Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“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.

Things I Will Do At Home:

—eat a steak

—volunteer at a nursing home

—practice the oboe

—get up early enough to watch the sunrise 4 x per year (one per season)

—be nice to everyone

—set up a fundraiser for Katy

—apologize to Harold

—apologize to Sebastien

—apologize to Mom and Dad

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.

A security guard finally appeared and led them down the hall, Maureen clutching Andrew’s hand. In the visiting room, Lily was sitting with her head down just where Andrew had left her the last time. He fought the image of her sitting there all week long, waiting for their return.

Maureen went to Lily and gathered her up into her arms. “Mom,” Lily hiccupped, bending her head into Maureen’s lap. Andrew leaned over both of them and pecked Lily on the cheek. Her hair was in clumps, and she smelled of oil and dirty laundry. Andrew did not know whether this was defiance or despair, or which would be worse.

“Sweetheart,” said Maureen. She gently cupped Lily’s head, as though she were a newborn—fragile, tender-fontanelled. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

This should have been the first thing Andrew had said when he’d visited. This should have been the first thing, not the last. Andrew patted Lily’s shoulder, then reached into his bag for the sandwich. “We brought you this,” he said. It was chorizo with egg—she’d loved this sandwich so much that she’d actually written home about it—and it had been Andrew’s idea to bring it to her. Lily lifted her head now and stared at the sandwich plaintively, as though she could not remember what one was supposed to do with such a thing.