The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  She ignores me. She’s right to do it. We get out of the car and it’s the type of afternoon that reminds me why old people move down here from Connecticut and why mothers come up here from Puerto Rico. We’re at St. Armands Circle with all the snowbirds and tourists. The water is a block away. The Estate is around the corner. I could turn and run and go there. But would the doors open for me right now? Would the secret painting be ready for me? Something says it’s not time to go at all. It’s time to buy Abuela a very special pillow.

  St. Armands is where we go when our tíos and their families visit, where everyone gets ice cream and Tía Elena always buys a gauzy bathing suit cover-up. This is the home of “nice” souvenirs, many of them with Florida-themed puns on them. Angela walks along in steady silence, but she’s so happy to be here. She stops to pet a dog, and then to listen to a guitarist playing at one of the outdoor restaurants.

  “Oh my God, every time I’ve ever walked by here, that guy’s playing ‘Brown-Eyed Girl,’” I say, because it’s true.

  “Shut up, please.” Angela sways to the music. When the song ends, she pulls a dollar from her pocket, steps toward the guitarist on his stool, scribbles a song request on a piece of paper, and drops it in the guitarist’s straw hat.

  “What about the pillow?” I ask.

  “I want to wait and see if he plays my song,” Angela says.

  “He plays every song the same way,” I say. “He’s not very good.”

  “Who are you to say what’s good?” Angela says this loudly enough that the guitarist, who’s now playing “Stairway to Heaven,” which I only know because of Tall Jon, and which I don’t think was Angela’s song request, looks over at us.

  Angela looks horrified to be singled out like that, so I don’t expect her to go on.

  But she does.

  “Seriously, Mercy, you act like there’s no way I could know what’s good or not.” Her voice is lower, but some of the people who noticed her before are still paying attention. She’s drama. She’s confession. “Maybe you’re avoiding me at home because you’re jealous. You never expected me to be good at something, especially something artistic. And now, you know what? I am. I don’t know how I did it, but it’s real. It has to be.”

  “I know,” I say out of the side of my mouth. “I know you’re good. And I probably was jealous.”

  I stop myself before I can say more, about why I’m not jealous anymore. About how I have my own place where I can go to be good at something. I catch the attention of a man and woman eating fries and having drinks out of coconut-shaped cups. It looks like the greatest and easiest thing in the world.

  The guitarist stops “Stairway to Heaven” before the big climax. I think he sees that Angela is still red-faced and fuming at me. He starts in on a new song.

  It’s Angela’s. It must be. Of course she would pick this one.

  It’s “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” made famous in the US by Doris Day, and in my life by Celia Cruz, and also by Abuela. She loves it.

  Abuela with her purple fingernails in her hospital bed with its sad lack of decorative pillows. Abuela who needs to wake up. Abuela, who had a stroke in her kitchen and who fell and hit the floor, and whose dogs yapped for long enough that the neighbors busted in and found her and called an ambulance. I hope that wasn’t luck and luck alone—I hope there was a strain of her fighting her luck, or fighting for it. And I hope if it was her luck, that her supply of it hasn’t run out.

  Every note of the song hits like a firework in my chest. I turn and run to the center of the circle, where the statues of Greek gods preside over flowers and crosswalks and trash cans and benches, and where I sit and stare at the Red Mangrove Estate while Angela listens to the song. Bits of it trail over here, and I exhale in the music’s direction.

  She will wake up.

  Angela crosses the street and sits next to me on the bench. I don’t meet her eyes, concentrating instead on the statue of Aphrodite on my left. It seems like it must be a rough life for a statue here, but besides a wad of chewing gum stuck to her, Aphrodite looks pretty good.

  “I was worried about you last night,” she says. “I was trying to get to sleep, and of course I made up this whole scenario in my head where you weren’t going to come home at all. I decided that you were tired of Florida and everything here and you were driving to Ohio to live with Dad.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “I almost called him. I really was convinced that’s what you were doing. I was going to be like, Dad, when Mercy gets there, can you send her back home, please?”

  “I wouldn’t have made it. I would have gotten as far as the Georgia state line and wondered what the hell I was thinking.”

  Angela tugs at her hair. “He doesn’t know we’re here by ourselves, does he?”

  “Nope.” Across the street, the song—Abuela’s song—has ended. Some polite applause. “Mom said she was going to tell him, but she never did. If she told him, he totally would have called.”

  “‘Hellooo, girls, what’s the story in old Floridy?’” For a fourteen-year-old girl, Angela actually does an excellent impression of a forty-six-year-old guy, born in Ohio to European parents, who thinks he’s secretly descended from a Spanish prince.

  “That’s perfect.” Now that we’re safe from the song, I start wandering back toward the shops. “And I’m not planning to say a word to him about all this, even if he does call. Can we agree on that?”

  “Sure, I guess.” Angela walks a step behind me. “You know I wanted to live with him at first?”

  I stop in front of the Ben & Jerry’s, in its sharp and sugary-scented cloud. “What? You never told me that.”

  “It’s true.” She looks in the windows at a big family eating ice cream cones. She looks a little too long, to the point where one of the kids glares at her and sticks out his tongue. “You remember how much Mom and Dad used to talk about starting over? Well, I felt like, if they could choose to start over, then I could too. And I thought living with Dad would be my chance to do that.”

  “But they didn’t let you.”

  “Nope.” She starts walking again, and this time I’m the one who’s a few steps behind. “Okay, your turn.”

  “My turn for what?”

  “To tell me something.”

  “Ah.” I keep thinking about Angela starting over, and what that would look like for her. And for me. “Okay. I remember a drawing I did a couple years ago. It was the last one Mom ever put on the fridge. It was of sea turtles—you know, how they hatch and then race to the water. That was the first time I ever drew something that was, like, symbolic of me and you.”

  “A turtle drawing is your secret,” Angela says. “Well, great.” She blows her bangs out of her eyes. “Let’s go get a pillow.”

  Here is the pillow. It is thick and purple. It has SEA LIFE’S BEAUTY in big, swoopy script in the middle, and Sarasota, Florida in small letters at the bottom.

  Angela settles herself at the piano as soon as we get home. I consider staying in my bedroom for the rest of the evening, but something doesn’t feel right about that.

  “Hey.” I flop into the recliner, grip its armrests. “Do you know any Beethoven?”

  “What? Do you know any Beethoven? I think that’s the real question here,” Angela says without looking at me.

  “I just thought . . . it might be something you can play.”

  “Lilia’s always saying weird things like that.” Angela taps out a melody on the far right side of the keyboard. It sounds like the birds that wake me up in the morning in the summer.

  “I’m confident in you, Ange. That’s what I’m trying to say. Let me try to find a recording for you.”

  Angela plays pieces of songs while I do a search for Beethoven on my phone. Her playing reminds me of the way the music changed at the Estate last night, from long songs to broken experiments, and how, just like Angela’s music, it always sounded good. Mrs. Pagonis told me last year that Food Poisoning #1 seemed “so insp
ired,” and at the time I mentally rolled my eyes. Well, of course it had to be inspired by something, or it wouldn’t exist. But there’s another level of inspiration, I think.

  Angela’s back tenses as she plays.

  Anyway. Beethoven. I’d forgotten that he was deaf when he composed a number of his pieces, and even when he performed his Ninth Symphony. I pull up a video of a woman playing the Moonlight Sonata and show it to Angela.

  She nods along. She grabs the phone and puts the tiny speaker up to her ear and she sweats beneath her too-long bangs and she lays a hand on the piano and taps out a few notes. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay, let me try.”

  It seems like a private moment between her and the piano, as weird as that is. I duck into the kitchen to get her—and me—some water. In the other room, Angela fumbles with the melody. Stops and starts. Maybe this was a bad idea. I should leave this stuff to the actual piano teacher. I load some silverware into the dishwasher, some of them right side up and some upside down, because that’s one of the ways to call for the Dishwasher Lemur. What would the Mercedes and Angela who invented the Dishwasher Lemur think of us now? Probably that we were screwing up this amazing opportunity to be parent free for a couple of weeks, wasting it on arguments and the pursuit of classical music. We should be inviting all our friends (I mean, the collective seven friends we actually like) over for dancing and movies and junk food.

  But.

  In the living room, the song comes together. Really, that’s what it sounds like—all the notes meeting one another and having the fantastic party that the alternate-reality Angela and I are meant to be having.

  She flies through the song, up and down the keyboard. I have no vocabulary for what she’s doing, so all I can do is watch her. How she’s more athletic playing the piano than she ever was at tennis camp. How she’s breathing hard and ragged, but not in a way that worries me. How I really need to take scissors to her bangs, or make sure we have the money this week for a haircut. How she’s taken to this piano the same way she learned to ride a bike: one day she was barely keeping her feet on the pedals as I held on to her, and the next she was off like a shot down the sidewalk.

  Our water glasses sweat in my hands.

  Angela finishes the song with a heavy, low note. And then she’s still. I sneak around her—her eyes are closed, her cheeks are pink—and put one of the water glasses on the top of the piano.

  “No!” she shouts.

  “Whoa! Okay, then.” I take the glass back.

  “It might damage the wood,” she says. “That can’t happen. I need this piano.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “That was amazing, though. You picked up the song in, like, five minutes.”

  “Yeah.” She looks down at her hands.

  “And, seriously, please have some water.”

  She does.

  A single knock on the door. Rex says, “You girls okay in there? I heard someone yelling.”

  I glance at Angela. Are we okay? She shrugs. And I invite ourselves over for dinner.

  Everything seems more possible in Rex’s half of the house. Lilia isn’t here. Rex and Angela are in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on a casserole. Here in the living room (which is positively expansive without a piano in it), the TV is on, switched to one of those channels that plays the same three or four twenty-year-old movies on a loop. I think this is what my parents watched, in separate rooms, when they were going through the divorce. Except this one time that I caught them sitting together on the couch, their hands almost touching, watching Jurassic Park. It was two days before the movers came. I don’t think they were sad about not being married anymore—I think they were sad that they were probably never going to watch TV together again.

  “Is Lilia around a lot?” I wander into the kitchen and ask this, fake-casual in a way that Rex probably won’t pick up on. “I feel like I only see her when she’s doing Angela’s piano lessons.”

  “Oh, you know, she’s in and out,” Rex says. He sprinkles cheese on the top of the casserole. “We have different schedules. She’s a night owl, I’m an early bird. It’s a good arrangement.”

  “Have you ever talked to her about her work?” I ask. Nothing’s different about the walls (and ceilings) I can see from here—no murals or Goya cans added to Rex’s place.

  “Not really. I asked about it once, but she said it was in transition.”

  “Like, she’s changing her style or something?”

  “You got me. You’re the other artist here,” Rex says. “I think she’s just private about it. Which is fine. I understand being a lone wolf.” He scratches his beard, and Angela snickers. “I thought the two of you would find that common artist bond, Mercedes.”

  “Yeah. I’m trying.”

  While Rex and Angela serve the plates, I duck out to the bathroom. I take the one in the hallway between the smaller bedrooms, and use the opportunity of the loudly flushing toilet to open the door to Lilia’s bedroom.

  The whole Estate series greets me. It’s more extensive than Monet and his precious haystacks and bridges. It’s the Estate over and over, against color after color of sky, in daytime and nighttime, some versions more slanted and abstract than others. The paintings lean against the wall, or are propped up on the dark brown antique hulks of furniture that sit awkwardly in the Florida-colored room. For as much as Lilia said the paintings were her way to escape, they seem more like a trap to me than anything else. They take over the room—the only clue that a human occasionally lives here is the small suitcase on the floor.

  It’s red, and made of worn-out leather. A pink dress spills from one side. Lilia is living out of a suitcase.

  I take a few tiptoed steps forward, as though any larger movement would set off some sort of alarm. The suitcase is zipped halfway, but I hold it tight and open it tooth by tooth. I’m a nosy person, and I’ve always justified it by telling myself that an artist needs to know other people’s secrets, and needs to be able to twist them enough to use them as material. But this—going into Lilia’s life feels so wrong, but so necessary.

  Three floral dresses on top. Well, yeah. If anything, I expected more.

  Sandals made of sturdy leather. A beautiful headband. Plain button-down shirts and some pants and even a pair of jeans.

  A few books. She likes philosophy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—I remember trying to sound out their names on my dad’s bookshelf a long time ago.

  Under the books is a folded piece of paper. Thick paper, like out of a Canson sketchbook. I peek inside it, as though Lilia herself could come roaring out. But what greets me is a colored-pencil sketch of a small white house. It’s a peaceful scene, the house surrounded by palm trees, the sky bright blue, and a couple of goats in the yard. It’s a pretty good sketch, not quite finished, but it makes me want to be there, to know the place.

  Oh. Wait.

  I do know this place.

  I’ve seen it in a few photos and I’ve been there once, a couple of summers ago, when Mom was so proud to show it to us. It’s the house in Guaynabo, outside San Juan, where she lived until she left Puerto Rico for college in Florida. The place where she grew up with Abuela and Abuelo and her two brothers. Lilia drew this—she must have. It’s clearly made by the same hand as the Estate paintings.

  My hand shakes as I snap a picture of it with my phone. Then I lay everything back where it was and join Rex and Angela at the coffee table for dinner.

  Rex’s place is so jumbled after being in Lilia’s room. Too many boxes, too many ingredients in the casserole in front of me. Rex asks what Angela and I are doing this weekend, and my sister fields the question by pointing a fork in my direction. “I have no idea what we’re doing,” I say, disappointing both of them.

  Angela eyes me. I must not look right. I’ve barely touched my casserole or my orange juice. And my heart is beating so hard and fast that I think Angela might be able to hear it. Rex goes to refill his water, and I open my mouth as soon as he’s around the corner.
r />   “She has a studio,” I manage to say. “Lilia.” I feel the tension draining. “I’ve been working there with her.”

  Angela tries to respond, but Rex returns, and I jump in to ask, “Hey, I was just wondering, how did you find Lilia?”

  “She found me!” he says. “I had barely put the ‘For Rent’ sign in the yard before she was knocking on the door. It was lucky for both of us. I think . . . I mean, I don’t know, but I feel like she came here out of desperation. She needed a place right then. I didn’t ask why, but I was happy to help.”

  Angela and I raise our eyebrows at each other in harmony.

  I need to get back.

  The house phone rings at nine.

  “Mijita.” I think calling me by a diminutive is my mom’s way of kinda-sorta apologizing for the way we ended our last phone call.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “She hasn’t moved since the last time I told you she moved.” Mom’s voice sounds tired and wrung out. “I think I was imagining things.”

  “No. You saw what you saw. I’m sure of it.” I lean against the fridge and concentrate on the mostly bare wall across the room, trying to will an image of Abuela to appear in the space above Mom’s spoon rack. Nothing happens.

  “That’s nice to say,” Mom says with a sigh. “And it’s nice to talk to you, at last. I’m worried about how much time you’re spending on that painting of yours.”

  Painting. I peel back the layers of the last few days to find what she means—ah, yes, a painting that no longer exists.

  “It’s for the county show, Mom.” I try to push some enthusiasm into this. “I’m so close to finishing it.”

  “So close. I remember that from last year. I remember how I would find you out on the porch with that painting at midnight, and then you’d be back at it before school, at six in the morning. I let you stick to it because you kept saying you were almost finished, almost finished. Think about time, mijita. Think about how you’re spending it. You’ve got about two months left of high school, and are you going to be spending that time finding the right place for, I don’t know, a purple dot in your painting? Is that what you want?”