The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  “I’m worried about you,” Vic says as soon as she shuts the car door.

  This is why.

  “You have to stop going to that creepy building. I don’t care if it’s helping you create the best painting of all time. I swear I’m going to see you on the news if you don’t quit going there.”

  “Maybe it is helping me create the best painting of all time.”

  “Oh man.” She drinks from her massive purple water bottle. “You’re not telling me something, and it’s bothering you, and it’s bothering me.”

  We pass the 7-Eleven where Angela and I haven’t missed a Free Slushie Day in three years, and the church that Mom drags us to on holidays. The wipers swish and squeak as the rain lightens. Vic weaves and unweaves her fingers, knowing that she’s thrown down a line that can’t be undrawn.

  “I can’t talk about it yet,” I tell her.

  Lilia didn’t give me a time, but by eight p.m. I’m getting restless, drinking orange juice until my stomach hurts, staring at my phone, and letting Angela load the dinner plates into the dishwasher.

  “Scratches,” I say under my breath.

  “Not again,” Angela says, but she grins.

  Scratches is the only word the Dishwasher Lemur can say. It’s a question, it’s a request, it’s an exclamation of anger or surprise or joy or confusion. And when your vocabulary is so limited, and your communication so reliant on tone, you consider what you say so much more carefully.

  “Scraaaatches,” I say, a suspicious lemur, my voice appropriately gravelly.

  “Scratches, scratches, scratches,” Angela says, head shaking and voice low.

  She fills the top rack with glasses and shuts the dishwasher. She has left the messiest pots and pans for me, but I am all kinds of tired and jumpy and hollowed out, and cleaning will have to wait until tomorrow.

  On my way out the door, Angela gives me a small smile and a whispered “Good luck.”

  The clouds move out, shoved to sea by an expanse of black. There’s a new warmth in the air, one that feels like it’s settling in for the spring and summer. And for the first time ever, when I pull into the Red Mangrove Estate, there’s a vehicle beside mine in the parking lot. It’s an old green minivan with an Alabama license plate.

  In the lobby, she’s there. Lilia. She’s rushing to open the door for me, but I make it in before she can. “Come on, come on,” she says, which is the best greeting I think she’s ever given me. We rush up the stairs and she leads me not to the second floor, or the third, or the fifth. I’m breathing hard and Lilia is half a flight of stairs ahead of me the whole time.

  “You should stop smoking,” she says.

  “It’s the shoes,” I tell her. Purple sandals again.

  She waits at the landing for the seventh floor, and she opens the door for me, and the music floods in. Always something left. It is the next best thing to hearing Abuela’s voice beside me. It is every time Tall Jon gave me pizza and smokes and a hug. It is the steady ground under my feelings for Victoria, as if I could pluck a beat or a line of the song out of the air, lay it down for her and say, Walk on this, and she would understand.

  It is Firing Squad.

  sixteen

  LILIA STANDS BACK and lets me open the door.

  They are here—in the living room, all four of them, looking like they do in the videos I have watched and watched of them online. Brad, the lead singer and bassist, calling out the words as though he is pulling them up from the soles of his feet. Nelson, the drummer, making it look easy, wearing a smile as he beats away. Jake on guitar and Mae on keyboards, sneaking glances at each other. There’s nothing that divides where they’re playing from the rest of the living room. They’re here, in front of me, playing their hearts out.

  Lilia joins me inside, stands next to me. It’s kind of like the time my dad gave me tickets to my first concert, and then I noticed there was one for him along with the tickets for me and Susana Romero. I had thought it was going to be weird, rocking out with Susana in general admission, in full view of him, wondering what he was thinking as he watched me have this notable Growing Up experience. But then the band came on, and my dad started nodding his head, and then his whole upper half. He was having an experience all his own.

  I nudge Lilia in the side. “Have you heard them before?”

  “No,” she says. “It’s their first time here.”

  “Well. They’re my favorite.”

  How ridiculous are the other people in the building tonight that there’s only a small crowd gathered here? There must be a cruel variety of soundproofing on this floor that’s not letting the songs carry to the floors above and below. I want to kick off my purple sandals and run up and down the stairs, knocking on doors and telling everyone to stop what they’re doing and come listen to the band in 723. But then I’d be missing their set, and who knows how long it’s going to go on? Maybe I’ve caught the second encore of their one-night-only engagement.

  This is the eternal problem with concerts, I swear. I have to remind myself to be in the moment, but to do that, I have to slip out of the moment. Enjoy it, enjoy it, goes my usual refrain. Don’t start counting the songs. Don’t start guessing which is going to be the last. Don’t look at the time and realize they’ve played ten minutes longer than you thought they would. Just enjoy it. But trying to enjoy it is as bad as losing time reminding myself to enjoy it, because it comes with the same force of expectation. I’m standing here waiting for the amazing piano work in the middle of “The Getting Is Good,” but I’m not sure how to deal with it when it comes. If I stand still and let it wash over me, is that enough? What’s the next level of enjoying something, and how can I get there, and how will I know when I arrive?

  Mae does the piano solo, and it hits me from all directions. I am a seashell in the gulf, alternately floating and sinking in sound. I am a hair in Picasso’s paintbrush . . . no, Botticelli’s. And I am whirled about, helping to birth Venus. I am losing myself and finding myself in note after note. Damn it, Angela would love this.

  They play and play, and I am completely taken over, the beat of each song in my chest as though the music is keeping me alive. My knees and ankles ache from standing for so long, and Lilia stands next to me, seeming to enjoy the music on the proper level, but also staying aware enough of me that she’d know if I, say, texted Tall Jon and told him to get over here as fast as possible.

  But hey, there’s Edie the bartender. I figured she’d have good taste. I keep my eyes on her for a second, three seconds, and yes—she realizes someone’s staring at her, and she turns, and she sees that it’s me, and she waves. I’m here. I’m really here.

  It’s over.

  Not in the way you’d usually know a concert was over, like with a long, improvised guitar line or a triumphant waving of hands at the crowd or a particularly electric but painful-looking dance move committed by the lead singer.

  No.

  “Head on a Train” finishes with the same bass notes as on the recording, and they don’t linger. The notes fall into us, the fifteen of us (unless we lost another guy from the back of the room), and as soon as we’ve caught them, the band lets out a collective breath. They’re done.

  Usually when I cheer at a show, my voice folds in among the rest. Not this time. It’s me above everyone. Lilia, applauding the way Mr. and Mrs. Caballini probably applaud at the symphony, looks at me and smiles. So does Edie. So do the members of Firing Squad. My heart leaps not only for this moment, but for the moment that I will shriek about this to Tall Jon, and all the moments afterward that I will think about this. This one area of my life, the Concert Satisfaction Area, is ever so brilliantly complete.

  “Do you think they’ll come back?”

  I’m ahead of Lilia as we head to the second-floor studio. She’s wearing a plain, light blue dress. Without her usual bouquet of fabric flowers, I have no idea if she means business or not.

  “They should, shouldn’t they?” Lilia says.

  I
wait for her and close the door behind us. The studio is looking like itself again, lit by a new floor lamp, free of dirty paintbrushes and piles of soap bottles. I lean against the wall dividing the living room from the kitchen, where a tower of soda cans points down at me from the ceiling.

  “How’d they find their way here, Lilia? Did you invite them?”

  Lilia yanks shut the black curtains over the door to the balcony. “People find their way here when they need something from us.”

  “What,” I say, heaving my hands in front of my chest, a classic Abuela gesture, “does that mean?”

  Lilia starts walking down the hallway, heading toward my studio, clearly having planned for this moment (planned, even, for the desperation steaming out of my hands and face and voice). I follow her, and in the studio I stand with my back against the Victoria picture, facing the wall where my Abuela portrait once had been.

  “The Estate guides us to fulfill its needs,” Lilia says, “with art and music, structure and form, color and light. But it knows what you need, too.”

  I stare at the white space on the wall instead of at Lilia. “I still don’t think I get it.”

  “Follow me,” she says. “Let’s get out of this apartment for a while.”

  She leads me past the ceiling art and into the hallway. As always, the red exit sign shines from one end of the hall, and I could turn and run and never come back. But the Abuela portrait, my Victoria picture, and even the lemurs—I created those here. That experience felt like nothing else. I can keep going for a little longer. I can keep going until I’ve created what I really need to create.

  We pass scuffed doors leading to other rooms. “Are people working in there right now?” I ask Lilia.

  “In a few of them, maybe,” Lilia says. “But definitely not all. We’ve got people who stick around for a while, and people who come and go.”

  I keep walking. My purple sandals kick up dust as I reach the window at the end of the hall, as far from the exit as I can get. “Lilia!” My voice echoes. It feels good to disturb things here, if only for a second. “Do you know this place, like, bends or erases time? Is that part of what it needs? Because that was really a mindfuck the other day.”

  She sort of laughs as I walk back toward her. “Yeah. It’ll do a lot of things to keep inside what needs to be kept inside.” She runs her hand over a dingy green door. “Let’s look in here for a minute. It might be a little . . . I don’t know. Disturbing.”

  Lilia opens the door for me and flips on a light as we step inside. Instantly, I feel like I’ve gone back in time—the living room and kitchen are in the same places as in Lilia’s (and my) studio, but they’re still the classic pink, beige, and white, and the carpet looks so damned pink and fluffy that I almost want to lie down and take a nap on it. It’s like no one has touched this place since before I was born.

  “Down the hall,” Lilia says. “Try the first room on the left.”

  I grasp the cold silver doorknob and turn it.

  I swear it’s ten degrees colder inside the bedroom than outside it. The walls are all a deep gray, and the carpet has been pulled up, though a few bits of pink remain. Stuck to the walls are the torn pieces of photos: school pictures, family pictures, and I think someone’s wedding portrait. Black paper or fabric covers the ceiling, and coming from somewhere, maybe the closet, there’s a recording, playing on a loop, of someone whispering.

  My head feels like it weighs a thousand pounds, and I can barely stand. I take a step back and brace myself with a hand on Lilia’s shoulder.

  “I need to get out of here,” I say.

  “I know. Come on.” Lilia takes my wrist and leads me out.

  “God.” I flop down onto the pink carpet of the living room. It really is as soft and wonderful as I thought it would be. “Who did that?”

  “Her name was Anna,” Lilia says. “She was here a long time ago, probably years before I came here.”

  “And she’s gone now? What happened to her? Is she okay?”

  Lilia sits in front of the door to the balcony. The vertical blinds, pink and plastic, clatter against one another. “I’m sure she’s fine. She unburdened herself here. And we’ve kept her art safe all this time.”

  “Can I do that?” I say it to the carpet at first. “I want to have my own space to do, you know, what Anna did. But mine won’t be as scary, I swear.”

  “You don’t know that yet. Yours could be scarier, in its own way,” Lilia says. “And it’s hard work.”

  “I’m sure it is, but I think I can do it.”

  Lilia crosses the room and opens the front door. “Maybe. First, let’s work on something together.”

  Back in the Land of Ceiling Recyclables, Lilia takes out a bunch of paint and a rectangular canvas. (A big one—twenty by twenty-four. I hardly ever dare to get those. There’s so much space to mess up.) We sit on the living room floor, beside the canvas. On her hands are bits of glue, the kind that’s satisfying to peel off.

  “Do you speak Spanish?” Lilia says.

  “Ugh, Lilia, these things you ask me.” I smack my palm against one of her strange wall murals. “My Spanish is terrible. I used to take it in school, but I got tired of being the Puerto Rican girl who couldn’t get an A, and so I switched to German in sophomore year. My mom is still pissed about it, and my German grades aren’t any better.”

  “There you are,” Lilia says. “A secret.”

  “Not really,” I say, though maybe she’s right.

  “I express myself better in Spanish, I think,” Lilia says. “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Uh-huh.” With one pink-socked foot, she nudges at a can on the floor, one that once held chicken broth. “I think I might be leaving here.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve had a sense of dread. You know? Every time I come here, I keep thinking it’s going to be the last time. I’m waiting for the day the door doesn’t open for me anymore.” She clenches her jaw and hurls a paintbrush across the room. It lands with a sad, quiet clatter in the kitchen. “I’ve been trying to do whatever it takes to stay, but I don’t know if it’ll work. I don’t know, I don’t know.” She looks over at me. “You saw my terrible paintings at Rex’s house. I might be stuck making those forever.”

  “They weren’t terrible,” is all I can think to say.

  “Hmm, maybe not,” Lilia says. “Anyway, you’re here now. Let’s get to work.”

  “Sure.” But I’m terrified. I don’t know what time it even is, and since time doesn’t seem to matter much here, I wonder if I could go back to the Firing Squad show and live in it for a few hours. But Lilia’s face is pleading, and I’d rather do art than try to bend time. I pick up a drawing pencil.

  “What do you see when you close your eyes?” Lilia asks.

  Muted colors. Orange and yellow and red dancing behind a black curtain. Hazy lines of light, like the projection that appeared and directed me toward the secret painting. And then—an image. Abuela asleep in her hospital bed.

  But the thought of painting her in that state makes my chest ache, as does the thought of even telling Lilia that this is the image in my head. I know so little about her—why do I have to start unburdening myself in front of her? Why do I have to prove to her that I can do it?

  I open my eyes. Lilia is looking off toward the window. She wears no makeup, has long eyelashes and a new-looking zit on her chin. “Let me guess,” I say. “If we finish this, I’ll never be able to take it to school to enter it in our countywide art show.”

  “That’s true.” She hands me a sketchbook.

  The idea of spending hours on a painting of Abuela in a coma is just—I don’t think I can do it. I shut my eyes again, will another image to appear. The house: Mom’s house, Abuela’s house. The one Lilia drew. If there’s anything burdening me that’s not related to Abuela’s coma or Vic or my art, it’s that picture.

  I steady the pencil, start drawing the outline.

&
nbsp; “So this is going to be good, I bet,” I tell Lilia.

  “It is.” She looks over my shoulder as I position the roof and then the windows.

  “Better than anything I could create in art class, huh?”

  “It’ll be exactly what we need here.”

  “But it’s still me, right? It’s not, like, the spirit of you working through me or something creepy like that? I seriously need to know.”

  “It’s the best version of you,” she says.

  My arms and hands and fingers chill at the thought.

  If she doesn’t know yet what I’m drawing, she will soon. She’ll know it the second I put in the little semicircular window above the door, or when I start drawing the goat. And so I sit in this moment for a little longer, this shiny glass of perfect expression. The house has the physical presence and the feelings I wanted. The palm trees wave at the right angles, framing the house and ushering the viewer in. And God, do I ever want to go in. If I could step inside and see the living, breathing younger versions of my grandparents and my mom, even if only to watch them for a minute of their lives, I would do it.

  I draw the goat. Lilia peers over my shoulder again.

  “Mercedes, what are you doing?” she asks, her voice at once high and low, warm and cold.

  I shiver. “I’m going to go downstairs and have a smoke.”

  I place the sketchbook next to the canvas and start backing out of the room, watching the canvas, watching her.

  Outside Lilia’s studio, I pull off my shoes and dangle them from my hands, and start running up the stairs. What I’m craving right now is far more complicated than a cigarette—it’s motion, it’s time, it’s a new space in my head for what Lilia showed me. Up to the fourth floor, the fifth. The seventh was where the concert was. Now, the eighth. I just want to see what’s here, but the door from the stairwell has other ideas. The handle doesn’t budge.

  I head downstairs. The fifth floor. The door opens with no problem, and I put my shoes back on.

  There’s a whisper of music coming from one of the doors on the right—that’s the one I’m looking for. The place that had the party. The music sounds like something that’d be playing in the background of a coffee shop, maybe another one of Vic’s bossa novas, but I’d have to get her to listen to it to be sure.