The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  “But we couldn’t get in, dearie,” Vic says in her matter-of-fact way. Her pointe-shoe voice. “I would have loved to have seen it, but it’s kind of hard when the doors won’t open, you know?”

  The sunlight is too much. I get out of bed and pull the curtains closed, but they’re so sheer that they don’t make much of a difference. I push them aside again, because I have to accept this day. The doors—they opened. The door to the right of the formerly automatic doors, the one that let us into the lobby, the one that trickily seems like it should be pushed rather than pulled. And then the doors in the stairwell, and of course the door to Lilia’s studio. I didn’t consider the physics of opening or not opening them, not with Victoria there. To say I didn’t open them—that we didn’t—is like saying I never lived in Florida, or I don’t have blood, or I don’t love her.

  “I don’t understand,” I tell her. “We were there. We were. I painted some lemurs on the wall. We heard a bossa nova, and you were dancing, and then—”

  Vic has no idea.

  She gets out of bed and she’s still wearing the gray shorts and the T-shirt with the contorted ballerina, and her hair has that same humidity-tinged messiness to it as at the party last night, but she has no idea.

  “What happened after the doors didn’t open?” I tug on one of the curtains as Vic heads into the bathroom to wash her face. I almost want to tell her not to, to leave each fleck of dust from the past twelve hours on her as long as she can.

  “We came here,” she says as the water runs. And she recounts the whole sleepy drive with Firing Squad, and coming into the house in the dark and putting on her pajamas and crashing into bed.

  She dries her face, and I go and stand next to her, and she’s kind of startled to see me when she drops the towel. Here we are again: Mercedes and Victoria, Mercy and Vic, dearie and all the pet names I’ve wondered if I would call her if she ever became my girlfriend. I consider her lips, and how, despite the insistence of this really happened, Victoria’s lips in Victoria’s reality did not touch my lips at all.

  “I’m worried about you,” she says. “You weren’t drunk last night, were you?”

  “Don’t ask me stuff like that.”

  “Hey, sorry.” Vic squeezes my shoulder. “Last night was fun. I just feel like we’re starting to run out of weekends like this, you know? My audition’s coming up, and then there’s all the BS before graduation. I think we’re both getting our foundations thrown off, you know?”

  I don’t know, not really. If anything, I have a fully new foundation, with ten floors of apartments on top of it. That foundation is as strong as ever, in the way it pulls me toward it, and the way it is pushing itself into my life. Clearly, the space within the walls of the building knows what happened. Lilia must know. And yet, the person who was right there, who touched those walls and those stairs and those floors, who spent several hours cloaked in the salty, musty air of the Estate, does not know.

  “Yeah,” I say. “There’s a lot in my head to sort out.”

  When Victoria has left the bathroom, I throw her face towel at the mirror. Thwap. The towel collapses onto my mom’s soap dish. I grab the soap and it snaps in two without a fight. I fling the soap dish at the tile floor, and the metallic clang it makes is finally satisfying. But now I need the towel again, for my own eyes and face.

  I read something recently about stroke recovery, about how the rehabilitation process from a moderate-to-severe stroke (that’s what Abuela had) can involve the victim becoming highly suggestible. They will believe anything you tell them. They’ll believe two contradictory statements, one said right after the other. I know I am a ridiculous person, but I want to bestow this power on Victoria for five seconds, ten, twenty. Long enough for me to tell her what happened again, and for her to believe it, and for her to know, just for a moment longer.

  Angela emerges from Hannah’s house looking dazed, and she heaves her backpack into the car as if it weighs two hundred pounds. As soon as she’s in the backseat, she leans against the window and closes her eyes.

  “Didn’t sleep well?” Vic asks from the front seat, observing Angela with the same wary stare that she’s been directing at me all morning.

  “I hate sleeping away from home,” comes the fuzzy reply.

  “Did you have breakfast?” I ask.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Screw this not remembering. Girls, we are going out for breakfast,” I announce. “Moreno family treat. And it’s gonna be amazing.”

  I turn on Angela’s favorite Firing Squad song, the one with the pianos, and Vic sings along as I drive all of us through the city on this unreal day. “And as the hours go by, there’s always something left to love.”

  Coffee all around, even for the historically noncaffeinated Victoria. She dumps milk into hers and takes a sip and then looks at me cross-eyed over the top of the mug. Angela snickers, dumps three packets of sugar into her coffee, takes a huge gulp, and then holds the mug on top of her head.

  “I’m not taking part in this piece of performance art.” My hands shake as I fix my coffee with normal amounts of sugar and milk. Anything I say or do could reveal how wrecked I am. “After my attempts at food-related art, I think I’m gonna sit back and enjoy my coffee for being coffee.”

  “Aw, come on, Mercy,” Angela says. “You’re not going to get away with looking like the normal one here.”

  “Ahem.” I put down my spoon, move my shoulders from side to side, and pick up from where Firing Squad left off in the car:

  “The time is trickling low

  The sun is bleeding slow

  But since you’re here with me

  There’s always something left to love.”

  At first, I’m singing only to Vic and Angela, but then they join in and there’s too much energy to be contained by our table alone. It has to go somewhere else, to catch in the restaurant’s ceiling fans and be whisked out to everyone else brunching here this late morning, to cling to the windows as condensation, to seep out to the parking lot. Maybe the people driving by will feel it, even for a moment, and know that we are a part of something, a certain vibration, a home for all the parts of us that do not fit anywhere else. The lonely and bright and discolored and weary and sad. The satisfied and the terrified and the longing.

  Every little sound unsettles me tonight, from my and Angela’s jeans clunking around in the dryer, to a pickup truck barreling down our street, to Angela tapping a mechanical pencil against her math book. Lilia has never come bursting into our half of the house before, but I’m building up a scenario in my head where she could, where she rips through the screened porch and tells me how I’ve fucked things up at the studio and how she knows I went through her suitcase and how she’s going to take something important from me.

  The dryer buzzes. The jeans clunk one last time.

  Angela and I sit on opposite ends of the couch, feet up, laps full of things we are supposed to be doing. The pull to go to the Estate isn’t around at all—I think the walls and the paint and I need to rest after last night. I keep glancing at my phone and wondering if I should send Victoria the smallest of messages: It really happened.

  “I tried to go last night,” Angela says from behind her geometry book.

  “Shit, Angela.” I throw my paperback copy of Slaughterhouse-Five in her direction. It bounces off the math book and lands on my sister’s feet. “Why would you think that’s a good idea?”

  “I didn’t think it was a good idea?”

  “Okay, forgive me, that was poorly worded. Why did you think that was something you could do?”

  “I felt like I had to be there,” she says. “And I felt like, if you weren’t there, if I could just find Lilia there, then it’d be okay. You know?”

  “No, I really don’t. Lilia said you weren’t invited, and clearly I messed something up by taking you there the other night. And beyond that, I was there last night, so you could have royally screwed up some shit. But I’m guessing you
didn’t make it?”

  “No.” Angela closes the book and sets it aside without looking in my direction. “I was able to get out of Hannah’s house and down her street, but then I realized I had no idea which way to turn from there.”

  “And you didn’t want to end up walking alone down Tamiami and across the bridge at three in the morning? Yeah, a sound decision, I’d say.”

  “I can’t explain it,” she says. “It’s like the building was calling me, and I feel like I let it down by not being able to make it there.”

  “Well, I was there, and the floors never shook.”

  “Did you go to the party?”

  “Yep, but it was boring, so we left early.”

  Angela knows who the “we” is. She wants to know what happened when I brought Vic, but she’s not asking, and I’m glad.

  It’s midnight and Angela slips into our mother’s room and, without a word, slumps onto the bed and nudges me. I guess she wants to be sure that I’m not leaving tonight. I give her some room and an extra pillow, because she can only fall asleep with her head propped up. Mom has said she’s been like that since she was a baby.

  “What if Abuela dies?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, even though, technically, I do. I mean, we have the plan: we will tell our dad and he will help us make the arrangements to meet our mom in San Juan, and there will be a funeral and we will have to be kind and familial to our uncles, who have pretty much never extended the same behavior to us. Abuela has never been shy about talking about her last wishes, to the point that we all know exactly which songs she wants played at her funeral, and how I’m supposed to read something from Romans (“And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us”), and Angela is supposed to read an Emily Dickinson poem, both in English and en español.

  So, yeah. We know this.

  But also, we don’t. I don’t know when we will start crying. Will it be the moment we hear the news, or will it be later, like standing in the security line at the airport, my shoes off and my backpack churning down the conveyor belt and tears running down my face? Who will cry the most? Will my uncles cry at all? I will want to take care of her little dogs, but I don’t know how you’re supposed to transport dogs from an island to a peninsula. I don’t know how I will feel at the funeral, and the burial. I hate crying in front of my family, especially Angela, because I don’t ever want her to think that I am not okay, but I will do it, this once, for Abuela.

  I don’t know how I will feel a week, or twenty days, or three hundred days later. And I for sure do not know how to comfort my mother, or if I should even try.

  This is why I’d rather paint at night.

  fourteen

  I COULD TELL her about the kiss.

  It’ll be at her house, the two of us sitting by the pool, the sun streaming in and dancing off the water. Dance. Shit. The Juilliard audition has to be kept in mind—should I, as she put it, throw off her foundation before the audition, or after it?

  I tap my paintbrush against its palette in a bossa nova rhythm. When Tall Jon gets into his amateur music critic mode, sometimes he refers to a beat as a tattoo. I like that. But Gretchen and Rider clearly do not find anything inspiring about what I’m doing. Well, fine. Back to my absentminded work on this week’s assignment, which is to create a piece about an early memory.

  “Green carpet,” Rider says to me, pointing at his sketch pad. I guess I’ve been staring. “The absolute first thing I can remember.”

  My earliest memory is of my mom telling me not to climb the ladder to the slide at the big playground in Naples, and of me doing it anyway, and getting to the top, but then being too afraid to attempt the slide.

  I remember her yelling my name over and over. Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes! Mercedes, no!

  It’s so easy to say what you need to say—to yell it, even—when it’s that crucial.

  It should be easy to tell Victoria.

  By the pool. Or at my house, whispering it to her in the kitchen while Angela pounds on the piano. Maybe even during lunch this afternoon by the Dead Guy. In any of these places, the words will be the same: I kissed you, Victoria. And you kissed me back. And it was perfect.

  But it was perfect because the Estate made it perfect.

  Can we ever get back there?

  It’s possible that telling her could screw everything up, that the memory was taken from her for a good reason. I spent so long planning to never say a word, and now the Estate has worked it out for that to be reality again. Maybe I shouldn’t disturb that.

  Rider finishes another dizzying corner of his green carpet sketch. I drop my paintbrush and work on a rough pencil sketch of the slide’s ladder. I want the focus of the picture to be the insistence of my mother’s words. The viewers should have a sense of being shouted at to run away from the picture, but—I hope—a couple of them will make the choice to stick around and climb the ladder.

  How do I accomplish this?

  The ladder looks disproportional and weird. I start an outline of my mom on the left side of the paper, but no, it’s not the physical presence of Mom that stuck with me, it’s the sound of her.

  Maybe there is a cloud of sound coming from that side of the picture, a distracting smoke bomb of Mom’s favorite shade of blue.

  Maybe Mom’s voice comes through in a barrage of M shapes.

  Maybe this idea won’t work at all. The viewer could sense that something’s wrong by the mixed-up proportions of everything else in the painting, and the skewedness of it could be the distraction.

  All of these things.

  None of these things.

  Rider makes his way through the green carpet, and Gretchen draws a close-up of a dog’s face, and here I am with half of a messed-up ladder. I wish they could have seen me painting those lemurs the other night, or discovering the secret painting. I wish they could know. Where is the moment where it becomes easy and beautiful and mystical? Where are those moments I remember when I was only a few years older than the Mercedes who climbed the ladder, the afternoons of wearing down colored pencils and crayons, of showing off the thick stain of marker on the side of my left hand, of preparing a new box of watercolors and watching the first drops seep into each little oval of paint. And it’s not even that I didn’t appreciate those things when I was a kid—I totally did. There’s something so true and solid about being a seven-year-old in paint up to your elbows and thinking, This is the best thing ever! Especially when you see your parents going off to work and then coming home and arguing. That’s enough to help you confirm it: Yes, this really is the best thing ever.

  I want to be there again.

  But the possibilities—for Victoria, for me, for this useless ladder picture—are crowding me out.

  There’s always something satisfying about ripping a piece of paper off a spiral binding.

  I fold the paper, rip it in two, keep ripping, keep multiplying, letting the pieces fan out in front of me on the table. I should tell her, I shouldn’t tell her, I could, I couldn’t, I can’t.

  Rider and Gretchen are staring at me.

  “I can’t do this,” I tell them.

  She’s at the Dead Guy.

  Even though it’s threatening to rain and no one else is outside today, she’s there. Because that’s what we agreed on this morning. She moves to the edge of Tim Gelpy’s marble bench to let me sit next to her, all the while balancing a bag of baby carrots on one knee and a tiny cup of ranch dressing on the other. She is totally getting into Juilliard. I start in on my fried chicken sandwich.

  “Are you okay?” she says after a while.

  We turn toward each other at the same time. She has the front of her hair pulled back with barrettes, and she’s wearing a navy dress with the gold bracelets I gave her for her birthday. It’s her, but it’s not her. It’s a version of her that doesn’t know all the wonderful things about a bossa nova. It’s a version of her that nev
er watched me paint in a moment when I felt I could do no wrong. There’s this crack—no, at this point, it’s a damned canyon—between my reality and hers, and I don’t know how long I can keep talking across it before we both fall in.

  “Vic, good God,” I say. “Is anything okay? Abuela’s still in the hospital, and she might never come out of there alive. I’m going to hear back from my damned colleges soon. I’m tired of cooking and doing laundry and getting the side-eye from Angela. I miss my mom. I miss feeling like I was a decent artist. I miss everything.”

  If nothing else, I’m good at making a carefully worded outburst.

  Not that I have Vic particularly fooled. She waits a minute, probably to see if I’m going to mention the studio I insisted that she visited.

  “Take a deep breath.” Vic dips a carrot stick in a dangerous amount of ranch dressing. “Let’s talk about infinite possibilities. Name a place.”

  “Right here.” I smack my hand against the corner of the bench.

  “Have we seriously never done a Dead Guy–themed edition of ‘How Many People?’”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wow! This should be good, then.” Victoria considers for a minute. “Obvious one. How many people before us have called Tim Gelpy the Dead Guy?”

  “How many people before us have called Tim Gelpy the Dead Guy and have defaced his bench out of a fear of their own mortality?”

  “You’re weird, dearie. Okay, how many Dead Guy–naming, mortality-fearing, bench-defacing people have eventually cried over their guilt for screwing with the Dead Guy’s memorial bench?”

  “All of them,” I say. “Definitely all of them.”

  Angela and Vic find each other at the front of the school and run to the car together under Vic’s polka-dotted umbrella. They both look so themselves today, like no one would ever mistake them for being anything other than an aspiring Juilliard dropout and a piano player with Sonia Sotomayor bedroom decor.