Cartwheel (46 page)

Andrew rolled down the window and let the air rush in at him. He thought of his Lily, alone at night, leaving Sebastien LeCompte’s house and going outside—for her own reasons, innocent and unknowable, both. It was terrifying to think of Lily doing anything alone at night. It was more terrifying—much more—to think of her never doing anything alone ever again.

Andrew thought of the phantom river with his phantom daughter beside it. It would have looked icy, probably, in the moonlight. Lily had merely done what Andrew had dreamed of doing so many times when Janie was sick, so many times since then: Without telling anyone, without asking anyone, she had opened a door and walked away.

“Andrew,” said Maureen. He could feel her looking at him in the darkness, and he turned his face to meet her gaze.

“Yes.” Out of the vast thicket of preexisting worries and sorrows that Andrew knew intimately, a new unnameable fear was seizing him. It released him and then seized him again, a clonic coursing, gripping and then relenting.

“You watched that security footage of her at the store?” said Maureen. “With Sebastien?”

“A few times, yeah.”

“Me, too.” The taxi rounded the corner to their hotel. Maureen turned back to the window. And she was still looking away from Andrew when she said, “Did you ever know that she smoked?”

Sebastien went to court every day for three weeks before Lily finally took the stand.

It was obvious as she testified that she’d been told to speak clearly and slowly; it was obvious that she’d been told to make eye contact. It was a mercy that nobody had told her to smile—that this was a performance that did not require cheer—because the smile she gave in pictures, Sebastien thought, really could make someone wonder about her. Her Spanish was much better now. Her hair was growing in, but its shortness made her face more severe, more frank, than it usually was. She wore an array of mock turtlenecks, often in pale pink—which struck Sebastien as so bizarre, so clearly not a choice she’d made; they reminded him of a picture he’d once seen of a skinny African child wearing a donated vanity T-shirt designed for some family’s 1993 reunion barbecue. The incongruousness of Lily’s shirt had to have been part of the strategy, Sebastien figured. It must have been chosen not only for its modesty, its subdued femininity, but also for the way it
showed the world that Lily was a captive now—that she was a prisoner, that she would take whatever shirt you gave her and wear it gratefully, that she was sorry, that she had not killed Katy Kellers but she was still sorry for everything else, she was sorry for the way she was and what she had and who she’d been, and that she had learned her lesson, and that the world could afford to forgive her.

Sitting in the courtroom, Sebastien listened to Lily explain the cartwheel—slowly and carefully, while making forced eye contact with a different arbitrary stranger every few seconds. She had done the cartwheel, she said, not to mock or disdain Katy’s death, and not to try to seem defiant or brave. She had done it, she said, simply because she’d felt helpless. She’d wanted to show herself that she could still do this one small thing. Maybe she couldn’t do anything else, but she could still do this.

And then, sitting in the courtroom, Sebastien listened—again—to the voicemail. The sound of Lily’s recorded crying filled the room. Sebastien still wanted to believe that that voice was crying over him. But he knew better now than to let himself believe something he so badly wanted to.

In the end, it was a relatively quick trial.

By the time Eduardo and Adelmo Benitez, the instructor judge, brought the case before the court, the story was neat and compelling. The DNA evidence had Lily handling the murder weapon; the delivery truck driver had her present and bloodied at the scene of the crime; her ruined alibi left Ignacio Toledo’s confession essentially unchallenged and unchallengeable. All that was left to do was stand back and watch motives orbit Lily like planets around a star.

First, Katy weighed in from the beyond, with her cryptic message about the new romance in her life, the one she was afraid would upset Lily terribly. Next was Beatriz Carrizo, shaking more from holy anger than from nervousness, describing how Lily had spied and snooped
and snuck out and been fired from her job, how not one week had gone by—literally not one week—when she hadn’t been in some kind of trouble or another. But really, the bulk of the work was done by Lily herself—bit by bit and word by word, in the emails, the voicemail, the fight, the lies—making Eduardo’s case more convincingly than even he could have done, long before she ever took the stand.

Next came Lily herself, speaking first for the defense. By now her Spanish was excellent, newly and finally fluid. She’d learned idioms and slang. She had, you could be sure, learned swears. Her Spanish now was the kind of thing you could dream in and rely on, and Eduardo was sure that she was sure that if she could have had the chance to do everything over—if she could have dubbed the last few months into
this
Spanish—that none of it would have happened. But, of course, it would have, and anyone could have seen it; her perverse callousness toward Katy required no articulation, and thus no translation. If anything, Lily came across worse in this improved Spanish than she had before. The newly jovial emphasis in her speech—her unself-conscious willingness to really commit to the accent—clashed strangely with her dispassionate account of Katy Kellers’s life and death. When her Spanish had been broken, limited, there was a sense that perhaps the nuance of her experience and perception was being lost; that perhaps a fuller, more sympathetic picture existed just on the other side of fluency. But now when Lily spoke you could be sure she knew what she was saying; and so when she issued some gigglingly inappropriate non sequitur about the quality of Katy Kellers’s orthodontia, one of the judges frowned and removed his bifocals and made a note of it, sure that whatever he was hearing was exactly what was meant.

Accordingly, in his examination of Lily, Eduardo could afford to be low-key. He spoke to her quietly, gently, and delivered only one serious jab. He needed only one.

“You say that you performed CPR on the victim when you found her body?”

“That’s right.”

“Lily, could you tell the panelists here the steps of CPR?”

She could not.

The impact statement came next. This was delivered by Mr. Kellers, eloquently and poignantly, the remaining members of his beautiful family making a tragic tableau behind the prosecution desk.

Then there was Anna: poised and self-contained; speaking crisply, with the terse composure of a law enforcement official, about all of Lily’s many fine qualities; and giving very good answers to all of Eduardo’s questions but one.

“I just didn’t think Lily would have wanted anyone to hear that message,” she said.

Eduardo tilted his head and furrowed his brows. “But why would you have worried about anyone else ever hearing it?”

Next came Sebastien LeCompte. He spoke tenderly of Lily when questioned by Ojeda, but even the mitigating assertions that he made about her—even the ones that Eduardo knew for a fact were true—wound up sounding somehow sneering and false. Perhaps this was due to stage fright. Perhaps it was due to the difficulty of entering an arena with one’s credibility already compromised, and the automatic inauthenticity that came with overcompensation (Eduardo remembered this from his own early attempts to network at law school, when he’d been so unpracticed and reluctant that he wound up coming across as even more transparently craven than his colleagues). Or perhaps, Eduardo thought, Sebastien LeCompte had actually forgotten how to mean anything. Perhaps he had never known.

In any case, there was no denying that Sebastien LeCompte had, like Lily, contributed to the obstruction of justice. Eduardo could have highlighted this fact in his questioning—he could have leaned on it, made Sebastien feel its threat, made the panelist judges see its import. But in the end Eduardo decided on a different approach, for its efficacy as much as for its humanity. At heart, after all, Eduardo did not believe Sebastien LeCompte was really dangerous to anybody, or that the mistakes he’d made were likely to be repeated outside of his own life. So
the kid had lied to protect his girlfriend: This only showed that he had enough sense to see that she was guilty and enough loyalty to love her anyway. And, at any rate, it was abundantly clear that Sebastien LeCompte already had a prison.

And so instead of pursuing Sebastien’s deceitfulness, Eduardo chased his ignorance. What had Lily’s birthday party been like? he asked. Sebastien had not been there. Why had Sebastien not been there? Because he had not been invited. And how did Lily feel after having been fired? Sebastien did not know. And why didn’t Sebastien know? Because Lily had never discussed it with him.

It was in these faltering moments of admitting his own agnosticism—and in these moments alone—that Sebastien LeCompte finally sounded like he was telling the truth.

Last came Ignacio Toledo. It was hard for Eduardo to confidently guess how he was coming across to the judges; in certain moments he struck Eduardo as evidently self-serving, and Eduardo was not at all convinced that the panelist judges were convinced that he was telling the whole story. But they were even less convinced that Lily was, after all that they had heard. And—since Ignacio Toledo’s testimony involved a lot more self-recrimination than Lily’s did—perhaps it seemed to them intuitive to split the difference. Ignacio Toledo was sentenced to fifty years in prison. Lily Hayes was sentenced to twenty-five.

Afterward, the camera crews mobbed Lily Hayes’s family on the courthouse steps.

“Were you surprised at the outcome?” they asked.

And Andrew Hayes looked wearily at the camera and said that at this point in his life he was fairly sure that nothing could ever surprise him again.

Lily wrote to Sebastien only once during the trial. It was an odd letter, formal and paranoid and strangely anonymous, as though she’d written it without knowing who, if anyone, would ever read it. It was mostly
about her parents: about how their visits were still at the center of her life, the thing that pinned her entire mind to the wall, but how every time they came she became obsessed with their leaving, consumed by thoughts of the minutes that had already passed, terrified of not feeling what she wanted to feel and not saying what she wanted to say during the time she had left with them. She wrote that she had to funnel her whole life, her whole secret heart, into these few moments, and that then they’d come and go and she’d spend the whole week worrying that she hadn’t gotten the visit right and vowing to do better the next time. But she didn’t, she said. She always found herself growing somehow abstracted, her attention half-deflected toward their departure. She wanted the visits to be something solid, she wrote, something she could fully get her arms around. But instead they were like everything else: They were diffuse, spurious things, like atoms, like seconds, like all the stuff you had to depend on but could never really trust.

The night of the sentencing, Eduardo took Maria out to dinner. At the restaurant, they were overly polite, like strangers who’d each been told that the other was freakishly given to offense. Eduardo knew he was being superstitious in not inviting anyone else out with them—he knew that he was trying to avoid an outburst of the sort that had happened after his promotion all those years ago. And though he was disappointed in his own childishness, he was far more disappointed that it did not seem to be working. Lately, their relationship had seemed to Eduardo like a coin spinning ever slower, far past the point at which you think it must surely, surely land.

That night, next to him in bed, Maria whispered a question into his ear when he was nearly asleep.

“Would you still love me if I killed someone?” she said.

The question crawled into Eduardo’s ear and hooked him out of his sleep, and it echoed within him for a moment, like something from a dream, before he realized it was real. “Did you say something?” he said.

“Well, would you?” Maria was on her side, head propped up on
elbow, ear cupped in her hand. Eduardo had the impression that she had been staring at him for a while.

“What are you talking about?” He sat up. “That’s ridiculous. You’d never kill someone.”

“But would you love me if I did?”

“But you wouldn’t.” He turned on the bedside lamp. Maria looked up at him, her face owlish and expectant. She did not sit up. “You wouldn’t be yourself if you did.”

“You get so philosophical sometimes.”

“No, really. You wouldn’t. There would be no ‘you’ to love.”

“But what if you don’t know that? What if I already have killed someone? Would I still be me? And if I’m not me, who am I?”

“You haven’t killed anyone.”

“You’re right. But what if someday I will?”

“Don’t be morbid. You won’t. Do you need me to promise you you won’t so we can go to sleep?”

She smiled. “You don’t know I won’t. You don’t know me that well, really, after all.” Her face was strangely serene, and she seemed to be speaking almost to herself. She flipped onto her back and scrunched down into the sheets. “Somebody probably still loves that girl. Even if she did do it.”

“I’m sure somebody thinks they do,” Eduardo said testily. “And she did do it.”

“Somebody thought they knew her, too.”

“That I don’t doubt.” Suddenly, Eduardo had the sensation that he had been in this moment for as long as he could remember—not this exact conversation, perhaps, but in some version thereof, some dialogue in which Maria wanted something from him that he could not, and would never be able to, discern. She knew—she must know—that he would have given her anything she needed. Not telling him what she needed was her way of forcing him to fail her, which she knew—she must know—was the most hurtful thing she could do to him. Eduardo could see this kind of moment stretch out forever around him. It was ahead of him and behind him. It was beyond him and
within him. It was, perhaps, the dark matter of the universe, and all the astronomers could stop looking.