Read Cartwheel for Free Online Page B

her—fiercely but swiftly, pulling away after a moment to stare at her feet.
    Andrew sat. He left his hand in the center of the table, in case Lily wanted to hold it at any point. “Sweetheart,” he said. “How are you doing?”
    Lily blinked, and Andrew could see shivering blue capillaries on her eyelids. Were they always like that? They were probably always like that. “When’s Mom coming?” she said.
    “Next week,” said Andrew. “She’ll be here for your next visit. On Thursday.”
    “Why isn’t she here now?”
    “We’re going to trade off weeks, sweetheart.” Andrew was going to have to stop saying “sweetheart” with such frequency, he knew. Lily was not likely to tolerate it for long, and he did not want to know what it would mean if she did. “So you’ll always have a visitor. Every Thursday.” Lily’s innocence was implicit. It was implicit. Andrew would ask questions that reflected that. “How are you being treated?” he said, in the same moment as Anna leaned forward and said, urgently, “Lily. Are you okay?”
    Andrew saw a momentary sardonic flash in Lily’s eyes—encouraging because it was so characteristic—but then it went away and Lily said, “I’m okay.” And Andrew knew then that she was protecting them, and he was afraid.
    Lily stood up. “Dad,” she said. There was a wavering note of hysteria in her voice. She began to pace. “I have to tell you what happened.”
    Andrew had never seen anyone pace before, and it was distressing. She really did look like one of those caged animals—her body seemed to register, at the edge of each cycle, that there was no place left to go; and she was doing something with her head that looked nearly equine—and he said, “Lily, do you want to sit down?”
    “No,” she said. Andrew could hear something toddleresque in the dismissal—in the jejune thrill at having something to reject—and he realized that this was a small thing they could give her.
    “Okay,” he said soothingly. “You don’t have to sit down.”
    “Dad, I have to tell you.” Lily’s gaze was narrowing, and Andrew felt that she was on the verge of some kind of change in pitch.
    “Lily,” he said quickly. “You don’t need to tell us anything.”
    “I do.”
    Andrew leaned forward and gestured to the ceiling. “Lily. You understand, right? You don’t need to tell us anything, if you don’t think you should.”
    Lily looked at Andrew then with the most open and wrecked expression he had ever seen; it was an expression that was shattered, that was nearly autopsied. “Dad,” she said, close to sobbing. “Of course I should. What the hell do you think? Of
course
I should.”
    “Okay, okay.”
    Anna was silent: hands folded, face terrified.
    “I was staying over at Sebastien’s,” said Lily.
    Andrew nodded. “Sebastien is your boyfriend?”
    Lily looked at him dimly. There was a time when she would have quibbled with this formulation; she would have said “lover” or maybe even “paramour,” or told him not to be so conventional, or asked him to remind her what century this was. Now she just shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Okay,” said Andrew, “but so, you were staying over there.”
    “The Carrizos were gone for the weekend. That’s why I was staying over.”
    “What did you do there?”
    “Dad.”
    “Okay.” Andrew hadn’t meant to ask any questions, but he did not know what he would say if he didn’t. “When did you get back?”
    “Like, maybe, eleven? I went to the bathroom to shower. Someone hadn’t flushed the toilet, which I thought was weird. It wasn’t like Katy. She’s a very neat girl.”
    Andrew could hear Lily struggling to manage her mouth here—the juggling act of teeth and tongue and saliva seemed to be eluding her, and there was a faint breathiness in her voice.
    “There was,” she said. “There was also. I can’t see.”
    “Put your head between your knees,” said Anna.
    “Yeah,”