Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“I just keep thinking about her lying there, while I was napping on the couch.”

“Don’t think about it,” said Anna.

“You try it,” said Lily. She sounded like herself, almost. She sat up. “So I got up. I felt really weird. Like, massively thirsty, but also weirdly emotionally, like, fragile. It wasn’t getting dark at all yet, but I just felt this kind of permanent emptiness in the house. I don’t know. I went down to the bedroom. I wanted to find Katy. I wanted to see if she wanted to go for a walk or something. Get out of that house. The door was still closed. And outside the door, there was a blood footprint. It seemed enormous, like it was from some kind of monster. And it was so detailed on the white carpet. Like, you could see each ridge on the sole of the sneaker. I screamed and ran into the room. She was lying in the middle of the floor with a towel over her head. I think I knew she was dead. I went over to her and pulled the towel off. Her face was turned to the side. Her lips were blue. I tried to give her CPR for like one second and her lips were so cold and I got her blood on my face.”

Lily was shaking so hard that she was moving Anna’s arm along with her shoulders. Andrew tried putting his arm around her again, and this time, she allowed it.

“I was totally bawling by this point. I ran out of there and over to Sebastien’s and then we called the police. Then the cops came and we were locked out of the house. The Carrizos couldn’t get a flight until the next day. I called Mom. Sebastien took me to buy a toothbrush. He was going to let me stay with him. I spent the whole night puking, I don’t know why. And then the next day they came for me and brought me here.”

Outside the door, the guard was telling them two minutes, which was unbelievable. Andrew hadn’t done anything yet, and he especially hadn’t done the most crucial thing.

“Lily.” He grabbed her hands so hard that he could feel the slight accordioning of her bones. What he wanted to say was Wait a minute. Just wait one goddamn minute here . As though the issue was only that things were going too fast. As though he could manage it, no problem, if he just had thirty seconds to sit still and really think about it. “How are they treating you?”

“I don’t know if I should say.”

“Tell me.”

“I have to pee in front of the guards.”

“I know.”

“There’s no trash can. There’s no running water except the shower. There’s no fork. The toothpaste doesn’t work.”

“It doesn’t work ?” said Andrew.

“We’ll get you real toothpaste,” said Anna.

“Can you get me real tampons?”

“ Real tampons?” said Andrew.

The guard had entered the room and was standing, with quiet obtrusiveness, in the corner.

“Yes,” said Anna, emphatically.

“What are real tampons?”

“Dad.”

“The shower is freezing,” said Lily. “I mean, freezing . I swear they’re doing it on purpose.”

The guard was upon her, and he stood her up—not roughly, but in a way that left no ambiguity as to what she was going to do. Andrew wanted to punch the guy in the face. He wanted to hold Lily and Anna and let them weep into his shoulders and tell them he would protect them always. But he knew he couldn’t. And he knew that a scene like that would terrify all of them. It would feel like a goodbye, which this certainly was not. They would see Lily very soon. Hysteria invited hysteria. There was nothing to be gained from it.

“We’ll see you in seven days,” said Andrew. He gave Lily a hug that was warm, but without any undertones of apocalyptic clinging. “Your mother will be here.”

“I love you,” she said.

“We love you,” they said.

They walked out into the hallway, leaving Lily behind them. When Andrew turned back to look at her, her head was down again, her long greasy hair obscuring her face. And she didn’t look back up at them, even though they waved to her all the way down the hall.

February

Eduardo Campos was not sure until he saw the pictures. Later, people would ask him—informally, socially—when he knew. Be honest with us, they’d say. We won’t tell. We knew when we heard about her Facebook page. We knew when we heard about her cartwheel. We knew when we saw the footage of her with the condoms—that cold, seductive look she gave the boy, and only hours after that poor other girl was knifed to death. That’s when we knew Lily Hayes was guilty. When did you know? And Eduardo would laugh and say that of course he never knew, that he still didn’t know. His job was just to make the case for the state, and the state’s case, one had to admit, was ironclad. But the truth was he did know, and he had first known when the judicial police brought him Lily Hayes’s camera.

The crime scene had not surprised him. Nothing surprised him, really, though there was certainly an incongruity between the upscale neighborhood and the well-kept house and the young American woman dead in a vast swamp of her own blood. It had taken Eduardo years to get used to how much blood one body could produce. But he was used to it now, and he studied the scene with his practiced dissociative attitude, reminding himself that the best way to help this young woman now was to pay very close attention.

She was lying on her stomach with her face to the side, hunched in the characteristic awkwardness of the dead. There was substantial bruising along her inner thighs. It was overwhelmingly likely that she had been sexually assaulted.

Eduardo followed the police with his notepad. He did not touch anything. In the kitchen, they found a knife, which was collected. In the victim’s drawer, they found a half-empty packet of Skin Skin condoms, which was also collected. In the bathroom, they found three discrete spots of blood and an unflushed toilet, all of which were photographed, then sampled. In the garden, they found Lily Hayes, who had discovered the body (according to her) moments before running across the lawn with blood on her face (according to the driver who was now shakily smoking a cigarette in front of his delivery truck). Lily Hayes was white, late teens or early twenties, with a squarish jaw and auburn hair and high, vaguely witchy eyebrows; she appeared to have already washed all of the blood off her face. She was standing morosely next to a very young man in suspenders. Behind them, the bald double pates of San Telmo Pedro gleamed in the distance. Lily Hayes was not crying. She was pale, but perhaps she was always pale. She kissed the boy once, somewhat chastely, and then again, a little less chastely. She looked, Eduardo decided, harassed. Inconvenienced. If she looked anything at all. There was a stillness to her face that would probably seem perverse under any circumstances, but especially these circumstances, and which could only be intentional. Eduardo let himself think the thought, and then he let it pass. He’d been at this long enough to know that you couldn’t scour yourself entirely clean of hunches and biases and premonitions; lurking suspicions; kneejerk reactions. You couldn’t help but know some things without knowing why you knew them.

But at that point he did not know; he was not sure. He wasn’t sure that afternoon, when he went home to drink two tumblers of whiskey and take ibuprofen for his costochondritis (an inflamed chest wall, his doctor had told him, though he knew that it was actually the somatic manifestation of loneliness, that his heart was finally quitting in protest). He wasn’t sure that night, when he was still awake past three, walking heel to toe through his living room, the apartment so empty around him that he could hear the sonic groans of his own intestines, like whale song. And he wasn’t sure the next day, when the police brought him the transcript of their initial conversation with Lily Hayes.