by Lauren Karcz
We order pizza and eat it in my mother’s bedroom, Angela and Mom sitting together on the bed and me in the easy chair that usually serves as a plump clothes hanger. Angela handily keeps the conversation going, stringing in one easy topic after another. The weather, the sartorial choices of Rex McBride, more about the weather, Vic’s audition, and what Angela and I have been doing at school. I reach for the last two breadsticks. No one notices. Angela is crafty—we haven’t been in the living room the whole evening. Angela got up and answered the door when the pizza arrived. Mom still hasn’t seen the piano.
“My girls,” Mom keeps saying. “My burbujas.” It has been so long since she’s called us her bubbles. I miss it. She motions to me to join them on the bed. I do, and she wraps one arm around me and one arm around Angela, tightly, which leaves us no physical choice but to look straight ahead, as though we’re posing for a photo.
Angela heads to bed at ten thirty, looking worn down but also seemingly sure that she knows where Mom will be for the rest of the night. I can’t bring myself to get up yet—my arms are still sore from drawing on the walls, and this bed feels more right than my actual bed.
Mom rubs my shoulder. “I know you’re still worried.”
I have my eyes closed, which helps to mute the strange experience of having my mother in the same room with me. “I’m sure you are too.”
“I am,” she says. “But I missed you girls. It was so hard to have our family divided.”
“We did fine here,” I say. “Did you see how the laundry hamper’s totally empty?”
“I did, and I know. But oh, mijita, I felt so torn. I started thinking about sending you girls up to Ohio until I got back. I was thinking about this as I was sitting with Abuela. It felt like I could never put my energy in the right place.”
I love hearing her voice beside me. It reminds me of when I would fall asleep listening to her read to me. I loved that so much that I almost wish I could fill that space with my story now—the Estate and how I got myself there.
“I missed you,” is all I manage to say. “And I miss Abuela too.”
“I know.” Mom gets up from the bed. I recognize the sound of her moving her perfume bottles aside and plugging in her electric toothbrush. “But, well, back to the real world for now. They wouldn’t let me take leave from work any longer, and I can’t afford to lose my job, especially with you graduating this year.”
“Yep.”
“Did you hear anything from your colleges?” she says.
I knew she would ask this. And the way she says it, quiet and languid, slipping it out of her subconscious where it’s been rolling around for weeks, makes me think I don’t have to answer it right now. I know she’s proud of herself for going to college. I know she wants everything to go right for me and Angela. And every time I consider that there’s so much about me she doesn’t know, I have to consider the same thing about her. Her childhood was in Spanish; her dreams and thoughts still are. I want us to understand each other.
She comes back to the bed and rubs my shoulder again. It feels amazing.
“I drove your car while you were gone,” I tell her sleepily. “Like, a lot. Every day.”
“Oh, Mercedes.” She laughs quietly. “If I was so worried about you driving it, I would have locked it up at the Tampa airport the whole time. And you probably still would have found a way to get it.”
“I appreciate that you appreciate my ingenuity.”
“Always have,” she says.
Sometime overnight, Angela has gotten rid of the piano. It’s just gone. And the living room looks how Mom probably thought it looked the whole time she was gone—cluttered with our stuff, not hers.
It turns out Mom changed up her sleeping habits when she was in Puerto Rico. It’s eleven p.m. on Tuesday and she’s baking bread for tomorrow’s dinner. I wander in and wait until she offers me a taste of her first finished loaf. I probably look convincingly like someone who is going to sleep soon, pajamas on and my hair pulled back in an elastic headband. She doesn’t know that we are engaged in a silent game of physical endurance called “Who Will Sleep First?” I glance at her face, at her eyes, without her taking too much notice, and I am pretty sure I am going to lose this round.
Twelve thirty, and she’s out in the living room, in the bare spot by the window, doing one yoga pose after another. I’m going to have to change my plans.
It’s Wednesday and the fifth-period English girls are suspicious of my presence. We’re sitting inside for lunch today, me on the periphery of their table beside the front windows as rain pounds against the school building. I used to imagine these days: the last quarter of senior year, when, as my mom always told me, everyone in the class becomes friendlier as they realize they’re going to miss one another. I think secretly I was waiting for that, maybe more as an exercise in performance art than anything else. I wanted to witness that moment when a kindly ambassador from the Smoking Corner residents visits the AP kids’ lunch tables, and bonds are formed on the basis of rebellion against the ruling class of Forever 21–clad statues to socially acceptable amounts of partying. But I have yet to see it happen. When I said hey and sat down next to the fifth-period English girls (Lizzy, always writing poems; Gianna, recently dumped after two years with the same guy; Em, queen of the swim team and possibly into girls), they looked at me like I was indeed a visitor from another place, and not one arriving out of goodwill. I think I regret not turning these girls from acquaintances to friends. I can’t blame them for how they’re looking at me.
“Hi, ladies. Can I join you all?”
A milk shake appears in the space on the table across from me. And then the familiar hands of Victoria Caballini.
I let the other girls officially invite her to sit. They want to know about her Juilliard audition, and so she holds court for a few minutes, telling them about each increasingly difficult dance section of the audition, and how dancers were sent packing after each part, with only a few making it all the way to the interview at the end.
“And so I finally got to sit down!” Vic says, which gets the expected laugh.
When she’s not talking, she’s been alternately sipping on and marveling at her milk shake, and I think she’s going to start reciting a poem about it any minute now. But whatever it is, it’ll have the rhythm that’s behind everything she says: I’m leaving, I’m leaving.
My fingers tremble against my water bottle. Shit. I hold one hand down with the other.
Vic glances at me.
She’s leaving.
The other girls are talking about the FSU party scene. Dorms and bars and how to start meeting people when you land in a place as big as the Tallahassee campus. I wouldn’t know. I nod along. An ache starts in my back, tugging its way up from my tailbone to my spine and into my shoulder and upper-arm muscles. Painting muscles, I sometimes call them.
I shift in my chair. My hand shudders against my water bottle, and I barely catch it before it falls over. The other girls look at me.
Vic says something about how Tallahassee isn’t as big as New York, which doesn’t land with the same success as her Juilliard story.
I want to thank her for being socially awkward. But my shoulders ache and the backs of my knees sweat. “Girls,” I say, standing up, “I’d like to announce that I have no idea where I’m going to college, and also that it’s been nice chatting with you.”
“Are you okay?” Vic says.
I’m not sure how to answer. The rain has stopped pummeling the windows, has moved aside for a minute to let me go. I hurry out of the cafeteria.
The Estate is silent and I feel like it has been waiting for me. Maybe. There’s nothing about my new studio that makes the work easy. It’s all dust and concrete and terrible lighting, with Lilia’s rug being the one soft, quiet island in the middle of all the chaos I both inherited and created. I’m on my own now. The nonerasable pencils taunt me, to the point that I can’t bring myself to pick one up today. Fine, if they want to be
that way, then I’ll deal with the permanence of what I’m creating, and I’ll start painting inside the outlines I already have. I dig through the kitchen in the new studio and find enough paint to help me get started. Acrylics—not my favorite, but they’ll do.
I remember my first paint set. It was the Crayola watercolors in a box, which is probably everyone’s first paint set. And it wasn’t a gift or anything—I picked up the set when Mom and I were out shopping at Target, and I stuck it on the bottom rack of the cart, where people usually put their dog food and diapers. I figured I would tell Mom about it when we got to the checkout, and at that point she’d wind up buying the paints for me rather than going through the whole mess of telling me no and putting them back. Except when we got to the front, when I was supposed to put this plan into action, I forgot, and the checkout guy wasn’t looking for stray watercolors at the bottom of the cart, and so they went unnoticed. I was six years old, and a paint thief.
If I was going to be coexisting with these stolen paints, I figured I should use them, and use them well. I set myself up with the paints, and a cup of water, and a stack of paper from the recycling box, and I painted and painted, creating frightening new colors and eroding holes into each little thumbnail of paint in the box. It was freeing—a mess of guilt and creativity and dirty water. The pictures weren’t anything interesting, but the watercolors were gone before I got into trouble, and before I knew how to stop myself.
Painting my new studio is like that. It’s easier not to stop.
It’s not finished yet, but so much is here. My life, surrounding me in brilliant colors on the wall. And for everything I have accomplished here, this self-portrait still doesn’t really feel like me. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done, the same way the Abuela and Victoria portraits were once the best things I’ve ever done, but there’s something dishonest about it, in the way it only captures my best self.
I flop down onto the concrete. My jeans are dusty, my arms are sore. It is two thirty in the afternoon, maybe. Or it could be later or earlier, if the Estate decides it. I need to head back to school soon to pick up Angela, but I have time to do a few more things here.
First things first. I put a wide streak of black across several of the parts of the self-portrait. The house in Naples. My first day of middle school. A scene with my dad and me in his old Jeep, and me smiling as we listen to the Rolling Stones’ “Shattered” for probably the eighth time in a row.
Ah, ridiculous “Shattered.” I really had myself convinced that I liked that song.
The black streak is thick and shiny, like the shell of a beetle. It’s certainly not the greatest thing I’ve ever painted, but it might be the most satisfying. I put the brushes to sleep in the dusty kitchen of the new studio and walk out, hoping the door locks behind me.
Several floors down, Lilia isn’t in her studio, but it’s clear that she’s been here recently. Wet paintbrushes rest on the side of the sink. Empty glue bottles litter the countertops. She has been working hard, and it shows: the ceiling is nearly covered with recyclables now. But the other canvases, the abstract paintings I noticed the first time I came, are gone.
I walk down the hall and poke my head into the purple room. It’s nearly the same as it was over the weekend, although someone has straightened up the place, with nicely made beds as though it’s a hotel room that’s expecting a whole different set of guests tonight.
There’s one room here I’ve never been inside, and that’s the first bedroom on the left. The corresponding one to Anna’s creepy dark room in the condo unit down the hall. I lean on the doorknob, and just as in Anna’s room, it sticks at first, then gives to let the door fly open.
And I should not be surprised. The piano, Angela’s piano, is right here. It’s polished and gorgeous, outfitted with a new music stand and an actual bench. I touch a few of the keys, as though, just because it’s here in the Estate, I could possibly get a different musical result. But no—as usual, the piano doesn’t want me, doesn’t call out anything besides a clamor of off-key notes. It’s waiting for Angela, maybe the one person who can play it right.
I let the piano be. Lilia’s canvases are turned around and leaning up against the opposite wall. I flip one over.
And I am face-to-face with myself.
It’s not even one of her abstract paintings. It’s a completely realistic portrait. She has me down, from the wisps of hair at the top of my head that never lie flat, to the indent in my chin.
I turn over the next one. Angela.
And the next. My mother?
It really is her. Even though I have no idea when Lilia came face-to-face with Mom long enough to know the tiny mole between her eyebrows and the shape of her ears. For the first time in a while, I stand and listen to the endless back-and-forth of the waves, because it is a simple thing to concentrate on. Swish-boom, swish-boom. Again and again. Around me, the Estate is silent, waiting.
I run out of the room. “Lilia?” I shout through the kitchen, through the living room, my voice echoing off the Goya cans and plastic bottles. “Lilia, where are you? What are you doing?”
And I don’t really expect her to come running, but she does. She appears from the stairwell and meets me in the doorway.
“Why are you spying on my family?” is the first thing that comes to mind to say. Lilia looks perplexed at this—well, tired and perplexed. Her eyes are bloodshot, and her whole face is worn down.
“You saw the paintings.” She tries to untangle a knot in the ends of her long hair. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Lilia leans toward me and whispers, “I’ve been trying to get them out. It would help everyone here if I could. But I can’t seem to do it.”
“Can I try it?” I ask.
And we stack the paintings and take them down the stairs. But as soon as we get out the front door, the canvases are blank.
twenty-one
DEJECTED, LILIA TAKES the canvases and turns to go back inside.
“Lilia, wait,” I say.
It has stopped raining, but everything around us drips, and behind us, the gulf churns gray and white. I take to one of the old plant beds on the side of the building—it seems like a neutral location, not yet out in the real world, but also free of the Estate’s power. A dead bush scrapes against my jeans, and a faded Fritos bag crunches under my feet.
Lilia joins me around the corner, her whole face and body in the middle of a long sigh.
“Is this who you want to be?” I ask her.
“What do you mean?” she says, staring off at the water.
“I mean, you told me that this place will give us the best versions of ourselves. But if you can figure out who that is, and take that idea outside the building with you, then . . . you know, you get to keep on being that person. Right?”
She brushes at a bit of dust on her pants. “Look at that. That’s all I was able to bring with me this time.” She shakes her head. “Mercedes. What did I tell you about everyone’s art? I have to help keep it there. I have to help keep everyone else’s secrets safe.”
“Fuck all those secrets.” I don’t know where this comes from, but the words strike the building and bounce back at me. “If everyone else who’s been here doesn’t know what to do with them, then why should you have to take that responsibility? Fuck it.”
Lilia meets my gaze. “Did you ever tell your dancer friend how you feel about her?”
“I should have known you’d remember that,” I say, kicking at the Fritos bag.
“Of course,” Lilia says.
I watch her as she’s walking away. Her long black hair. Her strange stride that goes from slumped over to confident within seconds. I remember back when Rex introduced her to me, how I was wondering if she was going to be like Frida Kahlo. That’s such a weird thought now. She’s not Frida at all, but she’s got a sense about her that reminds me of Frida’s portraits, how you look at them and want to know the subject.
And I know her now. Sort of.
&nbs
p; A green minivan rumbles into the parking lot. Firing Squad. They park at the front of the lot, the sliding door opens, and none other than Angela Moreno pops out.
The rest of the band is right behind her. I duck around the corner of the building again and let them go in as a group. Angela doesn’t say anything, but she smiles in that comfortable way I know, the way that says she belongs, that she’s not afraid to show how happy she is to be with these people.
I wait a few minutes for them to be well into the building, and then I enter.
The music is clear even from the lobby. Angela is playing with Firing Squad again. The one comforting thing about having the keys Lilia gave me (wait, do I still have them? Yes, they’ve sunk to the bottom of my bag, hanging around with my lighter and my actual non-art-related key ring) is that I know I can find Angela, no matter where she is in the building. I can get to her.
They ramble through the first part of “City That Does Not Wake” (track one on the album) and then make it connect with “At Four in the Afternoon” (track six) and now they’re playing something I’ve never heard, and all the while I’m climbing stairs. My steps occasionally sync with the beat of the music, but not often. Not when it keeps changing this much. How can Angela keep up with them?
It’s exactly what the Estate needs right now. It’s not enough to move the clouds or anything, but it’s what will keep this place humming.
The eighth-floor landing. I’m parallel with the music now, for sure. I pass the door to my new studio, and a few more doors, and I stop at 815, at the end of the hall. No keys needed this time—the door opens with a gentle push.
“I found it in my heart to give you the strip of myself that says ‘always,’” Brad sings, and he waves to me as I take a few steps into the living room. They’re all right here, Angela and everyone, along with a very familiar piano.
I smile at everyone as though I’ve popped in to chill out and hear the music. Brad and Mae nod at me as I saunter across the room (nodding along to the music—enjoy it, enjoy it).