My arms and hands and fingers chill at the thought.
If she doesn’t know yet what I’m drawing, she will soon. She’ll know it the second I put in the little semicircular window above the door, or when I start drawing the goat. And so I sit in this moment for a little longer, this shiny glass of perfect expression. The house has the physical presence and the feelings I wanted. The palm trees wave at the right angles, framing the house and ushering the viewer in. And God, do I ever want to go in. If I could step inside and see the living, breathing younger versions of my grandparents and my mom, even if only to watch them for a minute of their lives, I would do it.
I draw the goat. Lilia peers over my shoulder again.
“Mercedes, what are you doing?” she asks, her voice at once high and low, warm and cold.
I shiver. “I’m going to go downstairs and have a smoke.”
I place the sketchbook next to the canvas and start backing out of the room, watching the canvas, watching her.
Outside Lilia’s studio, I pull off my shoes and dangle them from my hands, and start running up the stairs. What I’m craving right now is far more complicated than a cigarette—it’s motion, it’s time, it’s a new space in my head for what Lilia showed me. Up to the fourth floor, the fifth. The seventh was where the concert was. Now, the eighth. I just want to see what’s here, but the door from the stairwell has other ideas. The handle doesn’t budge.
I head downstairs. The fifth floor. The door opens with no problem, and I put my shoes back on.
There’s a whisper of music coming from one of the doors on the right—that’s the one I’m looking for. The place that had the party. The music sounds like something that’d be playing in the background of a coffee shop, maybe another one of Vic’s bossa novas, but I’d have to get her to listen to it to be sure.
The door opens easily, and I’m relieved to see I’ll have good company. Edie the bartender is the only one here. She’s drying glasses by the sink.
“Are you open for business?” I sit on a stool and rest my head on my arms.
“For you, Mercedes Moreno? Sure. Make yourself comfortable.” She smiles and leans across the counter. “What can I get for ya today?”
“Whatever’s your favorite, I guess.”
“My favorite?” Edie says. “What if my favorite involves anise, and it turns out that licorice is your most hated flavor? You’ve gotta give me something to work with here.”
“Ah, okay. How about something with orange juice?”
“There you go,” she says. She’s not wearing her necktie tonight—just a red tank top and black pants.
I figure I will sit up straight and attempt normal chatter until I burst. “So do they pay you well here?”
Edie regards me knowingly. “Not too badly, considering the hours.”
“Yeah. I work at the deli in my mom’s office building in the summers. It opens at seven. And I have to be there at six thirty, ready to toast bagels and such. You think I’d be tired of orange juice after all that, but I’m not.”
“This is a version of a tequila sunrise,” she says, pouring something into a cocktail shaker. Our conversation takes a necessary break as she rattles it around in the shaker and then dumps it into a glass.
“Thanks.” I take a sip. It’s like orange juice poured through a loudspeaker. It’s amazing. “Am I allowed to ask you questions?”
“About the drink? Sure.”
“No.” I sink back down again. “I mean about everything else. About how the Estate knows what people need.”
“Ah. Well, give me a starting point, and I’ll see where I can fill in the gaps for you.”
“I just—I don’t even know. Tell me how you started coming here. Did you see the windows all lit up one night, too?”
“Oh! That’s a cool story. You’re going to think this is so blah, but I answered a job ad. It was almost two years ago. I was getting ready to go to college with my girlfriend to study photography—we’d both gotten accepted, we were going to live together, all that fun stuff. But, what do you know, she broke up with me a week before we were supposed to leave. I kind of snapped. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the same school as her, and I also couldn’t go back home, which is a long story. You bored yet?”
“Not at all.”
“Good.” Edie turns away, drinks from a bottle of water, and then whirls back to me and smiles. “So yeah, we’re at the low point of the story. No home, no school, no job. But I’d worked in a restaurant in high school, and I applied here, hoping they’d overlook my lack of bartending experience. ‘Barkeeper needed for onsite establishment at residential property. Photography experience preferred.’ That was how the ad read.” Edie raises an eyebrow at me. “It wasn’t really lying.”
I nod, and the amplified orange juice fills me with warmth.
“I think I’ll have one of those, too.” She starts mixing and pouring again, every gesture sleek and easy, like Vic when she dances, like Angela and the piano. “Anyway, Lilia wasn’t the one who hired me. It was this woman named Mary-Louise. She’s gone now, but she was the one who showed me the ropes, gave me a place to sleep, gave me a space to work on my photos. Pretty sweet deal, I have to say—Mary-Louise gave me a great new DSLR, and an old manual camera, and access to a darkroom.”
“And what did you have to do for her in return?”
“Hey now.” Edie looks over her shoulder at me. “I like my job. Didn’t you see me take a lot of pride in mixing that for you?” She shakes up her own drink and pours it out. “Besides this, I used to do some projects for Mary-Louise, but now I’m free to work on my own.”
“What happened to Mary-Louise?”
“She got tired. That’s how she explained it to me. She went to Colorado and she was going to start doing nature photography.”
“Because it’s pretty hard to take pictures of birds or whatever from inside an old building.”
“Hey, we’re not trapped here. I could go out right now and do a shoot down the beach. But it wouldn’t be my best work, you know?” She tries her drink and smiles. “I heard you’re a painter. So think about those times when you’re painting and it’s going well and you’re so into the work that six hours could pass and people could be yelling at you and none of that would even register. Because of your work. Because your work is so important. Think about scrubbing the edges off that time. Imagine that you never need to have those days when you’re putting off getting started on a painting. And then imagine that you never need to stop.”
The drink seeps into me, shooting warmth up and down my arms and legs.
“So, it’s like anything is possible here,” I say.