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 watching 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.”