Cartwheel (2 page)

But now, in the overheated taxicab, with fragments of Buenos Aires flashing through the window, Andrew was beginning to wonder. He was beginning to wonder if this was indeed a catastrophe on the order of the others; he was beginning to wonder if it might join them, making a triad that would hold up his life like Roman columns. First—most importantly, most irreducibly—there was the death of Janie, their first daughter, at two and a half, from aplastic anemia. This was the tragedy that made all other tragedies pale, the template onto which all other grief was mapped. The divorce, comparatively, was a minor hiccup. Nobody had been surprised—not even he and Maureen had been surprised—though they had been disappointed, certainly, in their own lack of originality. And now there was this. It was all, Andrew thought, a little much for one lifetime—though he had to weigh it against his socioeconomic privilege, health, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality, American citizenship, etc., etc.; he’d been in academia long enough to know how far the scales were tipped in his favor, and how strenuously he must try at all times to acknowledge this, and how earnestly he must attempt to make his life an apology for its central accidents—and yet, and yet.

“Look,” said Anna. She pointed to a mansion—enormous, drowning
in its own decadence, already receding behind them. “Is that where
he
lives, do you think?”

Andrew was not quite sure who
he
was—the rich boy with whom Lily had conducted a five-week-long romance, presumably—but he was resolved to answer firmly anyway. “No,” he said, tapping Anna’s shoulder and frowning at its boniness. He tapped his own for comparison. “How are you holding up, Old Sport?” he said. He’d started calling Anna “Old Sport” sometime during her adolescence, when it became quietly clear to him that she was his least favorite daughter.

“Okay,” she said dully. “I’m tired.”

“You can conk out at the hotel.”

“I have to run at the hotel.”

“Oh. Right.”

Anna was on the cross-country team at Colby—she wasn’t a star, but was known for her diligence—and she’d gone running every day for two years straight, even on holidays, even with the flu. There had been a local newspaper article about it. She had almost cried—and it was the only time she’d almost cried—when Andrew had told her that there was no fucking way she was going to be allowed to run outside on their trip. “Your sister is locked up for life, and you’re worried about getting your exercise? Priorities, please.” He had shouted it. It had been a terrible day with Peter Sulzicki, the lawyer. “You think you’re going to run through the streets of that city? You’ll be kidnapped in five seconds flat. I don’t need another daughter arrested or dead.” Andrew wished immediately that he had not said this. To make it up to Anna, he had promised to find a hotel with a gym. But Andrew knew that this trip would break her streak, one way or another.

Poor Anna. She loved Lily, but she must have had the sense that Lily was always the one to be involved in spectacles, that Lily was the one for whom the rules were always bent. It was all the more unfair, then, that Andrew loved Lily more. Not much more—but no difference could be truly negligible when it came to the love of your children, since what it really meant was that he loved Anna less. This was
only because Anna had such tough competition: Janie, precious Janie, was a tragedy, and Lily, cherished Lily, was a miracle. Anna, to her enduring misfortune, had only ever been a child.

Still, Andrew was filled with a lunge of tenderness for her now. “Hey,” he said, pulling at her ponytail.

“Dad, stop it.”

“I’ll order us some room service for when you get back. Something special. What’s the thing here? Steak?”

Anna gave him a flat stare. How could Andrew have produced a child whose face was unreadable to him? He’d
made
that face. “Well,” she said. “Since we’re going to be flying back and forth between here and home like every week for who knows how long, maybe you should be trying to save your money?”

She wasn’t wrong. Andrew tried not to think about how long all of the trouble with Lily might last, but he wasn’t kidding himself—even under the best of circumstances, it was probably going to last a very, very long time, and Andrew would no doubt be burning through his retirement fund to finance it. Though it was true he’d never particularly looked forward to retirement, especially now that he was alone: He imagined himself scraping along, scrambling eggs in his undershirt (he’d never learned to cook, and now he realized what an optimistic thing that was—it meant that he’d secretly believed he’d always be too busy to bother), watching the BBC at all hours of the day and night. This, exactly this, was what a life of the mind got you, give or take a 401(k) and some unnatural disasters.

At least Andrew could be grateful that he and Maureen had already spoken, and that they had agreed on so much. They had agreed that they would alert the State Department and contact the media; they had agreed that they would start a website and accept donations of frequent flier miles and, if it came to it, money. They had agreed to remortgage the house, though they had also agreed that they would most likely need to sell it eventually. (They had been keeping it ostensibly to minimize the disruptions in the lives of Anna and Lily, but for reasons both dreadful and benign this was a ship that had, decidedly,
sailed.) They had also agreed that only one of them should go to Buenos Aires first: They both wanted to be there, of course, but it was wise to plan for the long term, and if they switched off weeks, Lily could always have a visitor. Andrew had insisted on going first because he knew that if Maureen did, Lily would want her to stay and stay. Maureen, in an act of extreme kindness, had agreed. The unspoken concession on Andrew’s part had been bringing Anna along. It was these sorts of small, practical generosities that had made the final eight benumbing years of their marriage endurable—when they’d soldiered on, producing Lily and Anna in rapid succession, insisting on each other’s survival. Their marriage had run on the inertia that keeps a moving object in motion, at least until the girls were in school. Then came a sense of sputtering, of hopeless decline, and Andrew had had the image—inapt, but recurring and intrusive—of a headless chicken that runs around for a bit before falling down dead.

Andrew swallowed and tried to smile at Anna. “I think we can spring for it just this once, Old Sport,” he said.

At the hotel, Anna took a shower and went off to run with wet hair. Andrew lay on the bed for seven minutes—he counted—and then sat up, opened his laptop, and began looking again through the photos Lily had sent him before all of this began. She’d taken a lot of pictures of fruit: guavas and bananas and weird melons that looked like hedgehogs. There was a picture of Lily standing in front of a church, and Andrew grimaced again at what she was wearing: a low-cut top, one of those cheap, flimsy things she bought at deep-discount clothes warehouses. All the women around her were dressed conservatively. Had she really not noticed? There was also a picture of Lily and the dead girl, Katy, who was as strikingly lovely here as everywhere—she was extraordinary, really, with ash blond hair and strangely depthless eyes. Her beauty was, of course, terrible news. (“This does not help,” Peter Sulzicki had said, tapping Katy’s face in the photograph. “This does not help at all.”) In the picture, Katy and Lily are laughing, drinking beers
at a bar somewhere. They look friendly enough. But Andrew cringed when he thought of Lily’s emails and the things she’d written in them about Katy.
“Katy thinks that punning is the highest form of humor.” “Everything about Katy is perfectly average, except her teeth.” “Can we talk about her name? Katy Kellers. What were her parents thinking? Was their dearest ambition that their daughter grow up to be a local TV anchorwoman?”
The emails were already out there, of course—they’d been published in the local tabloids and helpfully reposted by what seemed like every blogger in the universe—and Andrew knew how bad they sounded. The dismissiveness and condescension wasn’t even the worst of it—the worst was the implied assertion that Lily must not be average if she could muster such disdain for the average. The irony of that was that Lily was indeed average, more or less—bright, of course, and curious, and a bit reckless, and possessed of an annoying tendency to try to bring philosophy to bear on daily life in rather purist and militant ways—but all that this added up to, essentially, was average for a decent young student at a decent New England college. Lily bounced through life with the sense she was discovering everything that existed for the first time—Nietzsche, or sex, or the possibility of a godless universe, or the entire continent of South America—and all that was
fine
, of course: She was twenty-one; she was allowed. It was maddening, then, the narrative that Lily somehow deviated so egregiously from the norm. She was typical, she was aggressively typical—all the more so if she didn’t quite know it yet.

In one photo, Lily licks salt from her hand; in the next, she sucks on a lime. In another, she has climbed a hill somewhere and is making a gesture of mock victory. The next picture is of a three-legged dog. The next is a terrible shot of the dome of a cathedral, from straight below: White rays lace through the architecture; the cupola is ablaze with light. How could a twenty-one-year-old girl
not
take this photo? All of these photos. Andrew’s heart broke on their banality.

He closed the computer and thought about what he needed to do next. Maureen would be calling soon. Tomorrow was the first meeting with the new lawyers. And at some point, Andrew wanted to go talk to
Lily’s rich friend—Andrew recoiled from his own use of the term “friend” here. It was a euphemism borrowed from Maureen: She had insisted on introducing one of Lily’s unfortunate college boyfriends as her “friend,” over and over, until Lily finally flounced dramatically and said, right in front of a dinner party, “Mom, he’s my
lover
.” The guy here was named Sebastien LeCompte, which sounded to Andrew like the name of a high-end suit store—though he knew he shouldn’t complain: If the name hadn’t been exotic Lily would never have written it out in its entirety. And silly name or not, Sebastien LeCompte was the single most important person in the universe: He was the person Lily had been with on the night Katy Kellers was killed. Andrew needed to know exactly what he was planning on saying about that. Sebastien LeCompte himself had not been arrested—though perhaps he might still be, of course—and Maureen and Andrew careened around this fact obsessively, with little sense of how they should regard it. In various lights, it could appear promising (if Lily had been with this guy and the police weren’t even bothering to arrest him, perhaps they knew that the case was weak?) or terrifying (what might have he told the cops in order to avoid arrest?) or patently good (no sense in two innocent kids being thrown in jail?) or baldly unfair (if one innocent kid had to be thrown in jail, why the hell wasn’t it this asshole instead of their daughter?). Andrew needed the answers to these questions, and he needed them as soon as possible, and he was going to go find Sebastien LeCompte and get them.

Andrew did not plan on mentioning any of this to Peter Sulzicki, the lawyer—although, to be technical, the only people he had specifically prohibited Andrew from contacting were the Kellerses. On this point, Peter Sulzicki had been emphatic. This was painful for Andrew, because he understood what the Kellerses were going through; he knew that losing a child was the single worst experience that life had to offer. Andrew did not know, of course, which way was harder—whether it was worse to lose a child when she was far away and you were sleeping, or when you were cupping her tiny head and feeling her delicate pulse go quiet. Not that Andrew had ever given up on working
through the hierarchies of pain, teasing out the taxonomies of grief; he scorned people who were untouched by death, and he
loathed
people who shared experiences about their dying parents when he spoke of Janie (
Who cares
? he wanted to shout.
This is the way of things!
). The only people he truly respected were the ones whose pain was objectively, empirically, worse than his. There was a man in Connecticut, for example, who’d lost his entire family—wife and two daughters—in a home invasion. They were raped and set on fire. Andrew felt sorry for this man.

And the Kellerses: Despite the details, their loss was, fundamentally, his. It pained him not to send a card, at the very least. And not reaching out to them would be even harder on Maureen, he knew; she had always been very into sending sympathy cards.
It’s the ritual
, she was always saying, swirling her cursive into a note destined for some barely known neighbor or long-forgotten aunt.
It’s the acknowledgment. Love is expressed through pragmatism. It may be just a card, but it’s also the objective correlative of their loss
.

The objective correlative?
Andrew would say. Maureen taught high school English.
I thought we said not to take work home
.

The phone rang and Andrew put the computer on the floor. “Hey,” he said.

“You made it,” said Maureen.

“So it would seem.”

“How’s Anna?”

“Running.”

“Outside?”

“Of course not.”

“Good.”

Talking to Maureen tended to lift Andrew’s spirits—this was not the typical experience of men speaking to their ex-wives, he realized, but then theirs had not been a typical divorce. In a way, Andrew often thought, the divorce had actually been deeply optimistic. Right after Janie died, all they’d cared about was stanching the hemorrhaging hole in the center of their lives; romantic love, or any of its shadowy iterations,
was no longer a concern. So the fact that they realized, almost a decade on, that they
weren’t
dead to the world, that their sexual selves still existed, that the notion of an adult relationship that wasn’t irredeemably destroyed actually held appeal for both of them—well, this was a sign of progress, in a way. It was probably the most hopeful thing they’d done since having Lily; it gestured toward the idea that things could be better for them both. Though it was true that nobody else saw it that way, and that all of their mutual friends tended to treat Andrew like Oedipus with his eyes clawed out—his situation no less distressing just because fate had ordained it.