The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  “Wait, so this is your studio?” Tall Jon asks. We’re standing at the glass doors. “I imagined it’d be swankier. It looks pretty broken-down in there.”

  “It’s a practice space. So, you know, it doesn’t have to be perfect.” The sunlight strikes the glass doors and beats back at us, as though it’s trying to push us toward the parking lot, toward Tall Jon’s Mazda, maybe all the way back to Tall Jon’s apartment. It doesn’t have to be perfect, I just told him, but it isn’t true. Everything inside these walls has to be exactly right for the Red Mangrove Estate’s magic to keep humming along. A green room at the top of the stairs on the ninth floor. Light and airy music and dance on the floor below the penthouse. My head aches at all this, and Tall Jon looks like he doesn’t believe anything I’ve told him about the Estate so far. He takes his cigarettes from his back pocket and lights one.

  “Hang on,” I tell him. “Put that out, and come into the lobby with me. You’re going to hear a song, and when it’s over, I need you to go back to your car. Seriously.”

  “Moreno, you’re telling me I have to deal with hearing a Firing Squad concert from some crappy lobby?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “And I guarantee you’ll love it.”

  It is strange and heady to be in charge, to be able to bend the rules just as much as I need to. I use my keys to get inside, and Tall Jon steps into the lobby, taking it all in. The air infused with salt and dust, the hiss of the vents, the years of solitude clinging to the gray walls. It must have been an amazing place back when people were really living here. But not everything is worth preserving.

  I take the stairs to the eighth floor, where Angela is practicing with the rest of the band. She gets excited when she sees me, and oh please, don’t let her make any grand proclamations about how I’ve decided to stay.

  “Hey, guys?” I say. “Can I make a request?”

  They all snap to attention.

  “Can you play ‘The Getting Is Good’ just once? I have a friend downstairs who would love to hear it. He’s actually the one who introduced me to your music.”

  Brad says, “Sure thing, Mercedes.”

  Angela readies her hands at the keys. The view through the window of this room is perfect, in some ways—nothing but blue, blue sky. I’d have to get closer, to put myself at a certain angle, to see the gulf and the road and the other buildings from here. You could trick yourself into thinking that only you exist.

  “Oh, and wait! He’d love to meet you. He’s a DJ at the USF radio station, so he could give you some more exposure.”

  “Mercy,” Angela says, “we don’t need that. We’re fine.”

  “Ange, come on. Go see Tall Jon at the end of the song. He’s downstairs, being all weirded out, and he’d love to see a familiar face.”

  They begin. The getting is good, so let’s get going. I know what Tall Jon’s hearing in the lobby isn’t exactly like what I’m hearing on the eighth floor, but it’s still Firing Squad, and it’s perfect for him right now, just like it’s perfect for me in here. Angela plays with everything she has, her fingers flying over the keys, head bowed in religious concentration. This is who she’s becoming. But there’s no reason it has to only take place here.

  The sense comes again, starting in the soles of my feet and then prickling at my scalp. The sense of what the building needs. A soft, sad song on the third floor. A shocking photograph on the second floor. Somewhere, a splash of yellow. It is exhilarating to feel this power. But maybe I don’t need it.

  Except for perhaps one thing.

  In the penthouse, in the blank space in the corner, I concentrate as hard as I can on the tiny hospital room in San Juan where Abuela Dolores is. Yes. She is there, silent and unmoving, her life represented by the green waves on her monitor.

  My self-portrait in its original, uncovered state flashes on the walls. Angela in the blanket, Victoria’s ballet shoes, my mother and my father and Abuela and the houses of San Juan. Lilia and my red room and my purple room.

  It’s here. I can stay. But I don’t need to. I duck out into the hallway and pull the fire alarm.

  Then, I sit down and start playing on Angela’s piano. The notes stream out like a tantrum. They thrash against one another and break into pieces. I may as well be playing all of the piano parts from all the Firing Squad songs at once, the way my fingers are flying across the keys. It’s music. It’s noise. It’s every confession I have, bursting out of me in the world’s most mixed-up song, one that no one else will hear. The floors rumble beneath me. The walls shake and crack and I have only a few minutes to get out of here myself. In a minute, I will race down the stairs for the last time. I’m leaving; I’m leaving, just like Victoria. There’s no time to stop and rescue a single thing, no time to smash my fist through the wall on the eighth floor and attempt to steal a piece of my self-portrait.

  After heading downstairs, I pause on the second floor and look out the window of the purple room for the final time. A crowd has gathered outside, by Tall Jon’s Mazda and the green minivan. I’m the only one left in here, and my head aches as though a thousand needles were pricking at it—more, more, the Red Mangrove Estate says. We need more of everything. More art, more music, more feeling.

  Lilia said that we needed to sense the needs of the Estate, preserve everyone’s secrets.

  But Lilia was willing to risk that to head off on her own.

  A terrible crack from the purple room walls, from the side of them visible to me and from the structure within them. And in the hallway and the living room, Lilia’s ceiling art trembles, a great metallic-plastic clatter from all the bottles and cans. A soap bottle and a Goya can are the first to fall, and I’m sure the others will follow soon. But I won’t be here to see them.

  I believed Lilia when she told me about the secrets and the needs of the Estate, maybe in the same way I believed my mother when she told me to pray to St. Fiacre for good grades (St. Fiacre, it turned out, was the patron saint of taxi drivers), or the same way I believed Victoria when she thought the spirit of Martha Graham wouldn’t help her through life.

  I won’t say that I know, but I will say that I believe. I believe that imperfection and tragedy are going to find me whether I stay here or not, because some of those tragedies will be from my own choices: I will hurt people, and they will hurt me. I believe in my mother’s yoga, in Angela’s fevered sessions at the piano, and in the New York version of Victoria and how she’ll feel the first time her pointe shoe thumps against a Juilliard practice floor. I believe that Duchamp was alternately brilliant and fucking cheeky to try to bottle the air. I believe in giving the world my portrait, however that may happen, and then walking away. It could be a picture the size of a room or a fingernail. It could be a bottle of breath, a laugh, a song, a sigh, or even a mood piece.

  I believe in the people who’ve been here and the secrets they’ve left behind. But I believe they’ve been keeping me standing all along.

  The Estate will fall. The artists will scatter, except for those who are nothing but a version of someone else, someone living a beautiful wreck of a life elsewhere in the world. Angela might not forgive me for a long time. Alone in the lobby now, I spot her, standing in the parking lot, her face creased in terror and anger, but also complete and utter certainty. She knows exactly what has happened, and exactly who did it.

  I push through the glass doors for the last time and toss my keys inside as they close.

  Edie and some of the others turn and run farther inland.

  Tall Jon yells from his car, “Moreno! Why are you still standing there?”

  Angela motions for me to come here, come here, and I do, and she doesn’t touch me and she says nothing. Finally, she takes a step backward, toward Tall Jon’s car.

  The women in the neighboring buildings have their curtains open.

  The windows and walls in the Estate’s penthouse succumb to their cracks.

  In a theater across town, Victoria Caballini waits offstage to begin a sequen
ce in the Gershwin show. She sees the stage laid out in front of her, scratched yet smooth, a face of perfection and imperfection, terror and potential. And she leaps into it. Before the music starts, she tears past her fellow dancers, and she leaps and twirls across the expanse of black.

  And at the same time, in a hospital room in San Juan, Dolores Camila Hernandez Acosta takes her final breath.

  twenty-six

  I KEEP THINKING about Abuela.

  About how I knew her and loved her my whole life but never suspected she was an artist. About why she was so sure that the nineteen-year-old version of herself that she kept at the Estate was the perfect way to be. About how many of the other people at the Estate were versions of an older self.

  I bet she’d prefer me not to wonder. But how can I not?

  Gretchen is working on a collage of some black-and-white photographs of people’s faces. She has ripped them apart and is now figuring out how to piece them together: an eye, a hairy nostril, one smiling side of a mouth, a forehead with bangs.

  She catches me looking at her project. “This was a better idea in my head than it is on paper.”

  “Nah, I think you can turn it into something cool,” I tell her.

  We leave class at the same time, both of us awkward with our portfolios and toolboxes. I stumble three paces behind her down the hallway, until I catch up to her at the stairwell.

  “Are you going to be at the show this weekend?” I mean, the answer’s obvious, but what else do I say to the person I’ve spent almost four hundred school days not becoming friends with? What do I say when I want to wish her well?

  “Yeah. My whole family’s coming. Grandparents and everybody. You?”

  “Sure. I mean, I guess. We had a death in the family a couple of weeks ago, and everything’s kind of a mess. I’ll probably just come by myself.” I let her ahead of me on the stairs so that she doesn’t have to see my face. “But I finally came up with something to enter. That red painting with the two figures.”

  “Well, then, you won’t be completely alone, will you?” Gretchen says.

  People shove by us. Some of them say hello to Gretchen and sort of nod at me. Our portfolios hang out into the walking space, disturbing the universe. “You mean, because I’ve got the people in the picture?”

  “Yep.” She moves to head up the stairs.

  “I’ll see you there,” I tell her.

  The house is quiet at night now. Mom has finally settled back into normal sleeping patterns, and Angela seems to be catching up on all the rest she missed when she was the newest member of Firing Squad. I think they’re both kind of suspicious of me right now, and I think Mom’s got Rex in on it too. He’s waiting for me to run after Lilia.

  I head out to the front steps with my sketchbook and a pencil. Once the point gets dull I’ll go inside, but until then, it’s nice out. The air sticks to me like it’s trying to keep me here, and so I sit on the concrete and let the night fall all over me.

  I owe Rex a picture, to replace the blue-and-orange one that disappeared with Lilia. (The question of where the painting is now and who it’s with have kept me up a lot of nights. That’s fine—those are nights I would have otherwise been awake missing Abuela.) A few things have been taking shape in my head, and I want them to start taking up actual space on the paper. It needs to be something to represent what happened at the Estate without actually depicting it—something sneaky, so that when Rex or my mom or anyone else sees it, they’ll get a feeling about it like a burst of light or a dream in color. The whole story will be there for them, but they’ll have to piece it together, moment by moment.

  Okay, that could be too much for one painting. Maybe I have a new series to create.

  All I know is I’m not drawing any buildings.

  If I can wait here long enough tonight, I might see one of them. The other night, it was the guy I saw at the bar that one time, the one who wore the fedora. He’d lost his hat somewhere along the way, so when he looked at me and waved, I didn’t know who he was at first. And then his face came back to me, and the bar, and the photographs in the room, and Edie. I was going to wave at my hatless friend, but he was already gone.

  And then again, the next night: it was one of the women from the party, on the night I almost finished the red room.

  I was prepared with a wave and a whole tide of questions for her. Where are you now? Do you know where Edie went? Do you all hate me? But she didn’t stop. She smiled at me, friendly as could be, and then went on walking down the street, striding around the corner as though she was one of the standard-issue dog walkers or stroller-wielding parents. I guess I could have followed her, but I didn’t think I needed to be anywhere that she could take me.

  Tonight, though, has the feeling that I’m alone. Just me and the lizards. Me and the pencil point that’s wearing down. Me and this gray sketch of an empty room—I think I’ll be able to fill it in.

  “You need to get up.”

  Angela doesn’t look any more prepared for the day than I do. Wonder Woman shirt and Tweety Bird pajama pants. She looked tired this whole week at school, in a way that could fool anyone else into thinking she was plain old last-month-of-school tired, but to me it’s something much grayer than that.

  She sits at the foot of my bed, gazes around at all the crap I’ve got on my walls that seems irrelevant now. A sagging poster I got at the Dalí museum. An article I printed out describing a play about Mark Rothko. A small print of one of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. Well, maybe I’ll keep that one.

  Angela says, “Mom’s made the travel plans.”

  Mom sits cross-legged on the edge of the living room recliner. When she smiles up at Angela and me, I can’t help but think of how she looked when picking me up from summer camp a couple of years ago—like I’d been picturing her face for weeks, and now here she was, looking happier than I’d imagined. That’s how she looks today: like someone who has all her energy here in the room with us, rather than split between us and a hospital room in San Juan.

  “Okay,” she says, “I’ve got this worked out.”

  Angela and I wait.

  “Looks like there’s not going to be time for you to work at the deli this summer, Mercedes,” Mom says.

  I attempt a smile.

  We are leaving. After school’s out, Angela and I are flying to San Juan, and then we’ll see Mom a few weeks later when she can take five days’ vacation. Angela and I are going to be in Puerto Rico most of the summer, helping clean out Abuela’s apartment, staying with our San Juan family, and trying to convince them to let us have Abuela’s dogs. And when we get back, it’ll be almost time for Angela to start tenth grade, and for me to start classes at USF. Victoria will have already left for New York.

  We agreed to this. I agreed to this. But it seems a lot different now, with all the arrangements made.

  “I think this will be good for both of you,” Mom says.

  My knees shake. I don’t think I have looked at my knees in a long time. I mumble something about needing to get some orange juice, but there’s none in the fridge, so I wind up back in my room, on the floor, with a stained palette and some colored pencils and about half of my pencil sharpener collection surrounding me. Maybe this is the right time to work on my painting for Rex, when I’m feeling all weird and conflicted. I grab my sketchbook, and it falls open not to last night’s pencil drawing but to a few words scrawled in bright blue Sharpie marker. If you still want to work here, come see me. I need you to do a self-portrait. Lilia’s directions to me from a few weeks ago. It is the only permanent thing she left behind.

  The pieces are arranged in a circle in the Sarasota Central High School courtyard, which creates either a nice communal experience of art appreciation, or an exercise in creative claustrophobia. The judges are circling, literally, and Gretchen and I hang back behind the pieces—specifically, behind Rider’s monstrous A Study in Chickens. It’s a massive canvas dotted with orange triangles and starlike patterns. Chicken
beaks and feet, I guess.

  “I don’t know if he was inspired by you,” Gretchen muses, “or if he completely ripped you off.”

  “Eh, I wouldn’t care if he did.” I poke my head around to see the piece close up again. The beaks and feet create a dizzying effect, pulling the viewer into their pointy web. “But I think even if he got the idea from me, he came up with something totally new.”

  Rider is in the middle of the circle with a bunch of girls, all of whom are pretty hot in that white-but-tan Florida-girl kind of way.

  It’s noon and we’re due to hear the announcement of the winners anytime now. The heat is blazing, radiating at us from the sky and the ground, and we’ve all probably got about twenty more minutes out here before it gets to be too much. Other people are streaming in now: the underclassmen slouching around with their resigned, maybe-next-year looks on their faces, the kids from other schools, wandering around and probably wondering why our courtyard features a plaque and bench for one random kid, and the families and friends, all shiny and loud, talking about where to go to lunch after this whole mess is over.

  Actually, some of those people belong to me.

  Mom and Angela and Tall Jon and Victoria are all coming my way, waving, and Tall Jon points with both hands to my picture, which cowers between a metal sculpture and a watercolor portrait. Mom looks where Tall Jon is pointing. “Oh, is that it?” she says. Well, it’s better than a frown.

  Angela is excited to see my latest painting out in the world. Victoria stands there looking amazing in a blue floral dress, tan sandals, and sunglasses. I saw her just yesterday, for lunch at the Dead Guy, but she seems different now, now that I know I’m leaving first. Some of our infinite possibilities are gone, plucked out of the air as they flew by.

  “Well, hey, everybody,” I say.

  Gretchen’s entourage moves toward mine, and the woman I remember from last year, the head of the county schools’ art departments, comes to the top step of the school and talks about how art is important, how we mustn’t shut down the schools’ art departments, how all we need to do is look around us at the talent in this courtyard. She’s right about that, but there’s more than this circle—there’s art being poured out into the world right now, in ways she can’t even imagine, and ways I can’t either. Everyone from the Red Mangrove Estate is out there now, somewhere, learning how to be themselves, learning how to bring their creations to the world.