Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“Aren’t you hungry?” said Maureen.

“I don’t know,” said Lily.

“Why don’t you take a bite, and maybe you’ll find out that you are?” said Maureen. This was a trick of hers that Andrew remembered from when the girls were little and prone to low blood sugar—they’d run around and forget to eat and then they’d cry, and Maureen would have to coax them into taking bites of grilled cheese until they calmed down. Now Maureen handed Lily the sandwich, which she held limply for a moment before taking a tentative bite. She chewed for a very long time, as though she wasn’t producing enough saliva to get the job done. She held her hand over her mouth daintily—a strange affectation she’d picked up from someone at college, made odder now by her grubby hair and oily skin, as though she were some Grey Gardens– style fallen aristocrat. She’d never been a vain child, their Lily—she always had a grass stain on her overalls or an eyelash on her cheek or a bit of cookie in the corner of her mouth; she was forever picking up cats and dogs against their will and getting animal hair all over her clothes. But she’d always been basically clean, basically presentable. The way she looked now was not entirely like herself.

Maureen must have been thinking the same thing, because she said, “Sweetie, here,” and began rummaging once more through her enormous bag. “I brought you a brush.”

Lily stopped chewing but didn’t swallow. “Are you serious?”

“I think it’d be a good idea to try to clean up a bit for the lawyers,” said Maureen.

“Are you fucking serious?” There was a flaky bit of egg on Lily’s lip, or maybe it was a piece of dry skin. “You want me to brush my fucking hair? That’s what you’re worried about? That’s what your priorities are?”

Andrew looked at Maureen. In the old days, Maureen had been very, very strict about language—one time Lily had sworn at her when she was on the phone with one of her friends, and Maureen had calmly unplugged it—but now her expression was pleading and subordinate. “Sweetheart,” she said.

“Stop calling me that, okay? Just stop it. I’m an adult. If you’re old enough to have everyone think you killed someone, you’re old enough to have your fucking parents stop calling you fucking sweetheart.”

“Everyone doesn’t think you killed someone,” said Maureen. “We all know you didn’t kill anyone. I just think it would be a very good idea for you to look like you haven’t. And like you haven’t given up on yourself entirely, either.”

“Well, what if I have?” Lily snarled.

“This is part of the problem,” Andrew ventured, and both Lily and Maureen turned to look at him like they were surprised he was still in the room.

“What are you talking about?” said Lily. She didn’t even sound angry. He wasn’t the parent worth her anger.

“Impressions matter, is all I’m saying, sweetheart.”

Andrew was only reiterating what Maureen had literally just said, and so he could not understand why Lily and Maureen were both looking at him like he’d just now revealed himself to be the cruel man they’d always suspected he might be.

“Are you joking?” Lily said, turning back to Maureen. “Are you two joking? Because you never used to have senses of humor.”

“Okay, Lily,” said Maureen. “Okay.” She was making gentle curlicues on Lily’s back now, and somehow Lily was allowing this. Andrew flashed to an image of Lily at age three or four—it was summer, and she was sprawled out on the couch in tiny shorts, licking a bright blue Popsicle and singing along to the theme song of some wretchedly long-running soap opera while Maureen traced letters through her T-shirt. The light of that long-ago late afternoon was silvery through the picture windows; in the corner, the monitor crackled with the sounds of baby Anna, sighing in her red inscrutable dreams, and maybe all of them had thought for a moment then that their lives would turn out to be tolerable after all. I love you , Maureen wrote, over and over, long before Lily could know what the shapes she was making meant. I love you, I love you .

“Okay, okay,” said Maureen, and Andrew saw that she was leaning over with the brush and taking it gently to Lily’s hair, and that Lily was not resisting. Andrew expected Maureen to say something—to coo a little, or offer something comforting, or in some way acknowledge that Lily was submitting where before she had defied—but she did not. She just kept brushing with one hand and stroking Lily’s back with the other, and slowly Lily’s hair returned to normalcy, and she began to look like a regular girl on a particularly bad day, but not necessarily in a particularly bad lifetime.

Velazquez and Ojeda entered the room, and Maureen and Andrew stood up to greet them. Lily remained seated. Andrew did not like this new passivity of hers, this tolerance of manhandling and ordering and planning by others. The lawyers sat and spread manila folders out on the table. They did not coddle Lily, or tsk over her, or offer expressions of sympathy to anyone. Maybe this was because her situation was not as bad as some they’d seen, or maybe it was because it was much worse and they’d already entirely given up. Or maybe—and, Andrew had to think, most probably—it was just because the lawyers were absorbed in the particular details of their own lives, and were already looking forward to the dinners that waited for them at home.

“Well,” said Ojeda. He was already sweating; his tie was tied too tightly and had the look of a purple silken snake throttling him about the neck. “The bottom line is that the DNA results are fairly good for us. First and most importantly, there’s DNA everywhere from a man—a man with a criminal record—who will now become the prosecution’s central suspect. He’s been arrested twice—once for drugs, once for trying to steal a car—and served nearly two years in prison. This is the man who committed this crime, and we can’t stress how significant it is to have him already identified.”

Maureen and Andrew nodded. Lily’s head listed to the side, her expression grave and still.

“Lily’s DNA was present in three places, however,” said Velazquez. “On the victim’s mouth, on a bra which may have belonged to the victim, and on the knife. Our first concern is with the knife.”

“When you say ‘the knife,’ ” said Maureen, “you mean the one that was—used—in the crime?”

“The murder weapon, yes.”

“My DNA is on that?” said Lily in a small voice.

“Well, it was a knife from the kitchen,” said Velazquez. He was looking at Maureen. “It was a communal knife. Beatriz Carrizo’s DNA is on it, too. And Lily surely had occasion to use it for cooking. Didn’t you, Lily?”

“Sure.” Lily nodded and clasped her hands in her lap—a little prissily, Andrew thought. “I’m sure I did.”

“Can you think of a specific time you might have used that knife for cooking?” said Ojeda.

“In particular, can you think of a time when somebody might have seen you use that knife for cooking?” said Velazquez.

Lily’s face paled, suddenly looking as fragile and ovoid as an egg. Andrew struggled to produce a memory, any memory, of Lily cooking anything, but he could not. Lily was notoriously and stridently indifferent to cooking. On Thanksgiving she’d stand around holding forth and drinking wine while Maureen basted the turkey, Maureen mashed the potatoes, Maureen chopped the squash. Maybe Lily would be given the occasional minor task—ferrying something from the counter to the table, polishing a glass, finding a ladle—but Andrew had never seen her voluntarily reach for a cooking gadget of any sort, and he seriously doubted she had recently taken an interest.