Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

Sebastien came to hear the tape so many times that it became impossible not to think of it as a loop or a cycle, or as a kind of mythic event that was somehow always occurring because it never had; like literature or drama or sacred texts, the tape seemed to demand the present tense. On the tape, Lily’s voice sounds like it’s being removed from her body with pliers. She gives the Carrizos’ address before she says anything else. Throughout the call, she speaks English to the dispatcher and never seems to notice. Qué es su emergencia? She’s dead, she’s dead, oh my God, oh my God, please hurry, oh my God, she’s dead. Quién? Katy. My roommate. God, please hurry .

All of this, of course, gave the anchors their new favorite question. If Lily was so sure that Katy was dead, they asked—breathlessly, delightedly—then why had she so valiantly attempted CPR? I don’t know , Lily said miserably, according to the leaked police report that ran without ceasing. I guess I thought maybe she wasn’t dead at first. But then by the time I made the call I just knew that she was. I just knew .

And this was another thing Sebastien wished he could tell the television, or at least tell someone: He had known it, too, somehow, as he stood holding Lily outside the Carrizos’ house. He had known that Katy Kellers was dead. It was a certainty as distinct and undeniable as a physical sensation, though somehow deeper than that—not like the chill of the sun moving behind a cloud, but like the particular sense of forsakenness this brings. The police were fanning into the house, and Sebastien was standing behind Lily, holding her by the shoulders, then the elbows, feeling her heartbeat rattle in her body. She was clenching her hands so hard that her whole body shook. This ferocity scared Sebastien; it suggested a wretchedness that he would not have been able to bear in anybody, but especially, especially, could not bear in her. This was why he had kissed her—first lightly, and then a second time more forcefully. It certainly wasn’t lust driving him to do it; it wasn’t even tenderness, quite. His only thought, really, was to distract her, to make her hands unfreeze from the terrifying shape they were taking.

The cameras never caught any of this, though. Instead, they showed Sebastien leaning into Lily. They showed Lily’s face, strangely slack and empty and looking, the commentators said, nearly bored. And they showed Sebastien kissing her and kissing her again, while the men outside the house rolled the police tape, drawing a line between Katy and everyone else.

March

At ten a.m. on Thursday, a taxi arrived to take Andrew, Anna, and Maureen back to Lomas de Zamora.

Anna sat wedged between Andrew and Maureen, whose hair was still wet from the shower; Andrew could see several wiry, lunar-white strands near her temple. The violently familiar smell of her shampoo filled the cab, casting Andrew uneasily back into the unplaceable past—he felt as though he’d awoken in some unknown, long-ago year of his life and had no idea whether great joy or great sorrow awaited him. Andrew’s sense of time was jostling; he simply could not believe how much of it had gone by—not the years since he’d last regularly ridden in cars with Maureen and Anna together, not the week since he’d seen Lily—and how little of it seemed to have properly passed. So much seemed entirely elided over somehow, like the hours lost to anesthesia.

At the jail, they were ushered in quickly. Andrew let Maureen and Anna walk ahead, not wanting to deny Lily one instant of her mother. And so he was trailing behind, unable to see anything, when he heard Maureen breathe in sharply and say, “Oh my God.”

“What? What’s happened?” said Andrew, hurrying into the room. Over Maureen’s shoulder, he could see that Lily was sitting in her usual spot, in her usual position, except that this time, she was bald.

“Oh my God,” said Maureen again. “What did they do to you?”

Lily had her hands spread out on the table again. Andrew had so hoped to find her in a different position this time. “I got lice,” she said.

Maureen cupped Lily’s head in her hands. Her face was concave with horror, and Andrew knew that part of what she was imagining was how Lily would now look on TV. “How did you get lice?”

“Everyone has lice.”

“They couldn’t have given you a special shampoo?”

“Mom,” said Anna.

“Mom, seriously?” said Lily, ducking away from Maureen. “There’s no shampoo. There’s definitely no special shampoo. We barely have soap.” The weary condescension in her voice was strangely, momentarily, consoling; Lily had used this voice many, many times, after all, for many, many occasions. A line ran through Andrew’s head, possibly remembered, possibly imagined: Mom, it’s college, of course they have coed bathrooms! But as soon as Andrew summoned that line he realized there was something different—something troublingly different—about Lily’s tone now; he recognized it after a moment as the complete absence of triumphalism. For years, Lily had thought that she knew more about the world than Andrew and Maureen did, and for years, she had been wrong. Now she was finally right, and she did not want to be.

Andrew looked again at Lily’s baldness. Her hair wasn’t actually entirely gone, he saw now; it was chopped off in pieces on one side, messy and askew, and shaved to a smooth bulb only near the top. It was the kind of thing she might have done to herself, actually, under different circumstances. Andrew flashed to an image of a different kind of Lily—rebelling and experimenting and trying out new identities; adopting lesbianism, briefly or permanently, at one of the Seven Sisters schools; coming home with a shaved head the Thanksgiving of her freshman year and saying you don’t understand, you don’t understand, you just don’t understand , no matter how strenuously Maureen and Andrew assured her that they did, they did, they absolutely did. This image flipped to a more frightening one: a different Lily, in a different sort of wayward twenties, as a cult member or religious supplicant; her hair, in a gesture to humility, arranged into the tonsure of some sort of Eastern monasticism; saying to Andrew and Maureen you don’t understand, you don’t understand, you just don’t understand , and this time it being true. That picture dissolved, and finally Andrew was struck with the one that would stay with him, no matter how he tried to shake it: the stunning, horrifying image of a Lily condemned. He saw a bald Lily burned for witchcraft, a bald Lily enduring the Spanish Inquisition, a bald Lily loaded onto a cattle car headed east. Andrew knew these comparisons were inapt; he knew that in invoking them he was hysterically overstating his daughter’s trouble while diminishing the suffering of history’s real victims, and that this was as disrespectful as it was useless. But Andrew couldn’t stop seeing those other Lilys, and his knees nearly buckled when he thought of them: all young and bald and innocent; all beyond the reach of his help, or anyone’s; all eternally living out stories with endings that the world now knew.

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Lily. Maureen was standing beside her, trying not to cry. Lily reached out and patted her in an odd swiping motion; the gesture was unnatural, as though Lily had read a manual on touching someone you loved but had never seen it done. “Don’t cry. It’s just hair.”

“I know,” said Maureen. “I’m not crying.” But it was clear that she was, or that she would be, though there were no tears. Maureen had the ability to visibly defer crying, if it was not a good time to cry. This was something Andrew had seen her do many, many times.