“In a few of them, maybe,” Lilia says. “But definitely not all. We’ve got people who stick around for a while, and people who come and go.”
I keep walking. My purple sandals kick up dust as I reach the window at the end of the hall, as far from the exit as I can get. “Lilia!” My voice echoes. It feels good to disturb things here, if only for a second. “Do you know this place, like, bends or erases time? Is that part of what it needs? Because that was really a mindfuck the other day.”
She sort of laughs as I walk back toward her. “Yeah. It’ll do a lot of things to keep inside what needs to be kept inside.” She runs her hand over a dingy green door. “Let’s look in here for a minute. It might be a little . . . I don’t know. Disturbing.”
Lilia opens the door for me and flips on a light as we step inside. Instantly, I feel like I’ve gone back in time—the living room and kitchen are in the same places as in Lilia’s (and my) studio, but they’re still the classic pink, beige, and white, and the carpet looks so damned pink and fluffy that I almost want to lie down and take a nap on it. It’s like no one has touched this place since before I was born.
“Down the hall,” Lilia says. “Try the first room on the left.”
I grasp the cold silver doorknob and turn it.
I swear it’s ten degrees colder inside the bedroom than outside it. The walls are all a deep gray, and the carpet has been pulled up, though a few bits of pink remain. Stuck to the walls are the torn pieces of photos: school pictures, family pictures, and I think someone’s wedding portrait. Black paper or fabric covers the ceiling, and coming from somewhere, maybe the closet, there’s a recording, playing on a loop, of someone whispering.
My head feels like it weighs a thousand pounds, and I can barely stand. I take a step back and brace myself with a hand on Lilia’s shoulder.
“I need to get out of here,” I say.
“I know. Come on.” Lilia takes my wrist and leads me out.
“God.” I flop down onto the pink carpet of the living room. It really is as soft and wonderful as I thought it would be. “Who did that?”
“Her name was Anna,” Lilia says. “She was here a long time ago, probably years before I came here.”
“And she’s gone now? What happened to her? Is she okay?”
Lilia sits in front of the door to the balcony. The vertical blinds, pink and plastic, clatter against one another. “I’m sure she’s fine. She unburdened herself here. And we’ve kept her art safe all this time.”
“Can I do that?” I say it to the carpet at first. “I want to have my own space to do, you know, what Anna did. But mine won’t be as scary, I swear.”
“You don’t know that yet. Yours could be scarier, in its own way,” Lilia says. “And it’s hard work.”
“I’m sure it is, but I think I can do it.”
Lilia crosses the room and opens the front door. “Maybe. First, let’s work on something together.”
Back in the Land of Ceiling Recyclables, Lilia takes out a bunch of paint and a rectangular canvas. (A big one—twenty by twenty-four. I hardly ever dare to get those. There’s so much space to mess up.) We sit on the living room floor, beside the canvas. On her hands are bits of glue, the kind that’s satisfying to peel off.
“Do you speak Spanish?” Lilia says.
“Ugh, Lilia, these things you ask me.” I smack my palm against one of her strange wall murals. “My Spanish is terrible. I used to take it in school, but I got tired of being the Puerto Rican girl who couldn’t get an A, and so I switched to German in sophomore year. My mom is still pissed about it, and my German grades aren’t any better.”
“There you are,” Lilia says. “A secret.”
“Not really,” I say, though maybe she’s right.
“I express myself better in Spanish, I think,” Lilia says. “I wanted to tell you something.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Uh-huh.” With one pink-socked foot, she nudges at a can on the floor, one that once held chicken broth. “I think I might be leaving here.”
“Why?”
“I’ve had a sense of dread. You know? Every time I come here, I keep thinking it’s going to be the last time. I’m waiting for the day the door doesn’t open for me anymore.” She clenches her jaw and hurls a paintbrush across the room. It lands with a sad, quiet clatter in the kitchen. “I’ve been trying to do whatever it takes to stay, but I don’t know if it’ll work. I don’t know, I don’t know.” She looks over at me. “You saw my terrible paintings at Rex’s house. I might be stuck making those forever.”
“They weren’t terrible,” is all I can think to say.
“Hmm, maybe not,” Lilia says. “Anyway, you’re here now. Let’s get to work.”
“Sure.” But I’m terrified. I don’t know what time it even is, and since time doesn’t seem to matter much here, I wonder if I could go back to the Firing Squad show and live in it for a few hours. But Lilia’s face is pleading, and I’d rather do art than try to bend time. I pick up a drawing pencil.
“What do you see when you close your eyes?” Lilia asks.
Muted colors. Orange and yellow and red dancing behind a black curtain. Hazy lines of light, like the projection that appeared and directed me toward the secret painting. And then—an image. Abuela asleep in her hospital bed.
But the thought of painting her in that state makes my chest ache, as does the thought of even telling Lilia that this is the image in my head. I know so little about her—why do I have to start unburdening myself in front of her? Why do I have to prove to her that I can do it?
I open my eyes. Lilia is looking off toward the window. She wears no makeup, has long eyelashes and a new-looking zit on her chin. “Let me guess,” I say. “If we finish this, I’ll never be able to take it to school to enter it in our countywide art show.”
“That’s true.” She hands me a sketchbook.
The idea of spending hours on a painting of Abuela in a coma is just—I don’t think I can do it. I shut my eyes again, will another image to appear. The house: Mom’s house, Abuela’s house. The one Lilia drew. If there’s anything burdening me that’s not related to Abuela’s coma or Vic or my art, it’s that picture.
I steady the pencil, start drawing the outline.
“So this is going to be good, I bet,” I tell Lilia.
“It is.” She looks over my shoulder as I position the roof and then the windows.
“Better than anything I could create in art class, huh?”
“It’ll be exactly what we need here.”
“But it’s still me, right? It’s not, like, the spirit of you working through me or something creepy like that? I seriously need to know.”
“It’s the best version of you,” she says.