The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  I got here to the Ford as soon as I could after last period, to cower in the driver’s seat and be sure that I’m feeling it again. Yes. It’s back. It started in English class and stayed through trigonometry. The insides of my fingers were itching. The veins in my legs were throbbing. This was stronger than it had ever been, and it was clear where I needed to go, as soon as I could.

  There’s no way I can drop them off and then come back. There’s no way.

  “I need to run an errand,” I tell them as we turn out of the school. “Can you both stand to hang out with me in the car for an extra thirty minutes?”

  Sure, they both say, and I wonder what they’re imagining. It’s quiet after that, and I’m relieved when Vic plugs her phone into the Ford’s stereo and coaxes it until her playlist comes on.

  “This is my new one,” she says. “I call it ‘Broadway Beginnings.’”

  “Oh yeah?” I click my fingernails against the steering wheel. We’re out to the main road. Ten more minutes to the Estate.

  “Yep. It’s the best opening numbers of various shows—not, I should say, the opening numbers of the best shows. There’s a difference. Some of them are my favorites, but some of them are just, like, eh. But the beginnings of them, you kind of want to live in forever. This is from Thoroughly Modern Millie, of course.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  I’m jerking the car in a way I haven’t since Mom gave me driving lessons at the back of the Publix parking lot. I am punctuating each stop. My legs ache, and the clouds push more rain down at us, gray water upon gray water, all of it piling up at the intersections until it’s hard to separate sky from land. Vic has her eyes closed and is humming along to the music. But every time I glance at Angela in the rearview mirror, she’s straight-backed and unblinking.

  Finally, we cross the bridge and have the gulf on our right side, though it’s blue-gray and indecisive about its direction in the wind and rain. The car behind me honks when I turn without signaling into the Estate’s parking lot. Look, dude, I’m a confused driver just turning around or checking my GPS. Why would anyone be stopping at this deserted place on purpose?

  Vic looks at me but stays quiet. Oh, good Lord, she definitely thinks something’s wrong with me, the way I’m trying this place again and hoping to get a different result.

  “I’ll be right back,” I tell her and Angela. “Just stay here.”

  Vic glances down at her phone—the picture of us on the beach, and the time. 3:32. Angela nods at me.

  I run through the parking lot, resist my urge to punch the front door as it opens smoothly for me, and tear up the stairs to the second floor. The lights are off in the hallway, and it looks about as lonely as Sarasota Central High on a Friday afternoon, or like the Naples house after the movers had already come and it was just Mom and me left to scrub the floors. Lonely in the way that makes me feel foolish for being here.

  Lilia isn’t in the studio, but her terrifying purple bathrobe hangs on a ladder, and she’s made progress on the ceiling of household products. A cluster of plastic butter tubs. A circle of Dawn dish soap bottles. It seemed pretty brilliant the first time I was here, but now I think it’d be a pain to have to clean out all that crap. A pile of cans sits on the kitchen floor, and one kick scatters them all. Lilia clearly does not have a Victoria, or a Victor, for that matter. Lilia has this building, this project.

  Down the hallway. Everything looks so different here during the daytime—bleached and shallow, showing all the ways that the Estate has been baking in the sun too long. Out the windows, the gray ocean and sky look bright compared to what’s in here.

  Except the red room.

  I let out my breath and drop onto the floor.

  Everything’s gone. The lemurs, the secret painting, and even the walls that were so red they practically strutted. Everything has been returned to white. I run my hand over the wall by the closet, as though it will give me answers. Nothing. The paint is smooth and dry. It may as well be the first coat ever painted on this wall.

  “I didn’t think you’d be here so early.”

  I turn around, my hands still on the wall. Lilia is here, with the bathrobe back on, with a look on her face that says everything’s okay. I’m relieved. But wait—why? She’s still taken the secret painting, and my moment with Victoria. All she hasn’t taken is my ability to be here.

  “What happened? Why did you do this?” I scramble to my feet so I can face her.

  “I’m trying to help keep your secrets for you.”

  “Well, please don’t,” I tell her. “I can decide which ones are worth keeping.”

  “Mercedes.” Every time she says my name, it sounds so earnest. “Remember how I told you that no one ever has to know what you create here? That’s such a gift to be given. Everyone here understands how rare that is. What would it take to help you understand?”

  “I don’t know.” But as I say this, I do know. To be able to confess these things to the four walls of the Estate, to be able to face Abuela even while she’s ill, to be able to paint far better here than I do in studio art or on the back porch—these things are incredible. Maybe it is worth going deeper into the Estate’s potential. Maybe I’m only scratching the surface of what I can do here.

  “Why don’t you try painting again?” Lilia says.

  “Fine.” The white walls are wearing me out, which was maybe Lilia’s desired effect. I try to sneer at her a little as I leave the room, annoyed at her for creating successful art out of the destruction of my paintings. It bugs me that for all the evidence of expression she has in the Estate, and for the whole series that’s still hanging out at Rex’s place, I know so little about her. From here in the kitchen where I’m grabbing the paint and brushes, I consider the ceiling art again. While it’s visually cool, it doesn’t hit me emotionally in any way. Is that my fault for not finding a way to connect to the piece, or is that Lilia’s fault for not putting enough of herself into her work?

  The one piece of hers that tugs at me is the picture of Mom’s old house. Maybe I could ask her about it. Sure, fine—this is the house of all secrets being free and easy and beautiful. I trudge back to the white room with a cup of brushes and a nice palette of paint, and Lilia is sitting against the wall, waiting for me.

  “Whatever you want,” she says, her face bright. “I’m interested to see what you do.”

  Never mind. I’m quiet. I can’t break this spell. Whatever courage I have, I need to save it for the painting.

  I dive in, taking the white wall across from where Lilia’s sitting. I remember the way it felt to trace the projections in the secret painting. How I didn’t have to think about the amount of paint to put on the brush, because it was right each time. How I didn’t have to consider the weight of each brushstroke, or the angle of my wrist. All those pricks of worry that appear every time I put a brush to canvas in the non-Estate world—all of them were gone.

  It’s like that again. And maybe it’s better. Because I’m painting Victoria.

  She’s dancing in this picture, and the best thing about it is that it’s a performance I’ve never seen. It’s something I’m creating for her in this moment. I like to imagine that it’s choreographed to Firing Squad’s “Always Something Left to Love,” and that I’m front and center in the audience. And she notices me, and breaks her concentration for half a second to meet my gaze and smile.

  “Do you see this?” I suddenly say to Lilia, jabbing the opposite end of my brush next to painted-Victoria’s outstretched arms. “Do you see this? I love this girl. I love her.”

  Lilia looks like she could cry. Good.

  “I love her, and I brought her to this ridiculous room, and I think for a second she knew that I loved her. But then all of that was gone.”

  “It’s not gone,” Lilia says, getting to her feet and shoving her hands in her bathrobe pockets. “You know exactly how it happened. You still have that beautiful memory, and you can relive it. You can even paint it on the wall,
if you want.”

  But painted-Victoria, even for being the best work I’ve ever done, isn’t nearly as luminous as Victoria when she was dancing with me here, when the room was red.

  “I don’t want to paint it,” I tell Lilia. “I want it to be real.”

  “Then tell her,” Lilia says. “Tell her again. See what happens. I’ll let you finish your work by yourself, okay?”

  And she marches out of the room, bathrobe ties flying. The front door slams shut.

  I run out of paint at exactly the right time.

  There’s nothing more to add to this painting.

  I hardly know what to do with myself. I haven’t finished and been satisfied with enough pieces to have any sort of ritual for this moment. So I just do what I always do when I’m done painting on the back porch, or when I end Mrs. Pagonis’s class in a normal state of mind—I go to the nearest sink to wash my hands and my painting supplies and put the brushes to sleep.

  I’ve been working long enough that I’ve got layers of paint on my hands and wrists, some of it still sticky, some of it totally dry. I—how long have I been here? I race to the nearest window, the one in the living room that cowers beneath Lilia’s ceiling art, and outside everything looks the same as it did before. The Ford is down in the parking lot. It’s still raining. My sense of time is skewed—I feel like if Lilia came back right now and told me I’ve been painting five minutes, or five hours, I’d believe her either way.

  I duck back into the bedroom to take a picture of the Victoria painting with my phone. My phone, which tells me it is now 5:41.

  5:41. I blink, disbelieving.

  That means Angela and Vic have been down there in the car, in the storm, for two hours.

  Doors and halls and the stairs and more doors and the lobby. Stupid purple sandals, getting swallowed by the murky water gathered by the front entrance. The Ford is still the only car in the lot. I run to it, waving, tepid rain dripping down my chin and arms, and my shoes slapping the whole way.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” I fall into the driver’s seat, let the sandals thud to the floor. My feet are freezing and the rough carpet doesn’t dry or warm them one bit. “I didn’t mean to stay there for so long. Vic, you can totally yell at me if I make you late to dance.”

  “There’s still plenty of time,” Vic says.

  “Yeah, maybe if I speed the whole way there.”

  “Hey, I have an extra hoodie if you want to dry off with it,” Angela says.

  I turn around and meet her eyes, expecting the same girl who yelled at me at St. Armands Circle. But she’s not mad at all—she really wants to give me the damn hoodie, so I take it and rub at my hair while my sister looks at me, concerned.

  “What were you doing in there?” she asks.

  I take a deep breath. “I’ll show you.” I grab my phone from my back pocket, where it only got slightly wet. 3:42, it tells me, the numbers clean and white over the photo of Vic and me at the party.

  “Hey, what’s the time on your phones?”

  “Three forty-two,” Vic and Angela say in unison.

  They don’t look tired or rumpled or like they were trying to call me and not getting through. They don’t look like they wore themselves out on Vic’s Broadway playlist and went wild and jumped around in the rain and then got back in the car to nap. Nope. They look like two girls who’ve been sitting in a car for about ten minutes.

  I click over to the photos. The most recent one is of Tall Jon and me at his party on Saturday. I close out of them and go back. Nothing from today.

  No pointe shoes or outstretched arms.

  No evidence of the painting at all.

  It’s still up there. I mean, of course it is, because Lilia herself approved of it. But here in the rest of the world, it doesn’t exist.

  “Never mind,” I say as my cold feet drain the warmth from the rest of me. “We need to go.”

  fifteen

  AT LEAST WHEN I’m at home, I know the general rules of permanence of the things I create. I alternate between making enchiladas and sketching out a few more versions of the Dishwasher Lemur and his friends. A kind, trusting lemur with a mischievous side. An ornery lemur who is convinced he wants everyone to leave him alone, until the moment when everyone actually does. A lemur in the spirit of Abuela Dolores: elderly, a little stubborn, strong, and proud of the gray-white stripes in her otherwise black fur.

  Hmm, do lemurs go gray?

  Across the dining table, Vic is putting on a good show of making notes on some poems for AP English (by “The Idea of Order at Key West,” she has written, layers of disorder??? or order??? I don’t knoooow), but mostly she has not taken her eyes off me. I wish this was for some reason other than her thinking I’m ridiculous.

  Angela is practicing on her own in the next room. Sort of. A chord here, a scale there, all of it sounding like she’s dusting the piano rather than playing it.

  “How about a song?” I call to her.

  “Eh,” comes the reply.

  I go to her wearing oven mitts, reach over her shoulders, and plunk both hands down on the keys. Thrum. “Is that what you’re so scared of? A little noise? Well, if your esteemed teacher comes over now because of that, you can tell her I was making all that racket.”

  Angela looks up at me, her cheeks and eyes red. Oh shit. I wipe at her cheek with the oven mitt from my right hand.

  “You realize she hasn’t been here to help me in a while?” she says.

  “I know.”

  “I get that she was mad, but I thought we’d still have our lessons. What’s so wrong with me?”

  “Nothing, I dunno.” I flop down on the couch. Beside me, the tissues Mom left behind stand guard on the end table. Oh, the things those tissues have seen. “I’m going to find out soon.”

  She isn’t surprised that I’m going back. She just tosses the oven mitt back to me, as though I will need it for strength and courage, and she leans back against the piano. Doop doop dop, say the middle notes.

  It keeps raining. I go out to the screened porch with my cigarettes and wait among the remains of the vanquished Food Poisonings, because I know if I stay long enough, she’ll be here.

  She is. And she even has the pink floral dress on.

  “Hey, Lilia, do you want a smoke?”

  Lilia stares at me like I am every obnoxious thing about next-door neighbors, which is exactly what I was going for, so at least I know that I can fool her occasionally. I shrug and take a drag on my cigarette and wait for her to lay into me.

  She says nothing. She looks out at the flat gray-green pad of yard beyond the porch in a way that tells me she is remembering another place, that she is taking this little piece of earth and the memory of another and watching helplessly as it becomes a third place, a place that never existed.

  This would be a great moment for Rex to barge in and offer us some casserole leftovers or at least harangue me for smoking.

  “So I finished that painting,” I tell her.

  Lilia pops out of her memory. “I know.”

  “So?”

  I’m not sure if she looks tired, defeated, pensive, or some combination of all three. “What do you want to know?” she asks.

  The words are going to tumble out of me, and I start walking from one corner of the porch to another so that I don’t bury myself in them before I can finish. “I want to know why you offered your help but then destroyed what I created. I want to know why I felt like I had to paint a room red. I want to know why Angela’s not allowed in the Estate yet. And why Victoria doesn’t remember being there. And why I keep coming back. I want to know when the hell you’re going to help with my work, or if you had ever planned on doing that, or if you’re using me for free labor for some weird renovation project.” I stop pacing at the screen that divides us. Her straight face is inches from mine. “And despite all that, I still really want to know what you thought of my painting from today. And of my lemurs from the other night, for that matter.”

/>   She smiles a little bit. “I don’t know what a real lemur looks like. But your paintings were good. Unexpected colors, nice technique.”

  “I wasn’t finished, you know. They probably would have gotten even better, if they hadn’t been painted over.”

  The rain is indecisive: it gets harder and then slower again, as though Lilia and I are standing in the midst of a sped-up video version of this day. Maybe Victoria has already finished her poem notes and called her mom to come pick her up. Because Mrs. Caballini would do that, no questions asked. Or, well, some questions asked, but nothing where the answers would rattle her.

  Lilia seems to be considering everything I have asked to know, and maybe more than I have asked.

  “Okay,” she says. “Come meet me tonight. In the studio. We’ll work together on a project, and I want to explain something to you.”

  And Rex pokes his head out of the sliding glass door of the McBride-Solis half of the house. “Well, hey, Mercedes!” Refreshingly, he has traded his bathrobe for a Tampa Bay Bucs hoodie with a coffee stain on one sleeve. “I feel like you girls have been quiet lately. Let me know if you need anything.”

  What I really want, in this one chilly, humid, impossible moment, is to talk to Abuela again.

  “Oh, Victoriaaah!” I jingle my car keys from the living room and try to sound like a Broadway star.

  Vic stumbles around the corner with her purse, backpack, and dance bag. “That was lovely, dearie. Was that the beginning of your opening number or your ‘I want’ song?”

  “It’s the triumphant song where the heroine escapes her humid-ass house by taking her friend to dance class.” Major props, self, for keeping composed while saying this. “Where does that come in the show?”

  “Hmm. Could be a nice transitional moment in the first act.” Despite the stuff hanging off both her arms, Vic opens the front door for me. “See you later, Angela!”

  For now, Angela has abandoned the piano to watch anime. Vic and I head out into the drizzle, this March day that is basically the Marchiest day I have ever seen, and for once I don’t want to be alone with her.