Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“You don’t really love me,” said Maria, blinking slowly. She said it as though it was a realization she had just made but did not really mind very much.

“My God” Eduardo shoved off the covers. He was blind with anger, shaken by the violence of its eruption. He had not even known how angry he could be about anything until now. “My every move, my every thought , is for you. This whole fucking case is for you. My whole life is for you. What more do you want from me?”

“It’s not about what I want. It’s not even about what you feel. It’s about who I am. And you don’t know that.”

Eduardo threw the bedclothes on the floor, and then he hit the wall open-handed, with some force. Maria looked at the sheets in mild surprise. She never really had to register his physical strength, because Eduardo let her forget it; every time he touched her—every single time—it was with gentleness, restraint. But he was much, much stronger than she was, and he realized that in this moment he was reminding her of that—not because he was threatening her, but because he was demanding she take his proper measure.

Maria, however, did not seem troubled by this outburst. She just looked at the sheets, and then at him, with an expression of patient interest, as though she was an incredibly intelligent lamb. “I hate this about you, you know,” she said.

Eduardo didn’t know whether she meant his job, or his temper, or something else altogether, but he realized—finally, with great certainty and relief—that it did not matter. “Yes,” he said. “I know.” He got out of bed and stood. On the carpeting in front of him was a pale demilune, cast by the streetlight outside the window. “Why did you come back?” he said. “Really.”

Maria rolled onto her back and put her hands over her eyes. “Because I had a dream.”

“You had a dream.”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“I dreamed you turned into a flower and I forgot to water you and you died.”

Eduardo snorted. He was appalled.

“If you want the truth,” Maria said from underneath the covers. “I think that poor girl is probably innocent.”

Eduardo turned to the window. Outside, the sky was growing lighter and somehow pellucid, suggesting rain in its mood if not quite in its color. Soon it would be morning again. It was always almost morning again.

“What,” he said. “Did you have a dream about that, too?”

At night, Sebastien kept up the anonymous donations. He gave money to Lily’s parents’ travel fund, and then he kept on giving. He gave money to Amnesty International, for Lily. He gave money to victims’ advocacy groups, for Katy. He gave money to the Space Foundation for the stars (if ever there was a project that could swallow up any fortune, any lifetime). The Space Foundation sent him maps of constellations. He put them on the walls; he put them over the photo of his tapir. It wasn’t actually his tapir: His father had shot it for him because he couldn’t do it and had let him stand in the picture anyway. Now Sebastien’s cowardly, adolescent feet poked out from underneath the purplish, smoky corona of a rotating galaxy. He put a map over the tapestry, partially obscuring it. Now the dogs chased streaky comets, the alluvial silt of the farthest stars. He put maps on the ceiling, making celestial clerestories. He realized he had never, in his entire life, slept outside.

He Googled “suicide” again and again, allowing himself each time to be moved anew by the automatic, impersonal concern of the Internet. It was so perfect in its abstraction, Sebastien thought. It was something like the Kantian categorical imperative, or the awesome callousness of nature, or the sort of nostalgic, flamboyant kindnesses that the United States very occasionally extended to its enemies: rebuilding postwar Germany, giving Osama bin Laden an Islamic ceremony before tossing his body into the sea.

In a way, Eduardo was surprised to find, losing Maria again turned out to feel almost natural. Eduardo had known that after the case was over he would have a feeling of having reached the peak of his life, of looking over its edge, of knowing that soon night would fall, and that even sooner it would be time to turn around. Now that Maria was gone again, he found himself heading back down already—and it seemed a less frightening journey, somehow, though he did have to marvel at its swiftness.

Her departure had been a catastrophe Eduardo had been drilling for most of his adult life. Her return had been, in the end, merely a kind of caesura between miseries. Or maybe not even that.

And yet it was true that Eduardo had been sure about her once—surer than he had ever been about anything else, before or since.

Over the months, Eduardo thought often of Lily Hayes’s time in prison—of how difficult it must be to be there after a life as short and easy as hers. She’d have to recall memories that she’d barely been present for at the time; she’d have to turn them over and over again in her mind, looking for new details and complexities. It would be like scrambling for the crumbs of meals you’d consumed without knowing you’d need to ration them. It would be like craning your neck to try to see something beyond a picture’s frame.

A year after the conviction, Eduardo read in the paper that Sebastien LeCompte was having an estate sale, and he hired a man to go to it and buy the Steinway. All told, the purchase was approximately what he’d made on Lily Hayes’s conviction. He saw how this could be viewed as a kind of revenge, but really he meant it as a kind of penance—though not penance for the chance that he’d been wrong about Lily. Eduardo felt humility before that possibility, as before all other possibilities. He had done his best. He had made a good faith attempt at agency in this lifetime. This, and only this, was all that any of us could really do or know that we had done. Conceding the fallibility of your knowledge was only the first step: Given that, you had to proceed, you had to discern, you had to assess and evaluate and distinguish right from wrong, you had to sort out truth from falsehood (people might say they weren’t doing this, but, of course, they were doing this; they were acting on many layers of unexamined belief with every breath they took, with every moment they lived). And then, whatever you decided you believed, you had to act as though you really believed it. If you did not do this, you weren’t just a coward. If you did not do this, you were forfeiting something far bigger than bravery.

After Lily’s sentencing, Sebastien was finally allowed to visit her in prison. He arrived to find her sitting at a table, smoking. Her hair was longer and seemed a different color—not just dirtier, but actually darker, somehow.

“They say that stuff will kill you,” he said feebly.

“God,” she said. “I hope something else gets to it first.”

“Is your hair a different color?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“They say Marie Antoinette’s hair went white the night before she was executed.”

Lily had once told Sebastien that he didn’t know what he meant when he talked, but this was not an accurate diagnosis. Usually he just didn’t care—he only wanted to sound clever, and there was a crystalline simplicity and directness in this, really, when you thought about it. But now he felt like he did care, he cared very much—he just didn’t know what he was trying to say. Whatever that was was off in some other galaxy, the kind that was so far away that by the time you got there you’d be dead.

Lily shook her head. “That’s not how it works. It’s just that all her brown hair fell out.” She took a puff of her cigarette. There was an intense agitation in her movements now that Sebastien hadn’t noticed at the trial. “I can’t believe they let you in here.”