that believed he was watching himself grow better, and that one day all of this virtue would suddenly reveal itself somehow.

Tell me about Sebastien LeCompte
.

I have told you everything I know
.

Remind me
.

Literally everything. I have told you things I don’t even know
.

You’ve told me things you don’t know?

Because you made me guess
.

You’ve lied to me, you’re saying
.

No!

Eduardo knew he should never be grateful for his work, since having work to do meant that evil had been done, and that suffering had occurred. And so he tried not to think of this new momentum as a kind of happiness, though of course that’s what it was.

You didn’t like Katy. There’s no crime in that
.

I did like Katy
.

You didn’t
.

And even if I hadn’t—

Even if you hadn’t, what?

The truth would emerge, like secrets rising out of the sea, like fossils
stepping out of their clay, like everything that makes us understand our world and, at long last, ourselves.

But you were nice to Katy, nonetheless
.

Yes
.

Nonetheless what?

What?

You just said you were nice to Katy nonetheless
.

You
said that
.

In every moment, Eduardo was tiptoeing into the bedroom; in every moment, Maria was putting down her book in a hurry. She was fiercely private about what she read for reasons she would never discuss. Eduardo had learned long ago that Maria’s secrecy could hurt him if he let it, and that ignoring this secrecy was his only armor, inadequate though it was.

“What does she say?” Maria would ask, putting down her delicate gold-chained bifocals, hiding her book underneath the sheets. Her toenails were buffed to opaline; her skin was nearly translucent. In the light of the reading lamp, she seemed to glow from within.

“I can’t tell you that,” Eduardo would say.

“She isn’t saying anything. I can tell.”

“She’s not saying anything she hasn’t said already. I’m listening to tapes.”

But this wasn’t entirely true. Lily may not have said anything new, but Maria had taught Eduardo to listen to her anew—and upon reflection, he had realized that the most damning thing that Lily had said in the interviews was not something that either of them had even realized was damning at the time. Argentina had always felt like a dream, she’d said. Nothing that had happened to her there had ever seemed totally real. And the night she killed Katy, Eduardo now saw, must have seemed the least real thing of all—merely the part of the dream that curdles into nightmare in the final dark moments of the night. It must have seemed as bad as that, and nothing worse. It was Maria who had taught Eduardo to see this; it was Maria who had taught him to look
beyond the signifier to the signified. He would tell her some of these things one day. He would thank her for them.