Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

The next day, the Carrizos left for their nephew’s baptism, and Katy went off somewhere with her even-tempered lady friends. To celebrate, Lily cut her classes and spent the day skulking around the house. Beyond opening one of Katy’s drawers to check her bra size (32B—Lily was not sure what she was going to do with this information), Lily behaved herself. She flopped carelessly on the sofa just because she could. She picked up the phone’s receiver and then set it back down. She rifled through the kitchen cabinets and inspected Beatriz’s incomprehensible cooking gadgets. But she opened no private drawers belonging to the Carrizos—Beatriz probably had everything booby-trapped, anyhow—nor did she brook the grim border of their bedroom door. She enjoyed only the meager proprietary feeling that came from washing her own dish, from changing the television to a new channel. Left to her own devices, Lily actually was fairly trustworthy—but, she thought bitterly, nobody would ever know it.

When evening fell, Lily began the walk across the driveway toward Sebastien’s, dragging her feet on the grass. She had told him she’d be over at seven-thirty and was already late; she could not possibly put it off any longer, she knew. And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself—the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all, at least for Lily. In her life so far, Lily had managed to remember with stunning clarity every truly painful conversation she had ever had; they ran through her head like incantations, like important speeches memorized during childhood (Lily wished she could still remember speeches—why was it that nothing could be tattooed onto your brain like something written there against your will when you were young?). The coming conversation with Sebastien would be no different, Lily knew, and she did not relish the thought of it replaying in her head for a lifetime—the scene made somehow grimmer and more ludicrous, both, by its setting in that ridiculous room, before that awful tapestry, which, she now thought meanly, Sebastien had probably commissioned to be made to look threadbare.

Across the yard, Sebastien’s house grew larger and larger, and then it was upon her. Lily stood for a moment on the porch, feeling, over her sadness, that strange flutter of excitement that often came to her in darker moments. It was a sense of detached curiosity and potential energy; a feeling that here before her was an important event she might witness, an important mystery she might solve, an important challenge she might rise to meet. This sensation had been with Lily from the first missteps of her childhood—she remembered it from the time she’d killed the banana slug, and the time she’d accidentally made Maureen cry over Janie—but it had had more sinister incarnations, too. It had been with Lily the time Anna had broken her ankle doing gymnastics in the living room; it had been there when she sat in her sixth-grade classroom and listened to the teacher try to explain what had just happened to the buildings in New York City.

Lily raised her hand to the knocker. Standing here now, undeniably, it was with her again—the same feeling as when she’d sat among her subdued classmates (sixth graders being too young to know what to be scared of or sad for and too old to fall into reflexive hysterics regardless); the same feeling as when she’d raced up the stairs and into the hallway and dialed 911 while Anna screamed in the background. Alongside the terror and the rabid sort of mania there was also something like elation. It was the elation of jumping off a bridge, perhaps—the momentary delirium you’d feel in the free fall—but whatever it was, it was with her now, as she knocked on Sebastien LeCompte’s door for the last time and heard him moving toward the door. Here we go. This is it . Lily closed her eyes. Someday we’ll all be dead, but we are not dead yet . She held her breath. And something is finally happening .

February

By the last night, the night Katy died, Sebastien already knew it was over.

Lily appeared at his door at nearly eight o’clock—late—and he took her coolly into his arms. He could smell the baseness of bleach, the dried beer spilled on her shoes, something skunk-cabbagey in her hair—now that she worked, Lily always smelled like the world. She submitted to his embrace with the resignation of a person who has already planned to take away something enormous, and so has no trouble giving something trifling.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, even though she must have known that he would never have remarked on it. She sounded too careful, too kind; he could hear in her voice the magnanimousness of the already decided. Sebastien had so little of her, he knew; he always had. Still, what could he do? He had to proceed as usual. He had to act as though what was clearly happening was not.

“Are you?” Sebastien was exhausting even himself now. “I never notice Newtonian time, myself.”

Lily nodded vacantly—he had to think: tolerantly—and wiggled away from him, kicking off her shoes. Sebastien would not fritter their last moments with indignity and anxiety, he decided. He would not paw at her and beg for her love and stroke her hair and say, What’s wrong, my love, what’s wrong, what’s wrong? He was his parents’ son, after all. If there was anything he could endure, it was solitude. If there was anything he could endure, it was abandonment. If there was anything he could endure, it was everything.

“Do you mind if I pour myself a drink?” said Lily.

She had never asked this before. “I’ll pour one for you,” said Sebastien. “Did you eat at home?”

“They’re out of town,” she said, padding off to the bathroom. “Beatriz left us some leftovers.”

She closed the door and turned on the water, and in a moment Sebastien could hear the beeping of her phone. He was not surprised. This was the way of things. She was young, and she was alive, and she belonged in the land of the living. Sebastien would not try to strongarm her into this sarcophagus of a house, to lie with him in his postmortal life for all eternity.

Lily came back from the bathroom and mustered a smile.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” said Sebastien. He’d meant to say, “Would the lady care to indulge in some of the more mediocre of our cinematic arts?”—but, for some reason, everything sardonic was curdling somewhere in the back of his throat. He felt himself regressing, turning into someone young and uncomplicated, someone who had never had to be brave.

“I guess,” Lily said dully. She was tugging at her split ends with the fretfulness of a trauma victim. Maybe, after all, she was not so special—just a pretty girl, a little less than conventionally gorgeous, a little more than conventionally bright, affixed with all the conventional scraps of luck that came with a conventionally privileged life. Maybe, Sebastien told himself, she would be easier to forget than he was imagining.

Sebastien put Lost in Translation into the DVD player and turned off the lights. Lily produced a joint, lit it, then passed it to him wordlessly. Sebastien was surprised but was not going to ask; instead he took a long drag, hoping for some kind of emotional blunting. On the screen, a mute Scarlett Johansson moved through a frenetic Tokyo. Sebastien began to feel the waves of weed, its surges of calm and twists of paranoia. Time passed. He did not touch Lily, and she did not touch him. The movie ended. Sebastien looked at Lily, who was still staring at the darkened screen. He was not ready for it, but he also knew he never would be.

“Let’s skip the histrionics, shall we?” he said.