“Green carpet,” Rider says to me, pointing at his sketch pad. I guess I’ve been staring. “The absolute first thing I can remember.”
My earliest memory is of my mom telling me not to climb the ladder to the slide at the big playground in Naples, and of me doing it anyway, and getting to the top, but then being too afraid to attempt the slide.
I remember her yelling my name over and over. Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes! Mercedes, no!
It’s so easy to say what you need to say—to yell it, even—when it’s that crucial.
It should be easy to tell Victoria.
By the pool. Or at my house, whispering it to her in the kitchen while Angela pounds on the piano. Maybe even during lunch this afternoon by the Dead Guy. In any of these places, the words will be the same: I kissed you, Victoria. And you kissed me back. And it was perfect.
But it was perfect because the Estate made it perfect.
Can we ever get back there?
It’s possible that telling her could screw everything up, that the memory was taken from her for a good reason. I spent so long planning to never say a word, and now the Estate has worked it out for that to be reality again. Maybe I shouldn’t disturb that.
Rider finishes another dizzying corner of his green carpet sketch. I drop my paintbrush and work on a rough pencil sketch of the slide’s ladder. I want the focus of the picture to be the insistence of my mother’s words. The viewers should have a sense of being shouted at to run away from the picture, but—I hope—a couple of them will make the choice to stick around and climb the ladder.
How do I accomplish this?
The ladder looks disproportional and weird. I start an outline of my mom on the left side of the paper, but no, it’s not the physical presence of Mom that stuck with me, it’s the sound of her.
Maybe there is a cloud of sound coming from that side of the picture, a distracting smoke bomb of Mom’s favorite shade of blue.
Maybe Mom’s voice comes through in a barrage of M shapes.
Maybe this idea won’t work at all. The viewer could sense that something’s wrong by the mixed-up proportions of everything else in the painting, and the skewedness of it could be the distraction.
All of these things.
None of these things.
Rider makes his way through the green carpet, and Gretchen draws a close-up of a dog’s face, and here I am with half of a messed-up ladder. I wish they could have seen me painting those lemurs the other night, or discovering the secret painting. I wish they could know. Where is the moment where it becomes easy and beautiful and mystical? Where are those moments I remember when I was only a few years older than the Mercedes who climbed the ladder, the afternoons of wearing down colored pencils and crayons, of showing off the thick stain of marker on the side of my left hand, of preparing a new box of watercolors and watching the first drops seep into each little oval of paint. And it’s not even that I didn’t appreciate those things when I was a kid—I totally did. There’s something so true and solid about being a seven-year-old in paint up to your elbows and thinking, This is the best thing ever! Especially when you see your parents going off to work and then coming home and arguing. That’s enough to help you confirm it: Yes, this really is the best thing ever.
I want to be there again.
But the possibilities—for Victoria, for me, for this useless ladder picture—are crowding me out.
There’s always something satisfying about ripping a piece of paper off a spiral binding.
I fold the paper, rip it in two, keep ripping, keep multiplying, letting the pieces fan out in front of me on the table. I should tell her, I shouldn’t tell her, I could, I couldn’t, I can’t.
Rider and Gretchen are staring at me.
“I can’t do this,” I tell them.
She’s at the Dead Guy.
Even though it’s threatening to rain and no one else is outside today, she’s there. Because that’s what we agreed on this morning. She moves to the edge of Tim Gelpy’s marble bench to let me sit next to her, all the while balancing a bag of baby carrots on one knee and a tiny cup of ranch dressing on the other. She is totally getting into Juilliard. I start in on my fried chicken sandwich.
“Are you okay?” she says after a while.
We turn toward each other at the same time. She has the front of her hair pulled back with barrettes, and she’s wearing a navy dress with the gold bracelets I gave her for her birthday. It’s her, but it’s not her. It’s a version of her that doesn’t know all the wonderful things about a bossa nova. It’s a version of her that never watched me paint in a moment when I felt I could do no wrong. There’s this crack—no, at this point, it’s a damned canyon—between my reality and hers, and I don’t know how long I can keep talking across it before we both fall in.
“Vic, good God,” I say. “Is anything okay? Abuela’s still in the hospital, and she might never come out of there alive. I’m going to hear back from my damned colleges soon. I’m tired of cooking and doing laundry and getting the side-eye from Angela. I miss my mom. I miss feeling like I was a decent artist. I miss everything.”
If nothing else, I’m good at making a carefully worded outburst.
Not that I have Vic particularly fooled. She waits a minute, probably to see if I’m going to mention the studio I insisted that she visited.
“Take a deep breath.” Vic dips a carrot stick in a dangerous amount of ranch dressing. “Let’s talk about infinite possibilities. Name a place.”
“Right here.” I smack my hand against the corner of the bench.
“Have we seriously never done a Dead Guy–themed edition of ‘How Many People?’”
“I don’t think so.”
“Wow! This should be good, then.” Victoria considers for a minute. “Obvious one. How many people before us have called Tim Gelpy the Dead Guy?”
“How many people before us have called Tim Gelpy the Dead Guy and have defaced his bench out of a fear of their own mortality?”
“You’re weird, dearie. Okay, how many Dead Guy–naming, mortality-fearing, bench-defacing people have eventually cried over their guilt for screwing with the Dead Guy’s memorial bench?”
“All of them,” I say. “Definitely all of them.”
Angela and Vic find each other at the front of the school and run to the car together under Vic’s polka-dotted umbrella. They both look so themselves today, like no one would ever mistake them for being anything other than an aspiring Juilliard dropout and a piano player with Sonia Sotomayor bedroom decor.
I got here to the Ford as soon as I could after last period, to cower in the driver’s seat and be sure that I’m feeling it again. Yes. It’s back. It started in English class and stayed through trigonometry. The insides of my fingers were itching. The veins in my legs were throbbing. This was stronger than it had ever been, and it was clear where I needed to go, as soon as I could.
There’s no way I can drop them off and then come back. There’s no way.