“Hi, Mercedes.”
Lilia’s wrapped in her purple bathrobe (but at ten p.m., this makes sense) and she looks strange to me, sort of like it was to see my mom after all those weeks away.
“Angela’s not feeling well,” I tell her in Rex’s living room. “Do you . . . do you know—”
Lilia sighs. “Come in here.”
Rex’s bedroom door is closed, and the thudding soundtrack of some suspenseful movie leaks through. Lilia leads me into her bedroom, leaves the door open a crack, and turns on a small stereo. Thank God she doesn’t start playing Firing Squad, but rather some quiet jazz. I never thought it would happen, but I may be fully sick of “The Getting Is Good.”
“She needs to be there,” Lilia says. “You understood that before I did, and you did it brilliantly, I have to say. Angela’s really ready.”
“What about me?”
“You? You’ve been ready, maybe even for longer than I thought.”
“Then why haven’t I gotten sick?”
“You’d probably have the same thing happen, if you stay away long enough. I bet you’ve been feeling some weird things. Aches and itches, things like that. Right?”
“Uh-huh.”
I sink onto the antique ottoman next to the antique bed. She has moved the Estate series and stacked all the canvases into a single tower in the corner of the room, tall enough that she might as well be creating a 3D model of the damn place. I imagine how she’d represent me and Angela and Edie and Firing Squad and the rest of them with a bunch of Lego people, a few of us trapped within each layer of canvas.
The red suitcase is right where it was before. Lilia doesn’t seem bothered that I’m seeing her room—maybe she would have let me see her work all along.
“I don’t understand,” I say, and then nothing comes after this, nothing, still nothing, because where am I going to begin, and what if she doesn’t understand either? I rub my hands on the knees of my jeans. I love these damn jeans. If I do what Lilia and Edie and apparently Angela all want me to do, will I be stuck wearing a rotation of floral dresses for the rest of my life?
“I don’t either, sometimes,” Lilia says. “I saw your mom is back. How is your abuela doing?”
“Not very well,” I say.
Lilia leans against the bed. “I’m so sorry.” Where, I wonder, are Lilia’s grandmothers? If they’ve died, how lonely were they when it happened?
“But seriously,” I say, “I don’t understand. If I take over what you do, then what’s your part in all of this going to be?”
“I told you before, I’m pretty sure I have to go. And I’m trying to do it in a way that doesn’t mess everything up. It’s an experiment, and it’s so fragile.” Lilia rummages in her suitcase for a minute and produces a hair tie. She gathers her long hair into a low ponytail, which she flings around to her front. “Every day, I try to get a little farther away, and every day, I wind up right back there, or back here, with you and your sister.”
“Nothing wrong with being here,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says, turning away from me and opening one of the creaky wooden drawers of the antique dresser. “I know that. But it’s been wonderful to live at a place where I feel like I don’t have to worry. Where our art and music are perfect. Where we don’t get hurt.” She finds what she’s been looking for in the drawer: a pair of red-handled scissors. “That’s what you want too, right? I mean, it has to be, or you wouldn’t have been able to get in so easily.”
“I don’t know anymore,” I tell her.
Lilia looks down and clips off her entire ponytail.
“Damn,” I say.
“What do you think?” she says. The ponytail in her hand flops over like a dead fish.
“Short hair, don’t care, Lilia,” I say, fluffing my curls with my fingertips. “But seriously, you’ve got the face for it.”
“Thanks.” She puts the scissors back in the drawer and lays the ponytail on the dresser. I’ll have to come back later and tell her to donate it, or maybe donate it myself, since she’s getting ready to go.
“Hey, before you go.” My voice catches in my breath. “Tell me about how you got my picture out of the Estate. The one with the house. I thought I’d never see it again.”
“You make it sound easy,” she says, “like I just had to walk out with it one day. It took me ages to figure it out. And it had to do with the picture itself. The connection it has to the person who drew it.”
I think of my mom, sitting a few walls away with Angela, knowing nothing about any of this. I could bring Lilia and the house picture to her right now and blow her mind.
“Why are you leaving all this to me?”
“Because you understand what the Estate can do for people,” she says. “You understand how some things need to stay perfect. You understand how we want to hold on to the best moment of our whole lives, and the person we were in that moment.”
I do.
Lilia runs her hand along the strange new ends of her hair. “But anyway, you haven’t finished your self-portrait.”
“Okay, but how am I supposed to know when it’s done?”
“You’ll know,” she says. “I promise you’ll know the second it’s done, dear.”
“You don’t get to call me that,” I snap.
I want to grab the red suitcase and hurl it out the window. To make her stay a few days longer to clean up her shit. We are her shit—my sister and me, left behind to take care of the things she couldn’t. All the potential for beauty and tragedy in the world—it’s all there, swimming around in one place, like the colors in my eyeball.
And I have let her lead us there.
My foot grazes the red suitcase as I get up from the ottoman. I give it another shove for good measure. “Look, sorry. I’ll figure out how to finish the damn thing. But right now, is there anything you can do for Angela?”
Lilia’s mouth slants. She opens one of the creaky drawers in the massive antique dresser and pulls out a bottle of antacid tablets.
“You think that’s actually going to help?” I say.
“They won’t hurt,” Lilia says. “You’ll figure out what you need to do.”