Cartwheel (42 page)

It was a few days before Carlos came to the door. Sebastien watched him approach but believed until the very last moment that Carlos must have other business somewhere—maybe he had something to say to the garden flowers, maybe there was something on the porch he wanted to vandalize—and, even after hearing steps on the front walk, Sebastien still jumped to hear the querulous sound of the knocker.

He went to the door, and Carlos was standing on the porch, gaze cast downward, looking as though, had he been a person who was inclined to wear hats, he’d be wringing one in his hands right now.

“Yes?” said Sebastien.

“Yes, hello,” said Carlos. Sebastien felt a current of mutual embarrassment flash between them—embarrassment that such a thing as a murder had occurred, and that they both knew it had occurred, and that it had occurred somehow on their shared watch, as well as embarrassment at the abject, frenzied hysteria the situation now necessitated (anything less than that would, after all, be inhumane), as well as embarrassment at their joint failure to completely participate in it. Carlos laughed apologetically. “I was just admiring this knocker you’ve got here. What is that?”

“It’s a bust of my grandfather,” Sebastien said automatically.

“Ah.” Carlos looked down quickly and cleared his throat. “Well. I’m sorry if Beatriz was rude to you the other day. She’s sorry, too.”

“Oh,” said Sebastien, fixing his eyes on Carlos’s shoulder. He could not guess what was expected of him here.
Please, Carlos, don’t think of it for a moment! What’s a suspicion of murder between neighbors? I certainly hope Beatriz hasn’t been fretting over it
. “All right,” he said.

“You know, it’s a difficult time right now,” said Carlos regretfully. “She’s scared. You can imagine.”

“It’s an unspeakably dreadful thing, what’s happened,” said Sebastien. It came out with more intensity than he’d meant it to.

Carlos squinted, even though the light was behind him. “Yes,” he said. “Katy was a very sweet girl.”

“It must be an absolutely terrible time for you,” said Sebastien. He meant it. He did not mean anything, ever, but he meant this.

Carlos inclined his head and looked at Sebastien directly for the first time. “For you, too, I’d imagine.”

“Worse for you, I’m sure,” said Sebastien. “It was your house. And, really, I didn’t know Katy that well.”

Sebastien had meant this as a kindness—an acknowledgment of the magnitude of the Carrizos’ pain, a deferral to their closeness to the situation—but it seemed to hit Carlos wrong somehow, and his expression changed, and there was a creeping feeling along Sebastien’s neck.

“You knew Lily well, though,” said Carlos.

Sebastien recognized Carlos’s new expression as one of suspicion. And—perhaps because this time he was, on some level, expecting it—Sebastien found himself looking at Carlos with frank suspicion right back. “You know she didn’t do it, right?” he said.

Carlos retreated by a step. “Beatriz is just shaken up.”

“But you do know that, right? You really know that?”

At this, Carlos shook his head slightly. “I’ve recently realized I’m too old to think I really know anything.”

That night, Sebastien sat up donating anonymously to Lily’s parents’ travel fund.

He’d found the site immediately after its conception. It had clearly been erected by one of Andrew or Maureen’s baby boomer friends—its pleas for money or frequent-flier miles were written in outlandish, early Internet fonts, floating above family pictures of the Hayes family at wholesome New England destinations. On top of Mount Washington, Maureen, Lily, and Anna bend against the wind, matching red
hoodies pulled tight around their faces; Lily pretends to hold on to a railing for dear life. After each donation, Sebastien felt a brief sense of calm; he was glad to finally have found some way to spend money that didn’t make him feel wretched. He would make a great philanthropist yet, he thought, after completing his fifth donation. He laughed and got up to fix himself a drink.

When he sat back down, he Googled the word “suicide.” A toll-free hotline number popped up above the search results, and Sebastien felt the hairs on his arms stand up, just as they always did. Sebastien had discovered this search engine curiosity right after his return to Buenos Aires.
NEED HELP
? the message above the number said, a question that Sebastien found oddly, overwhelmingly touching, though he did not know what entity could be said to be asking it. The computer? The aggregated information of the Internet? The kind person in Mountain View, California, who had thought of this idea in the first place? The anti-suicide lobbying group that had demanded it? Sebastien did not know, but still the message had made him cry the first time he saw it—for the impersonality of the algorithm that was behind it, and for the pure indifferent public-spiritedness that was behind
that
. He took a sip of absinthe. It almost did not matter, he realized, what the intelligence generating the message was—whether it was conscious or unconscious, singular or plural, animate or inanimate. The message was simply concern cast out into the universe—toward him or anyone or no one. No matter what it was, it had helped him once, and no matter what it was, it could not know that it had.

Sebastien palmed his cheek, then clicked back over to Lily’s travel fund website. He zoomed in on the picture of Lily on Mount Washington. He touched her hood, putting his finger directly on the computer screen. Lily’s face was scrunched and red, her eyes wet with tears from wind or laughter. Sebastien clicked on the Donate button. He was about to click again when he heard a knock on the door.

He startled and looked at the clock. Somehow, it was already eleven a.m. The knock came again, and Sebastien scurried to the bathroom to swallow some toothpaste and run a comb through his hair. There was
a third knock, and Sebastien ran to the door—tripping over the leg of a piano bench and swearing loudly—and opened it.

On his stoop was a girl—young and reddish haired and wiry, like a vehicle built for efficiency.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Anna.”

Sebastien was stupefied. He tried to summon Lily’s description of her sister but could produce nothing specific; Anna had floated around the edges of Lily’s anecdotes, a pixelated smudge of sidekick, consigned to the modal past tense—
Anna and I always used to do this, Anna and I would always go there
—and listening to the stories it would have been easy to think, to the extent one thought about it at all, that Anna was still six years old somewhere, pigtailed, mischievous (though not quite as mischievous as Lily), eternally trailing after the shadow of her older sister. Sebastien had detected no animosity in these narratives, only the profoundly tangential nature of Anna’s role in Lily’s world today. What could you say about someone like Anna? You were children together, that’s all. But now here was an adult Anna, standing on Sebastien’s porch and, presumably, in the very center of her own life.

“Don’t tell me I look like her,” she said. “I already know.”

She did not, in fact, look all that much like Lily, in Sebastien’s estimation. Their features were similar, but Anna seemed mad about it, somehow—as though her face was just a mask of Lily’s face that had been foisted upon her against her will and that the cruel townspeople were now forcing her to parade around the square in.

“That’s an interesting knocker you have,” she said.

“I got it at a rummage sale,” said Sebastien, unfreezing. Why weren’t her parents watching her? he caught himself thinking, then could not believe he was thinking it.

Anna frowned and leaned closer to it. “It’s a griffin, right?”

“I’m sure I never asked it such a personal question,” said Sebastien. It came out snappish. He didn’t want to seem surprised that Anna had known, but he was, a little, and he saw that she could tell.

“Lily always did have weird taste in boys,” Anna murmured, as if confiding in the griffin. She stood back up. “I’m a classics major.”

“Oh,” said Sebastien. “Lily didn’t tell me that.”

“Oh, yeah? What major did she say I was?”

Lily hadn’t mentioned it, of course—though Sebastien would have imagined (had he been forced to imagine) that Anna might have been studying business, or finance, or some other soulless discipline of the sort pursued by compulsive exercisers. “Lily didn’t talk about you very much, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Well, yeah. I mean, I’m not Lily, am I?” Anna gazed sourly past Sebastien’s shoulder and into the house. “Could I come in, do you think?”

Sebastien gestured an elaborate
by all means
. Anna walked inside, squinting against the room’s patchy light and nodding faintly, as though confirming to her own silent satisfaction that everything was exactly as she’d thought it would be. Sebastien was irritated.
You try having lights under the circumstances
, he wanted to say.
You try having furniture
. At least there was a sheet over the television; Sebastien still could not bear the thought of anyone—even a stranger, and even now—knowing that he owned one.

“Forgive me for asking,” said Sebastien, “but why are you here?” He’d been planning to offer Anna a drink but now he wanted her out of the house; the expression on her face was too much like the one he’d been afraid Lily would have the first time she came over, and on the whole, this encounter with Anna was starting to feel too much like an alternate, wholly unpleasant version of the inaugural one with Lily.

“Shouldn’t you be asking how you can help me?” said Anna.

“I’m afraid I presumed you would not hesitate to tell me.”

“I have to ask you a question.”

Sebastien mimed loading and firing a gun.

Anna nodded again, as though Sebastien had just done something that she’d been assured many times that he would. “My sister dumped you, right?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Would this be less weird if we were sitting down?”

Sebastien waved at one of the sheeted lumps. He wished Anna would remark on the lumps—it would be much better if she would—but she did not. Instead, she lifted the sheet to look under it—it turned out to be an oak bench—before sitting down.

“I wouldn’t feel bad about it,” she said. “My sister dumps a lot of guys. She even dumps guys she’s not even really dating. It’s sort of a hobby of hers.”

“We all need to pass the hours somehow.”

“But I guess what I’m wondering is, did she do something particularly awful to you? Or did you guys do something awful together?”

“Forgive me,” said Sebastien. “But I am really struggling to imagine how you’re seeing any of this as your concern.”

“The night Katy died, I mean. I don’t want to know about anything awful that happened any other night. That really wouldn’t be any of my concern, you’re right.”

Sebastien could feel angry horror rising through him, and he was beginning to be unable to bear the sight of Anna’s face. He closed his eyes. “Did I sell out your sister for revenge, is what you’re here to inquire?”

Anna gave him a flat look. “I just think it’s strange that she’s in trouble and you’re not, that’s all.”

“Is that a question?” said Sebastien. “Or is this morning’s program only going to involve a lecture segment? What a thrill it is to be the recipient of personal disquisitions from
both
Miss Hayes the Younger
and
the estimable Andrew Hayes, PhD. Of course, it’s true that a less easygoing fellow might start to find all this a tad pedantic.”

Anna raised her eyebrows. They were high arched, like Lily’s, which made her look even more surprised than she probably was. “My father came to see you?”

“He did indeed.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“To live is to learn. Your father came here, and we had a truly unendurable conversation, and I am starting get an unhappy picture of
the Hayes family’s manners, particularly as they pertain to
barging in
. It’s a miracle Lily is as affable as she is.”

Anna’s forehead was still slightly unsettled; Sebastien could see that this revelation had thrown her off, and that it was time to capitalize on this. “Speaking of your Andrew,” he said, “does he know you’re here? Or does Maureen?”

“Do Andrew and Maureen know I’m here?” Anna’s face clenched—this was a sort of airless, noiseless laugh, Sebastien supposed, though it looked strikingly like some kind of medical problem. “No. They don’t keep terrifically careful track of me.”

“That seems odd, considering.”

“Not really.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’ve never been overly interested in me. They really only had me because they thought I’d be important for Lily’s psychological development. I was like a kiddie Mozart CD for her. Or didn’t she tell you that either?”

Sebastien looked at his feet. “Lily’s take on it, I think,” he said carefully, “was that you both felt a bit extraneous to Janie. That was her name, right?” Even though he already knew.

Anna nodded, then shook her head. “They would have had Lily anyway, though. No one ever talks about that. Janie and Lily, that was supposed to be their family. Two kids. I was just the sub, and no one seems excessively happy that I got off the bench. To use an American sports metaphor that, I’m sure, seems pretty vulgar to you. But all of that can be a good thing sometimes. It means I can do stuff I might not be able to otherwise. Like come here and talk to you, for example.”

Sebastien flashed, suddenly, to a memory of his father. Growing up, Sebastien had noticed—first vaguely, then with growing attentiveness—the way his parents lied about their work. Their strategy seemed mostly to involve making their jobs sound very, very boring, and the more Sebastien understood how interesting their jobs really were, the more he marveled over the fact that this approach was actually effective.
When Sebastien’s parents were queried about their profession, they gave breezy, dismissive, self-deprecating answers, countered the question with a question, and—just like that—the subject was changed. Invariably, whomever they’d been speaking with was only too happy to do the talking; invariably, it was what they had really wanted to do all along. Sebastien had asked his father about this once, in one of their only direct conversations about such matters. Sebastien was always trying to find the right questions—questions based on tacit mutual understanding, questions that did not demand any concrete answers—and this question, it turned out, was one of them. His father had even looked a little bit pleased that he’d asked it.