There’s nothing to do but let her follow.
I let her tail me through a McDonald’s drive-through first. I get Angela and myself hash browns and orange juice, and Mom goes through and gets something for herself, and waves at me from behind, as if she is relieved, as if this was the big secret.
Angela sips on her orange juice. She smiles at me, but she doesn’t look any better.
We keep going. Mom stays behind us the whole time.
I pull into the parking lot. The green minivan is here.
“Just get out. Just run. I’ll deal with Mom.”
Angela leaves the rest of her breakfast behind, and she disappears into the building.
Mom parks and gets out of her car and taps on the window of my Pontiac with a hand that is not holding an Egg McMuffin. “Did Angela go in there?”
My throat goes dry. My whole face. My body, down to my toes. Everything is dry and cold. “I don’t think so.”
Mom glares at me with the same look she’s had each time she’s talked about Lilia—anger at her own lack of control. Her lack of balance. “Well, I’m going to find out. Stay here.”
There’s an alternate version of this moment playing in my head, one in which Mom walks right into the Estate, hears the sounds of Firing Squad, follows the music to where Angela is, and requests no explanation for any of this. She’d smile, bop along to the sound while finishing her breakfast, and then go back to work.
Or Mom could go up to the glass doors and turn right back.
Because, in reality, there’s no way for her to get in.
She sees me watching her, and she shrugs, and she keeps walking to the other side of the parking lot, the one overlooking the beach.
Everything gets very quiet. I roll down all the windows in the Pontiac because maybe, maybe, I’ll be able to hear Angela and Firing Squad playing from here. But no—even the waves aren’t that loud from here. This is what Victoria saw when she was here on the night of the bossa nova. Just closed doors and waves and their own kind of silence. And even though I suppose that’s not the worst alternate reality to be in, I hate that she was in it. I hate that I wasn’t able to track her down after first period today, and that she knows nothing about any of this.
My mother returns, having finished her sandwich and, apparently, started beaming.
“I get it,” she says, nodding. “I understand now. Angela needs the ocean to be rejuvenated, right? I swear I read about this somewhere, how the presence of salt water can cure a person.”
I attempt a smile from behind my orange juice cup. “Well, it’s good we live here, isn’t it?”
It’s afternoon now. Mom went back to work after taking Angela’s temperature seventeen times, looking behind her as she left the house, seemingly dazed at what happened. On our phones in the Estate parking lot, only three minutes passed before Angela appeared again, but whether the time in the Estate was the same, I never knew. We’re sitting on the floor of my bedroom doing homework, and she looks normal. But here in non-Estate time, I know she doesn’t have much longer until she descends again.
“So, probably tonight,” Angela says, not looking up from her biology book.
“Probably tonight what?”
“When I’m moving in.”
“The hell you are,” I say, and throw down my English notebook, where I eventually need to draft an outline for my paper on Slaughterhouse-Five. “You’re going to leave home at fourteen years old to play with a band that may not even exist in another year? Yeah, that’s a grand plan.”
“Oh, you sound like Mom, when she used to tell you not to throw your life away on art,” Angela says.
“I suspect she’s not done saying that,” I say. “But this is different. You don’t know what you’re getting into there.”
“I will if you go, too,” Angela says. “Come on. Everyone knows that Lilia left everything there to you.”
“Everyone? So they’re all waiting for me?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“Maybe you don’t realize you did,” Angela says.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Probably to have a smoke and some orange juice.”
Except I haven’t gotten any cigarettes from Tall Jon lately, so that’s out. I’m on the porch with a glass of orange juice, but it’s the sludgy end of the bottle. Orange-flavored motor oil.
Rex comes out on the other side of the porch. He’s wearing a T-shirt that reads You Don’t Know Me at the top, and in small letters at the bottom, Federal Witness Protection Program. It was funny the first ten times I saw it. Now it’s comforting, because it is so Rex.
“Hey there, Mercedes,” Rex says. “I feel like I haven’t seen you around in a while.”
“Yeah. My days have been kind of mixed up.”
“I’m feeling a bit off myself. You know Lilia left? No warning whatsoever from that girl. I saw her in the morning, and then in the afternoon, she and her stuff had completely cleared out.”
“Wow.” I down some orange juice.
“Oh, and I wanted you to know, she took that painting of yours that I had hanging up. The blue-and-orange one you sold me right after I met you.”
I smile. “I can paint a better one for you now. Free of charge.”
But there’s nothing I can do right now to change Angela’s mind. I pass her room and she’s putting clothes in a bag, even pulling the Wonder Woman T-shirt out of her dirty laundry.
Angela has everything timed right. Mom goes to bed at one a.m., and at one thirty, the green minivan pulls up. Seen from the living room window, Angela looks poised and confident as she heads down the driveway, but I wonder if she’s trembling on the outside or the inside. She was always too scared of the woods and other people to go to summer camp. I could count on getting an existential-sounding text or two every time she went to a slumber party in middle school. She hates having dirty clothes. She doesn’t even turn fifteen until July. But she is leaving.
twenty-five
IT’S QUIET ON the roads at this time on Saturday, and I am driving too fast and changing lanes all over the place. And I don’t even hit a red light until I get stuck at the longest one ever, here at Honore Avenue, about five minutes from Victoria’s house. The red seems to blink at me while I wait, daring me to blink back. I remember when I was learning to drive two years ago, and I finally figured out why people ever so slightly let up on the brake when they’re sitting at a long-ass stoplight like this one. It’s not that they think moving up seven inches is going to help them; it’s just that it’s damn hard to keep your foot mashed down on the brake for so long.
The light changes, and I head on to Vic’s without another stop. The sky brightens from white to blue as I go. I have texted Mom, telling her that Angela and I are supposedly going to tell Victoria to break a leg before her matinee performance of the Gershwin show today. I have time. We have time. Vic and me.