I step back. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean,” she says, “sometimes you look at a thing, to draw it or sculpt it or paint it, and it becomes more than just your subject. It compels you in some way. You want it, you need it. ?Entiendes?”
“Um, I guess so.”
Except I don’t think I do understand. I think that feeling she’s talking about is something I’ve wanted, but not something I’ve ever had. It’s easy to confuse a craving for wanting with the wanting itself.
But Lilia, with all her paintings in front of her, seems to know the feeling well.
“So when you saw the building lit up, what did you think?” she asks me, sounding hopeful.
“I mean, I thought it was pretty weird. I kept wondering about the people in there, and the people in the neighboring buildings. But I felt like no one was seeing the light except me.” I didn’t mean to tell her that last part, but there it is.
“Yeah,” Lilia says. “I know what you mean.”
“So how big is this series going to be?”
“Oh, just you wait.” She stands up straight, hands on hips, like she’s been waiting for me to ask her this question. “If things go as planned, it’ll be huge. It’ll come spilling out the windows. I’ll have to double my rent for all the space I’m taking up, and I won’t even care.”
It kind of kills me that she feels so strongly about a building.
“Wow,” I say.
“I mean,” Lilia says, “it’s okay if it didn’t inspire you. We all have our different subjects.”
Even my sandals are mottled with the remains of FP #1.
“Tell me if you want to paint together sometime,” Lilia says.
And she turns to go, leaving me to look at the red and gray skies, and everything I have to clean up.
Victoria texts me that her Juilliard audition has been confirmed—it’s three weeks away. Cool, amazing, great, awesome, I text back, at rhythmic intervals. She will make it: there will probably be an interview, during which she will talk about her worship of the queen of modern dance, Martha Graham, and she will scatter charming details about her many well-worn copies of Blood Memory, Martha’s autobiography, and how she and her parents sought out Martha’s childhood home on one of their leisurely yet educational summer vacations.
But none of that will even be necessary—the Juilliard people will know they want her for their school by the way she strides through the door and postures herself into a chair. They will see the streaks of music and joy and feeling left by her footsteps. They will say lovely, thoughtless things that will fall out of their mouths and crawl to the door. Her feet will turn out in the perfect way, and the Juilliard people will shove their smiles into the angle they make.
Ah, damn it. Juilliard. They’re not even good enough for her.
“She responded today,” Mom says. We’re on the phone after dinner. “Just once, for a half second. And no one saw it but me! I don’t even think the nurses believe me.”
I sit by the window of my bedroom, braiding the fringe at the bottom of my curtains, the way I did when I used to talk to Bill on the phone. “What did she do?”
“I touched her hand, and it moved. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to grab my hand or push it away. The nurses think I’ve been here too long and I’m making things up.”
“Did they tell you that?”
“No, no. I saw it their faces. They’ve started smiling at me more. Longer.”
“Maybe they’re getting used to you.”
The dogs are yapping, and Mom clunks around Abuela’s kitchen, and it’s so hard to imagine that apartment without Abuela in it. Who’s watering the flowers, who’s sitting on the big pink sofa? “I don’t think so, I don’t think so.” She takes in a deep, deep breath, as though she is sucking air all the way from Florida to San Juan. “Mercedes, when was the last time you talked to her?”
“I guess about five days before the stroke.”
“Did you tell her—did you—” She’s crying now. Shit. I hate hearing her cry. It’s long and loud and full of vowels, and sounds like she’s releasing something held inside for years. “Did you tell her that we love her and we are always thinking about her? Because I feel like I didn’t say it enough. I feel like it was one of those things I said at Christmas and on Papi’s birthday and no other time. Did you tell her?”
“Yes,” I say. Has she stopped crying yet?
“I didn’t tell you this. But I remember a couple weeks ago when you said you were sending her some of your pictures.”
“Not pictures,” I say. “A painting.” It was a little square of canvas that I had painted with sort of a representation of the colorful buildings in Old San Juan. It was sloppy in places, the paint too thick. But I liked it, because it reminded me of Abuela, and I was pretty sure Abuela would like it, because it would remind her of me.
“I’m sorry, mi vida.” She sniffles. “I didn’t send it. I took the envelope out of the mailbox. I couldn’t let her see it, if it was going to be anything like that food poisoning thing you have in your bedroom.”
That thing. That useless thing that isn’t in the house anymore, that isn’t anywhere. That I created, and that now has completely ceased to exist.
I am the god of my artwork. Unless, of course, my mother intercepts the US Fucking Mail.
“Well, where is it now?” I ask.
“At my office,” she sniffs. “Locked in my desk drawer.”
“Shit, Mom,” I whisper. “Just . . . shit.”
Angela finishes her evening practice with a note of finality that reminds me of the triumphant end of the Firing Squad album (track nine, “Always Something Left to Love,” with the winding refrain that makes you think it’s going to fade out—I hate songs that fade out—but then brings itself home), and then goes to her bedroom to do homework. I slip into the living room and sit on her makeshift piano bench, and I run my hands over the wood. Someone had loved this piano and polished its wood and kept it clean before it wound up on our lawn. I lean into it, rest my head on it, stare down its keys without touching them. Maybe it’ll yelp out a note, or guide me to play a song that’ll give me all the answers: about Victoria, about Abuela, about how to create something that’s more meaningful than a mood piece.
Thrum-bum-bum. The sound is messy and tired. It’s the sound of a girl who doesn’t know how to play music banging on an old piano. The sound of my continued trying and failing. I run my hands down the keys, and I swear they un-tune themselves as I go. My eyes fill with tears. I can’t play, I can’t paint, I can’t ever be Victoria’s girlfriend. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.