The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  The music comes to a close, and Angela wipes the sweat from her cheeks and underneath her bangs. She lays the wooden cover over the piano keys and runs her hand over the piano. She’s stalling, clearly. It’s like when she used to put her Lego blocks away brick by single brick, to avoid having to get ready for bed.

  “Hey, Ange.” I lean against the wall by the front door. “I was about to go to school to wait for you.”

  “Sorry,” she says, not looking at me. “I was in sixth period and I couldn’t concentrate. I had the urge to come here and play.”

  There are a whole bunch of things I could say to this, things that would make me sound maybe not so much like our mom, but like a mom. You could have been patient. You could have kept on being like the Angela I have always known, rather than this girl who sneaks out and plays with my favorite band. That would be easier.

  “Are you finished?” I ask her.

  She glances around at the rest of Firing Squad (is she officially a part of the band now? Are they going to add her name and picture to their website?), notes that they are packing up too, notes that no one is stopping her from leaving, and says, “Yeah, I guess so.”

  I got so into the habit of cooking that it’s weird not to have to. I offer to help Mom, but she insists that only she can make her famous chicken soup. So I put the clean dishes away and watch her chop the carrots and onion, her fingers soft machines making precise movements. It is a nice evening—Mom opens the door to the back porch and the breeze breathes in and out through the dining room and kitchen.

  “I haven’t seen you painting since I got back,” she says.

  “Yeah. I’ve been doing most of my work in art class lately,” I tell her. “I had kind of a breakthrough.”

  “That sounds promising.” She scoops the chopped vegetables into the big soup pot.

  “Maybe.”

  “I took your advice about Abuela.” Chili powder into the soup pot. “I whispered to her everything I could think of that I had never told her. And I hope you don’t mind, I whispered all sorts of things about you and Angela, too.”

  “Oh yeah? I don’t mind.”

  “I told her I sensed something was happening back at home, but I didn’t know what. I almost felt like she would wake up and tell me, but she didn’t.”

  “Hmm,” I say. “Well, everything’s fine here.”

  Except that when we sit down to dinner, Angela is silent and pale, and her soup spoon never moves from the bowl.

  “I’m sorry, I’m just not feeling that great,” she says when Mom notices that she hasn’t eaten anything.

  Mom sets some crackers by Angela’s bowl. “Have these, then try the soup again.” She says to me, “I bet you remember. When Angela was two, she had a terrible stomach bug, and I gave her this soup for the first time. It was like magic, the way she ate a whole bowl and then asked for more.”

  But I don’t think it’s going to work this time.

  Angela lies on the couch all evening, not eating crackers or soup, not watching TV, but just staring at the ceiling with her headphones on. Mom, as usual, has no plans for going to sleep anytime soon, and she sits at the dining room table, drinking tea and reading one of her thriller novels, this one in Spanish. Should I say something—to either of them—or should I retreat to my room and sink into myself?

  “Hey, Mom,” I say. “I’m gonna pop next door for a minute. The girl renting Rex’s room has a bunch of natural remedies.”

  “Oh?” Mom looks up from her book.

  “Yeah, I thought, you know, it might be worth a shot.”

  “The soup always worked before,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “Who is that girl?” Mom asks. “I saw her getting into a car this morning, but that was it. I said hello and she didn’t even turn around.”

  I say, “Her name is Lilia. She works odd hours. I think she’s tired a lot.”

  Mom says, “Hmm,” like she wants to ask more, but also doesn’t really want the whole story.

  “Hi, Mercedes.”

  Lilia’s wrapped in her purple bathrobe (but at ten p.m., this makes sense) and she looks strange to me, sort of like it was to see my mom after all those weeks away.

  “Angela’s not feeling well,” I tell her in Rex’s living room. “Do you . . . do you know—”

  Lilia sighs. “Come in here.”

  Rex’s bedroom door is closed, and the thudding soundtrack of some suspenseful movie leaks through. Lilia leads me into her bedroom, leaves the door open a crack, and turns on a small stereo. Thank God she doesn’t start playing Firing Squad, but rather some quiet jazz. I never thought it would happen, but I may be fully sick of “The Getting Is Good.”

  “She needs to be there,” Lilia says. “You understood that before I did, and you did it brilliantly, I have to say. Angela’s really ready.”

  “What about me?”

  “You? You’ve been ready, maybe even for longer than I thought.”

  “Then why haven’t I gotten sick?”

  “You’d probably have the same thing happen, if you stay away long enough. I bet you’ve been feeling some weird things. Aches and itches, things like that. Right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I sink onto the antique ottoman next to the antique bed. She has moved the Estate series and stacked all the canvases into a single tower in the corner of the room, tall enough that she might as well be creating a 3D model of the damn place. I imagine how she’d represent me and Angela and Edie and Firing Squad and the rest of them with a bunch of Lego people, a few of us trapped within each layer of canvas.

  The red suitcase is right where it was before. Lilia doesn’t seem bothered that I’m seeing her room—maybe she would have let me see her work all along.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, and then nothing comes after this, nothing, still nothing, because where am I going to begin, and what if she doesn’t understand either? I rub my hands on the knees of my jeans. I love these damn jeans. If I do what Lilia and Edie and apparently Angela all want me to do, will I be stuck wearing a rotation of floral dresses for the rest of my life?

  “I don’t either, sometimes,” Lilia says. “I saw your mom is back. How is your abuela doing?”

  “Not very well,” I say.

  Lilia leans against the bed. “I’m so sorry.” Where, I wonder, are Lilia’s grandmothers? If they’ve died, how lonely were they when it happened?

  “But seriously,” I say, “I don’t understand. If I take over what you do, then what’s your part in all of this going to be?”

  “I told you before, I’m pretty sure I have to go. And I’m trying to do it in a way that doesn’t mess everything up. It’s an experiment, and it’s so fragile.” Lilia rummages in her suitcase for a minute and produces a hair tie. She gathers her long hair into a low ponytail, which she flings around to her front. “Every day, I try to get a little farther away, and every day, I wind up right back there, or back here, with you and your sister.”

  “Nothing wrong with being here,” I tell her.

  “I know,” she says, turning away from me and opening one of the creaky wooden drawers of the antique dresser. “I know that. But it’s been wonderful to live at a place where I feel like I don’t have to worry. Where our art and music are perfect. Where we don’t get hurt.” She finds what she’s been looking for in the drawer: a pair of red-handled scissors. “That’s what you want too, right? I mean, it has to be, or you wouldn’t have been able to get in so easily.”

  “I don’t know anymore,” I tell her.

  Lilia looks down and clips off her entire ponytail.

  “Damn,” I say.

  “What do you think?” she says. The ponytail in her hand flops over like a dead fish.

  “Short hair, don’t care, Lilia,” I say, fluffing my curls with my fingertips. “But seriously, you’ve got the face for it.”

  “Thanks.” She puts the scissors back in the drawer and lays the ponytail on the dresser. I’ll have to come
back later and tell her to donate it, or maybe donate it myself, since she’s getting ready to go.

  “Hey, before you go.” My voice catches in my breath. “Tell me about how you got my picture out of the Estate. The one with the house. I thought I’d never see it again.”

  “You make it sound easy,” she says, “like I just had to walk out with it one day. It took me ages to figure it out. And it had to do with the picture itself. The connection it has to the person who drew it.”

  I think of my mom, sitting a few walls away with Angela, knowing nothing about any of this. I could bring Lilia and the house picture to her right now and blow her mind.

  “Why are you leaving all this to me?”

  “Because you understand what the Estate can do for people,” she says. “You understand how some things need to stay perfect. You understand how we want to hold on to the best moment of our whole lives, and the person we were in that moment.”

  I do.

  Lilia runs her hand along the strange new ends of her hair. “But anyway, you haven’t finished your self-portrait.”

  “Okay, but how am I supposed to know when it’s done?”

  “You’ll know,” she says. “I promise you’ll know the second it’s done, dear.”

  “You don’t get to call me that,” I snap.

  I want to grab the red suitcase and hurl it out the window. To make her stay a few days longer to clean up her shit. We are her shit—my sister and me, left behind to take care of the things she couldn’t. All the potential for beauty and tragedy in the world—it’s all there, swimming around in one place, like the colors in my eyeball.

  And I have let her lead us there.

  My foot grazes the red suitcase as I get up from the ottoman. I give it another shove for good measure. “Look, sorry. I’ll figure out how to finish the damn thing. But right now, is there anything you can do for Angela?”

  Lilia’s mouth slants. She opens one of the creaky drawers in the massive antique dresser and pulls out a bottle of antacid tablets.

  “You think that’s actually going to help?” I say.

  “They won’t hurt,” Lilia says. “You’ll figure out what you need to do.”

  I tell Mom that if Angela doesn’t get better soon, then maybe I’m going to take her to urgent care? Or maybe I don’t let a question mark hang in the air when I say this. We sit on the floor in front of the couch, drinking tea and staring at the opposite wall, where Mom hung my and Angela’s school portraits up too high. That’s my last-summer self, she who was still high on the victory of Food Poisoning #1, and who had just been blown away by the realization that she loved Vic. I can see it in her eyes, as she’s holding it, her one big shining secret. And I’ve never noticed how stressed she looks—there’s a certain anxiety to love, the way your mind and body wear down to make up for your heart beating so furiously all the time.

  And I feel like that again now, but it’s for all these other things. For Angela. For Abuela and my mother. For my huge painting sitting alone at the building, waiting for me to return and be sure I still want it to look the way it does. For Lilia, and hoping she’s okay, and wondering what the hell her secrets are and what she’s going to do. For all the other artists at the building, working away, but never able to have everything they want.

  “Mom, you can go to bed,” I say. “I’ll take her.”

  “Ay, bendito, you’ve got school in the morning.”

  “Yeah, I know. But we got in sort of a pattern when you were away, staying up late and doing things together. This is just, you know, another one of those things.” I nudge Angela’s shoulder. “Hey, let’s go.”

  She sits up.

  Mom stares at her. “What kind of medicine did that girl give to you?”

  Angela’s eyes get teary. “She taught me how to play the piano.”

  “She’s kind of delirious,” I say. “Come on, Ange.”

  We don’t waste any time getting to the Estate, which is all lit up again. She seems to gain some energy as we park and head inside. Going up to the second floor, there’s color returning to her face, and opening the door to Lilia’s studio, she’s looking a lot more like herself. The floor lamp hums in the corner, waiting for us, and Angela heads straight back to the piano room. I check the fridge for some water, and not only is there one of those fancy water filters, but there’s also an unopened carton of orange juice.

  I figure we have maybe an hour or an hour and a half, max, before Mom starts freaking out and calling us. Yes, of course we’re at the urgent care place, I’ll tell her. Maybe an hour is all Angela needs. Maybe that’ll take her through the end of the week, or even just through tomorrow after school.

  Angela’s playing is quick and insistent, like she’s a mad scientist at the piano. On another floor, someone is dancing to her music, and someone is drawing to it, and someone is tuning up their saxophone before starting to play along. Everything goes on here, and on and on.

  twenty-two

  THE DOOR TO Mrs. Pagonis’s room is shut even after the late bell rings. We hang around outside, a bunch of studio art misfits with our supply boxes and portfolios, forced away from our color-coded tables for the first time in ages. It’s Thursday, it’s spring, and people are appropriately restless. I make eye contact with some of the Yellow Table people I’ve hardly spoken to all year. And I feel a particular allegiance with Rider, for once, who keeps taking glances through the door’s thin window.

  “She’s in there with Gretchen,” he whispers to me.

  “Oh man.” I scrape at a slick of dried glue on my art toolbox. It reminds me of Lilia and the ceiling art. I figured I was going to spend most of today silently willing Angela to make it through seventh period, but now, this worry about Gretchen is lumped on top of it. “Maybe it’s nothing bad. I heard Gretchen got into SCAD, you know.”

  Rider nods. “I know. Good for her.”

  Mrs. Pagonis opens the door without a word, and all of us flood in. Gretchen’s situated in her usual spot at the Orange Table, setting her supplies out neatly just as she would on any other day. But as I sit across from her, it’s clear that she’s been crying.

  “What’s going on?” I ask her, trying to weave my voice under the morning announcements.

  Gretchen shakes her head, grips a drawing pencil, and slaps a fresh, blank piece of paper in front of her on the table. “Just starting my piece for the county show.”

  “What happened to the lizards?”

  “Mrs. Pagonis said it was too much. Too confessional. She couldn’t have that representing her class.” She snakes a line across the paper, sort of like the traditional “here’s the ground” line I used to draw as a kid. “She recommended me to a counselor. I told her I already see one. I just—I don’t even know what to make now. Maybe I won’t enter.”

  “No.” I fling my sketchbook open. “I don’t have anything either. Let’s do this together.”

  Gretchen smiles. “Is it time for some more food poisoning art?”

  “Nah. I never knew what that was about, anyway.”

  The blank sketchbook page looks like a door or a window to me this morning, an opening to a world of possibility that could be treacherous, but could be great all the same. I don’t know what I’ll find there, but at least it’s a clearer path than the scuffed-up white walls of my studio in the Estate. Rider joins in, and the three of us are off, in our separate worlds, but with the scratches of our drawing pencils whispering to one another. I draw some lemurs, one napping, one with her tail wrapped over her shoulder, and one sort of jumping. Do lemurs actually jump? I don’t care. It’s my truth, and I’m happy to be living with it, at least for a little while.

  I have so much energy from the lemur drawing that I go up to Victoria after lunch, after the fifth-period English girls are out of earshot, and tell her that I’m going to drive her to her dance class today.

  “Sure,” she says, as though this was a totally natural thing between us again. She doesn’t ask if Angela’s goi
ng to come with us, and I’m glad, because I have no good way to explain why an old minivan’s going to show up and take her to the Estate. Vic, in her blue-and-white-striped dress and yellow sandals, standing with easy poise in front of the notoriously toxic front-hall girls’ bathroom, looks exactly like someone who has always known what she wants to do with her life. She doesn’t look like someone who has occasionally had that balance thrown off, or like someone who’s about to have it thrown off again.

  It’s raining when Victoria and I head out. I have to do the thing Mom taught me where I turn the AC and the defroster on full blast to get the windows to stay unfogged.

  Vic doesn’t say anything about her playlist. I don’t put on Firing Squad.

  “It might be warm enough to swim this weekend,” Vic says. “I mean, if you’re up for that.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Have you talked to Tall Jon since his party?”

  We’re at a red light, and Vic starts twisting her hair into a bun.

  “Nope,” I tell her.

  “Dearie.” Vic faces me, or tries to, but the light turns green and I’m straight ahead again, pretending not to be side-watching her as she looks away from me and grabs her usual tangle of bobby pins from her dance bag. One, two, three, four, in they go. Good Lord, I think even I could do her hair in the dark at this point.

  “Dearie.” A little louder this time. “If there’s something going on . . . with your new project, with Lilia, with anything, you know that you can tell me about it. Actually, let me rephrase that, you better tell me about it, because I don’t want to see your picture on the news in a few weeks just because I didn’t bug you for details.”

  “I’m not in danger.”

  “Yeah, but you keep trying to break into an abandoned building,” Vic says. “Something tells me that’s not going to work for very long, not in the land of fancy condos over there.”

  “My project is there. And Lilia is too. And a bunch of other artists and musicians.” We are almost to Vic’s studio. One more block down the street, past a funeral home and a plastic surgery place. Both too much and too little time and space to bring that weekend crashing back into this car. “And so were you.”