Cartwheel (38 page)

At ten a.m. on Thursday, a taxi arrived to take Andrew, Anna, and Maureen back to Lomas de Zamora.

Anna sat wedged between Andrew and Maureen, whose hair was still wet from the shower; Andrew could see several wiry, lunar-white strands near her temple. The violently familiar smell of her shampoo filled the cab, casting Andrew uneasily back into the unplaceable past—he felt as though he’d awoken in some unknown, long-ago year of his life and had no idea whether great joy or great sorrow awaited him. Andrew’s sense of time was jostling; he simply could not believe how much of it had gone by—not the years since he’d last regularly ridden in cars with Maureen and Anna together, not the week since he’d seen Lily—and how little of it seemed to have properly passed. So much seemed entirely elided over somehow, like the hours lost to anesthesia.

At the jail, they were ushered in quickly. Andrew let Maureen and Anna walk ahead, not wanting to deny Lily one instant of her mother.
And so he was trailing behind, unable to see anything, when he heard Maureen breathe in sharply and say, “Oh my God.”

“What? What’s happened?” said Andrew, hurrying into the room. Over Maureen’s shoulder, he could see that Lily was sitting in her usual spot, in her usual position, except that this time, she was bald.

“Oh my God,” said Maureen again. “What did they do to you?”

Lily had her hands spread out on the table again. Andrew had so hoped to find her in a different position this time. “I got lice,” she said.

Maureen cupped Lily’s head in her hands. Her face was concave with horror, and Andrew knew that part of what she was imagining was how Lily would now look on TV. “How did you get lice?”

“Everyone has lice.”

“They couldn’t have given you a special shampoo?”

“Mom,” said Anna.

“Mom, seriously?” said Lily, ducking away from Maureen. “There’s no shampoo. There’s definitely no
special
shampoo. We barely have soap.” The weary condescension in her voice was strangely, momentarily, consoling; Lily had used this voice many, many times, after all, for many, many occasions. A line ran through Andrew’s head, possibly remembered, possibly imagined:
Mom, it’s college, of course they have coed bathrooms!
But as soon as Andrew summoned that line he realized there was something different—something troublingly different—about Lily’s tone now; he recognized it after a moment as the complete absence of triumphalism. For years, Lily had thought that she knew more about the world than Andrew and Maureen did, and for years, she had been wrong. Now she was finally right, and she did not want to be.

Andrew looked again at Lily’s baldness. Her hair wasn’t actually entirely gone, he saw now; it was chopped off in pieces on one side, messy and askew, and shaved to a smooth bulb only near the top. It was the kind of thing she might have done to herself, actually, under different circumstances. Andrew flashed to an image of a different kind of Lily—rebelling and experimenting and trying out new identities; adopting lesbianism, briefly or permanently, at one of the Seven
Sisters schools; coming home with a shaved head the Thanksgiving of her freshman year and saying
you don’t understand, you don’t understand, you just don’t understand
, no matter how strenuously Maureen and Andrew assured her that they did, they did, they absolutely did. This image flipped to a more frightening one: a different Lily, in a different sort of wayward twenties, as a cult member or religious supplicant; her hair, in a gesture to humility, arranged into the tonsure of some sort of Eastern monasticism; saying to Andrew and Maureen
you don’t understand, you don’t understand, you just don’t understand
, and this time it being true. That picture dissolved, and finally Andrew was struck with the one that would stay with him, no matter how he tried to shake it: the stunning, horrifying image of a Lily condemned. He saw a bald Lily burned for witchcraft, a bald Lily enduring the Spanish Inquisition, a bald Lily loaded onto a cattle car headed east. Andrew knew these comparisons were inapt; he knew that in invoking them he was hysterically overstating his daughter’s trouble while diminishing the suffering of history’s real victims, and that this was as disrespectful as it was useless. But Andrew couldn’t stop seeing those other Lilys, and his knees nearly buckled when he thought of them: all young and bald and innocent; all beyond the reach of his help, or anyone’s; all eternally living out stories with endings that the world now knew.

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Lily. Maureen was standing beside her, trying not to cry. Lily reached out and patted her in an odd swiping motion; the gesture was unnatural, as though Lily had read a manual on touching someone you loved but had never seen it done. “Don’t cry. It’s just hair.”

“I know,” said Maureen. “I’m not crying.” But it was clear that she was, or that she would be, though there were no tears. Maureen had the ability to visibly defer crying, if it was not a good time to cry. This was something Andrew had seen her do many, many times.

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Lily again. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

Maureen’s face continued its silent internal collapsing. Watching this was far more excruciating, always, than her actual crying would have been. It meant that something had happened that she could not
endure, and that she would not endure—just as soon as she endured it a little longer.

In the taxi on the way back to the hotel, Maureen stroked Anna’s head. “I know it’s not what’s important,” said Maureen. “But her hair was just so pretty.”

The rest of their time with Lily had been halting and quiet—with the urgency of the first visits over, a strange sharp-edged shyness had overtaken all of them. In an especially painful moment, Lily had actually resorted to giving them listless recommendations about what to see in the city. Perhaps this terrible new awkwardness was because of Lily’s baldness.

“We always wanted red hair,” Anna said to Maureen. “I mean, really red hair. Like yours.”

Or perhaps it was merely the oddness of the four of them, alone together in a room—though they’d congregated with some regularity after the divorce, it had usually been at holidays or weddings or funerals or other special occasions, in the presence of relatives or mutual friends or one of Lily’s beleaguered suitors.

“Blame your father and his dominant genes,” said Maureen.

But probably, after all, the strangeness hadn’t been because of Lily’s hair or the posthumous assemblage of their nuclear family. Probably it was because Lily was in jail, and after an hour the three of them would be leaving without her. And even if Lily knew rationally that there was nothing Andrew and Maureen could do about it, how could this abandonment not feel to her like a betrayal? After all, when the time was up and the security guards arrived, did Andrew or Maureen physically fight them? Did they grab Lily and try to make a break for it? Did they throw themselves in front of her and tell the guards that they could take them but they could not, could absolutely not, take their daughter? They didn’t. Instead, they rose and hugged Lily and whispered promises and encouragement and then, at the appointed time, they left, widening the new, terrifying chasm between Lily and everyone
else. Andrew could almost hear it happening. He’d certainly heard it in Lily’s voice—
We barely have soap
, she’d said, and in that “we,” it seemed to Andrew, she had signified allegiance to a different realm. In some very fundamental respects, and through no fault of her own, Lily now had more in common with the worst people in the entire world than with her own family.

“Really, it was so beautiful,” said Maureen. “Like yours.”

“It wasn’t beautiful,” said Anna. “Mine’s not, either. Like Lily said, it’s just hair.” But she did not shrink away from Maureen; in fact, Andrew thought, she settled in closer to her.

That night, Andrew dreamed of flying away. When he woke, he stared at the ceiling fan above him, waiting for the sedative effects of its cyclonic whir. In three days, he was supposed to be leaving Buenos Aires. His plane ticket was already booked.

Andrew had had the flying dream often when Janie was sick. In the dream, there was no question as to whether he was flying away for good—he knew that he was delirious with the wickedness of precisely this—though he was always unable to make his way through the elusive dream-memory and figure out how he had ever let it happen in the first place. All he could really remember was the exhilaration: In the dreams he flew low enough for a detailed aerial view of the world; for some reason he seemed always to be headed north (to Canada, perhaps—like an escaped slave? Or like a draft dodger?), and whatever had allowed him to leave in the first place was already far, far behind him, and he could not account for it. This wasn’t so different from the way it must feel to do inconceivable things in real life, Andrew thought. There wasn’t a single cell in our bodies that was the same as the day we were born, and yet we were still held responsible for everything all of our former selves had ever done.

Nevertheless, after the dreams Andrew had always felt a guilt that was nearly tactile—not unlike the guilt he used to feel after the occasional sex dream (about old lovers, or old almost lovers, or students)
back when he and Maureen were first married. Andrew could scarcely believe now that such trivialities had ever mattered so much to him. There had been great stretches of sexlessness between him and Maureen during those dark barren months when Janie was dying, and touching each other seemed unthinkable (not forbidden and thus alluring, but beyond comprehension, outside the realm of possible occurrences, something belonging to paraphysics or myth), and Maureen had even told him once that she did not care if he slept with someone else. Andrew’s actually acting on this was, as Maureen surely knew, implausible (who would he possibly have slept with?) and yet he did not take her offer as a dare, or as a taunt, or as a trap. When Maureen said she would not care, Andrew really believed her. During that time, and exactly as psychology predicted, Andrew was dreaming of losing his teeth.

Andrew got up and put on his bathrobe. He switched on the light. Outside, a cadaverous alley cat was mewling at a garbage can. He opened the door to the living room and jumped. Anna was sitting on the edge of the couch, watching the television with almost no sound.

“Hey,” said Andrew. His voice was craggy. “Why are you up?”

“Why are you?”

Andrew shrugged and began rifling for coffee filters. He opened the mini-fridge and stared into it dumbly. “Do you want a yogurt?” he said. Anna pointed to the yogurt she was already holding. Andrew closed the refrigerator.

When he went home, the idea was that he would try to resume his life. He would meet with Peter Sulzicki, the lawyer; he would meet with the accountant; he would, perhaps, make an appearance at his classes. From now on, he and Maureen would alternate weeks in Buenos Aires—a jointly devised plan that Andrew knew he couldn’t postpone forever. Trading weeks meant that Lily would always have a visitor, and that Andrew and Maureen would each be able to keep a foot—or at least a toenail, as Maureen had said—in their former lives. It was understood that they would have to do this because they’d need the money and small interim scraps of sanity their jobs afforded them.
It was also understood, though never mentioned—much like the possibility of Janie’s death was never mentioned until it was already a reality, already in the past, already an event they were moving further away from with every second that passed—that they might never get out of this thing. They might, in fact, be in it for the long haul, and they had to try to keep now whatever they would need for the duration. Andrew had discussed this explicitly with his dean, who had listened with tented fingers and uncharacteristic generosity. He had a full beard and seemed to know how much everyone expected him to stroke it; Andrew suspected that he did not do this out of spite. Even so, he had been kind. An extra TA had been assigned to Andrew’s class. A grading schedule had been worked out.

Andrew poured himself a coffee and padded over to the couch. On the TV, a reporter was interviewing an athlete. “Who is that?” said Andrew.

“A tennis player,” said Anna.

“Oh.” Why didn’t Andrew ever think to turn on the TV? It was such a friendly presence. He cocked his head to one side and let the Spanish slip around him; it was a uniquely tantalizing feeling—that sensation of something eddying just beyond your comprehension. “I didn’t know they did tennis here,” he said.

“He won the U.S. Open.”

“Oh.”

“Is he saying anything interesting?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I guess probably not.”

Andrew rose and went to the window. He leaned his head against the glass. Outside, the light was sepulchral and thin, and Andrew remembered the light from his dreams: the sun tilting through the clouds, casting vast lattices of shadow on the ground; Andrew, above it all, skimming over stands of majestic northern firs, great meadows of allium flowers, rattling trains on trestle bridges. In the dream, Andrew was always struck by how easy it was to do all of this. He was always amazed that he had not done it earlier.

Andrew turned back around and found that Anna was frowning at him. “Am I supposed to ask you if you’re okay?” she said.

This, Andrew knew, was not an expression of genuine concern. It was a tactic of confrontation, inherited from Maureen and based on the premise that the speaker had silently suffered more than you had—more than you could ever even imagine someone suffering—and that condescending to deal with your weakness now was merely the latest trial to be endured with superior resilience and grace.

“I am okay,” said Andrew. “Of course I’m okay. Obviously, it’s probably not great about your sister’s hair.”

“Well, I mean, it’s the kind of thing she probably would have done to herself anyway.” Anna grabbed the remote and turned up the volume on the TV. “She’s always been weird.”

Andrew considered this. Had Lily been weird? She was high-spirited, certainly, and maybe there were times when that had put her out of sync with her peers in various small ways. It was true she hadn’t worn a bra until a bit later than she should have—this had been a point of principle, and she’d been earnest and humorless on the matter—and there had been something a little strange, and more than a little funny, about a child so young fighting a battle so old and so lost. But that only meant that she had ideas of her own. Andrew, through his squeamishness, had even been a little proud of her. “Weird?” he said. “You think so?”