“That’s all I can tell you.”
She shrugs, and I can’t help it. I run to her and let her put her arms around me in a tentative hug. I like her. I like her. She’s clearly one of those people who can pick through the wasted bits of another and find something they never knew they had.
But I’m scared. And, oh shit—did I just say that? I whispered it into Edie’s shoulder, because this is the Red Mangrove Estate and nothing I feel so strongly is going to stay inside my head for very long. I’m scared because Edie kind of wants me, and because I know I could take away the “kind of” and still be thinking a true thought. I’m scared because I don’t know how many and which of my feelings I could beam onto her without myself becoming dimmed. I put my lips on her cheek for the quickest of seconds, and she leans forward, then pulls back.
“Oh, girl,” she says, breathing on me. “I know, I know. But we don’t want to ruin this.”
“Ruin?” I say. I mean for it to be a question, but it flattens itself into a statement. As though I’m agreeing with her. Am I?
She untangles herself from me and lets me go.
The door to Lilia’s apartment on the second floor opens easily to reveal the homiest version of the front room I could imagine. She has decked the place out with a little couch, a floral easy chair, a floor lamp, and a coffee table. The lamp burns politely over the whole situation, annoyed that I took so long to get here.
And in the purple room, there are now two single beds. Angela is sleeping, her breaths slow and satisfied, because I suspect you probably sleep really well after you’ve had the best night of your life.
Me, I think I still have some work to do.
At some point, there is nothing to do but draw.
I begin in a dusty corner of the eighth-floor room by brushing away the cobweb tent that has formed and then wiping part of the surface clean. I take a sharpened drawing pencil I found in the kitchen and try to set myself free on this massive, imperfect canvas.
I doodle on the wall. This is the only sort of thing I can stand to assign the stupid word doodling to—crooked lines and asymmetrical ocean waves and drunken circles I draw when I am trying to make sure I’m not drawing anything. Ruin. Edie’s word keeps coming back to me, a parade of ruin-ruin-ruin tromping through my head, and it’s the last thing I want to do to anything here. Maybe I’ve found the way to actually ruin a piece of art within the Estate—to have absolutely no vision for what it should be.
Except that the lines of my doodle remind me of the Naples house, which was built in a “modern” style twenty years before I was born, and never aged well. When we lived there, I called it a cubist house out of love, but I haven’t thought of it in that way in a long time. I think Gris and Picasso and their pals wouldn’t have found anything particularly artistic about it.
Wait, no, that can’t be true. I have to believe, if I am ever going to finish anything, that there’s art to be had anywhere, whether it’s New York or Savannah or that ugly old house that was probably glad to see us go. And it’s a part of me more than almost any other place I can think of.
So onto the wall it goes: the house, or my memory of it. Its proportions are those of my elementary-school mind, when the living room was mostly ignored and the thick, crunchy grass of the front yard seemed to go on forever. It is now seven inches tall, tucked into this corner, its street lost to the cracked baseboard of this room. But it is here, and already I feel much less lonely.
I keep going. I draw Angela the way I remember seeing her the first time, tiny dark eyes opening within a bundle of pink blanket knitted by Abuela, and a wordless thought forming in my head that I would know this girl forever. I draw my parents, standing next to each other, not touching, stuck in different years—my dad looks like he did when I knew him best, when he would give in to my begging every middle-school morning to save me from the social jungle of the school bus, and my mom looks the way she did when she left the house a few weeks ago, pained expression and floppy hat and all.
There’s no color to any of this yet. That will come later. For now, the outlines are enough.
I clean out another corner and sketch the first girl I ever drew, maybe the first nonimaginary person I ever drew. It was this girl from summer camp, Mia Cortelyou, and I covered a whole drawing tablet with this girl’s face before I spoke a word to her. She was the first person I was fascinated with, the first person whose life I wanted to know, and since I thought I was never going to know it, I spent hours making it up with a set of colored pencils. Mia Cortelyou was the friendliest girl, the most adventurous girl, with a house full of ponies and puppies and exotic reptiles. And when she and I were the only ones from the old group who returned the next summer, and when she acknowledged this and said we should be friends, I was shocked. Did I want to know Mia, and her true history? I thought I did, but I resisted keeping in touch with her when the summer was over, so that I’d never be invited to her house, so that I’d never have to become part of her terribly normal life.
In this picture, there are two Mia Cortelyous: Mia the adventurer, riding bareback across a long landscape, and summer-camp Mia, looking shy and pretty in shorts and a T-shirt and old sneakers.
Mia was my first crush. That is as starkly obvious to me now as the gaping hole in the door, but to admit it in those words, to have her on the wall in front of me—these things are new.
And there’s so much wall space left.
This is going to be harder than I thought.
“Hello?”
Sun streams in through the single, uncovered window. Footsteps on the concrete. It’s Lilia.
“Hey.” I sit up and rub at my eyes. Lilia is dressed as though she has responsibilities somewhere other than the Estate today—she’s wearing black pants and a floral button-down shirt. The flowers remind me of one of Abuela’s scarves, and that’s enough to shock me out of my sleepy state.
“I didn’t mean to doze off here. I just wore myself out. And also, this rug is way too comfortable for a rug.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lilia says, walking around the perimeter of the room. “I wanted to make sure you were still around.”
“Yeah. Until tomorrow, when my mom comes home.”
She nods. “You’re doing a good job here.”
“It’s the start of something. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the color or with, you know, the whole rest of the room.” One of the penciled-in Mia Cortelyous seems to peek over at me. Not only will I have to revisit her, to give her color and depth, but I’ll have to do it again and again, with so many pieces of my life.
“It’s the start of something. Keep going.” Lilia smiles at me. “Feels like it’s going to be a good day.” She produces a set of keys from her pocket and hands them to me. “Take these. Keep them with you. In case you ever find one of these doors locked, you’ll now be able to get in whenever you need.”