But Lilia was willing to risk that to head off on her own.
A terrible crack from the purple room walls, from the side of them visible to me and from the structure within them. And in the hallway and the living room, Lilia’s ceiling art trembles, a great metallic-plastic clatter from all the bottles and cans. A soap bottle and a Goya can are the first to fall, and I’m sure the others will follow soon. But I won’t be here to see them.
I believed Lilia when she told me about the secrets and the needs of the Estate, maybe in the same way I believed my mother when she told me to pray to St. Fiacre for good grades (St. Fiacre, it turned out, was the patron saint of taxi drivers), or the same way I believed Victoria when she thought the spirit of Martha Graham wouldn’t help her through life.
I won’t say that I know, but I will say that I believe. I believe that imperfection and tragedy are going to find me whether I stay here or not, because some of those tragedies will be from my own choices: I will hurt people, and they will hurt me. I believe in my mother’s yoga, in Angela’s fevered sessions at the piano, and in the New York version of Victoria and how she’ll feel the first time her pointe shoe thumps against a Juilliard practice floor. I believe that Duchamp was alternately brilliant and fucking cheeky to try to bottle the air. I believe in giving the world my portrait, however that may happen, and then walking away. It could be a picture the size of a room or a fingernail. It could be a bottle of breath, a laugh, a song, a sigh, or even a mood piece.
I believe in the people who’ve been here and the secrets they’ve left behind. But I believe they’ve been keeping me standing all along.
The Estate will fall. The artists will scatter, except for those who are nothing but a version of someone else, someone living a beautiful wreck of a life elsewhere in the world. Angela might not forgive me for a long time. Alone in the lobby now, I spot her, standing in the parking lot, her face creased in terror and anger, but also complete and utter certainty. She knows exactly what has happened, and exactly who did it.
I push through the glass doors for the last time and toss my keys inside as they close.
Edie and some of the others turn and run farther inland.
Tall Jon yells from his car, “Moreno! Why are you still standing there?”
Angela motions for me to come here, come here, and I do, and she doesn’t touch me and she says nothing. Finally, she takes a step backward, toward Tall Jon’s car.
The women in the neighboring buildings have their curtains open.
The windows and walls in the Estate’s penthouse succumb to their cracks.
In a theater across town, Victoria Caballini waits offstage to begin a sequence in the Gershwin show. She sees the stage laid out in front of her, scratched yet smooth, a face of perfection and imperfection, terror and potential. And she leaps into it. Before the music starts, she tears past her fellow dancers, and she leaps and twirls across the expanse of black.
And at the same time, in a hospital room in San Juan, Dolores Camila Hernandez Acosta takes her final breath.
twenty-six
I KEEP THINKING about Abuela.
About how I knew her and loved her my whole life but never suspected she was an artist. About why she was so sure that the nineteen-year-old version of herself that she kept at the Estate was the perfect way to be. About how many of the other people at the Estate were versions of an older self.
I bet she’d prefer me not to wonder. But how can I not?
Gretchen is working on a collage of some black-and-white photographs of people’s faces. She has ripped them apart and is now figuring out how to piece them together: an eye, a hairy nostril, one smiling side of a mouth, a forehead with bangs.
She catches me looking at her project. “This was a better idea in my head than it is on paper.”
“Nah, I think you can turn it into something cool,” I tell her.
We leave class at the same time, both of us awkward with our portfolios and toolboxes. I stumble three paces behind her down the hallway, until I catch up to her at the stairwell.
“Are you going to be at the show this weekend?” I mean, the answer’s obvious, but what else do I say to the person I’ve spent almost four hundred school days not becoming friends with? What do I say when I want to wish her well?
“Yeah. My whole family’s coming. Grandparents and everybody. You?”
“Sure. I mean, I guess. We had a death in the family a couple of weeks ago, and everything’s kind of a mess. I’ll probably just come by myself.” I let her ahead of me on the stairs so that she doesn’t have to see my face. “But I finally came up with something to enter. That red painting with the two figures.”
“Well, then, you won’t be completely alone, will you?” Gretchen says.
People shove by us. Some of them say hello to Gretchen and sort of nod at me. Our portfolios hang out into the walking space, disturbing the universe. “You mean, because I’ve got the people in the picture?”
“Yep.” She moves to head up the stairs.
“I’ll see you there,” I tell her.
The house is quiet at night now. Mom has finally settled back into normal sleeping patterns, and Angela seems to be catching up on all the rest she missed when she was the newest member of Firing Squad. I think they’re both kind of suspicious of me right now, and I think Mom’s got Rex in on it too. He’s waiting for me to run after Lilia.
I head out to the front steps with my sketchbook and a pencil. Once the point gets dull I’ll go inside, but until then, it’s nice out. The air sticks to me like it’s trying to keep me here, and so I sit on the concrete and let the night fall all over me.
I owe Rex a picture, to replace the blue-and-orange one that disappeared with Lilia. (The question of where the painting is now and who it’s with have kept me up a lot of nights. That’s fine—those are nights I would have otherwise been awake missing Abuela.) A few things have been taking shape in my head, and I want them to start taking up actual space on the paper. It needs to be something to represent what happened at the Estate without actually depicting it—something sneaky, so that when Rex or my mom or anyone else sees it, they’ll get a feeling about it like a burst of light or a dream in color. The whole story will be there for them, but they’ll have to piece it together, moment by moment.
Okay, that could be too much for one painting. Maybe I have a new series to create.
All I know is I’m not drawing any buildings.
If I can wait here long enough tonight, I might see one of them. The other night, it was the guy I saw at the bar that one time, the one who wore the fedora. He’d lost his hat somewhere along the way, so when he looked at me and waved, I didn’t know who he was at first. And then his face came back to me, and the bar, and the photographs in the room, and Edie. I was going to wave at my hatless friend, but he was already gone.