The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  That was the first show she invited me to, and I remember how nervous I was for her when she stepped out to do her solo. It was the climax of Rhapsody in Blue, the moment where the orchestra sounds like it’s diving down into itself, and you’re not sure if it’s coming back up. But then, ah, it does, and you can’t believe you were ever uncertain. Victoria danced beautifully, gliding alongside the melody, leaping into it and landing in place. And so it was strange when I went to the R&B-themed spring show a year later and felt the same heart-stop when she danced. Process of elimination—it was not the music this time, it was not her dancing, it was something about her, something else entirely.

  “Vic, I need help,” I tell her quietly, figuring I’ll only expand if she asks.

  “With what?”

  “You know, shit. Life.”

  “Oh, dearie. I don’t know what I can tell you right now that doesn’t involve dance.” She turns her head toward me, puts a hand on her brow, and opens her eyes.

  “No, that’s perfect. Tell me again how you started to dance. Tell me anything you remember.”

  “Mmm, okay.” She’s quiet, and she has her eyes closed again. Across the courtyard, Connor Hagins and his buddies still occupy the tables we sat at last year, and strains of their nonconversations threaten to drop into our spot if someone doesn’t start talking soon. “Well,” Vic says, slowly, “there was a little girl in an apartment in Brooklyn, and there were her parents, who traveled a lot, and there was this girl’s nanny, Celine. So one day, the girl was supposed to be watching Sesame Street while the nanny did whatever the nanny did, but the girl started going through the big cabinet by the TV, and she found her mother’s collection of Broadway cast albums. And she put one on the CD player and started to move around.”

  I finish my fries and place my empty lunch tray by the Dead Guy’s plaque. (O Tim Gelpy, here is your offering of ketchup residue for the day.) And I scoot backward across the ground one, two, three times so that I am in the shadow of the bench. One more and I’d be leaning against it. I want to, but she’d notice, even though she has her eyes closed again.

  “And how could you not move around, you know? It had all the steps shouted out right in the beginning of the first song. It was A Chorus Line, have I told you that before? I guess that’s kind of key to our story, because I—I mean, she, our heroine—had no idea that good old Celine the nanny was going to hear some of the words in the music she was dancing to and get really pissed off. So she stopped the music and locked me in my bedroom.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I bet I never told you that part before. She was planning to lock me in there just until my parents came home, but then she remembered that, oh, my parents were flying back from the West Coast and wouldn’t be home until late.”

  “How long were you stuck?”

  “I don’t know. Long enough to have to empty my box of Legos and pee in it.”

  “Damn, that’s awful.”

  “And I didn’t tell my parents what Celine did. She asked me not to tell. So she was my nanny until we moved to Seattle.”

  The leg of Tim Gelpy’s memorial bench is cool to the touch. I can see why Victoria likes it. I lean against it, with one shoulder.

  “But you started taking lessons in New York. The place above the dry cleaners, and the teacher with the pink hair and the cat she brought to class, and all that.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah. All of that totally happened. My mom came to me a few days after the locked-room ordeal, and she was like, ‘Celine said you might like some dance lessons,’ and I agreed.”

  The fifth-period bell.

  I dart away from the bench, and Vic sits up and for a second her legs come apart, but she smooths out her skirt and gets back to herself.

  “So, wait,” I say, picking up my lunch tray.

  “Hmm?”

  “You started dancing because your nanny traumatized you?”

  “That’s not what I said,” Vic says. “I dance because I love it.”

  We’re back in the building, and I’m walking too slowly. Vic stops to let me catch up, and the crowd slides back and forth around us. It’s the weird post-lunchtime dimness after being out in the sun—dim vision, dulled senses. Vic still looks gorgeous, of course, but her face is hazy.

  “So I’m working on a new piece,” I tell her.

  “That’s great, dearie! What is it?” We’re walking in step again.

  “It’s totally different from anything else I’ve done. It’s kind of abstract, but also not?” She wouldn’t believe me even if I told her about the Red Mangrove Estate and what Lilia has done there. So why should I even try to tell her? While I’m creating it, my project can be my own perfect secret.

  “Here’s to the girl on the go!” Victoria grins. “Tell me when it’s ready. I want to see it.”

  I wish Vic’s story was different. I want it to be a story of pure love for her art—of inspiration and creation, a sense of having had her vision. She leaves for French, and I head in the opposite direction for trigonometry, and with every step of my purple sandals, I’m trying to make something happen. For her, for me, for us. Moving forward . . . well, I’m always moving forward when I walk, but this time seems more solid than usual. I’m going back to Lilia’s. I’m going to finish the red walls and the secret painting. What would it be like to bring Victoria there someday, to let her try to see what I’m seeing? The beauty, the simplicity. Just love. Just art.

  The clock by my mother’s bed says 10:02.

  Angela is the champion sleeper in our family. She doesn’t remember a single one of our flights to or from San Juan because she always zonks out before takeoff. She slept through hurricanes while my parents and I stared down the trees closest to our house in Naples, willing them not to fall.

  But I feel like my taking a single step in the house tonight will wake her up. And, you know, if life was fair and logical, that’s what should happen. Angela should catch me trying to leave, should remember that she’s still mad at me, should force me to sleep on the floor next to her bed to make sure I don’t try to leave again.

  It’s so easy to go out the window.

  In the imaginary conversation I’m having with my sister, I’m explaining the unexplainable. I’m telling her about the Estate and its weird energy. Its patient doors and its musty stairways and its secret paintings. I’m telling her about how I’ve got to go there, right now—that everything I’ve ever wanted to do with my art seems possible in that place. And somehow, I’m able to say this in a way that makes sense to Angela, and she smiles and remembers Abuela’s mofongo recipe after all, and tells me it’ll be ready when I get home.

  I wonder how Lilia leaves the other half of the house. I can’t imagine her saying to Rex, “Hey, I’m going to my studio. I’ll be back at six in the morning.” I bet she just shuts the door and is gone.

  But she doesn’t have anyone expecting her to be in a certain place.

  Does Victoria feel this way when she’s going to the dance studio or to one of her company practices? Does she feel this pull toward the art, a pull so hard that I think I might wake up with sore muscles tomorrow?

  I leave the light on in Mom’s room. “I’m sorry,” I say, to the whole Moreno half of the house.

  Outside, it’s colder than it’s been in weeks, and a chilly mist of rain moves in and sticks to me as I’m climbing into my car. I don’t know why, but I feel like taking my cranky old Pontiac tonight. Poor thing needs to get out of the driveway and see the sights. It grumbles at me as I’m maneuvering around Rex’s Jeep, but on the main roads, it doesn’t make a sound. It’s like it knows where I need to be, and that I need to get there as soon as I can.

  At a stoplight, I turn the wipers off and the windshield blurs over with rain. A sheen of tiny drops, all of them trapped in the glow of the stoplight and reflecting red onto my hands and face and neck. It’s beautiful. I’m beautiful. There’s no one around to see it, but maybe that’s okay. I flick the wipers on
again to wash it away, and then the car pushes on toward the Estate.

  nine

  “I’M BACK.”

  I say it to the room, to the walls. I thought I’d feel relieved to be here, but it’s more of a shout than a sigh. Yes! I’m here. Time to work.

  The paint and supplies have already been set up for me. My circle and lines from the secret painting are there, but the projection guiding me is gone.

  Okay, fine. Back to the red walls.

  I wonder what led Lilia here, if this room I’m standing in right now is a place she’s lived in, or if it’s truly nothing more than an adopted studio to her.

  I wonder if she’ll ever tell me.

  I’ve swept across another white wall with red paint. All I need to do is edge around the door to the empty closet, and it’ll be done.

  The door to the bedroom is open, and Lilia walks by. She pauses, peers in, and says nothing to me. I figure if I were doing something wrong, she’d tell me, or take away the paint. Maybe the room is starting to look how she pictured it would. Yes—the word strums in her head. Yes. And there’s a warmth in my chest and my knees as Lilia returns to the living room.

  There’s only one more thing to do: I need to take on the secret painting again. The lines on the opposite wall are back, having faded in like sunlight. I abandon the closet and go straight to them, to catch them before they disappear. They seem clearer this time, though, and less likely to dance away. I grab a thin brush and a palette of colors and go.

  I’m quick and smooth—like scribbling with a brand-new rollerball pen. Like Angela’s hands across the piano. Like Victoria in the Gershwin show, making effortless leaps across the stage and falling into a pirouette. There’s a move in modern dance called the downward spiral—Vic is always trying to perfect hers. Maybe this is my downward spiral, careening yet controlled. When art is like this, when the work is so hard and so easy at the same time, I feel like I’m breaking all the rules of the universe. It’s thrilling. It’s terrifying. I may as well be falling through the floor, down to the beach and the gulf, straight down to the water, all the while managing to bring this painting to life.

  It is taking shape. Curves and thin lines. Wrinkles. Eyes that are open and wide and friendly. It’s a portrait of the person I most want to see and most want to avoid seeing right now. Abuela Dolores.

  Abuela, who loves her dogs and mofongo and flowers and funny nicknames. Abuela, who has always accepted my art even when she hasn’t loved it, and loved it when she hasn’t understood it (which is great, considering all the times I haven’t understood it either), and now I guess it’s fitting that she’s part of it herself, here on my wall.

  And I want to tell someone, or show someone, but can I? Should I? Is this painting even mine?

  Elsewhere in the Estate, the music starts up again. Quietly, like a footstep on carpet. Like it’s coming toward me but has a while before it reaches me.

  I sit on the floor next to the painting and work on the corner and the bottom, which seems to be some sort of background pattern. The guidelines are barely here now, but maybe they’ll stay long enough to let me finish this corner. It’s coming together. The pattern down here, whatever it is, is more intricate than the rest.

  Actually, it’s not a pattern—it’s a word. This.

  I keep going. More red paint and clean brushstrokes. More spiraling.

  The next word: really.

  And one more: happened.

  And a dot at the end. Final.

  I drop the brush and stumble to my feet. This really happened. Okay, but what did? This is where I need the English-class analysis skills of Angela and Victoria. Maybe I’ll let the painting hang out and be on its own for a while. At the doorway, I peer out into the rest of the apartment.

  The music is clearer and louder now, like bells, or a brand-new piano. Every note, no matter what instrument makes it, is full and bright, bursting through the walls of the Estate like a searchlight.

  “Lilia?” I say into the hall.

  No reply.

  “Hey, I’m going to take a short walk, okay?”

  She has left. In the living room, she’s finished a whole new ceiling section of Goya cans, and cleaned up her supplies. She told me before how we wouldn’t be alone here, how this is a community of artists, so maybe she floats from one place to another, checking on other people’s red or purple or orange rooms. I just know that my urge to find the music tonight is stronger than my urge last night to leave without seeking it out.

  Out in the hall, it sounds different. It’s still bright and brilliant, but it’s clearly coming from somewhere farther away. Another floor.

  I take the stairs one floor up. Still farther away.

  Two more floors, and I peer into the hallway. I’m on the fifth floor. The hallway is identical to Lilia’s floor. The music seems to be coming from an even higher place now.

  Sixth floor. Seventh floor.

  Finally, at the eighth floor, the music stops.

  I step out into the hallway.

  There. A note. The strains of a new song. They start as whispers with glances of a tone, but they fold on top of one another and now the music pours over me. It floods from the end of the hall. As I walk closer, other instruments announce themselves: bass, keyboard, and saxophone. The door to number 810 is ajar. I push it open only enough for me to slip through.

  They’re all here. In the living room, in the kitchen, in the hall. These must be the other working artists Lilia talked about. The rooms glow a dim orange, and the artists cluster in groups, shoulders close together. I have walked into parties before: Bill’s pool parties where he would grab my hand and jump with me, fully clothed, into the deep end; Tall Jon’s parties, full of members of two-month-old bands; a popular-kid party I went to with Connor and Victoria; a cast party for one of Victoria’s shows, just after the lead dancer had announced that she was leaving; weed parties and cheap-beer parties, all of which smelled more like guy sweat and microwaved food than anything else. But I have never walked into an artist party.

  I don’t even know what it smells like here. Not smoke, not paint, not food. Maybe just like people.

  A few steps forward. There’s a group of three women talking. They look at me—they are older, like in that big swath of time between Tall Jon’s age and Abuela’s age. Like when you’re supposed to be doing things and making things.

  “Do you know what band this is?” I say. “They’re really good.”

  They all look like they’re trying to signal one or the other to speak to me. “Are you Lilia’s new friend?” the tallest one asks.

  “I guess so.” Maybe I look nervous. I uncross my arms, let them hang by my sides. It’s easier to do parties when you have a Tall Jon–donated cigarette in one hand. “My name’s Mercedes.”

  “We’re glad you could come up tonight,” another one says. She is strikingly pretty, a mix of colors: brown eyes, medium-tone skin, a striped scarf in her dyed red hair. “This isn’t a band, not in the usual sense of the word. They’re here most nights, though, just experimenting with different songs and sounds. You might hear some of them again, one day.” She winks at the other ladies.

  “Cool. Thanks.” I move farther into the crowd. People say hello and excuse me and sometimes nothing. But I am supposed to be here, I’m pretty sure. They haven’t turned me away. And—yes—there’s Lilia, heading toward me down the hall, and people step aside to make sure that she, now wearing a floaty light green dress and sandals, can get by.

  Her eyes lock on me. “Did you finish your painting?”

  “Yes,” I say, “with the wall I came to finish. I mean, I didn’t originally plan on coming back tonight. I know I didn’t tell you that earlier. I really needed to stay home with my sister. But I just couldn’t stay away. I just had to—”

  “Your sister will be fine,” Lilia says.

  But. Angela. I can see her, as if an image of her was being hazily projected onto the living room wall. She’s asleep—covers
kicked off, Tweety Bird pants making another appearance, ceiling fan swishing her bangs around. I can stop looking at her, can’t I? There’s nothing to see, nothing that’s going to change in this picture until her 6:33 alarm because she hates even numbers.

  But. She’s mad at me.

  When she was in kindergarten, a bunch of the boys on the school bus called her Miss Piggy, apropos of nothing, and I, a cool if not ice-cold third grader at the time, didn’t say a word about it.

  When she was starting middle school, our parents bought her a new desk and chair, and I said I liked them more than my own desk and chair, and before I knew it, hers were in my room.

  Last summer, when I told Mom that I’d broken up with Bill and that I thought I might go out with a girl next, and when Mom looked at me sideways and walked out of the room, Angela sat with me for a long time, the two of us staring straight ahead at Antiques Roadshow as I burned at my outburst with its ridiculous overrehearsed casualness. And Angela ate chicken soup with crackers and didn’t seem to mind living in my world.

  Also, let’s not forget all my smoking.

  Shit.

  “Lilia.” I shift to looking at her—well, at a noncommittal place on the top of her head—and the image of Angela vanishes. “Can I bring her here? Is there a place she can practice?”

  “Your living room works for now, doesn’t it?” It’s like she’s daring me to say no, to complain about how the piano and its teacher’s randomness bother me.

  “But Angela’s about a million times better than I am. I mean, good Lord. She’ll probably be playing Beethoven’s unfinished symphony or whatever by the end of the week.”

  Lilia pushes back her hair. For the first time, she looks exhausted. “No. That can’t happen right now. I’ll let you know if you can bring her in the future. But now, absolutely not.”

  The music swirls around us. It’s only a guitar and drums right now, and has that classic feeling about it, like something I’d hear if Abuela took me to her favorite place for lunch. I should stay here a little longer. I should. I open my mouth to say something to Lilia—a protest, a question—but nothing comes out.