Cartwheel (33 page)

Maureen sighed. “I can’t believe she lied about the drugs.”

“Well, she didn’t lie, I don’t think,” said Andrew. “Not really. She just didn’t volunteer that information.”

“She should have known better.”

“She’s scared. She’s with lawyers. She doesn’t know what to say.” Andrew ran his hand through his hair. “Anyway, it was just a little dope.”

“Just a little dope? Down here? Jesus Christ. Just a little dope would have been a big enough problem, even if she hadn’t happened to manage to buy it from a murderer.” Maureen sighed again and shook her head. “God. You know, I can’t even really let myself think about it, but it could have been her. It so, so easily could have been her, instead of Katy.”

“I know,” said Andrew. It was true. It could have been her. It
had
been her once. It had been Janie.

Maureen traced her pinkie along the rim of her vodka, then put it in her mouth. “Do you think I was unreasonable about her hair?”

“You weren’t wrong.”

“But do you think I was unreasonable?”

Andrew flashed again to that photo—the forbidding sobriety of the church, Lily’s bosom spilling out of that ridiculous tank top, which had probably cost her less than the equivalent of three U.S. dollars somewhere. Could she not afford a shirt containing enough fabric to actually cover herself? They would have bought her one! Didn’t she know that? Is that all it would have taken? Andrew shook his head. “It just might have been a little late, you know?”

“What do you mean?” Maureen’s voice was vinegary.

“I just mean,” Andrew said slowly. “It seems like there are things we should have talked to her about. In terms of how she presents herself. Probably a while ago.”

“Me, you mean.” Maureen was chewing audibly on her nail. The physiology of her anxiety was like a childhood language Andrew hadn’t known he still remembered until now.

“Us, I mean.”

Andrew did not know if this was really what they had done wrong—but clearly, they had done something wrong. And really, how could they not have? They had just been trying to keep it together, and Andrew was still proud of them—he would never stop being proud of them—for having managed as long as they had; in situations like theirs, it was usual to divorce much earlier. Right after Janie had died, of course, there’d been a moment when they’d teetered. Maureen’s mother had come to stay; she was rigid and humorless even under the best of circumstances, her face flat and white as a Japanese empress’s. The three of them moved through those days with the insensate numbness of creatures of the very deep sea: They were little translucent crabs scrabbling along near the volcanic vents, they were blind and mute and looming dumbo octopi. Maureen walked around with an expression of enduring, ferocious blankness, and Andrew had known she would not have noticed then if he’d let her drift away, or if he’d drifted away himself: into the geriatric Peace Corps, perhaps (they had a branch, he knew, for sufferers of late-onset idealism), or the arms of a younger, undestroyed woman. It was nearly unbelievable to Andrew now that they’d even bothered to bathe and dress, let alone hang on to their marriage for a time. He could see how an outsider might think they’d been saints, though, of course, that wasn’t true at all—they had, in fact, been utterly devoid of compassion for anyone besides Janie and each other (and, for a brief time right before the death, only Janie; and, for a brief time afterward, only themselves). Janie’s death was the monstrous planet around which everything else orbited. Even the other children at the hospital lived and died merely in relation to Janie; viewed in one
light, the death of another child could seem like a harbinger of Janie’s departure, the hideous reality that made the more hideous potentiality more real; viewed in another, it could feel like dodging a bullet (and, as Churchill had said, there’s nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result). And if only a certain percentage of children with X were doomed, and if child Y died, would that mean it was statistically more or less likely for Janie to die, too? Andrew and Maureen would actually talk about this. Maureen would point out that they were conflating probability with odds. Neither of them would point out that in the narcissism of their grief they had forgotten the other child, forgotten the other family—who were somewhere weeping, picking out a tiny gold-limned coffin. There was no other family, there were no other children. There was only Janie and Maureen and Andrew, at sea on a little boat, and all the continents of the world submerged.

How did they love each other again after that? How did they even look at each other? But they did, somehow they did, and there were the years of Lily and Anna: chubby hands, dandelion-down hair, adorable little pets—a tuxedo kitten who eventually grew to a murderous twenty pounds, a precious lop-eared dwarf bunny who transformed into a sexual predator overnight—and life had been livable, at least until the girls went to school. But once they did, the show was over: The stage lights dimmed, the orchestra was dismantled; the audience, drunk on their own lives, disappeared into the night. And Maureen and Andrew found themselves staring at each other, alone together at last.

Andrew nearly wanted to say some of these things to Maureen, but he looked down and found her in a shallow and hard-earned sleep. He rose, careful not to crinkle the newspapers, and turned out the light.

Andrew rode the elevator up one floor, then stood for a moment in the harsh yellow light of the soda dispenser, listening to the snorkeling of the ice machine, before walking back to his room. He dipped his key and watched the console flash green and opened the door.

Anna was not in the room.

She was not in the closet, not in either bedroom, not in the bathroom. Not, when Andrew went downstairs to check, at the gym. She
had not been seen by the hotel concierge. Andrew headed back toward his room to put on his sneakers. He was not about to rouse Maureen from sleep to confess that he’d lost another daughter.

This time when he opened the door, Anna was sitting in the corner on the floor, long legs folded up around her as though she were a piece of obsolete video equipment. Andrew wavered in the doorway. “Where were you?” he said.

“Have you been drinking?” said Anna. In the moonlight, her hair looked nearly gray, and Andrew thought he could almost see her as she would someday look—in some future unimaginably far, that Andrew would never live to witness.

“Excuse me, have
you
been drinking?” he said. “Just where the hell have you been?”

“I’m nineteen years old,” said Anna, standing up. She was shorter than Andrew by a good three inches, but her litheness and youth conspired to make him feel towered over. “You can’t keep me locked up here. I’m not the one in jail.” She hiccupped.

“You can’t just take off like that. This is a dangerous city.” Andrew’s voice was shaking. “Do you know how worried I was?”

“Afraid someone will kill me?”

“Christ, Anna. Yes. Obviously. Among other things.” Andrew wanted to go to her and take her in his arms, but he could not bear the thought of her shrugging him off.

“Other things? What other things?” said Anna. “Like that I’ll kill someone, maybe?”

“Stop it,” said Andrew, with volume. Anna looked surprised. Because Andrew normally spoke so gently, nobody ever remembered that he had a voice that carried when he wanted it to.

“Dad.” Anna wobbled again. “Would you still love her if she did it?”

“Stop it,” said Andrew again. “Sit down.”

She did.

“Take off your shoes,” said Andrew, even though he didn’t know why he was telling her to do this. She wouldn’t run off again without her shoes, maybe. Or maybe she would. Maybe he had no idea what
his daughters would or wouldn’t do. Maybe Andrew just wanted to tell Anna to do something and watch her actually do it. “Hand them to me,” he ordered.

She did. Andrew was feeling marginally more under control. “Okay then,” he said. “I’m going to get us some water.”

Andrew went to the bathroom and ran the water until it was cold. In the mirror, the skin around his eyes and mouth were furrowed; his teeth, he could see, were yellowing by the day. It was very clear to Andrew that he was older now than he had ever, ever been before; worse, he strongly suspected that, from now on, he was only going to get older still.

Back in the room, Anna was sitting on the bed. Andrew handed her a glass of water, then drank his own in one gulp. He wiped his mouth. “She didn’t do it,” he said.

“I know.” Anna looked into her water balefully. “But what if she had?”

“That’s not a useful thing to think about.”

“Everything’s useful to think about. That’s a direct quote from you. You have actually literally said that.”

“Well, not this.”

“Hypotheticals. You always say you truck in hypotheticals.”

“Anna—”

“Counterfactuals, right? That’s your word. So what if she did it? What if she had done it?”

“Stop it.”

“Or what if I did? What if I did something terrible?”

Andrew squinted into his glass. He remembered when Anna and Lily were small and terrified of their nightmares and would come crawling into bed with Andrew and Maureen to make them promise not to die. Andrew had never been inclined to promise this, since, in fact, he and Maureen
would
someday die, and the best of all possible outcomes was that Anna and Lily would have to watch them do it. And Andrew had imagined some future reckoning, some kind of confrontation (though when this would occur exactly, he was unclear) when
Anna and Lily would point at him with accusing fingers and go back to the videotape and say
Look, you promised not to die, and look, you did die. You promised not to and you did
. Lying to them about this most irreducible fact seemed to Andrew an unforgivable deceit—he was giving them the wrong idea about absolutely everything if he gave them the wrong idea about this.

But Maureen had not agreed. She felt that the children were children, and that they needed a promise in order to sleep at night—on this one particular night, the wind shivering through the white pine trees outside their windows, their sheets vaguely redolent of lavender—and that by the time Maureen and Andrew died the children would be grown and with children of their own and they would understand the lie, and would look back and forgive them.

And so Andrew and Maureen had promised: They had looked their two living children in the eyes and promised not to die. And Andrew remembered how this had assuaged Anna—how, sleepy with relief, she had tugged at her ear and grabbed her stuffed rabbit, Honey Bunny, by one felt foot and dragged him up the stairs—but how Lily had remained awake, staring at them with her fierce agate eyes, saying, “That’s not true. I know that you can’t promise that. I know that that isn’t true.”

Andrew made a decision. “You wouldn’t do something terrible,” he said to Anna. “You couldn’t do something terrible. But if you did, I’d always love you. That’s our job.” Probably, this wasn’t a lie. Probably, he would still love her. This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own.

Anna looked at him hard, and for a moment Andrew saw her as a child, yawning and pacified, swinging her rabbit from her hand, turning around to pad up the stairs. And then the look changed, hardening into something brittle and unyielding and wise, something that could know things that Andrew didn’t know, that Andrew might never know.

“No,” she said finally. “You wouldn’t.”

The day after her birthday, Lily awoke to a bright dawn. Preposterously pink light streamed in through the windows; it was like waking up in the middle of a conch shell, and Lily felt a sense of emergency—apocalypse, war, alien invasion—before realizing that this was only a sunrise. This happened every morning; every morning she was bathed briefly in this otherworldly light, and she was never even awake for it. She propped herself up on her elbows. It was strange, maybe a little violating, that the room could turn this color without her noticing. She popped her head over the side of the bed to look at Katy, feeling, as she did so, the first ominous heave of what she knew would be a daylong hangover. Below her, Katy was composed, even in sleep. At the sight of her, the whole of the previous evening came back to Lily, and she remembered that she was going to have to break up with Sebastien. She lay back down.

Lily was sorry she had to end things with Sebastien, but she saw no
alternative; she was outmaneuvered, and to do nothing now would only make her a chump. Lily didn’t know how she’d gotten herself into a situation where being a chump was even possible—being, as she was, about as committed to transparency and low-stress, drama-free entanglements as a person could be—but there it was. Lily hadn’t asked anything from Sebastien—she hadn’t even wanted anything, really: She hadn’t required him to make any promises, she hadn’t put him in a position where he’d need to tell her any lies. The fact that he’d treated her poorly anyway could only mean that he’d wanted to.

Lily rolled over and stifled a groan. She’d been childish, she saw now; she’d wanted everyone to be liberated and generous with one another, and somewhere along the way, she’d started believing that that meant people actually would be. Why had she believed this? Was it because she’d watched too many reruns of
Friends
growing up? In which everyone jumped in and out of bed with one another but no one got hurt and the truly sacred, eponymous relationship—friendship—remained intact? Or maybe Lily’s problem was her parents’ fault; perhaps it was some kind of inherited naïveté. Maybe it stemmed from Maureen and Andrew’s allegedly hippie-ish youth (though the only supporting evidence for this characterization was Maureen’s claim that she’d gone barefoot for the entire summer of 1971), or maybe it somehow came from Andrew’s outmoded, overly sanguine scholarly worldview—all the end-of-history-Francis-Fukuyama shit he’d committed to twenty years ago and now had to wearily, disingenuously maintain in article after article. Lily did not know. All she knew was that she was going to admit it when she was wrong. It was true that in her generation people didn’t have to be cruel and deceitful in order to get what they wanted—unless being cruel and deceitful
was
what they wanted, in which case they had a whole new vista of opportunity to be that way. Whenever Lily herself had juggled dates, she had done it because she really
liked
a few men at once—she wanted to talk about politics with one of them and she wanted to talk about music with another and with a third she wanted to go on playful midnight adventures
to search for free furniture on the street when the first of the month came and everybody moved out of their apartments. And in this spirit, Lily had done new things: She went to a rally for a union, even though she’d always found labor issues terribly dull; she found a child’s abandoned skunk piñata on the street and kept it in her dorm for half a year; she attended a concert of an intolerable band whose music was like the forceful overthrowing of the concept of music, and after a while she found herself dancing, actually dancing, even though she still didn’t like the songs. The reason Lily didn’t want a boyfriend was because she actually cared for all of these men. They were all her friends, and Lily’s friends mattered to her; she was not in love with any of them, but she would have given any one of them a kidney. She understood now that this was not how Sebastien felt about her. A situation like theirs arose not because a man liked too many women, but because he hated too many.