Cartwheel (22 page)

Eduardo put the email down. “Lily,” he said gently. “You’re in trouble. You’re scared. You’re confused. Of course you are. Who wouldn’t be? That’s natural. And I don’t know exactly what happened that night. But the best thing you can do for yourself now—and the best thing you can do for Katy—is to be completely honest. That’s the best way. I’ve seen lots of young people in trouble like you, and I can tell you—and I’m telling you this in all sincerity—that nobody ever improved their situation by lying.”

This statement itself sounded like a lie, Eduardo knew, but actually it was, in his experience, generally true. The sooner a person admitted to what had happened, the sooner they could begin the long hard work of living with themselves. Something like what Lily had done could never be made right, of course; it could not necessarily ever be made much better. But it could be made varying degrees of worse, and Eduardo believed that honesty was the way to avoid that. And one thing was certainly clear: Lily Hayes had not done this alone. And the best way to learn who she had done it with, for now, was by letting Lily externalize the scene; allowing her to watch it from a distance, as though it had happened in a movie, or to somebody else entirely. Once she could see it that way, they could work on getting her to pull back the curtain and see herself there, too, standing in the corner.

Eduardo put his hands on the folder, palms up, in a gesture he knew to be subtly imploring. “Did Katy have a lot of friends in the city?”

“Just from the program,” said Lily quietly. “And just girls.”

Just girls. As though your gender could absolve you. Was this cleverness, or was this denial? Eduardo turned his hands palms down. “Is there anybody else she knew?” he said. “Anybody you can think of? Anybody who had a problem with Katy, or anybody she had some odd dealings with?”

“No.”

“It’s a big city. It’s a dangerous city, to be frank.”

“No.” Lily’s voice was shakier.

“Any boyfriends, other than Sebastien LeCompte?”

Earlier in the week, Lily might have told him derisively that Sebastien LeCompte was
not
Katy’s boyfriend. But now she just shook her head weakly.

“You must have known somebody,” said Eduardo. “You’ve been in town six weeks. You had the job at Fuego. You knew so much about the city.”

“No.”

“The only way you can help yourself now is to think of someone. That’s the only way you can help Katy.”

Lily shook her head, but Eduardo could see that she’d thought of who she would say, if she had to say someone.

“Just one name,” he said. “Just one name, and we’ll check it out.”

She closed her eyes. The hollows under her eyes had turned the color of eggplant. “Maybe Javier,” her eyes still closed.

“What?”

“Javier.” She opened one eye.

“Javier Aguirre? Your boss at Fuego?”

She nodded.

“You think he could have done this?”

“No.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Anything is possible.”

It was true. Anything was possible. Maria had left once, and then
she had come back again. Anything was possible, unthinkable beauty and unthinkable horror, both. The sooner Lily saw that the impossible was possible, the better it would be for everyone.

“Thank you, Lily. That’s very good. Now. Can I get you a glass of water?”

Because she could not bear to ask Katy about the lawsuit, Lily began looking around the house for clues. She tiptoed past the Carrizos’ bedroom and paused there, listening for revealing snatches of conversation, but somehow only ever heard the TV. She gazed at Carlos’s face searchingly during dinner; she tried to use words like “corruption” and “fraud” and “disaster” to see if any of them stuck. She realized that she was half-hoping to be able to bring some kind of treasured bit of information back to Katy—to drop some spectacular revelation casually into conversation as though it were common knowledge and then widen her eyes in shock when Katy expressed surprise.
“What?”
she’d squeal gleefully. “You didn’t
know
?” But in spite of her best efforts, often enough Lily forgot to spy and missed the best opportunities—when the mail came in, when the phone rang, when Beatriz and Carlos spoke in hushed murmurs in the kitchen.

Around Lily, the city flashed from spectacular to hideous to ordinary, like a sky in a fast-motion video. In a strange inversion of what
she’d experienced when she first arrived in Buenos Aires, Lily found herself lost in extended reveries about New England. She remembered the brutal wheels of white light coming off the rivers; the snarl of lemon-colored leaves in the fall, making crisp fragile sounds like dead insects underfoot. She remembered the celestial whiteness of winter mornings, the clean searing smell of apocalypse. She remembered the languor and contingency and drama of the summer: the heavy sulfur smell before thunderstorms; the understated nodding of the leaves, like they were acquiescing or drifting off to sleep. She remembered the way the light tongued the bark of the trees on summer late afternoons, the heartbreaking sense of time passing, time passing, time passed.

She had been away, she realized, only a month.

And when she turned her thoughts back to Buenos Aires, Lily found that the city no longer seemed so exotic. She caught herself effortlessly riding the Subte, confident in all transactions and maneuvers, without secretly feeling very independent and proud. She knew which restaurants were overpriced and which buses had pickpockets and how to avoid them both. She knew to expect sloppy cheek kisses from perfect strangers, and she had learned, finally, not to look so surprised when they came. On the weekends, she watched the tourists carrying around their cameras, timid and admiring, and felt a certain scorn. Lily was different from them now, and better; she had more in common with the porteños than the tourists. And when she saw a
HELP WANTED
sign at a Belgrano café/club called Fuego, she felt breezy enough to go in and apply even though she didn’t have a work visa. She walked out fifteen minutes later with a job.

Lily’s boss at the café was Javier Aguirre, a Brazilian with incredibly black skin. Lily was not sure she’d ever seen a person with skin so black—there was almost a purity to it, she thought: This was how people were supposed to look, before they began migrating north to snowy climes and growing pale and dumpy. Lily broke a wineglass her first night on the job and her drawer came up short the second—but Javier seemed to believe that this was a failure of competence, not of honesty,
and he kept her on. Both times, Ignacio the weeknight bartender gave Lily cigarettes and told her dirty jokes to cheer her up afterward.

“What do you want a job for?” Beatriz said one night, rinsing cucumbers at the sink. “Don’t we feed you enough?”

Lily frowned. She didn’t know how to explain it. “Of course you do,” she said. “This is just for spending money.”

But it wasn’t, really. Lily actually liked working at Fuego. She liked the banter with the waiters and the customers, and she liked the happy noises a table made when she brought them a tray of drinks, and she liked watching the strange people she would never otherwise meet—Javier, with his impish, impossibly white grin; Ignacio the bartender, with his sleepy eyes and his face like a tortoiseshell; one very fat regular who came in with a rotating array of very thin girlfriends. It was hard work, and Lily always felt harried—but she found she sort of
liked
feeling harried: Sometimes she caught glimpses of herself in the bathroom mirror, looking young and tired and put-upon, and was surprised at how satisfied she was with the sight. She didn’t look her most attractive in these moments, certainly. But she did look the least like herself she ever had in her life.

“For the weekends,” Lily added.

Beatriz shook her head. “God knows what kind of characters you’ll meet.”

She was imagining alcohol consumption, no doubt, illicit drug use, various unnamable and unknowable extravagances at the home of Sebastien LeCompte. And so Lily added, “This is just for extra money. For books. For travel,” even though it hadn’t occurred to her until that very moment to travel anywhere farther than she’d already gone.

After starting at Fuego, Lily began to see less of Sebastien. He often texted her in the evenings—oblique and faux-literary missives that seemed to always begin mid-conversation—and she’d glance at them while working and somehow feel that she’d already responded even
when she hadn’t. After coming home late she’d scroll through all the communiqués she’d missed, shielding the light from Katy’s sleeping face, and resolve firmly to answer them the next day. But in the morning she’d be racing to her classes, guzzling the dregs of the instant coffee that Katy had made, and she would forget again. Finally, one Friday night—after some negotiating and bidding and counterbidding—Lily agreed to go over to Sebastien’s for a drink. It had been nearly a week since she’d last seen him.

They had planned for ten, but Lily did not begin walking across the lawn until ten-thirty. Underneath her flip-flops, the grass smelled vernal and sweet. She knew Sebastien would never mention her lateness, and she took a terrible delight in knowing this fact and exploiting it. It was the kind of thing a boy would do.

At the house, Lily knocked on the door with her knuckle—using that gargoyle thing seemed to be a concession to affectation that she did not wish to make—and Sebastien opened the door quickly. Behind him, the house smelled musty, and Lily wondered when he had last left it. The must, the dark, the unnerving declivity to the floors—why had all of this seemed so tragically romantic once?

“Well,
hello
,” said Sebastien. “You’re a vision for sore eyes.”

“You look nice,” said Lily. He did. He was wearing a jacket. And sometimes Lily liked to irk Sebastien by saying dull things. It was a habit she found herself falling into—the more he wanted to talk in the abstract, the more she found herself commenting on the softness of his hair, the radiant greenness of the trees. Was she trying to get him to like her less? She had to wonder.

But to her surprise, Sebastien actually blushed lightly and tugged at the ends of his coat. “Well. I do try. And how have you been filling the many hours since I saw you last?”

“Oh, you know,” Lily said, wrinkling her nose and stepping into the house. “This and that.”

“The rigorous demands of the intellectual life, I suppose.”

“Yes.” Lily leaned in and kissed him, feeling the warmth of his
cheek, the sturdiness of his clavicle. He would be so lovely if only he would stop talking. “It’s all very draining. As you yourself know, of course.”

“Of course,” said Sebastien. He retreated to the kitchen, returning a moment later with two glasses of something amber.

“And as it happens,” Lily said brightly, taking her glass, “I got a job.”

“A job!” Sebastien set down his drink. “How adorably plebeian of you!”

For some reason, Lily had not wanted to tell Sebastien about Fuego. She’d thought he might see through it somehow; after all, a person as fake as Sebastien had to have some otherworldly insight into other people’s vagaries. But as soon as Lily walked in the house she’d realized, with a gnawing anxiety, that she had not thought to generate any backup topics of conversation, and could not quite think what else they would manage to discuss.

“A job!” said Sebastien again, clinking his glass against Lily’s. “Workers of the world, unite!”

Lily had known he would react this way; provoking this exact mockery was the conversational favor she was doing for both of them, and the fact that it had worked made her both pleased and sad.

“It seemed like a good way to get to know the city better,” she said, taking a sip of her drink. Whatever it was made her feel like a very old man.

“A plucky young lass, just trying to make her way in the world?”

“Something like that.”

“I certainly hope you haven’t resorted to selling your rare charms on the street.”

“I’m a hostess at Fuego.”

“How very prerevolutionary France of you!”

“I think they’ll make me a waitress after a bit.”

“Well, shoot for the moon and you’ll land amongst the stars, you know. People were always telling me that in high school, and just look at me now. Am I not a truly serious and substantive adult?”

Lily kissed him again, just to make him stop talking. His mouth tasted clean. “No,” she said. “Even if we are drinking brandy. Are you trying to be?”

“Not often,” he said, and kissed her back, more earnestly. Sometimes Lily could almost feel his heart beating through a kiss, though that was probably impossible. She pulled away and stuck out her tongue at him.

“Do you even know what you mean half the time?” she said.

“I do not,” he said regally. “And that, I like to think, is part of my own rare charm.” This made Lily kiss him one more time and take his hand—which was rough and boyish and vaguely callused, though she couldn’t think what he might possibly do to make it feel that way—and lead him toward the bed. She suddenly knew that now they would sleep together. She had never decided to, exactly, but she had also never decided not to, which was, under the circumstances, a kind of decision. And he was, after all, a very dear boy, if only he wouldn’t say so much nonsense.

On the bed, they wrestled for a bit until the moment came when Lily usually put the brakes on things; this time, she did not, and Sebastien pulled her hand to him. She gave a tentative stroke. She always forgot how hard these things were, and how quickly they got that way—she felt a little startled, every single time. She was still holding her brandy with the other hand. She put that down. Her heart was hammering out its fear now—forget the bravado, okay, she admitted it, she still got nervous about this stuff. This was going to happen, she realized. She was young and single and living in Latin America, and she had an outstanding collection of condoms. This is what she was here for. Her teeth were nearly chattering. Sebastien was kissing her. He took off his pants and his shirt and he started in on hers, all the while looking deeply grave. Lily wished he knew that he didn’t have to look that way. He was on top of her, then inside her. His entry was unremarkable. Afterward he looked at her with that wondering, faltering gaze of his and said, “I love you.”