The Estate is silent and I feel like it has been waiting for me. Maybe. There’s nothing about my new studio that makes the work easy. It’s all dust and concrete and terrible lighting, with Lilia’s rug being the one soft, quiet island in the middle of all the chaos I both inherited and created. I’m on my own now. The nonerasable pencils taunt me, to the point that I can’t bring myself to pick one up today. Fine, if they want to be that way, then I’ll deal with the permanence of what I’m creating, and I’ll start painting inside the outlines I already have. I dig through the kitchen in the new studio and find enough paint to help me get started. Acrylics—not my favorite, but they’ll do.
I remember my first paint set. It was the Crayola watercolors in a box, which is probably everyone’s first paint set. And it wasn’t a gift or anything—I picked up the set when Mom and I were out shopping at Target, and I stuck it on the bottom rack of the cart, where people usually put their dog food and diapers. I figured I would tell Mom about it when we got to the checkout, and at that point she’d wind up buying the paints for me rather than going through the whole mess of telling me no and putting them back. Except when we got to the front, when I was supposed to put this plan into action, I forgot, and the checkout guy wasn’t looking for stray watercolors at the bottom of the cart, and so they went unnoticed. I was six years old, and a paint thief.
If I was going to be coexisting with these stolen paints, I figured I should use them, and use them well. I set myself up with the paints, and a cup of water, and a stack of paper from the recycling box, and I painted and painted, creating frightening new colors and eroding holes into each little thumbnail of paint in the box. It was freeing—a mess of guilt and creativity and dirty water. The pictures weren’t anything interesting, but the watercolors were gone before I got into trouble, and before I knew how to stop myself.
Painting my new studio is like that. It’s easier not to stop.
It’s not finished yet, but so much is here. My life, surrounding me in brilliant colors on the wall. And for everything I have accomplished here, this self-portrait still doesn’t really feel like me. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done, the same way the Abuela and Victoria portraits were once the best things I’ve ever done, but there’s something dishonest about it, in the way it only captures my best self.
I flop down onto the concrete. My jeans are dusty, my arms are sore. It is two thirty in the afternoon, maybe. Or it could be later or earlier, if the Estate decides it. I need to head back to school soon to pick up Angela, but I have time to do a few more things here.
First things first. I put a wide streak of black across several of the parts of the self-portrait. The house in Naples. My first day of middle school. A scene with my dad and me in his old Jeep, and me smiling as we listen to the Rolling Stones’ “Shattered” for probably the eighth time in a row.
Ah, ridiculous “Shattered.” I really had myself convinced that I liked that song.
The black streak is thick and shiny, like the shell of a beetle. It’s certainly not the greatest thing I’ve ever painted, but it might be the most satisfying. I put the brushes to sleep in the dusty kitchen of the new studio and walk out, hoping the door locks behind me.
Several floors down, Lilia isn’t in her studio, but it’s clear that she’s been here recently. Wet paintbrushes rest on the side of the sink. Empty glue bottles litter the countertops. She has been working hard, and it shows: the ceiling is nearly covered with recyclables now. But the other canvases, the abstract paintings I noticed the first time I came, are gone.
I walk down the hall and poke my head into the purple room. It’s nearly the same as it was over the weekend, although someone has straightened up the place, with nicely made beds as though it’s a hotel room that’s expecting a whole different set of guests tonight.
There’s one room here I’ve never been inside, and that’s the first bedroom on the left. The corresponding one to Anna’s creepy dark room in the condo unit down the hall. I lean on the doorknob, and just as in Anna’s room, it sticks at first, then gives to let the door fly open.
And I should not be surprised. The piano, Angela’s piano, is right here. It’s polished and gorgeous, outfitted with a new music stand and an actual bench. I touch a few of the keys, as though, just because it’s here in the Estate, I could possibly get a different musical result. But no—as usual, the piano doesn’t want me, doesn’t call out anything besides a clamor of off-key notes. It’s waiting for Angela, maybe the one person who can play it right.
I let the piano be. Lilia’s canvases are turned around and leaning up against the opposite wall. I flip one over.
And I am face-to-face with myself.
It’s not even one of her abstract paintings. It’s a completely realistic portrait. She has me down, from the wisps of hair at the top of my head that never lie flat, to the indent in my chin.
I turn over the next one. Angela.
And the next. My mother?
It really is her. Even though I have no idea when Lilia came face-to-face with Mom long enough to know the tiny mole between her eyebrows and the shape of her ears. For the first time in a while, I stand and listen to the endless back-and-forth of the waves, because it is a simple thing to concentrate on. Swish-boom, swish-boom. Again and again. Around me, the Estate is silent, waiting.
I run out of the room. “Lilia?” I shout through the kitchen, through the living room, my voice echoing off the Goya cans and plastic bottles. “Lilia, where are you? What are you doing?”
And I don’t really expect her to come running, but she does. She appears from the stairwell and meets me in the doorway.
“Why are you spying on my family?” is the first thing that comes to mind to say. Lilia looks perplexed at this—well, tired and perplexed. Her eyes are bloodshot, and her whole face is worn down.
“You saw the paintings.” She tries to untangle a knot in the ends of her long hair. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Lilia leans toward me and whispers, “I’ve been trying to get them out. It would help everyone here if I could. But I can’t seem to do it.”
“Can I try it?” I ask.
And we stack the paintings and take them down the stairs. But as soon as we get out the front door, the canvases are blank.
twenty-one
DEJECTED, LILIA TAKES the canvases and turns to go back inside.
“Lilia, wait,” I say.
It has stopped raining, but everything around us drips, and behind us, the gulf churns gray and white. I take to one of the old plant beds on the side of the building—it seems like a neutral location, not yet out in the real world, but also free of the Estate’s power. A dead bush scrapes against my jeans, and a faded Fritos bag crunches under my feet.
Lilia joins me around the corner, her whole face and body in the middle of a long sigh.
“Is this who you want to be?” I ask her.
“What do you mean?” she says, staring off at the water.
“I mean, you told me that this place will give us the best versions of ourselves. But if you can figure out who that is, and take that idea outside the building with you, then . . . you know, you get to keep on being that person. Right?”