Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

Anna was not in the room.

She was not in the closet, not in either bedroom, not in the bathroom. Not, when Andrew went downstairs to check, at the gym. She had not been seen by the hotel concierge. Andrew headed back toward his room to put on his sneakers. He was not about to rouse Maureen from sleep to confess that he’d lost another daughter.

This time when he opened the door, Anna was sitting in the corner on the floor, long legs folded up around her as though she were a piece of obsolete video equipment. Andrew wavered in the doorway. “Where were you?” he said.

“Have you been drinking?” said Anna. In the moonlight, her hair looked nearly gray, and Andrew thought he could almost see her as she would someday look—in some future unimaginably far, that Andrew would never live to witness.

“Excuse me, have you been drinking?” he said. “Just where the hell have you been?”

“I’m nineteen years old,” said Anna, standing up. She was shorter than Andrew by a good three inches, but her litheness and youth conspired to make him feel towered over. “You can’t keep me locked up here. I’m not the one in jail.” She hiccupped.

“You can’t just take off like that. This is a dangerous city.” Andrew’s voice was shaking. “Do you know how worried I was?”

“Afraid someone will kill me?”

“Christ, Anna. Yes. Obviously. Among other things.” Andrew wanted to go to her and take her in his arms, but he could not bear the thought of her shrugging him off.

“Other things? What other things?” said Anna. “Like that I’ll kill someone, maybe?”

“Stop it,” said Andrew, with volume. Anna looked surprised. Because Andrew normally spoke so gently, nobody ever remembered that he had a voice that carried when he wanted it to.

“Dad.” Anna wobbled again. “Would you still love her if she did it?”

“Stop it,” said Andrew again. “Sit down.”

She did.

“Take off your shoes,” said Andrew, even though he didn’t know why he was telling her to do this. She wouldn’t run off again without her shoes, maybe. Or maybe she would. Maybe he had no idea what his daughters would or wouldn’t do. Maybe Andrew just wanted to tell Anna to do something and watch her actually do it. “Hand them to me,” he ordered.

She did. Andrew was feeling marginally more under control. “Okay then,” he said. “I’m going to get us some water.”

Andrew went to the bathroom and ran the water until it was cold. In the mirror, the skin around his eyes and mouth were furrowed; his teeth, he could see, were yellowing by the day. It was very clear to Andrew that he was older now than he had ever, ever been before; worse, he strongly suspected that, from now on, he was only going to get older still.

Back in the room, Anna was sitting on the bed. Andrew handed her a glass of water, then drank his own in one gulp. He wiped his mouth. “She didn’t do it,” he said.

“I know.” Anna looked into her water balefully. “But what if she had?”

“That’s not a useful thing to think about.”

“Everything’s useful to think about. That’s a direct quote from you. You have actually literally said that.”

“Well, not this.”

“Hypotheticals. You always say you truck in hypotheticals.”

“Anna—”

“Counterfactuals, right? That’s your word. So what if she did it? What if she had done it?”

“Stop it.”

“Or what if I did? What if I did something terrible?”

Andrew squinted into his glass. He remembered when Anna and Lily were small and terrified of their nightmares and would come crawling into bed with Andrew and Maureen to make them promise not to die. Andrew had never been inclined to promise this, since, in fact, he and Maureen would someday die, and the best of all possible outcomes was that Anna and Lily would have to watch them do it. And Andrew had imagined some future reckoning, some kind of confrontation (though when this would occur exactly, he was unclear) when Anna and Lily would point at him with accusing fingers and go back to the videotape and say Look, you promised not to die, and look, you did die. You promised not to and you did . Lying to them about this most irreducible fact seemed to Andrew an unforgivable deceit—he was giving them the wrong idea about absolutely everything if he gave them the wrong idea about this.

But Maureen had not agreed. She felt that the children were children, and that they needed a promise in order to sleep at night—on this one particular night, the wind shivering through the white pine trees outside their windows, their sheets vaguely redolent of lavender—and that by the time Maureen and Andrew died the children would be grown and with children of their own and they would understand the lie, and would look back and forgive them.

And so Andrew and Maureen had promised: They had looked their two living children in the eyes and promised not to die. And Andrew remembered how this had assuaged Anna—how, sleepy with relief, she had tugged at her ear and grabbed her stuffed rabbit, Honey Bunny, by one felt foot and dragged him up the stairs—but how Lily had remained awake, staring at them with her fierce agate eyes, saying, “That’s not true. I know that you can’t promise that. I know that that isn’t true.”

Andrew made a decision. “You wouldn’t do something terrible,” he said to Anna. “You couldn’t do something terrible. But if you did, I’d always love you. That’s our job.” Probably, this wasn’t a lie. Probably, he would still love her. This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own.

Anna looked at him hard, and for a moment Andrew saw her as a child, yawning and pacified, swinging her rabbit from her hand, turning around to pad up the stairs. And then the look changed, hardening into something brittle and unyielding and wise, something that could know things that Andrew didn’t know, that Andrew might never know.

“No,” she said finally. “You wouldn’t.”

February

The day after her birthday, Lily awoke to a bright dawn. Preposterously pink light streamed in through the windows; it was like waking up in the middle of a conch shell, and Lily felt a sense of emergency—apocalypse, war, alien invasion—before realizing that this was only a sunrise. This happened every morning; every morning she was bathed briefly in this otherworldly light, and she was never even awake for it. She propped herself up on her elbows. It was strange, maybe a little violating, that the room could turn this color without her noticing. She popped her head over the side of the bed to look at Katy, feeling, as she did so, the first ominous heave of what she knew would be a daylong hangover. Below her, Katy was composed, even in sleep. At the sight of her, the whole of the previous evening came back to Lily, and she remembered that she was going to have to break up with Sebastien. She lay back down.

Lily was sorry she had to end things with Sebastien, but she saw no alternative; she was outmaneuvered, and to do nothing now would only make her a chump. Lily didn’t know how she’d gotten herself into a situation where being a chump was even possible—being, as she was, about as committed to transparency and low-stress, drama-free entanglements as a person could be—but there it was. Lily hadn’t asked anything from Sebastien—she hadn’t even wanted anything, really: She hadn’t required him to make any promises, she hadn’t put him in a position where he’d need to tell her any lies. The fact that he’d treated her poorly anyway could only mean that he’d wanted to.