The piano opens at the top, revealing a bunch of little pins and hammers that connect to the keys and their strings. Even the beauty of its pattern makes my chest ache. This is a work of art. This, too, can be destroyed.
I pull at one of the pins, bending it, and then another and another. Everything inside me tightens as I do this. I shouldn’t have touched it, but to have its music out of our lives, even temporarily, is exactly what I need. If I could break the strings and crack the keys, I would. If I could tip the entire wretched thing over, I would do that too.
“Mercy!”
Angela’s face is cracked. Pink. Something essential about her is torn apart.
“What?”
“What? You look at me with your hands in my piano and say, ‘What?’” She rushes over and clutches both ends of the instrument. “Stop touching it! Are you trying to break it?”
I take my hands out and tip the lid until it slams.
“I can’t believe you,” Angela says. She sits at the piano and glares at me while her hands move up and down the keys. My face burns at the sound. The sound, the sound: it’s perfect. Nothing has changed.
She’s still playing as I put on my purple sandals and grab a sweater and the keys to Mom’s car. She’s still playing as I stare at her from the front doorway and she doesn’t see me. She’s still playing as I stumble out into the yard, and I can think of only one place that has given me beauty and sense and comfort and light. Only one place to go.
Firing Squad (track seven, “The Getting Is Good”) pleads at me from the stereo, and I take the curve toward the gulf. If this is where Lilia gets her inspiration, then maybe there’s going to be something here for me, too. I’ve always resisted using things like beaches and sunsets as backdrops for my art, but maybe ignoring them in favor of food poisoning is what’s gotten me to this point.
The stretch of condo buildings comes into view. The normal ones first, with their dim orange lights burning in some of their windows and big sedans turning in and out of their parking lots. And then, yes—the building, mine and Lilia’s, pops up from behind one of the taller ones. It’s just as bright as it was the other night. My head hums like it did the morning that Angela played with Lilia for the first time, whirring with a pure sense of music, like I’m savoring the last beats of an amazing concert.
Or maybe not the last ones. Maybe this is the beginning instead.
A sign at the building’s driveway reads Red Mangrove Estate. I signal right and pull the car (my mom’s car) into the chipped parking lot. It’s the only one here.
Because I left the house in such a rush tonight, I don’t have any of my usual art stuff with me. I feel naked without my sketchbook and at least a couple of decent drawing pencils. The only thing in my tote bag is a verb conjugation worksheet from German class. I dig a pen out of the glove compartment and sketch the basic outlines of the building. There is something about this place that wants to be captured. (Immortalized is too grandiose, considering the fate of the two Food Poisonings.) In one way, it’s a hulking mess of natural resources built when Florida was trying to cram as many rich senior citizens as possible along the shoreline. In another way, I want people to know how the moonlight hits it, and how the waves sound beside it. And the building seems like it wants other people to know, too.
Did it make you want something? Lilia had asked.
I tuck my phone into my tote bag and my bag under my arm, and I leave the car and take a few steps toward the building. The light’s so bright I expect it to make a noise of its own, but the waves are still the loudest thing around. I’m closer to the beach than I’ve been in months, though there’s a thicket of weeds around the Red Mangrove Estate and the parking lot that I’d have to drag myself through to get down to the water.
But that’s not where I want to go.
I cross the parking lot. The windows’ light glints on my skin for the first time. I want—no, I need—to see inside, but a set of tall glass doors stands as a fortress to the building’s interior.
A terrible, mechanical squeak above me. One floor up, a window is opening.
“Hey, you made it.” Lilia pushes her face against the narrow space where she has wedged the window open. “Come on up to the second floor. The elevator’s broken. You’ll need to take the stairs.”
The doors aren’t locked? I want to ask her, but she slams the window shut.
The once-automatic center doors stay tight, but the regular door on the right pulls open. The lobby is quiet, but not silent—somewhere there’s a swish of air, as though the building is having its life breathed back into it. A lonely emergency light sears everything a dusty shade of yellow.
The doors to the elevator are open, but the actual moving box that would take me upstairs is stuck, suspended between the lobby and the second floor.
I used to have to go to my dad’s office on school holidays when I was little. I would bring a case of markers and draw on scrap paper pulled from Dad’s recycling bin. But as soon as he got up to go somewhere, I would escape. I would race to the stairwell and run up and down the stairs, stopping at each floor to poke my head out and see how the hallway on floor eight was different from the hallway on floor seven.
The stairs in this building are in almost the same place as the stairs in Dad’s old office tower in Naples. It’s hot in here and the walls seem to be sweating dust. If Dad were to find me here, now, he’d have the same reaction he did ten years ago: Mercedes, why do you keep doing this? I was never a good troublemaker—I was predictable, and I had no fear.
The door to the second floor swings open before I can grab the handle. Lilia, of course.
For someone who clearly didn’t care for Vic’s grand entrance the other night, she sure likes making them herself.
“Hey, Lilia.”
She’s still wearing the paint-splattered dress from earlier. Her hair is down and her face is smudged and dusty, as though she’s had to crawl here. She smiles at me—Frida Kahlo again.
“Well, you’re here. Do you want to get started?”
seven
“THIS IS YOUR studio?”
Lilia pushes a small brown chair toward the center of the room for me. “It’s a temporary space.”
“It’s very quiet,” I say. “My sister told me you had a commission.” My sister, my sister. I feel like, before I do anything else, I need to dig through the photos on my phone and find a picture of a grinning Angela to remind me that Lilia has done brilliant things for her, that Angela lives with me in a house owned by Rex, who rents to Lilia, and that Lilia’s space has a totally normal chair in it, waiting for me.
I sit.