“Mercedes. He’s a policeman. And he loves her, too.”
“If you don’t want to stay there, then I’ll come down.”
“Mija, please.”
“I will. Angela and me both. You can come home—we’ll just trade places.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not. She needs someone there. Imagine what would happen if she woke up tomorrow and there was no one there to help her get back home.”
“I’m sure I’ll stay through this weekend.”
“You didn’t even know it was the weekend.”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, mijita.”
Angela stares at me from the doorway. I suppose it’s a good thing that one of us is frightened to talk to Mom like that and the other isn’t. She looks mad at me, but what was I supposed to do, say mm-hmm a lot and shoot pointless smiles at the phone? Say, Sure, Mom, come on back, and we’ll meet you with flowers at the airport? Damn it, no. Between Angela and me, there’s one perfect person: this fabulous Renaissance girl who paints and plays piano and speaks with kind confidence to everyone. She arrives fashionably late to parties and then leaves tantalizingly early, as though she’s got somewhere more important to be, but she’s really going home to finish her precalc homework. Perhaps she manages to carry on two best-friendships without anyone getting jealous. She speaks elegant Spanish, grammatically correct from subjunctive to swear words. She’s vice president of the National Honor Society. She only skips school for socially useful events like beach bonfires. She knows the mathematics of risks to be taken: a Coke and rum, plus or minus an herbal cigarette.
Angela waits for me to bring her phone back. I press it into her hand and rub her mess of hair as I leave the room. “I’m going to have some orange juice,” I tell her.
A knock on the door. It’s the same one Angela uses to signal Lilia.
“I’ll get it!” Angela calls.
It’s almost noon, but neither of us have bothered to get out of our pajamas, and even though Lilia’s assured in her floral-based fashion, I still don’t want her to see me looking like I just rolled out of bed. Like I was tired from running down stairs and like I told Angela to come sleep in Mom’s bed next to me and like I woke up at two thirty thinking about how we shouldn’t have gone there and like I sat in the kitchen for a while and couldn’t force my damn imagination to abandon a version of Victoria’s Juilliard audition where they say yes to her and whisk her away right then and there. Like that.
In my bedroom, I do homework that doesn’t require a sketch pad. Thirty pages of Slaughterhouse-Five for English (so it goes), and an in-depth look at the endocrine system for human anatomy. I sketch it in the margins of my notebook with a plain old mechanical pencil, and it comes out looking like one part female anatomy, one part Florida highway map, and one part drunken hippo. Blast. Angela’s current song resounds through the house, stops, and then rushes down the hallway again. It is not a song I know, and she’s playing the same part over and over, and it’s like the song is trying to trap me in. The song and the piano. Not Angela.
Silence.
“I wanted to get closer to the music was all,” Angela says.
More silence.
“I wasn’t trying to cause any trouble.”
Her voice is barely there. Lilia’s voice. She’s whispering, but it cuts. I can’t let Angela take this verbal beating. I move toward the living room.
“I told your sister that you would need to be invited before you could come to the studio.” Lilia standing is barely taller than Angela sitting in her usual piano chair, but she holds her head as though she towers over Angela.
“We didn’t go into your studio.” I sound loud and brash compared to the two of them. I sound more like the piano than anything else in the room. “Okay? I didn’t even touch the doorknob. We were in the hallway on the fifth floor and the second floor. But we didn’t go inside a single room.”
Lilia, in her light blue dress again, stares me down. “That doesn’t matter. You were there, weren’t you?”
“Well, I took Angela there myself, so blame me if you have to blame someone. I’m the one with the car.”
“She could have stayed in the car.”
“That’s not the point. She played the Beethoven piece perfectly, Lilia. I thought she was good enough to come inside.”
Angela looks like she wants nothing more than to hide under her bed and never see Lilia again. She also seems like she could stand not to see me for a couple of days. Lilia considers the both of us, seeming lost, as though she is stuck listening to repetitions of a song she’s never heard.
“You could have caused so much damage with what you did,” she tells me. “I trusted you with that space.”
“I know, I know.”
“You don’t!”
Her voice slices the room. It is gravelly at that level. High and low at the same time. I hate it. I want Rex to come running in to see what’s going on. I want to throw a pillow at her to make her shut up and go away. I want to crawl under the piano until she leaves.
“Okay, I’m sorry. Do you want us both to stay away?”
My chest aches as I say this.
It is not what I want.
I want to go back.
But I want her to want me back.
“No,” she says, taking a few steps backward and leaning, almost collapsing, against the door to the rarely used coat closet. “But there’s a moment when it’s right to arrive there. And that means there’s a whole lot of moments when it’s not right to be there. You don’t want to ruin your work, do you, Mercedes?”
Lilia pushes her long hair out of her face. I think of the house drawing, and how she knows us. She knows things about the Puerto Rican side of our family that I’m not sure I’m okay with her knowing. It’s as though she’s sifted through our history the same way I rummaged through her suitcase.
“Of course not,” I tell her.
“There’s a plan.” She says this quietly, looking out the living room window instead of at me or Angela. “For the studio. For all of us to be able to work there. It’s more, I don’t know, mechanical than I would like. But it’s there. Can you come back and finish your work, Mercedes?”
“Yeah. I’ll finish it.”
“Okay.” She looks over at me. Her face is drained of color. “Oh, and since I never told you the other night, my favorite artist is Calder.”
She has no other words for Angela, nothing but a glance back at her as she heads for the door. I almost want to run and try to beat her to Rex’s, so I can steal her safe place the way she’s stolen ours.
The one good thing about all this is that my work and my space are still safe at the Estate. It’s not just that the work needs to be finished—it’s that she needs me to finish it. The idea takes hold in me and whirls around.
Angela slumps against the piano. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s my fault,” I tell her. “Seriously, don’t think about any of this for a while.”
“Who’s Calder?” Angela asks.