Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“Probably.”

“Why haven’t they arrested you?”

“I was not actually involved.” Sebastien looked down, and Andrew charitably allowed himself to consider the possibility that he might actually feel sorry for what he’d just said. Perhaps as penance, Sebastien continued—his voice a bit lower, a bit less theatrical, than it had been before. “There’s nothing to tell you about that night. Truly. Lily was here. We talked and had some cocktails. We went to sleep around two. She went back to the Carrizos’ in the morning. She came back over here after finding Katy. Then she called the police.”

It was strange to listen to the boy speak so frankly—recalling events comprehensibly, constructing a linear narrative. The sun shifted, and two strips of cadmium midafternoon light fell onto the floor and across Sebastien’s face, catching his freckles and making him look innocent and heartbreakingly young.

“The police came pretty quickly and cordoned off the house,” said Sebastien. “They arrested her the next morning. I don’t have anything else I can tell you. I’m sorry.” He looked at his hands for a moment and then said, very quickly, “Do you think I could see her?”

For a moment, Andrew had wanted very much to suspect this boy. It was as though the universe was shoving Sebastien at him—here was a man, involved with two women, living right next door to both of them—and what a gift it would have been to have such an obvious answer. But now Andrew was confronted with the reality that believing in Sebastien’s guilt would mean the beginning of believing in Lily’s. And that was unthinkable.

“I can’t imagine they’ll allow that,” Andrew said gently.

“Could I write her a letter?”

“Maybe.”

There was a silence. “I’m sorry,” Sebastien said finally, in that harsh, too-flat voice, and then he said it again. And then Andrew’s feeling flipped over again, and he wondered, with a judder of suspicion that made all other suspicions seem shallow, just what it was that Sebastien was so sorry for.

“For what?” said Andrew. He looked around the place—its garish loneliness, its ghoulish ornateness—and he looked again at Sebastien: that goofy hair, that unreasonable outfit, that too-young face that shifted from guile to guilelessness with the movement of the sun. Andrew did not know why Lily liked Sebastien LeCompte, but he had to accept that she did—perhaps she even loved him. And one explanation for all of this trouble was that Lily was protecting this boy, against all reason, out of some strange sense of martyrdom or infallibility or perhaps something else altogether that Andrew might never begin to guess.

“What are you so sorry for?” said Andrew again meanly.

“I am sorry,” said Sebastien, “for your absolutely abominable luck.”

When Andrew returned to the hotel, Anna was staring listlessly out the window. The movie had ended and the screen had become a vivid aquarium blue, but she hadn’t turned it off.

“Whatcha up to, Old Sport?” said Andrew.

Anna stared at him dully, unsurprised, though she’d made no move when he entered the room. Andrew suddenly wanted to go to her and take her bony shoulders in his arms. He wanted to curl up around her body and whisper “Hush,” even though it was unlikely that Anna would ever require anyone to tell her to hush.

“Dad,” she said. Even the way she said “Dad” sounded to Andrew like a kind of grudging concession. “Is Lily going to be okay?”

Andrew sat down on the edge of the bed and patted Anna’s shoulder. “We are going to do everything we can for her.”

“Jesus.” Anna’s voice was astringent. She stood up. “ ‘We’re going to do everything we can for her’? You’re such an irredeemable pessimist.”

From the mouth of someone so young, the phrase “irredeemable pessimist” sounded rehearsed, obsessed over. Possibly, Andrew thought nervously, inherited. Or even worse, therapeutically processed. Andrew gave Anna what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

“I think she’s got as good a shot as we could hope for,” he said. Andrew had watched his child die. He was well beyond considerations of pessimism or optimism. But he did not want Anna to be, and he did not want her to have to understand. “I think the lawyers are terrific,” he said. “And, of course, she’s innocent. So we’ve got that going for us.”

A shiver went across Anna’s jaw. “Of course,” she said. Her eyes were like bolts. She hated that he’d said it, maybe because it was so obvious. But then, Andrew wasn’t above stating the obvious. He was the parent. More than anything, perhaps, that was his job.

“Once,” said Anna, “just once, could you tell me that everything is going to be okay?”

Andrew nodded. “I could. I could tell you that. And it might be. That’s certainly what we all are hoping and working for. But you’re an adult now. And this might be a very long haul. And I want you to be prepared for anything.”

“Do we? Do we eternally have to be prepared for anything?”

“It seems that we do, often enough.”

Anna turned and faced the window. The light caught her flyaway hair, and she looked frenzied and, Andrew thought, angelic. His daughter. His one daughter, living and free. “I’m sorry, Old Sport,” he said.

“I hate that you call me that, you know.”

“I—you what? I didn’t know that.”

“You wouldn’t have.”

“You really hate it? It makes me feel ironical and literary.”

“That is exactly why.”

Andrew felt stung in a nearly physical way. He thought inexplicably of those furry little creatures in Australia, the ones with the vestigial, frighteningly nonmammalian stingers. “You could have told me,” he said.

“Well, I just did.” Anna stomped over to her suitcase and produced a plastic bag. Platypuses, that was what those animals were. “I bought these things for Lily,” she said, pulling out soap, toilet paper, tampons. Shampoo with cursive writing on it. A razor.

“Where did you get all that stuff?” said Andrew. “Did you go out?”

“For Christ’s sake, Dad. No. I went to the little store in the lobby.”

“They’re not going to let her have the razor.”

“Okay,” said Anna, putting the razor back in the bag. “Fine. But we need to get her these other things. She needs them.”

“We can’t get back there until Thursday, sweetie.” Was he going to have to call her “sweetie” from now on? Surely that was worse.

“She needs them,” Anna said again.

“I know,” said Andrew. “But she’ll manage. She’s been managing already.” He heard his own voice and realized he was angry. He wished he had gotten the things for Lily himself—even though it did not matter, not really. They could not see her until Thursday, anyway, and so it could not make a difference whether the things were purchased today or three days from now. And yet there was something galling about Anna having done it; Andrew imagined her walking into that lobby, flushed with exercise, meting out her foreign currency (saved from her various jobs, and then exchanged at a loss in the airport), and then selecting the best versions of whatever it was she thought Lily might need. All of this, all of this, was the job of a parent. In its unsentimental practicality it was, perhaps, the job of a father. It did not matter—of course it did not matter. And yet there was so little that could be done for Lily. Andrew couldn’t help but feel it was ungenerous of Anna to do it all herself.

“You don’t understand,” said Anna, and Andrew heard the strange timbre in her voice that used to mean tears. She coughed herself into a more serious register. “You don’t understand anything about it.”