Cartwheel (28 page)

“Patience, mi amor,” Maria would whisper, patting him fondly on the thigh. “She will say something soon.”

On Wednesday, Andrew took Anna out to Tigre, north of the city, to see the ocean.

“It’s not really the ocean,” Anna said, looking up from the pamphlet she was reading. She was sprawled over a handrail because there was only standing room on the train. Andrew was trying to ignore the public service signs above her head, obviously warning against malarial mosquitoes. They were both wearing splashily patterned shorts and flip-flops, packed in some fit of optimism or delusion he could not now fathom.

“It’s just a delta,” said Anna.

Andrew shrugged. “It will still be fun.”

When they were little, Lily and Anna had loved the sea. Andrew and Maureen had usually taken them in the summers—going early to beat the heat, piling into the car with Cokes wilting in the back, sometimes getting there before the sun had even burned off the dew, while the fog still rolled in like tulle. Andrew would read
The Economist
while the girls buried and unburied him. Sometimes they’d go in the winter, when the weeds were scraggly and the snow stretched out like sand and the water was a dimpled sterling. Andrew and Maureen would fill a thermos with hot cocoa and get the girls comically bundled in brand-new pastel snowsuits. When she was pregnant with Lily, Maureen had wanted to keep some of Janie’s things for the next baby. But Andrew could not abide the thought of seeing another toddler in Janie’s clothes—it felt too nightmarish to contemplate—and so Maureen had conceded the point, because in those days there’d actually been a very simple rule about who conceded what: Whenever there was a way for one of them to ease the other’s pain in any way, they did. And so the new snowsuits had been bought, along with the new diaper
bags and the new toddler shoes and a new arsenal of stuffed dogs and bears. Andrew had repainted the nursery. The Beatrix Potter décor was changed to Winnie-the-Pooh.

“What about it is going to be fun, exactly?” said Anna.

“We’ll rent a canoe,” said Andrew. In the pamphlet, Tigre was brimming with nuclear families paddling happily in red kayaks. It was strange to Andrew that other people came to this country for vacation. “We’ll ride on a boat. Don’t you still like boats?”

The train stopped and the doors opened. Anna was backlit by sun and Andrew had to squint to see her. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I want to go with you to meet with the lawyers.”

Tomorrow, Andrew and Maureen would be meeting the lawyers to discuss the DNA findings. Lily’s DNA, it seemed, had appeared on Katy’s mouth—which was not surprising, considering her CPR attempt—as well as on the murder weapon—which was actually not surprising, either, considering the murder weapon was a kitchen knife belonging to the Carrizos. Lily’s DNA had also appeared, a bit oddly, on one of Katy’s bras. Reassuringly, most of the DNA collected near Katy’s body was from someone else. All Andrew knew about this person was that he was a man, and already in the system, both of which facts were suspicious, and thus encouraging. After hanging up the phone, Maureen had stared at Andrew emptily and said, “Well, you might as well take Anna somewhere, since there’s nothing else we can do today.” He’d been glad for the chance. In the days since Maureen had arrived, Anna had moved mostly into Maureen’s hotel room, and the two of them had spent their evenings together, whispering and watching telenovelas and, Andrew realized once when he picked them up for breakfast, drinking their way through the minibar. This made Andrew feel strangely frustrated; it wasn’t that Andrew was the bad cop and Maureen was the good one, it was just that Maureen was both. Andrew could no more let Anna drink something out of the minibar than he could stop her from doing so, right in front of him, if she decided she wanted to. The fact that she didn’t was, he understood, a courtesy that she extended to him—like still calling him “Dad” and
Maureen “Mom,” when Lily had long ago begun addressing them by their first names.

“It’s going to be boring, sweetie,” said Andrew, ushering Anna out of the train and into the depot, which smelled oppressively of pastries. All around were kiosks selling gum and soda and tabloids. Andrew tried hard not to look at the headlines.

“Boring?” said Anna. “Are you kidding me?”

“Excuse me, do you speak English?” A worried-looking couple with a map was standing in front of them.

“No,” said Andrew, hurrying Anna out of the depot. Outside, the sky was blazingly blue, the palm trees obnoxious.

“Dad, what the hell are you doing? They were just trying to ask directions.”

“Well, we can’t exactly give them directions, can we? Now, will you look at this?” Andrew gestured grandly. Before them, beer-colored delta water lapped desultorily against the hulls of rental boats. Nearby, a man was giving a bikinied woman a piggyback ride. Andrew could not understand what would impel an adult woman to allow herself to be carried like that. The entire town seemed to smell of coconut sun-block and Quilmes. Andrew could hear the woman’s thighs slapping against the man’s back.

“Dad,” said Anna. “I’m trying to talk to you.”

“Listen, sweetie—oh, shit.” A mosquito was buzzing menacingly close to Anna; Andrew bent to swat it away from her leg—which was denuded and well moisturized, he noticed: How did she possibly have the energy to keep shaving her legs?—and then stood back up. “It’s going to be a big conversation.”

“I know it’s a big conversation,” said Anna. “That’s exactly why I want to be there.” Another mosquito veered brazenly toward her other leg, and Andrew waved that one away, too—though this, he saw, was perhaps a lost cause. He couldn’t really protect Anna from malaria, or a lingering death, or an interminable unjust detention. But it had to be better to keep pretending that he could.

“Dad,” said Anna, “you have to stop that.”

Andrew stood. Across the street, he could see, was a little stand selling ice creams and Cokes. “Do you want an ice cream?”

“Jesus Christ, Dad. You’re trying to ply me with ice cream? I’m not nine.”

“Anna, I’m sorry. You can’t go to the meeting. They only want to talk to me and your mom, anyway.” This was not technically true. Andrew marched Anna across the street to the ice cream stand. “Uno helado, por favor,” he said to the vendor, smiling brightly.

“What flavor?”

“Um. Chocolate, please.”

“Why don’t you want me there, Dad?” said Anna. “Seriously. Tell me. Do you think you’re going to hear something you don’t want to in that conversation?”

“Well, of course we will.” Andrew lowered his voice. He wished he didn’t have to know that the ice cream vendor spoke English. “It’s a gruesome thing that’s happened, and we’re going to hear all about it. And it’s happened to a girl only a few years older than you. Which is part of why it’s not a good idea for you to come along. This trip is upsetting enough for you already.” Andrew rifled in his pocket for change.

“I know all that, Dad,” said Anna. “That’s not what I’m wondering.”

“What then?” Andrew handed her the ice cream and was relieved when she took it.

“I’m wondering if there’s something else we might hear that we don’t want to.” Anna sounded careful, and Andrew wondered fleetingly, uncomprehendingly, if she was talking about Lily’s sex life.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” he said. He saw now that it was a mistake to have brought Anna here. It was too much; she was too young; her just-begun life with all of its own rich dramas and disappointments was being put completely on hold, and for what? “But please don’t worry.” He pulled Anna to him, and she allowed this, barely, holding her ice cream away from her body with exaggerated awkwardness. Andrew could never get over how tall Anna was, how substantial and lanky; her body had grown into its own authoritative spin on his genetics, like she was the product of some kind of unholy tinkering with recombinant
DNA. The possibility that a child of his could grow to nearly his height, could one day live to outlive him, was nearly as unthinkable as the fact that such a creature could ever die. It was possible, Andrew realized with terror, that he needed Anna here. She had, after all, already done more for Lily than he, or anyone else, had been able to. But none of that was any excuse to let her stay.

“Anna,” said Andrew, “do you think you’d like to go home?”

“What?” She wriggled out of his embrace. Andrew had meant it as an offer, but he realized it had come out as a kind of threat.

“We could get Uncle Phil to pick you up at the airport and drive you back up to Colby.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“You’ll need to go back eventually.”

“When Lily’s free. She needs me here now.”

“Anna, look.” Maybe Andrew would just be honest. Maybe, for the first time in a long time, he’d just be direct. “I need you here. Lily needs you here. Your mom needs you here. But just because we all need you here does not mean you have to be here. And while we figure all of this out, Maureen and I need to be your parents. We are still your parents.”

Anna was letting the ice cream melt onto her hand now, in a show of indifference either authentic or feigned. Andrew tugged off his backpack and started rummaging through it for the antibacterial hand wipes that he knew Maureen would have packed.

“Do you understand, Anna?” Andrew found the wipes and marveled—for the millionth time—at Maureen’s somber resourcefulness, her capacity to predict and prepare for all manner of future disasters, large and small. “I want you here. I need you here. But there have to be limits. We have to protect Lily. We have to protect you. And what we need from you tomorrow is to stay in the hotel.”

There was a sort of solar wavering in Anna’s expression, but then it seemed to downshift and she smiled. Andrew handed her the wipes and she licked the melted ice cream off her wrist. “Okay, Dad,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Yes. Okay. Now, do you want to see about renting a kayak?”

·  ·  ·

The next day, Maureen and Andrew rode in silence to Lomas de Zamora. Andrew clutched a paper bag with an egg sandwich for Lily; he’d just bought it and already it was leaking, turning the paper oily and translucent. At the jail, Maureen paid the driver with a twentypeso bill and Andrew was sure she’d get her change back in counterfeits, but he didn’t have the heart to comment on either of these things.

In the waiting room, they sat. Maureen hadn’t been to the jail before, and Andrew was glad that he was able to direct her through the metal detector, to point her toward the bathroom, to show her that things were not as awful as she might have imagined they would be. They waited. Maureen pawed through her bag and produced her wallet. Poking out of the billfold, alongside receipts and her United Airlines boarding pass, Andrew saw the blue tip of her passport. He nudged her.

“You shouldn’t carry that around,” he whispered.

“I know,” she said apologetically.

This was where Lily got it, no doubt—Andrew had never realized it before, but now it seemed obvious. Maureen had lost one child to death and another to incarceration, and yet here she was, breezing around town with her passport in her bag and accepting back fistfuls of cash as change without even holding them up to the light.

“Do you want to read something that will break your heart?” said Maureen.

“No,” said Andrew, because he was a little angry with her. “Not really.”

Maureen ignored this—she understood that Andrew did want to see the thing that would break his heart, that he couldn’t bear not to see it now that it was on offer. She produced a journal from her overstuffed bag.

“Flip to the page that’s paper-clipped,” she said, handing it to him.

The paper inside the journal was creamy and expensive and lined with Lily’s handwriting, and Andrew realized with an anguished stab
that Maureen (or Anna) had thought to buy Lily a notebook and a pen and had figured out how to get it to her. He read.

Andrew stared at the sheet—the clean white paper, the handwriting shaky (from what? he wondered. From malnutrition or terror? Or merely from years of Internet use?)—and his eyes filled with tears. He knew from much practice that the best thing to do now was to keep his eyes down and to open them very wide so as to prevent spillover. It was the line about being nice to everyone that really got to him. To Lily, this whole disaster must indeed seem the result of not being nice enough. She hadn’t killed anyone, but she’d written a few mean-spirited emails. And now she was in jail, those emails paraded around everywhere as evidence of her depravity. Of course she was promising to be good, promising to be a lamb, promising never to think a mean thought, or any thought, ever again, if only they would let her out.

“ ‘Mom and Dad’?” said Andrew.

“I know. Who knew?”

“Where did you get it?”

“She had the lawyers mail it.”

Andrew stared again at Lily’s handwriting. Something about it made him afraid of what she might look like this week; he didn’t like to admit it to himself, but he had some doubts about her internal resiliency. She wasn’t the fussiest of all possible middle-class children, of
course. She’d always worked in college; in the summers, she worked more than full-time, refusing offers of financial help—this stemmed from some kind of confused and contradictory sense of self-sufficiency that accepted sizable government loans and even more sizable parental tuition payments and rejected all other forms of charity—and it was clear that she actually enjoyed reveling in temporary, self-imposed poverty. Toward the end of her paycheck, Andrew knew, she ate mostly popcorn and hot dogs from her movie theater job. But all of this, of course, was because she’d had a childhood characterized by neither deprivation nor ostentatious wealth: a childhood in which modest desires were firmly affixed to what was actually possible. She did not know to regard the absence of comfort with fear—partly because she wasn’t particularly materialistic or entitled, but partly because she did not believe, not really, that such a state could ever truly be permanent. And that
was
entitled, Andrew saw now—that expectation of the universe’s benignity. Lily felt she did no wrong, and that this demanded that no wrong be done unto her. The simplicity of this thinking beggared belief. It was almost too perilously sad for Andrew to contemplate.