Cartwheel (5 page)

“Okay,” said the man in the box. “You can come in now.”

Andrew squeezed Anna’s shoulder, and they walked through another set of metal detectors and down a long hall of blue doors. The light was dimmer here, and Andrew had trouble telling if the clots of darkness in the corners were dirt or only shadows. The blue doors ended and a glass-walled room began and there, sitting at a table, fingers spread out before her with an odd, unsettling sort of precision, was Lily.

Her head was bent forward. Her hair, Andrew could see, was very
dirty. He couldn’t remember the last time Lily’s hair had been really dirty—maybe that time she’d had pneumonia for ten days when she was seven. She looked sallow, bony—a little Third World, Andrew couldn’t help thinking, though this was no longer a relevant term, post–Cold War. He could feel Anna startle against him, and he pressed his hand to her wrist. It was very important that neither of them seem startled.

The guard fumbled with his keys, rattling them. Lily still did not look up, and Andrew realized she couldn’t hear them. But she knew they were coming; shouldn’t she have been waiting, head raised, face expectant? The fact that she wasn’t seemed another bad sign, alongside the hair and that awful thing she was doing with her fingers.

The guard opened the door, and Lily finally looked up. The skin underneath her eyes was dark and dingy; her lips were very dry. Andrew flashed to an image of Janie—unconscious, intubated, her little macerated mouth a gaudy red, too gaudy for a two-year-old. The paleness of Lily’s skin now reminded him of the paleness of Janie’s skin then: It was the color of absence or impending departure. Andrew had expected Lily to stand, maybe even jump up, but she didn’t—she just smiled a sickly smile and waited for them to come to her.

“Dad,” she said. Andrew went to her and hugged her, taking some basic inventory as he did so. Up close she seemed about the right size, he supposed, like the same essentially sturdy child she’d always been (he remembered a picture of her on her fifth birthday, wearing some goofy little red jumper that Maureen had bought and that Anna wore later, her calf muscles straining as she stood on tiptoe to give a kiss to a man in an enormous Winnie-the-Pooh suit whom Maureen had hired for the occasion). Andrew grazed his hand along Lily’s forehead—her temperature seemed normal—and he squeezed her fingertips—like her mother, her circulation sucked, and her extremities were always getting too cold—but they seemed okay, just chilly, not frozen. He cupped the back of her head with his hand, a gesture that he knew was self-consciously maternal, that he knew he was copying from Maureen. It occurred to him briefly that it had been years since Lily
would have allowed him such familiarities; since college began she’d become physically curt, a giver of hugs that seemed to communicate her general displeasure with the overall project of hugging. Andrew lingered for a moment with his hand on Lily’s head, just because he could. Then he stepped away so Anna could hug her—fiercely but swiftly, pulling away after a moment to stare at her feet.

Andrew sat. He left his hand in the center of the table, in case Lily wanted to hold it at any point. “Sweetheart,” he said. “How are you doing?”

Lily blinked, and Andrew could see shivering blue capillaries on her eyelids. Were they always like that? They were probably always like that. “When’s Mom coming?” she said.

“Next week,” said Andrew. “She’ll be here for your next visit. On Thursday.”

“Why isn’t she here now?”

“We’re going to trade off weeks, sweetheart.” Andrew was going to have to stop saying “sweetheart” with such frequency, he knew. Lily was not likely to tolerate it for long, and he did not want to know what it would mean if she did. “So you’ll always have a visitor. Every Thursday.” Lily’s innocence was implicit. It was implicit. Andrew would ask questions that reflected that. “How are you being treated?” he said, in the same moment as Anna leaned forward and said, urgently, “Lily. Are you okay?”

Andrew saw a momentary sardonic flash in Lily’s eyes—encouraging because it was so characteristic—but then it went away and Lily said, “I’m okay.” And Andrew knew then that she was protecting them, and he was afraid.

Lily stood up. “Dad,” she said. There was a wavering note of hysteria in her voice. She began to pace. “I have to tell you what happened.”

Andrew had never seen anyone pace before, and it was distressing. She really did look like one of those caged animals—her body seemed to register, at the edge of each cycle, that there was no place left to go; and she was doing something with her head that looked nearly equine—and he said, “Lily, do you want to sit down?”

“No,” she said. Andrew could hear something toddleresque in the dismissal—in the jejune thrill at having something to reject—and he realized that this was a small thing they could give her.

“Okay,” he said soothingly. “You don’t have to sit down.”

“Dad, I have to tell you.” Lily’s gaze was narrowing, and Andrew felt that she was on the verge of some kind of change in pitch.

“Lily,” he said quickly. “You don’t need to tell us anything.”

“I do.”

Andrew leaned forward and gestured to the ceiling. “Lily. You understand, right? You don’t need to tell us anything, if you don’t think you should.”

Lily looked at Andrew then with the most open and wrecked expression he had ever seen; it was an expression that was shattered, that was nearly autopsied. “Dad,” she said, close to sobbing. “Of course I should. What the hell do you think? Of
course
I should.”

“Okay, okay.”

Anna was silent: hands folded, face terrified.

“I was staying over at Sebastien’s,” said Lily.

Andrew nodded. “Sebastien is your boyfriend?”

Lily looked at him dimly. There was a time when she would have quibbled with this formulation; she would have said “lover” or maybe even “paramour,” or told him not to be so conventional, or asked him to remind her what century this was. Now she just shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay,” said Andrew, “but so, you were staying over there.”

“The Carrizos were gone for the weekend. That’s why I was staying over.”

“What did you do there?”

“Dad.”

“Okay.” Andrew hadn’t meant to ask any questions, but he did not know what he would say if he didn’t. “When did you get back?”

“Like, maybe, eleven? I went to the bathroom to shower. Someone hadn’t flushed the toilet, which I thought was weird. It wasn’t like Katy. She’s a very neat girl.”

Andrew could hear Lily struggling to manage her mouth here—the juggling act of teeth and tongue and saliva seemed to be eluding her, and there was a faint breathiness in her voice.

“There was,” she said. “There was also. I can’t see.”

“Put your head between your knees,” said Anna.

“Yeah,” said Lily, and did. She stayed there for thirty seconds, then carefully brought her head back up. “There was also some blood on the floor.”

“Some blood?” said Andrew casually. “Like, how much?” He wanted to stop with the questions, but he could not. At any rate, Lily seemed to be used to them.

“Like, not very much,” said Lily. “I thought maybe she’d cut herself. Or had her period and bled coming out of the shower or something. It wasn’t like her not to notice, though.”

“But you didn’t see her?”

“The door was closed. I thought she was still asleep. I went and got some cheese from the fridge and sat on the couch for a few hours watching some game show. I was pretty hungover, to be honest. I fell asleep for a while. When I woke up, it was much later—like maybe almost four. Excuse me.” She put her head down again. Andrew went to her and tried to wrap his arm awkwardly around her shoulder, but she shook him off. Anna tried, and Lily accepted this.

“I just keep thinking about her lying there, while I was napping on the couch.”

“Don’t think about it,” said Anna.

“You try it,” said Lily. She sounded like herself, almost. She sat up. “So I got up. I felt really weird. Like, massively thirsty, but also weirdly emotionally, like, fragile. It wasn’t getting dark at all yet, but I just felt this kind of permanent emptiness in the house. I don’t know. I went down to the bedroom. I wanted to find Katy. I wanted to see if she wanted to go for a walk or something. Get out of that house. The door was still closed. And outside the door, there was a blood footprint. It seemed enormous, like it was from some kind of monster. And it was so detailed on the white carpet. Like, you could see each ridge on the
sole of the sneaker. I screamed and ran into the room. She was lying in the middle of the floor with a towel over her head. I think I knew she was dead. I went over to her and pulled the towel off. Her face was turned to the side. Her lips were blue. I tried to give her CPR for like one second and her lips were so cold and I got her blood on my face.”

Lily was shaking so hard that she was moving Anna’s arm along with her shoulders. Andrew tried putting his arm around her again, and this time, she allowed it.

“I was totally bawling by this point. I ran out of there and over to Sebastien’s and then we called the police. Then the cops came and we were locked out of the house. The Carrizos couldn’t get a flight until the next day. I called Mom. Sebastien took me to buy a toothbrush. He was going to let me stay with him. I spent the whole night puking, I don’t know why. And then the next day they came for me and brought me here.”

Outside the door, the guard was telling them two minutes, which was unbelievable. Andrew hadn’t done anything yet, and he especially hadn’t done the most crucial thing.

“Lily.” He grabbed her hands so hard that he could feel the slight accordioning of her bones. What he wanted to say was
Wait a minute. Just wait one goddamn minute here
. As though the issue was only that things were going too fast. As though he could manage it, no problem, if he just had thirty seconds to sit still and really think about it. “How are they treating you?”

“I don’t know if I should say.”

“Tell me.”

“I have to pee in front of the guards.”

“I know.”

“There’s no trash can. There’s no running water except the shower. There’s no fork. The toothpaste doesn’t work.”

“It doesn’t
work
?” said Andrew.

“We’ll get you real toothpaste,” said Anna.

“Can you get me real tampons?”

“
Real
tampons?” said Andrew.

The guard had entered the room and was standing, with quiet obtrusiveness, in the corner.

“Yes,” said Anna, emphatically.

“What are real tampons?”

“Dad.”

“The shower is freezing,” said Lily. “I mean,
freezing
. I swear they’re doing it on purpose.”

The guard was upon her, and he stood her up—not roughly, but in a way that left no ambiguity as to what she was going to do. Andrew wanted to punch the guy in the face. He wanted to hold Lily and Anna and let them weep into his shoulders and tell them he would protect them always. But he knew he couldn’t. And he knew that a scene like that would terrify all of them. It would feel like a goodbye, which this certainly was not. They would see Lily very soon. Hysteria invited hysteria. There was nothing to be gained from it.

“We’ll see you in seven days,” said Andrew. He gave Lily a hug that was warm, but without any undertones of apocalyptic clinging. “Your mother will be here.”

“I love you,” she said.

“We love you,” they said.

They walked out into the hallway, leaving Lily behind them. When Andrew turned back to look at her, her head was down again, her long greasy hair obscuring her face. And she didn’t look back up at them, even though they waved to her all the way down the hall.

Eduardo Campos was not sure until he saw the pictures. Later, people would ask him—informally, socially—when he knew. Be honest with us, they’d say. We won’t tell. We knew when we heard about her Facebook page. We knew when we heard about her cartwheel. We knew when we saw the footage of her with the condoms—that cold, seductive look she gave the boy, and only hours after that poor other girl was knifed to death. That’s when we knew Lily Hayes was guilty. When did you know? And Eduardo would laugh and say that of course he never knew, that he still didn’t know. His job was just to make the case for the state, and the state’s case, one had to admit, was ironclad. But the truth was he did know, and he had first known when the judicial police brought him Lily Hayes’s camera.

The crime scene had not surprised him. Nothing surprised him, really, though there was certainly an incongruity between the upscale neighborhood and the well-kept house and the young American woman dead in a vast swamp of her own blood. It had taken Eduardo
years to get used to how much blood one body could produce. But he was used to it now, and he studied the scene with his practiced dissociative attitude, reminding himself that the best way to help this young woman now was to pay very close attention.

She was lying on her stomach with her face to the side, hunched in the characteristic awkwardness of the dead. There was substantial bruising along her inner thighs. It was overwhelmingly likely that she had been sexually assaulted.

Eduardo followed the police with his notepad. He did not touch anything. In the kitchen, they found a knife, which was collected. In the victim’s drawer, they found a half-empty packet of Skin Skin condoms, which was also collected. In the bathroom, they found three discrete spots of blood and an unflushed toilet, all of which were photographed, then sampled. In the garden, they found Lily Hayes, who had discovered the body (according to her) moments before running across the lawn with blood on her face (according to the driver who was now shakily smoking a cigarette in front of his delivery truck). Lily Hayes was white, late teens or early twenties, with a squarish jaw and auburn hair and high, vaguely witchy eyebrows; she appeared to have already washed all of the blood off her face. She was standing morosely next to a very young man in suspenders. Behind them, the bald double pates of San Telmo Pedro gleamed in the distance. Lily Hayes was not crying. She was pale, but perhaps she was always pale. She kissed the boy once, somewhat chastely, and then again, a little less chastely. She looked, Eduardo decided, harassed. Inconvenienced. If she looked anything at all. There was a stillness to her face that would probably seem perverse under any circumstances, but especially these circumstances, and which could only be intentional. Eduardo let himself think the thought, and then he let it pass. He’d been at this long enough to know that you couldn’t scour yourself entirely clean of hunches and biases and premonitions; lurking suspicions; kneejerk reactions. You couldn’t help but know some things without knowing why you knew them.