I turn on Angela’s favorite Firing Squad song, the one with the pianos, and Vic sings along as I drive all of us through the city on this unreal day. “And as the hours go by, there’s always something left to love.”
Coffee all around, even for the historically noncaffeinated Victoria. She dumps milk into hers and takes a sip and then looks at me cross-eyed over the top of the mug. Angela snickers, dumps three packets of sugar into her coffee, takes a huge gulp, and then holds the mug on top of her head.
“I’m not taking part in this piece of performance art.” My hands shake as I fix my coffee with normal amounts of sugar and milk. Anything I say or do could reveal how wrecked I am. “After my attempts at food-related art, I think I’m gonna sit back and enjoy my coffee for being coffee.”
“Aw, come on, Mercy,” Angela says. “You’re not going to get away with looking like the normal one here.”
“Ahem.” I put down my spoon, move my shoulders from side to side, and pick up from where Firing Squad left off in the car:
“The time is trickling low
The sun is bleeding slow
But since you’re here with me
There’s always something left to love.”
At first, I’m singing only to Vic and Angela, but then they join in and there’s too much energy to be contained by our table alone. It has to go somewhere else, to catch in the restaurant’s ceiling fans and be whisked out to everyone else brunching here this late morning, to cling to the windows as condensation, to seep out to the parking lot. Maybe the people driving by will feel it, even for a moment, and know that we are a part of something, a certain vibration, a home for all the parts of us that do not fit anywhere else. The lonely and bright and discolored and weary and sad. The satisfied and the terrified and the longing.
Every little sound unsettles me tonight, from my and Angela’s jeans clunking around in the dryer, to a pickup truck barreling down our street, to Angela tapping a mechanical pencil against her math book. Lilia has never come bursting into our half of the house before, but I’m building up a scenario in my head where she could, where she rips through the screened porch and tells me how I’ve fucked things up at the studio and how she knows I went through her suitcase and how she’s going to take something important from me.
The dryer buzzes. The jeans clunk one last time.
Angela and I sit on opposite ends of the couch, feet up, laps full of things we are supposed to be doing. The pull to go to the Estate isn’t around at all—I think the walls and the paint and I need to rest after last night. I keep glancing at my phone and wondering if I should send Victoria the smallest of messages: It really happened.
“I tried to go last night,” Angela says from behind her geometry book.
“Shit, Angela.” I throw my paperback copy of Slaughterhouse-Five in her direction. It bounces off the math book and lands on my sister’s feet. “Why would you think that’s a good idea?”
“I didn’t think it was a good idea?”
“Okay, forgive me, that was poorly worded. Why did you think that was something you could do?”
“I felt like I had to be there,” she says. “And I felt like, if you weren’t there, if I could just find Lilia there, then it’d be okay. You know?”
“No, I really don’t. Lilia said you weren’t invited, and clearly I messed something up by taking you there the other night. And beyond that, I was there last night, so you could have royally screwed up some shit. But I’m guessing you didn’t make it?”
“No.” Angela closes the book and sets it aside without looking in my direction. “I was able to get out of Hannah’s house and down her street, but then I realized I had no idea which way to turn from there.”
“And you didn’t want to end up walking alone down Tamiami and across the bridge at three in the morning? Yeah, a sound decision, I’d say.”
“I can’t explain it,” she says. “It’s like the building was calling me, and I feel like I let it down by not being able to make it there.”
“Well, I was there, and the floors never shook.”
“Did you go to the party?”
“Yep, but it was boring, so we left early.”
Angela knows who the “we” is. She wants to know what happened when I brought Vic, but she’s not asking, and I’m glad.
It’s midnight and Angela slips into our mother’s room and, without a word, slumps onto the bed and nudges me. I guess she wants to be sure that I’m not leaving tonight. I give her some room and an extra pillow, because she can only fall asleep with her head propped up. Mom has said she’s been like that since she was a baby.
“What if Abuela dies?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, even though, technically, I do. I mean, we have the plan: we will tell our dad and he will help us make the arrangements to meet our mom in San Juan, and there will be a funeral and we will have to be kind and familial to our uncles, who have pretty much never extended the same behavior to us. Abuela has never been shy about talking about her last wishes, to the point that we all know exactly which songs she wants played at her funeral, and how I’m supposed to read something from Romans (“And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us”), and Angela is supposed to read an Emily Dickinson poem, both in English and en espa?ol.
So, yeah. We know this.
But also, we don’t. I don’t know when we will start crying. Will it be the moment we hear the news, or will it be later, like standing in the security line at the airport, my shoes off and my backpack churning down the conveyor belt and tears running down my face? Who will cry the most? Will my uncles cry at all? I will want to take care of her little dogs, but I don’t know how you’re supposed to transport dogs from an island to a peninsula. I don’t know how I will feel at the funeral, and the burial. I hate crying in front of my family, especially Angela, because I don’t ever want her to think that I am not okay, but I will do it, this once, for Abuela.
I don’t know how I will feel a week, or twenty days, or three hundred days later. And I for sure do not know how to comfort my mother, or if I should even try.
This is why I’d rather paint at night.
fourteen
I COULD TELL her about the kiss.
It’ll be at her house, the two of us sitting by the pool, the sun streaming in and dancing off the water. Dance. Shit. The Juilliard audition has to be kept in mind—should I, as she put it, throw off her foundation before the audition, or after it?
I tap my paintbrush against its palette in a bossa nova rhythm. When Tall Jon gets into his amateur music critic mode, sometimes he refers to a beat as a tattoo. I like that. But Gretchen and Rider clearly do not find anything inspiring about what I’m doing. Well, fine. Back to my absentminded work on this week’s assignment, which is to create a piece about an early memory.