Cartwheel by Jennifer Dubois Read Free Book Online Page B

long enough to know that you couldn’t scour yourself entirely clean of hunches and biases and premonitions; lurking suspicions; kneejerk reactions. You couldn’t help but know some things without knowing why you knew them.
    But at that point he did not know; he was not sure. He wasn’t sure that afternoon, when he went home to drink two tumblers of whiskey and take ibuprofen for his costochondritis (an inflamed chest wall, his doctor had told him, though he knew that it was actually the somatic manifestation of loneliness, that his heart was finally quitting in protest). He wasn’t sure that night, when he was still awake past three, walking heel to toe through his living room, the apartment so empty around him that he could hear the sonic groans of his own intestines, like whale song. And he wasn’t sure the next day, when the police brought him the transcript of their initial conversation with Lily Hayes.
    There were a lot of transcripts—the police’s first talks with the neighbors, the vendors, the traumatized American study-abroad students, the family who’d been hosting both girls, the improbably named boy who had been kissing Lily Hayes in the garden. But the conversation with Lily Hayes stood out, and not only because there was no sign of a break-in and she was the only person in a hundred kilometers who’d had a house key. Eduardo read the transcript in his apartment with the shades drawn, while the sky outside his window stayed maddeningly light well past eight o’clock. In the transcript, of course, it was difficult to ascertain exactly what Lily Hayes’s tone had been as she answered questions about Katy Kellers’s short life and violent death. But Eduardo detected a cold current, a psychological dislocation, that made him read and reread the interview—though, for obvious reasons, Lily Hayes was not likely to have been the sole perpetrator of the crime.
    “You say you saw some blood in the bathroom,” said the interviewing officer.
    “Yes,” said Lily.
    “How much blood was there, exactly?”
    “Not much,” she said—and Eduardo could feel the pause there, the implied flippancy. At one point, the transcript remarked flatly that Lily Hayes, left briefly alone but for the watchful gaze of the security camera, had done a cartwheel. Eduardo turned this image over in his mind.He regarded it without judgment. He was surer, but he was not yet sure. And it was very important to be sure, because once he was sure, he was never wrong.
    The next morning, Eduardo arose before dawn to run through the darkness. He was sweating by the end of the block; he was, as usual, overdressed for the weather. He could never believe that the world outside was so much warmer than it looked.
    The running was new, though the general ritualized masochism was not. Whenever Eduardo felt it coming back again, he commenced a series of steps, a sequence arrived at through guessing and testing and the emergence of a grim, white-knuckled will. First, he assessed all the things in life that would make him feel worse. You won’t feel any better if you get fat, he’d tell himself, while jogging. You won’t feel any better if you get gingivitis, he’d tell himself, while flossing. The corollary—which was intrusive and unarticulated and omnipresent—was that he wouldn’t feel any better either way. It never worked, of course. But it did make Eduardo feel as though he had tried. If Eduardo did anything, it was try. And, after all, it had been only two months since Maria left.
    Maria—Eduardo would be the first to admit—had crashed into his existence, unearned, unwarranted. They’d been married for three years, and during that time Eduardo had never entirely gotten used to the idea. So when she left him—for a Brazilian opera singer, he’d heard—who was Eduardo to say she was not making the right decision? He had felt, somewhere in his devastation, that the universe was actually righting itself, and that resenting this