She’s dancing in this picture, and the best thing about it is that it’s a performance I’ve never seen. It’s something I’m creating for her in this moment. I like to imagine that it’s choreographed to Firing Squad’s “Always Something Left to Love,” and that I’m front and center in the audience. And she notices me, and breaks her concentration for half a second to meet my gaze and smile.
“Do you see this?” I suddenly say to Lilia, jabbing the opposite end of my brush next to painted-Victoria’s outstretched arms. “Do you see this? I love this girl. I love her.”
Lilia looks like she could cry. Good.
“I love her, and I brought her to this ridiculous room, and I think for a second she knew that I loved her. But then all of that was gone.”
“It’s not gone,” Lilia says, getting to her feet and shoving her hands in her bathrobe pockets. “You know exactly how it happened. You still have that beautiful memory, and you can relive it. You can even paint it on the wall, if you want.”
But painted-Victoria, even for being the best work I’ve ever done, isn’t nearly as luminous as Victoria when she was dancing with me here, when the room was red.
“I don’t want to paint it,” I tell Lilia. “I want it to be real.”
“Then tell her,” Lilia says. “Tell her again. See what happens. I’ll let you finish your work by yourself, okay?”
And she marches out of the room, bathrobe ties flying. The front door slams shut.
I run out of paint at exactly the right time.
There’s nothing more to add to this painting.
I hardly know what to do with myself. I haven’t finished and been satisfied with enough pieces to have any sort of ritual for this moment. So I just do what I always do when I’m done painting on the back porch, or when I end Mrs. Pagonis’s class in a normal state of mind—I go to the nearest sink to wash my hands and my painting supplies and put the brushes to sleep.
I’ve been working long enough that I’ve got layers of paint on my hands and wrists, some of it still sticky, some of it totally dry. I—how long have I been here? I race to the nearest window, the one in the living room that cowers beneath Lilia’s ceiling art, and outside everything looks the same as it did before. The Ford is down in the parking lot. It’s still raining. My sense of time is skewed—I feel like if Lilia came back right now and told me I’ve been painting five minutes, or five hours, I’d believe her either way.
I duck back into the bedroom to take a picture of the Victoria painting with my phone. My phone, which tells me it is now 5:41.
5:41. I blink, disbelieving.
That means Angela and Vic have been down there in the car, in the storm, for two hours.
Doors and halls and the stairs and more doors and the lobby. Stupid purple sandals, getting swallowed by the murky water gathered by the front entrance. The Ford is still the only car in the lot. I run to it, waving, tepid rain dripping down my chin and arms, and my shoes slapping the whole way.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” I fall into the driver’s seat, let the sandals thud to the floor. My feet are freezing and the rough carpet doesn’t dry or warm them one bit. “I didn’t mean to stay there for so long. Vic, you can totally yell at me if I make you late to dance.”
“There’s still plenty of time,” Vic says.
“Yeah, maybe if I speed the whole way there.”
“Hey, I have an extra hoodie if you want to dry off with it,” Angela says.
I turn around and meet her eyes, expecting the same girl who yelled at me at St. Armands Circle. But she’s not mad at all—she really wants to give me the damn hoodie, so I take it and rub at my hair while my sister looks at me, concerned.
“What were you doing in there?” she asks.
I take a deep breath. “I’ll show you.” I grab my phone from my back pocket, where it only got slightly wet. 3:42, it tells me, the numbers clean and white over the photo of Vic and me at the party.
“Hey, what’s the time on your phones?”
“Three forty-two,” Vic and Angela say in unison.
They don’t look tired or rumpled or like they were trying to call me and not getting through. They don’t look like they wore themselves out on Vic’s Broadway playlist and went wild and jumped around in the rain and then got back in the car to nap. Nope. They look like two girls who’ve been sitting in a car for about ten minutes.
I click over to the photos. The most recent one is of Tall Jon and me at his party on Saturday. I close out of them and go back. Nothing from today.
No pointe shoes or outstretched arms.
No evidence of the painting at all.
It’s still up there. I mean, of course it is, because Lilia herself approved of it. But here in the rest of the world, it doesn’t exist.
“Never mind,” I say as my cold feet drain the warmth from the rest of me. “We need to go.”
fifteen
AT LEAST WHEN I’m at home, I know the general rules of permanence of the things I create. I alternate between making enchiladas and sketching out a few more versions of the Dishwasher Lemur and his friends. A kind, trusting lemur with a mischievous side. An ornery lemur who is convinced he wants everyone to leave him alone, until the moment when everyone actually does. A lemur in the spirit of Abuela Dolores: elderly, a little stubborn, strong, and proud of the gray-white stripes in her otherwise black fur.
Hmm, do lemurs go gray?
Across the dining table, Vic is putting on a good show of making notes on some poems for AP English (by “The Idea of Order at Key West,” she has written, layers of disorder??? or order??? I don’t knoooow), but mostly she has not taken her eyes off me. I wish this was for some reason other than her thinking I’m ridiculous.
Angela is practicing on her own in the next room. Sort of. A chord here, a scale there, all of it sounding like she’s dusting the piano rather than playing it.
“How about a song?” I call to her.
“Eh,” comes the reply.
I go to her wearing oven mitts, reach over her shoulders, and plunk both hands down on the keys. Thrum. “Is that what you’re so scared of? A little noise? Well, if your esteemed teacher comes over now because of that, you can tell her I was making all that racket.”
Angela looks up at me, her cheeks and eyes red. Oh shit. I wipe at her cheek with the oven mitt from my right hand.
“You realize she hasn’t been here to help me in a while?” she says.
“I know.”
“I get that she was mad, but I thought we’d still have our lessons. What’s so wrong with me?”
“Nothing, I dunno.” I flop down on the couch. Beside me, the tissues Mom left behind stand guard on the end table. Oh, the things those tissues have seen. “I’m going to find out soon.”
She isn’t surprised that I’m going back. She just tosses the oven mitt back to me, as though I will need it for strength and courage, and she leans back against the piano. Doop doop dop, say the middle notes.
It keeps raining. I go out to the screened porch with my cigarettes and wait among the remains of the vanquished Food Poisonings, because I know if I stay long enough, she’ll be here.
She is. And she even has the pink floral dress on.
“Hey, Lilia, do you want a smoke?”