I’m awake and she’s still here.
The sunlight crashing through the windows tells me it’s midmorning already, that, somewhere across town, Angela has been up for hours and is imagining me hungover at Tall Jon’s apartment, that my mother is going to visiting hours at a hospital in San Juan, that Abuela Dolores is asleep in her persistent way.
Vic turns over and startles herself awake. She stares around at the room, at the light. And then at me. I try to smile. I know that she’s not one to confuse reality with dreams—she knows where we were last night. Surely the music is running through her head the same way it is through mine.
“Morning,” she says, and rolls onto her back.
“Morning,” I say. I check my phone—ten thirty a.m., and two generic where are you’s from Angela. “Can you hang around a little longer?”
“Sure.” She gives me a sleepy smile. “Before I left last night, I told Mom I was going to keep you company today.”
“We have to pick up Angela soon. I get the feeling she chose her friend’s house over the party only as the lesser of two evils.” I lean on my side. The sun catches me at that angle, hits my eyes and strips my sight for a minute. I’m here, but I’m nowhere. I’m with Vic, but without the prodding hum of the studio, I don’t know how to do anything but long for her. “Hey, Vic.”
“Yeah?” She looks at me like she’s expecting something, but she’s not sure what. It’s probably like when she’s at a Broadway show and waiting for that one last big revelation before the intermission.
I am above her, sort of. I can see what it’d be like to lie on top of her and kiss her. I can see it, I can see it. But it’s the fading image of a dream—if you catch it at the right time, you might live in it for a minute more. And if you don’t catch it, it’s just gone.
“We have to talk about it,” I say.
“What?”
“Last night. In the studio.”
Vic narrows her eyes. “The dance studio?”
“Come on. No. I mean the Red Mangrove Estate. The place where I’m working with Lilia. I mean the red and white room and everything that happened there.”
“But we couldn’t get in, dearie,” Vic says in her matter-of-fact way. Her pointe-shoe voice. “I would have loved to have seen it, but it’s kind of hard when the doors won’t open, you know?”
The sunlight is too much. I get out of bed and pull the curtains closed, but they’re so sheer that they don’t make much of a difference. I push them aside again, because I have to accept this day. The doors—they opened. The door to the right of the formerly automatic doors, the one that let us into the lobby, the one that trickily seems like it should be pushed rather than pulled. And then the doors in the stairwell, and of course the door to Lilia’s studio. I didn’t consider the physics of opening or not opening them, not with Victoria there. To say I didn’t open them—that we didn’t—is like saying I never lived in Florida, or I don’t have blood, or I don’t love her.
“I don’t understand,” I tell her. “We were there. We were. I painted some lemurs on the wall. We heard a bossa nova, and you were dancing, and then—”
Vic has no idea.
She gets out of bed and she’s still wearing the gray shorts and the T-shirt with the contorted ballerina, and her hair has that same humidity-tinged messiness to it as at the party last night, but she has no idea.
“What happened after the doors didn’t open?” I tug on one of the curtains as Vic heads into the bathroom to wash her face. I almost want to tell her not to, to leave each fleck of dust from the past twelve hours on her as long as she can.
“We came here,” she says as the water runs. And she recounts the whole sleepy drive with Firing Squad, and coming into the house in the dark and putting on her pajamas and crashing into bed.
She dries her face, and I go and stand next to her, and she’s kind of startled to see me when she drops the towel. Here we are again: Mercedes and Victoria, Mercy and Vic, dearie and all the pet names I’ve wondered if I would call her if she ever became my girlfriend. I consider her lips, and how, despite the insistence of this really happened, Victoria’s lips in Victoria’s reality did not touch my lips at all.
“I’m worried about you,” she says. “You weren’t drunk last night, were you?”
“Don’t ask me stuff like that.”
“Hey, sorry.” Vic squeezes my shoulder. “Last night was fun. I just feel like we’re starting to run out of weekends like this, you know? My audition’s coming up, and then there’s all the BS before graduation. I think we’re both getting our foundations thrown off, you know?”
I don’t know, not really. If anything, I have a fully new foundation, with ten floors of apartments on top of it. That foundation is as strong as ever, in the way it pulls me toward it, and the way it is pushing itself into my life. Clearly, the space within the walls of the building knows what happened. Lilia must know. And yet, the person who was right there, who touched those walls and those stairs and those floors, who spent several hours cloaked in the salty, musty air of the Estate, does not know.
“Yeah,” I say. “There’s a lot in my head to sort out.”
When Victoria has left the bathroom, I throw her face towel at the mirror. Thwap. The towel collapses onto my mom’s soap dish. I grab the soap and it snaps in two without a fight. I fling the soap dish at the tile floor, and the metallic clang it makes is finally satisfying. But now I need the towel again, for my own eyes and face.
I read something recently about stroke recovery, about how the rehabilitation process from a moderate-to-severe stroke (that’s what Abuela had) can involve the victim becoming highly suggestible. They will believe anything you tell them. They’ll believe two contradictory statements, one said right after the other. I know I am a ridiculous person, but I want to bestow this power on Victoria for five seconds, ten, twenty. Long enough for me to tell her what happened again, and for her to believe it, and for her to know, just for a moment longer.
Angela emerges from Hannah’s house looking dazed, and she heaves her backpack into the car as if it weighs two hundred pounds. As soon as she’s in the backseat, she leans against the window and closes her eyes.
“Didn’t sleep well?” Vic asks from the front seat, observing Angela with the same wary stare that she’s been directing at me all morning.
“I hate sleeping away from home,” comes the fuzzy reply.
“Did you have breakfast?” I ask.
“I don’t remember.”
“Screw this not remembering. Girls, we are going out for breakfast,” I announce. “Moreno family treat. And it’s gonna be amazing.”