The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  I messaged her that we were all next door. I even made her a plate. Heavy on salad, light on Sunday Slop. I thought about holding her fork to my mouth before placing it on her napkin.

  She pushes open the door with enough force to send the doorknob through the wall, but somehow she keeps it from making contact. She whirls around to close the door, but not in a way that would make anyone else call it whirling around. It’s all part of one motion, and it’s still going as she drops her stuff and waves hello and flings her hair behind her shoulders. And it ends as soon as she drops down next to me. Bam. Applause.

  Lilia stares at her as though Victoria has done all this while spitting, or carrying snakes, or wearing a garbage bag, or whatever else Lilia might find bizarre and obscene. I almost want to swoop in and help Vic, grab her by the sleeve of her purple dress and pull her closer to me, but this seems more dangerous than what’s happening here. She’s Vic: worldly and self-sufficient. Maybe I’m the one who needs the intervention. I lock eyes with Angela, and I think we both have the feeling of things being askew, of Rex’s half of the house being less a vacation and more a version of our home where the doorknobs and bathrooms are not in the places we expect. Where dinner is two feet lower than it should be. Where the fans click as they turn, and the lights burn orange, and where we have this new neighbor. And I feel like if I leave and come back, she might not be here at all.

  The blue-and-orange painting gives me no answers (not that it was ever going to). Lilia connected to it, though. She really did. And I’m not going to spoil that moment by saying something ridiculous.

  I watch Victoria, who’s good about living in the real world.

  “Hello,” she says to her silent critic. “I’m Victoria.”

  “Lilia Solis,” Lilia says, going back to her dinner.

  “I slept in the girl’s mom’s bed at a sleepover once,” Victoria says from the bathroom. “It was so late, and I was so tired, and the other girls were taking pictures of their feet. I started crying out of frustration, and the other girls got super concerned, especially when I insisted that I wasn’t crying. They decided I was allergic to the family cats, and I slept curled up at the edge of the mom’s bed. A lot like a cat, now that I think about it.”

  She pokes her head out. She’s been washing her face and sniffing some of Mom’s vast perfume collection. “What about you?”

  “Nah, I was always the one the mom was sorry got invited in the first place.”

  “Aww, that can’t be true. You know my parents love you.”

  “Well, they’re the first. Trust me.”

  “Can we watch something else, or is your delightful new neighbor going to call the police if she hears a peep after eleven p.m.?”

  “I don’t know what’s up with her.” And I mean this in the truest way. Vic probably thinks I’m dismissing Lilia, but I’m not. As much as I want to be with Vic, I also want to peer into Rex’s house at the moment that Lilia begins working on her art, to be her silent apprentice.

  “She reminds me of this awful girl from my ballet company in Brooklyn. I can never forget her evil stare. Ugh, chills.”

  “Rex told me she’s a painter.” I peek out the window to see if any lights from the other half of the house are beaming into the backyard. Nothing.

  “Probably of, like, creepy religious murals or something,” Vic says.

  “Hmm, who knows.”

  I wish that even one of Vic’s T-shirts from the American Ballet Theatre’s youth summer program would get shrunk by the dryer or stained into oblivion by a wayward pair of black underwear. Do I have to be reminded that last summer’s took place in Alabama (the home of Firing Squad!) and lasted from June 9 until July 31? Does she realize what a damned long time that is, especially when one’s summer consists of stirring the egg salad at the deli, driving one’s sister back and forth to tennis day camp, and taking a weekly painting course at Ringling College that one did not expect to be full of people older than Abuela?

  Vic’s wearing the stupid shirt with a pair of red cotton shorts with triangle-shaped slits up both sides.

  Why does she have to be so ridiculous?

  She flips off the bathroom light and gets into bed. Beside me. Well, not really beside me. She always sleeps curled up, so far to the edge of the bed that a hand dangles over. Her back faces me. The stars fell on Alabama! American Ballet Theatre Summer Intensive.

  “When you go back to Alabama this summer, I’m coming with you. There’s this band Tall Jon played for me the other night—they’re from there. I’m going to come with you and see one of their shows.”

  “Hmm, your dream vacation is Alabama, huh? You’re funny.”

  “Yep. We’ll bust that place up.” I don’t know what busting a place up actually entails, but I’m sure Victoria and I can figure it out.

  “I’m not going back, though.”

  “You’re not?” I sit up in bed. Victoria’s still lying down. The streetlight or moonlight slices through the curtains and settles on her cheek.

  “No. There’s no way. I liked it, but there’s no way. I’ve got to get to New York as soon as possible after graduation.” She’s in that murky place between wake and sleep. I’d like to think that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but for me, that’s always the place where my ideas are the clearest. “I don’t care if Juilliard accepts me or not. I’m leaving. Like, a few weeks after graduation. I’m just leaving.”

  “When did you decide this?”

  “I don’t think I ever really did.” Vic rolls over so that she could look at the ceiling fan if her eyes weren’t closed. “It was always there, you know?”

  I could tell her that I’ll go with her, but it would be about as real as claiming that Food Poisoning #2 is going to be finished anytime soon. For all Vic sounds like she’s dreaming, she actually has big, sturdy Reasons lined up for this move: money and talent and parental support. A birth certificate naming a Manhattan hospital. An aunt and uncle living in Brooklyn. The ability to hum the approximate musical notes made by a subway leaving the 42nd Street station. And her very specific aspiration to be not a Juilliard graduate, but a Juilliard dropout (one or two years there, max, she says, and then she wants to be working on Broadway).

  My only reason is Vic herself. And would she be enough? Would she let herself be enough for me?

  She’s asleep now, her breaths long and steady. Not me. I’m all charged up, like how my teeth feel before a thunderstorm.

  “I could go with you,” I whisper, just to know that I have said it.

  Light on my eyelids. Orange. Red. It’s the time of day and the time of year that sunlight hits the back of the house harshly enough to have texture and sound.

  Wait, no—that’s a different sound, coming from the living room.

  I keep the covers on Victoria while throwing them off myself. I put my ear to the bedroom door.

  Out in the living room, the piano’s going full blast: notes, chords, lines of music. Angela. It has to be her, doesn’t it? Because who would break into our house to play the piano? I wipe the thought away as though erasing it from a chalkboard. It’s Angela, hitting more than one key at a time. It’s Angela, playing music.

  Victoria sleeps through it, probably because she spends her days dancing intensely and all I do is stare at mostly blank canvases. I slip out of Mom’s room and try to be quiet about closing the door, which is kind of pointless because Angela’s insistent song fills every space in the house and drips down the walls.

  “Angela?” I try calling her from the kitchen, as I wipe the microwave clock with a dishtowel. There are stray streaks of peanut butter painted around the kitchen. “Don’t you know it’s only seven thirty?”

  The piano keeps going.

  I pour some orange juice and peek around the corner.

  It’s true—Angela is playing the piano. But she isn’t alone in the living room.

  A glance of long dark hair. A purple bathrobe. It’s Lilia, sitting in the recliner and w
atching Angela as she plays. She doesn’t see me, transfixed as she is, tapping her fingers against her arm, as though Lilia herself is a part of the music. She’s relentless, but so is Angela, keeping pace with notes that run toward the beat and then scatter away from it. There’s a rush within my cheeks, behind my eyes, like it’s taking all my strength not to start singing. I can’t see either of their faces, but all of Angela’s body looks strained, as though the piano keys are weights, and they’re pulling her down.

  five

  TALL JON HAS come through with the Firing Squad album. Listening to it with my eyes closed in my mom’s car, in the school parking lot, the pureness of the music washes over me just like it did at the bowling alley last week, and I’m obsessed all over again. Plus, Tall Jon is amazing: when he got in touch with Firing Squad to be sure he could make a copy to send to his weird friend Mercedes, he asked the perfect music-snob-in-all-the-right-ways questions about their songs, and they wrote back with the answers. So now, when I’m listening to track nine, “Always Something Left to Love,” I can picture the way it was recorded: in a barn, with a bunch of senior citizens hired from a Birmingham retirement community to play a whole chorus of pianos.

  The passenger door clicks open. “Hey.”

  “Angela. Are you listening to this? If you keep up what you’re doing, you could play on the next Firing Squad album.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”

  I open my eyes. In the passenger seat, Angela has her knees pulled to her chest and is listening intently, a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

  “Wait, is this the day I have waited for? The day Angela Moreno declares that she likes the same song I do?” I lean out the window. “Hallelujah, my friends! Hallelujah! Angela’s a fan of Firing Squad!”

  “Not as much as you,” Angela says.

  “I’ll take what I can get,” I tell her. “Let’s celebrate by going to the grocery store.”

  We used to go to San Juan for Christmas and New Year’s, and during the last twelve seconds of the old year, Abuela Dolores would make us all eat twelve grapes for good luck in the next year. It takes a hell of a lot of coordination to eat that many grapes so quickly, especially if you get stuck with the seeded ones, and especially if you have a ten-year-old’s mouth. Our parents would always cram the grapes in and wash them down with champagne. Angela and I would fumble the grapes all over the place, dropping or squishing or spitting out more than one.

  “Bad luck! Mala suerte!” our mother would scream out, followed by all sorts of dire warnings in Spanish.

  But Abuela Dolores would pick up the grapes and whisper how we still had time, how it was still the old year in Alaska.

  (“Well, in part of Alaska,” Angela said. “There are a few islands on the other side of the International Date Line.”)

  And then she’d say, in English, “You can fight your luck.”

  Which is something I think about a lot.

  I toss a bag of grapes into the grocery cart.

  It bugs me that Mom keeps telling us on the phone or over email that Abuela has been “so weak” for a long time. The only potentially wimpy thing about my grandmother is that she won’t get on a plane and come to visit us in Florida, and she definitely won’t come to live with us, even though Mom has pleaded with her to do so. Abuela hasn’t left Puerto Rico since she spent a couple of years on the mainland as a teenager, and she doesn’t intend to start traveling again at the age of seventy-five. But maybe that’s not wimpy at all—it takes a certain kind of conviction to stay on the same 3,500-square-mile hunk of rock for over fifty years. At that point, your transplanted daughter should come to you.

  And she doesn’t want to die. If I couldn’t feel that pricking at me, I’ve got the evidence from the last time I talked to her on the phone. She was still going to her ballroom dancing class twice a week, and her little dogs were following her around the apartment as we spoke, and she laughed when I asked her where Abuelo was. Just sitting at the kitchen table, she told me. His ashes, that is. Last time I saw her, that week in Puerto Rico last June, she switched his ashes from their old urn to a “more portable” one, so that he could go with her from room to room in the house.

  She doesn’t want to die.

  Angela jogs toward me and the cart with a bouquet of flowers. “These are only four bucks.”

  “And?”

  “And I need to get them for Lilia. As a thank-you gift.”

  “I’m still not sure what she actually did,” I tell Angela, but it’s nice to see her so happy, and I place the flowers in the cart.

  Mom has transferred a hundred bucks into my bank account so that we don’t have to attempt another pasta-and-peanut-butter creation. But the flowers now sticking out of the cart feel like a pink-and-purple flag heralding Angela and me as impostors in this world. It’s four thirty and the Publix is a mix of parents with kids and people in business-type clothes hurrying from aisle to aisle. It’s the kids, especially, who look at Angela and me, like they are going to tattle on these two girls who aren’t supposed to be pushing and filling the cart. Humming “Interpretation” (Firing Squad album track two), I snap three cans of black beans off the shelf as though I do this all the time.

  Angela says, “I’m not sure either. But I could feel it starting before she knocked on our door the other morning. I woke up with my fingers twitching, and with this idea in my head that if I sat at the piano right that moment, I’d be able to play. And then when Lilia came in, it was like, I don’t know, I think I could have played any song in the world.”

  “Uh-huh.” I push the cart. She is still my sister, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and trying to grab the other end of the cart to take a ride. I swerve from one side of the canned veggies aisle to another, not letting her on.

  “I bet she could help you, too.”

  “I doubt it.” But I slow down to let Angela on the cart.

  “No, seriously. She told me she has a studio space to finish some artwork. What’s it called when someone pays you to make something specific?”

  “A commission.”

  “Right. Well, she’s got some sort of commission project she’s working on. You should talk to her about it.”

  “Hm.” I stare into the cart. “Hey, have you asked her anything about, you know, how she came to be renting Rex’s place?”

  “I tried,” Angela says. “But she told me she didn’t have a past.”

  The keeper of the cigarettes, the lady at the customer service counter, looks pretty friendly today. I doubt she remembers me trying to buy from her before, but I also doubt she’d hand over a pack. It’s been a ridiculous couple of days and I’ve already smoked through what Tall Jon gave me.

  Angela says, “Let’s speed up this cart! I need to get home and practice.”

  My sister is amazing.

  She can do all her scales now. She can play chords. She can play “Chopsticks.” She can play the first half of “Für Elise.” It’s only been a week since the piano arrived, but it’s a part of our lives now. It’s an uninvited houseguest that fits with our family (well, the currently fractured version of the Moreno family). And if Angela’s not worried about where it came from, then neither am I.

  We’re home and she bounds out of the car, unlocks the front door, and raps on Rex’s door to announce her arrival. I follow with the grocery bags. Angela sits at attention, her hands waiting on the keys. The living room keeps changing: the piano and the repurposed dining room chair have become fixtures. And now, I drop the flowers into a vase and set them on a table beside the piano.

  When Lilia arrives, she says hey to Angela and perches on the edge of the recliner. I duck into the kitchen. “Remember what you did yesterday,” Lilia tells my sister. “You can do it again. Keep going.” Angela nods and begins playing, starting “Für Elise” with the right amount of quiet and then letting it build until it fills my head. She doesn’t play notes anymore—she plays songs.

  How did she do it?

&nb
sp; I open the back door and step out on the porch to escape the music. Food Poisoning #2 is still hanging out, waiting for me to return with ideas. “You’re gonna be waiting a while, buddy,” I say, patting the top of the canvas. Aside from those streaks I made the other day, it’s looked the same for so long.

  On the other side of the porch, though, there’s something different. Four canvases. Half-finished ones, drying. It’s Lilia’s artwork.

  She must also be attempting a series, because all four pictures are of the same building. The building in front of a light blue sky, then a dark blue sky, and then an orange sky. The last one doesn’t have a sky yet. But the building is recognizable: about ten stories tall, with iron balconies on each level, and light radiating from each window. It is—it’s got to be—my favorite condo building from down on the beach.

  A couple of months ago in Mrs. Pagonis’s class, we talked about Monet’s Haystacks series. Literally, a series of paintings of the same haystacks. “I know a lot of you might not think you understand the series,” Mrs. Pagonis had said, “or maybe you do think you understand. That’s fine. But it’s also fine to look at the paintings and live in them for a minute and not worry too much about why you’re doing that.”

  That wasn’t me, though. I squinted hard at the projection of the paintings on the screen in the classroom, my whole body tensing. I understand it. I do, I told myself.

  I didn’t really understand it. But I get this: Lilia’s series, and her attempts to capture the building and its light. Because to see something amazing like that is to get obsessed with it, to wonder how it works and where it comes from, but not to wonder so hard that the magic drips away.

  I lean against the screen. Her paintings aren’t done, or even that good, but they’re there. They exist.

  Back inside, Angela plays “Für Elise” again. The melody crawls up and down my spine as I approach the living room, as I consider what I’m going to say to Lilia. I saw your paintings, I could say. Or, like Mrs. Pagonis sometimes says about giving feedback, start with a question: Why did you paint that building? That’s what I most want to know.