Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“She was upset,” said Anna.

Eduardo probed his spoon further into the cup, scraping it against the granular sludge of sugar on the bottom. It made sharp little belllike sounds against the porcelain, which seemed somehow louder than they should have in the empty café. “She seems like she’d be a tough person to console,” Eduardo said to his coffee. “Under any circumstances.”

“I guess that’s why I didn’t answer,” said Anna. She blinked when the spoon hit the cup.

“Well, that’s understandable,” said Eduardo, motioning to the waitress for the check. “To tell you the truth,” he said, and this time he actually was, “I’m not sure I would have, either.”

March

Andrew awoke to Maureen’s lunging toward a ringing phone.

“Hello?” she said. She’d been startled into the gulping shock that always accompanied her sudden awakenings, and hadn’t yet managed to sand down the rough edges of panic in her voice. This, Andrew knew, had nothing to do with Lily’s situation; this was long-standing, possibly endemic. Maureen would sound this way at home, at one p.m., on a Sunday, with a telemarketer.

“Lawyer,” she mouthed. She’d become comically disheveled during their nap, another classic characteristic. I want to know where you went and what you did and whether you took pictures , Andrew used to say to her in the mornings. It was one of the many small things about her that Andrew had neither particularly treasured nor particularly disliked and so had not, until this moment, particularly remembered.

“I see,” said Maureen. Her face, Andrew noticed, was blanking. “Oh, God.” Andrew raised his eyebrows. “Okay. Yes. We’ll be there. We’re on our way.” She hung up.

“What?” he said.

She shook her head. “Lily has done something incredibly stupid.”

Oh, something else? Andrew wanted to say. His mood was still fossilized from the mirth of the morning; he sat up straighter in order to shake it off. He said, again, “What?”

Maureen ran her fingers through her hair. “She’s said some really stupid, incriminating things.”

“What things? To whom?”

“To Anna, I guess. On the phone. There was a voicemail.”

“What? When?”

“That night. There was a voicemail. We need to get Anna.”

“Okay,” said Andrew. He stood up, pulled on his pants, and began walking to the closed door of the other bedroom.

“What are you doing?” said Maureen, as he knocked. “She’s in your room,” she said, as he said, “Isn’t she in here?” Maureen’s look was floundering, and Andrew could see that Maureen knew Anna was not there but was willing to check anyway, because she would not want to be too confident about what was or was not possible anymore.

“I mean, isn’t she in your room?” said Maureen.

And instead of saying no, Andrew said, “We’ll go look.”

Outside, the sky was high domed, impossibly distant. Andrew had an image of it floating farther and farther away from them—perhaps in forgetfulness, perhaps in disgust, perhaps in total indifference. The sky seemed suddenly like a child’s balloon, like something you could lose if you weren’t careful or weren’t paying attention.

Anna had not been in the room.

In the taxi, Andrew squeezed Maureen’s hand lightly, and she squeezed back. Their refusal to console each other was their way of offering consolation; they were so far past reassurances. For this, and maybe for only this, Andrew was grateful.

When they reached Tribunales, Ojeda and Velazquez were already standing outside the office building, waiting. Andrew could see the flare of one of their cigarettes and he wondered pointlessly which one of them smoked. Behind them was another figure—Andrew saw a sheet of russet hair, the severe right angle of a substantial jaw, looking like cast silver in the early afternoon light.

“Oh my God,” Maureen breathed, and he knew that she was seeing Lily. The possibility that this person actually was Lily was low—for one thing, Andrew realized, this person had hair—and yet it held them there for a moment, as they rose and got out of the car, seeming to move against some sort of aquatic resistance, like the density that fills the atmosphere when you’re running from terror in a dream.

“It’s Anna,” said Andrew.

“Of course it is,” said Maureen. And Andrew knew, with a seam of certainty that opened within him like an old scar, that they were doomed, once again.

Anna began running toward them. “Mom,” she said. “Dad.” Her running was smooth and intentional and competent, even though she was crying—truly, she was her mother’s daughter. Even so, Andrew could feel the doom in the air around him. He could have reached out, he was sure, and fluttered his fingers through it. “I’m sorry,” said Anna. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Sebastien is sleeping , said Lily’s voice on the tape. Eduardo could hear in her voice a desperate treble—something he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard in their conversations, or even in any of the other recordings.

I just came back , she said. I just—what’s wrong with me?

Anna’s iPhone was, of course, subpoenaed; the relevant message was, of course, retrieved. This only took half an afternoon, since the voicemail, though deleted, had been helpfully stored in the iPhone’s deleted messages vault. Eduardo listened to it over and over, of course—first alone, many times, and then with the person who would need to try to explain it.

Jesus. I don’t know what I did .

Lily sounded hazy on the tape; altered, no doubt. But this line meant she’d been in possession of her faculties, mental and moral, and that she’d known she’d committed a hideous wrong. She’d known it enough, after all, to call her sister and sob about it. And you could hear in her voice that she really was sorry for whatever it was she had done. Nothing, nothing, could be more damning than that.

Once more, Eduardo restarted the message; once more, Lily’s voice filled the room. Once more, she said, Sebastien is sleeping .

Eduardo looked across the table at Sebastien LeCompte. His face was ashen. Eduardo glanced down at his notepad and began to form the obvious questions.

Sebastien sat across from Eduardo Campos, waiting to be made to listen again to Lily’s voicemail. Its content, as Campos was once more explaining, had raised some new issues.

“Lily says quite clearly that you are sleeping in the other room,” said Campos. “As you can hear.”

All around Sebastien, everything was white and unreal. He swallowed.

“You told me that you were with Lily all night,” said Campos. His hair was glistening with an indecipherable sheen—either sweat or gel, Sebastien couldn’t tell. “But the tape tells me that, in fact, she left. You’d lied about that.”

This was true, and yet Sebastien felt his brain cleave with a dizzying shock at the accusation. Why? It must be because he’d told the story so many times that he’d begun to remember it the way he told it. This had happened to him sometimes as a child—he’d embellish a story slightly and then eventually lose track of which narrative zigzags were real and which had been added later for flourish. Now—confronted with the evidence of Lily’s departure, bludgeoned by the memory of that night—Sebastien felt almost as surprised as he would have if he’d been told something he actually hadn’t known.

“I don’t think so, no,” he said shakily.

“That’s all on tape, too, as, of course, you realize. This isn’t a question of you convincing me my memory is fuzzy. It isn’t, as it happens, but you don’t have to take my word for it. You can take your own.”