My self-portrait from two floors below. It has appeared here, at the top of the Estate.
I stand at the window and yank it open. The sea breeze rushing in makes it bearable to stay here longer. I can’t go back downstairs right now, and risk running into Edie or the members of Firing Squad. Even Angela, with her physical enthusiasm for this place, is too much for me today. She’s playing the piano, so she’s fine for the time being.
I call on the only person alive who might be able to help me make sense of all this. Abuela. I stick around, she told me that time, and yes, she does. She has been here, in the form of her supposed perfect self, watching me, helping me. I realize I never saw Lilia in a place that wasn’t our house or the Estate, both places where she seemed to carry her magic. She was with me. The breeze blows me back from the window, and, turning, I see her. Abuela, projected into this room. Abuela, still hanging on in the hospital room in San Juan. I want to whisper to her in Spanish, but the words don’t come. But they’re not there in English, either. Please or por favor is not even close to what I want her to hear from me.
Abuela’s perfect black hair has grown out, slashed at the top with a thick line of silver-gray. Her face is relaxed and her eyes look so small without eye makeup. And her hands . . . ah, if only I could have the same moment my mom had, thinking she saw a flicker of movement from Abuela’s fingers.
It’s okay if you need to go.
This is what I’m trying to tell her.
It’s okay if you need to move on.
It’s a huddle of words, but it’s also a feeling, a shove away from the window and toward the door of the room.
It’s okay if you can’t stay here anymore.
She’s trying to tell me the same thing.
Across the gulp of air that separates the Estate from its nearest neighboring apartment building, there’s a single light on—a woman sitting in bed, trying to finish reading a novel before she wears out for the night.
“Hey!” Did I just yell that out to her? Shit. I really did.
No sound comes back.
“Hey! Somebody over there!”
Nothing.
It doesn’t matter if the woman across the way ever notices me. What matters is that Lilia doesn’t belong to the Red Mangrove Estate anymore. Lilia is nowhere.
Angela falls asleep in the car on the drive home. She looks normal and calm again, but how long will this last? She could wake up screaming in the middle of the night, or disappear from school again. I’m going to be worried about her every second of the day until I figure this out. Figure out what I’m going to do.
twenty-four
OF COURSE I don’t have any finished work for Mrs. Pagonis on Friday. Of course. She drops by the Orange Table and smiles understandingly at me, like she knows she’s going to have to give me a low C (in art! The last semester of senior year!) and that I’m not going to have anything for the county show and that I’m definitely not going to SCAD and that I’m going to be one of those people who puts down my paintbrush after graduation and doesn’t pick it up again until I’m, like, Abuela’s age and taking a class down at Ringling on Wednesday mornings. That’s really what she thinks.
I can explain, I want to tell her. She moves past the table, and I want to explain to someone, to Gretchen or even Rider, about Angela and the piano and everything else. Or I could pull out one of the big rolls of brown stock paper that Mrs. Pagonis keeps on a shelf at the back of the room, stretch it out from one end of the room to another, and paint everything, starting with the arrival of the piano and Lilia’s and my red room.
Maybe I will.
I raise my hand. “Mrs. Pagonis?”
She lets me have the paper. I start with a small section, stretched across my territory of the Orange Table. But now, with the opportunity to draw everything out, to do a different sort of self-portrait, I don’t even know where to begin.
Maybe with the red room.
It’s going to be tricky, getting this painting the way I want it to look. I’m envisioning a whole swath of dark red, with two abstract figures, unpainted, approaching each other from opposite sides of the paper. And this time, these elements will be here for good reasons: for instance, Vic and I will be abstract because everything has been strange between us lately. With every brushstroke of red I make, I want her to know more and more about my life. I could seek her out after this class, take the still-wet paper from here to the hallway junction she crosses through on the way to second period, and hold it in front of my face as a way to say, Hey, I miss you, learn about me again.
Gretchen leans in toward my work. “What’s that?”
“It’s something that happened to me recently,” I say, and Gretchen seems to accept this. There’s an alternate first-period studio art today in which I stop drawing and tell her the whole story. She doesn’t believe me at first, but when I get to the part about my self-portrait and where it could end up, I dig in my pocket and show her the keys, and she gasps—“Ah!” But then the surprise slides off her face as she nods and smiles, because even Alternate Morning Gretchen knows better than I do what I should do about all of this.
In this actual morning, Mrs. Pagonis says, “Mercedes?” and she motions to the door of the classroom, and I think I already know what this is about.
Angela is in the nurse’s office, lying flat on her back on a cot. Temperature of 103. I sit by her while the nurse tries to get in touch with Mom. “Shit, Ange,” I whisper. “We haven’t even been here an hour.”
“I know, I know.” Angela has both hands over her face. “I feel awful.”
“Your mom said she can come to get you,” the nurse says.
“No!” Angela’s hands fly out to her sides, and her eyes are wide open. “She doesn’t know where to take me. Only Mercedes does!”
The nurse looks to me for an answer about that one. “She’s very particular about doctors. It’s a thing she has.”
“Well, your mom’s on her way,” the nurse says. “Only she can check Angela out for the day.”
“Can I sit with her?” I ask.
“Sure.”
When Mom arrives, I corner her in the hall outside the nurse’s office. “Look, you can’t take her to urgent care—I mean, back to urgent care. They can’t do anything.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Mom says. “I’m sure it’s just a virus. She needs to stay at home and rest.”
“No, it’s not that, either. She needs to go to a specific place. Can you check me out, too? I can take her.”
“Damn it, Mercedes. Are you both on drugs? Is this what happens when I go away? Rex’s renter was a drug dealer, wasn’t she? Rex says she disappeared last night. Well, good riddance. She can wreck somebody else’s family.”
“That’s not it. Just check me out of school. Say I have the same bug, or I’m the only one who can take care of Angela, or something like that. I know exactly what she needs.”
“Fine,” she says, “but I’m following you. And if that girl’s there, I don’t know what I’m going to do to her.”