Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“We were friends.”

“You had a sexual relationship?”

Lily turned her face to the side. “Briefly.”

“Were you aware that the victim was also having a sexual relationship with Sebastien LeCompte?” This query contained a bluff, as well as a fairly obvious supposition—but, being a question, it was not exactly a lie. And at any rate, the reality of Sebastien LeCompte’s involvement with Katy Kellers did not matter half as much as whatever Lily had believed that reality to be.

“I wouldn’t necessarily have called it a relationship.”

“You were aware of it, though?”

“I mean, I certainly wondered.”

“What made you wonder?”

“I’m not stupid.”

Eduardo pretended to make a note of this, though he wasn’t really writing anything.

Lily shifted in her seat. “I just mean, I could tell. They weren’t as careful as they thought they were.”

“And how did you feel about it?”

“Not much.”

“Really? You weren’t angry?”

“Not really. We weren’t in love or anything.”

During his seventh week with Maria, Eduardo had whispered into her ear while she was sleeping: “Tell me who you are, because I love you already and I want to know who I love.”

“I mean,” said Lily, uncertain about what to do with his silence. “Sebastien and I weren’t, like, a couple.”

“But you were sleeping together.”

Lily looked pensive; the light through the bars made long tapering wicks on her face. “I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore today,” she said.

Eduardo nodded. “That’s your right,” he said. He snapped his notebook shut in order to convey a sense of finality, of satisfaction. “This has been a good conversation. You can go have your medical exam now.”

Though he would never let it matter, it was true that something about Lily Hayes reminded Eduardo of Maria. What was it, exactly? The breeziness of a person to whom nothing was ever denied? But in Maria this quality had been charming and elfin, and in Lily it was, assuredly, only obnoxious. And at any rate, Eduardo knew that there was something sinister about Lily that went well beyond impulsivity.

Take, for example, the cartwheel. Eduardo had worked enough high-profile cases to know how the cartwheel would play, what binary of accusation and defense would grow in its wake. For the prosecution, by way of the media, an argument would be made that the cartwheel was callous, flippant, reflective of the same kind of bottomless disregard that could, given the right circumstances and drugs, disregard another human life. The counterargument, obviously, would assert that the cartwheel was whimsical and guileless; an exuberant outburst that was now being willfully misunderstood by the old and the humorless and the agenda having. Indeed, the defense might say, if the cartwheel was evidence of anything it was evidence of innocence: How could someone guilty, someone who wanted to look not guilty, do something like that? Only a person who knew that she was innocent and was too young to know that this might not matter would ever, ever do a cartwheel in an interrogation room.

But Eduardo knew better, because he had spent years studying an impulsive woman. Maria sometimes did things that were crazy or ill-advised, Eduardo would be the first to admit—though more commonly she did things that were merely strange: He’d once found her in the living room at three a.m. staring at a red umbrella she’d lit up with a flashlight, and more than once he’d passed by the closed bathroom door and heard her murmuring to herself in the claw-footed tub. One time she’d hung up a paper moon in a tree, where it shone through the branches like an illuminated coin.

“It’s beautiful,” he’d said, assuming Maria had wanted to do something beautiful.

“Oh, is it?” she’d said distractedly, as he wrapped his arms around her.

“I just wanted it to be interesting.”

“It is,” said Eduardo. He could hear the sticky note of pleading in his own voice. He so wanted to see whatever it was she wanted him to see.

“No,” said Maria, looking at him calmly. “Nothing beautiful is really interesting.” She’d torn it down then, though not angrily—just methodically, thoroughly, as though correcting a mistake she now saw that she’d made.

There were difficulties, too, of course. Maria had a tendency to internalize free-floating stress from the universe, though her life was not, as far as Eduardo could discern, at all stressful. This knotty, inaccessible melancholy of hers was so different from his own; whatever went on with Maria was always some strange iteration away from sense. She’d fall into black spells, growing monosyllabic and morose, speaking in a kind of halting iambic pentameter. She’d disappear into the bathroom to sob (and how she sobbed—these choking, wretched sobs that somehow came at exactly even intervals, so that they seemed almost like some kind of biological or geologic process). One winter she even went a little bald; Eduardo came upon a collapsed black octopus of hair in the shower drain, looking like the remnant of a massacre.

And there were times—rarely, but memorably—when she could be cruel. The first time he’d really seen it was the night he’d been appointed fiscal de cámara. Maria had organized a celebration for him at a restaurant, though he realized later that every night with Maria was a kind of complicated, triple-edged celebration—like the wedding of an old lover, or the birthday party of an old enemy. There was always a manic sheen of strenuously sought and hard-won fun and an underlying sense of deep and growing trouble. The night of the promotion, Eduardo had felt humble and serene and pleased with himself for the first time in he didn’t know how long. Their friends were laughing and drinking and having a great time until Maria clinked her glass for a toast. Everybody stopped speaking and stared at her happily, and Eduardo felt grateful and honored—because she was so beautiful, because he was so lucky—as he waited to hear what she would say about him.

“Eduardo,” said Maria. She was smiling. She was radiant. “I always knew you’d excel at this job. You were born for it, weren’t you? You were born to be a prosecutor. Or maybe a prison guard.”

Eduardo could feel his smile freeze. “I don’t know what you mean,” he’d said, trying to keep the bleakness out of his voice. Truth be told, he rarely knew exactly what she meant.

“Oh, Eduardo,” said Maria, and the strangest thing was how much genuine affection was still in her face, her voice. “The reason you’re a genius at your job is because you love to punish people. You love to make sure everyone’s having as little fun as you are.”

People never actually put down their forks when these things get said in public. They gather themselves further into the small tasks of eating; they busy themselves with spoons. Eduardo tilted his head back and laughed. This was what he’d learned to do whenever Maria said something like this; everyone was long accustomed to understanding nothing of the romantic relationships of others, and so they could accept anything as a sort of baffling in-joke, if that’s how Eduardo treated it.

“I’m having fun.” Eduardo laughed again. “I am having fun.”

After Maria left, it had been occasionally suggested to Eduardo that she might have been a bit selfish. It had been once proposed that she might, in fact, have had a diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder. “Garden-variety crazy,” his friends had said, “just your typical crazy-woman crazy,” but Eduardo could never agree. Maria was crazy, perhaps, but she was not typical; her lunacy was the blue electricity running through a more finely wired system. And though it might be a kind of madness, it was also a kind of rare brilliance, a rare honesty.