Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Lily again. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

Maureen’s face continued its silent internal collapsing. Watching this was far more excruciating, always, than her actual crying would have been. It meant that something had happened that she could not endure, and that she would not endure—just as soon as she endured it a little longer.

In the taxi on the way back to the hotel, Maureen stroked Anna’s head. “I know it’s not what’s important,” said Maureen. “But her hair was just so pretty.”

The rest of their time with Lily had been halting and quiet—with the urgency of the first visits over, a strange sharp-edged shyness had overtaken all of them. In an especially painful moment, Lily had actually resorted to giving them listless recommendations about what to see in the city. Perhaps this terrible new awkwardness was because of Lily’s baldness.

“We always wanted red hair,” Anna said to Maureen. “I mean, really red hair. Like yours.”

Or perhaps it was merely the oddness of the four of them, alone together in a room—though they’d congregated with some regularity after the divorce, it had usually been at holidays or weddings or funerals or other special occasions, in the presence of relatives or mutual friends or one of Lily’s beleaguered suitors.

“Blame your father and his dominant genes,” said Maureen.

But probably, after all, the strangeness hadn’t been because of Lily’s hair or the posthumous assemblage of their nuclear family. Probably it was because Lily was in jail, and after an hour the three of them would be leaving without her. And even if Lily knew rationally that there was nothing Andrew and Maureen could do about it, how could this abandonment not feel to her like a betrayal? After all, when the time was up and the security guards arrived, did Andrew or Maureen physically fight them? Did they grab Lily and try to make a break for it? Did they throw themselves in front of her and tell the guards that they could take them but they could not, could absolutely not, take their daughter? They didn’t. Instead, they rose and hugged Lily and whispered promises and encouragement and then, at the appointed time, they left, widening the new, terrifying chasm between Lily and everyone else. Andrew could almost hear it happening. He’d certainly heard it in Lily’s voice— We barely have soap , she’d said, and in that “we,” it seemed to Andrew, she had signified allegiance to a different realm. In some very fundamental respects, and through no fault of her own, Lily now had more in common with the worst people in the entire world than with her own family.

“Really, it was so beautiful,” said Maureen. “Like yours.”

“It wasn’t beautiful,” said Anna. “Mine’s not, either. Like Lily said, it’s just hair.” But she did not shrink away from Maureen; in fact, Andrew thought, she settled in closer to her.

That night, Andrew dreamed of flying away. When he woke, he stared at the ceiling fan above him, waiting for the sedative effects of its cyclonic whir. In three days, he was supposed to be leaving Buenos Aires. His plane ticket was already booked.

Andrew had had the flying dream often when Janie was sick. In the dream, there was no question as to whether he was flying away for good—he knew that he was delirious with the wickedness of precisely this—though he was always unable to make his way through the elusive dream-memory and figure out how he had ever let it happen in the first place. All he could really remember was the exhilaration: In the dreams he flew low enough for a detailed aerial view of the world; for some reason he seemed always to be headed north (to Canada, perhaps—like an escaped slave? Or like a draft dodger?), and whatever had allowed him to leave in the first place was already far, far behind him, and he could not account for it. This wasn’t so different from the way it must feel to do inconceivable things in real life, Andrew thought. There wasn’t a single cell in our bodies that was the same as the day we were born, and yet we were still held responsible for everything all of our former selves had ever done.

Nevertheless, after the dreams Andrew had always felt a guilt that was nearly tactile—not unlike the guilt he used to feel after the occasional sex dream (about old lovers, or old almost lovers, or students) back when he and Maureen were first married. Andrew could scarcely believe now that such trivialities had ever mattered so much to him. There had been great stretches of sexlessness between him and Maureen during those dark barren months when Janie was dying, and touching each other seemed unthinkable (not forbidden and thus alluring, but beyond comprehension, outside the realm of possible occurrences, something belonging to paraphysics or myth), and Maureen had even told him once that she did not care if he slept with someone else. Andrew’s actually acting on this was, as Maureen surely knew, implausible (who would he possibly have slept with?) and yet he did not take her offer as a dare, or as a taunt, or as a trap. When Maureen said she would not care, Andrew really believed her. During that time, and exactly as psychology predicted, Andrew was dreaming of losing his teeth.

Andrew got up and put on his bathrobe. He switched on the light. Outside, a cadaverous alley cat was mewling at a garbage can. He opened the door to the living room and jumped. Anna was sitting on the edge of the couch, watching the television with almost no sound.

“Hey,” said Andrew. His voice was craggy. “Why are you up?”

“Why are you?”

Andrew shrugged and began rifling for coffee filters. He opened the mini-fridge and stared into it dumbly. “Do you want a yogurt?” he said. Anna pointed to the yogurt she was already holding. Andrew closed the refrigerator.

When he went home, the idea was that he would try to resume his life. He would meet with Peter Sulzicki, the lawyer; he would meet with the accountant; he would, perhaps, make an appearance at his classes. From now on, he and Maureen would alternate weeks in Buenos Aires—a jointly devised plan that Andrew knew he couldn’t postpone forever. Trading weeks meant that Lily would always have a visitor, and that Andrew and Maureen would each be able to keep a foot—or at least a toenail, as Maureen had said—in their former lives. It was understood that they would have to do this because they’d need the money and small interim scraps of sanity their jobs afforded them. It was also understood, though never mentioned—much like the possibility of Janie’s death was never mentioned until it was already a reality, already in the past, already an event they were moving further away from with every second that passed—that they might never get out of this thing. They might, in fact, be in it for the long haul, and they had to try to keep now whatever they would need for the duration. Andrew had discussed this explicitly with his dean, who had listened with tented fingers and uncharacteristic generosity. He had a full beard and seemed to know how much everyone expected him to stroke it; Andrew suspected that he did not do this out of spite. Even so, he had been kind. An extra TA had been assigned to Andrew’s class. A grading schedule had been worked out.

Andrew poured himself a coffee and padded over to the couch. On the TV, a reporter was interviewing an athlete. “Who is that?” said Andrew.

“A tennis player,” said Anna.

“Oh.” Why didn’t Andrew ever think to turn on the TV? It was such a friendly presence. He cocked his head to one side and let the Spanish slip around him; it was a uniquely tantalizing feeling—that sensation of something eddying just beyond your comprehension. “I didn’t know they did tennis here,” he said.

“He won the U.S. Open.”