Free Cartwheel by Jennifer Dubois

and in Lily it was, assuredly, only obnoxious. And at any rate, Eduardo knew that there was something sinister about Lily that went well beyond impulsivity.
    Take, for example, the cartwheel. Eduardo had worked enough high-profile cases to know how the cartwheel would play, what binary of accusation and defense would grow in its wake. For the prosecution, by way of the media, an argument would be made that the cartwheel was callous, flippant, reflective of the same kind of bottomless disregard that could, given the right circumstances and drugs, disregard another human life. The counterargument, obviously, would assert that the cartwheel was whimsical and guileless; an exuberant outburst that was now being willfully misunderstood by the old and the humorless and the agenda having. Indeed, the defense might say, if the cartwheel was evidence of anything it was evidence of innocence: How could someone guilty, someone who wanted to look
not
guilty, do something like that? Only a person who knew that she was innocent and was too young to know that this might not matter would ever, ever do a cartwheel in an interrogation room.
    But Eduardo knew better, because he had spent years studying an impulsive woman. Maria sometimes did things that were crazy or ill-advised, Eduardo would be the first to admit—though more commonly she did things that were merely strange: He’d once found her inthe living room at three a.m. staring at a red umbrella she’d lit up with a flashlight, and more than once he’d passed by the closed bathroom door and heard her murmuring to herself in the claw-footed tub. One time she’d hung up a paper moon in a tree, where it shone through the branches like an illuminated coin.
    “It’s beautiful,” he’d said, assuming Maria had wanted to do something beautiful.
    “Oh, is it?” she’d said distractedly, as he wrapped his arms around her.
    “I just wanted it to be interesting.”
    “It is,” said Eduardo. He could hear the sticky note of pleading in his own voice. He so wanted to see whatever it was she wanted him to see.
    “No,” said Maria, looking at him calmly. “Nothing beautiful is really interesting.” She’d torn it down then, though not angrily—just methodically, thoroughly, as though correcting a mistake she now saw that she’d made.
    There were difficulties, too, of course. Maria had a tendency to internalize free-floating stress from the universe, though her life was not, as far as Eduardo could discern, at all stressful. This knotty, inaccessible melancholy of hers was so different from his own; whatever went on with Maria was always some strange iteration away from sense. She’d fall into black spells, growing monosyllabic and morose, speaking in a kind of halting iambic pentameter. She’d disappear into the bathroom to sob (and how she sobbed—these choking, wretched sobs that somehow came at exactly even intervals, so that they seemed almost like some kind of biological or geologic process). One winter she even went a little bald; Eduardo came upon a collapsed black octopus of hair in the shower drain, looking like the remnant of a massacre.
    And there were times—rarely, but memorably—when she could be cruel. The first time he’d really seen it was the night he’d been appointed fiscal de cámara. Maria had organized a celebration for him at a restaurant, though he realized later that every night with Maria was a kind of complicated, triple-edged celebration—like the wedding of an oldlover, or the birthday party of an old enemy. There was always a manic sheen of strenuously sought and hard-won fun and an underlying sense of deep and growing trouble. The night of the promotion, Eduardo had felt humble and serene and pleased with himself for the first time in he didn’t know how long. Their friends were laughing and drinking and having a great time until Maria clinked her glass for a toast. Everybody stopped speaking and stared at her happily, and Eduardo felt