“Lilia’s always saying weird things like that.” Angela taps out a melody on the far right side of the keyboard. It sounds like the birds that wake me up in the morning in the summer.
“I’m confident in you, Ange. That’s what I’m trying to say. Let me try to find a recording for you.”
Angela plays pieces of songs while I do a search for Beethoven on my phone. Her playing reminds me of the way the music changed at the Estate last night, from long songs to broken experiments, and how, just like Angela’s music, it always sounded good. Mrs. Pagonis told me last year that Food Poisoning #1 seemed “so inspired,” and at the time I mentally rolled my eyes. Well, of course it had to be inspired by something, or it wouldn’t exist. But there’s another level of inspiration, I think.
Angela’s back tenses as she plays.
Anyway. Beethoven. I’d forgotten that he was deaf when he composed a number of his pieces, and even when he performed his Ninth Symphony. I pull up a video of a woman playing the Moonlight Sonata and show it to Angela.
She nods along. She grabs the phone and puts the tiny speaker up to her ear and she sweats beneath her too-long bangs and she lays a hand on the piano and taps out a few notes. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay, let me try.”
It seems like a private moment between her and the piano, as weird as that is. I duck into the kitchen to get her—and me—some water. In the other room, Angela fumbles with the melody. Stops and starts. Maybe this was a bad idea. I should leave this stuff to the actual piano teacher. I load some silverware into the dishwasher, some of them right side up and some upside down, because that’s one of the ways to call for the Dishwasher Lemur. What would the Mercedes and Angela who invented the Dishwasher Lemur think of us now? Probably that we were screwing up this amazing opportunity to be parent free for a couple of weeks, wasting it on arguments and the pursuit of classical music. We should be inviting all our friends (I mean, the collective seven friends we actually like) over for dancing and movies and junk food.
But.
In the living room, the song comes together. Really, that’s what it sounds like—all the notes meeting one another and having the fantastic party that the alternate-reality Angela and I are meant to be having.
She flies through the song, up and down the keyboard. I have no vocabulary for what she’s doing, so all I can do is watch her. How she’s more athletic playing the piano than she ever was at tennis camp. How she’s breathing hard and ragged, but not in a way that worries me. How I really need to take scissors to her bangs, or make sure we have the money this week for a haircut. How she’s taken to this piano the same way she learned to ride a bike: one day she was barely keeping her feet on the pedals as I held on to her, and the next she was off like a shot down the sidewalk.
Our water glasses sweat in my hands.
Angela finishes the song with a heavy, low note. And then she’s still. I sneak around her—her eyes are closed, her cheeks are pink—and put one of the water glasses on the top of the piano.
“No!” she shouts.
“Whoa! Okay, then.” I take the glass back.
“It might damage the wood,” she says. “That can’t happen. I need this piano.”
“Sorry,” I say. “That was amazing, though. You picked up the song in, like, five minutes.”
“Yeah.” She looks down at her hands.
“And, seriously, please have some water.”
She does.
A single knock on the door. Rex says, “You girls okay in there? I heard someone yelling.”
I glance at Angela. Are we okay? She shrugs. And I invite ourselves over for dinner.
Everything seems more possible in Rex’s half of the house. Lilia isn’t here. Rex and Angela are in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on a casserole. Here in the living room (which is positively expansive without a piano in it), the TV is on, switched to one of those channels that plays the same three or four twenty-year-old movies on a loop. I think this is what my parents watched, in separate rooms, when they were going through the divorce. Except this one time that I caught them sitting together on the couch, their hands almost touching, watching Jurassic Park. It was two days before the movers came. I don’t think they were sad about not being married anymore—I think they were sad that they were probably never going to watch TV together again.
“Is Lilia around a lot?” I wander into the kitchen and ask this, fake-casual in a way that Rex probably won’t pick up on. “I feel like I only see her when she’s doing Angela’s piano lessons.”
“Oh, you know, she’s in and out,” Rex says. He sprinkles cheese on the top of the casserole. “We have different schedules. She’s a night owl, I’m an early bird. It’s a good arrangement.”
“Have you ever talked to her about her work?” I ask. Nothing’s different about the walls (and ceilings) I can see from here—no murals or Goya cans added to Rex’s place.
“Not really. I asked about it once, but she said it was in transition.”
“Like, she’s changing her style or something?”
“You got me. You’re the other artist here,” Rex says. “I think she’s just private about it. Which is fine. I understand being a lone wolf.” He scratches his beard, and Angela snickers. “I thought the two of you would find that common artist bond, Mercedes.”
“Yeah. I’m trying.”
While Rex and Angela serve the plates, I duck out to the bathroom. I take the one in the hallway between the smaller bedrooms, and use the opportunity of the loudly flushing toilet to open the door to Lilia’s bedroom.
The whole Estate series greets me. It’s more extensive than Monet and his precious haystacks and bridges. It’s the Estate over and over, against color after color of sky, in daytime and nighttime, some versions more slanted and abstract than others. The paintings lean against the wall, or are propped up on the dark brown antique hulks of furniture that sit awkwardly in the Florida-colored room. For as much as Lilia said the paintings were her way to escape, they seem more like a trap to me than anything else. They take over the room—the only clue that a human occasionally lives here is the small suitcase on the floor.
It’s red, and made of worn-out leather. A pink dress spills from one side. Lilia is living out of a suitcase.
I take a few tiptoed steps forward, as though any larger movement would set off some sort of alarm. The suitcase is zipped halfway, but I hold it tight and open it tooth by tooth. I’m a nosy person, and I’ve always justified it by telling myself that an artist needs to know other people’s secrets, and needs to be able to twist them enough to use them as material. But this—going into Lilia’s life feels so wrong, but so necessary.
Three floral dresses on top. Well, yeah. If anything, I expected more.
Sandals made of sturdy leather. A beautiful headband. Plain button-down shirts and some pants and even a pair of jeans.