Wild Awake (7 page)

Why would she lie? I would have given her my entire allowance every week. I would have given her my birthday money. I would have begged Mom and Dad to let her move back in. Anything so she didn’t have to live in a place like this.

Step fourteen. Doug plants his crutch in the middle of a half-eaten egg salad sandwich that’s lying on the step. He doesn’t notice and swings himself up anyway, then pauses to take a rest. The stale, eggy stench of the sandwich fills up the entire stairwell. Doug burps.

“Almost there, honey.”

I roll my eyes. Almost there, unless you count a million more steps full of belching, dirty jokes, and rogue egg salad sandwiches.

Doug interprets my expression correctly for once and scowls.

“What’s a matter? You got a TV show to watch?”

He squints at me reproachfully. When he looks at me like that, I do feel kind of ashamed for being impatient with an old disabled man trying to climb a million stairs on crutches, even if he is an obnoxious drunk. I bite my lip.

“Sorry. It’s just, my friend’s waiting with the van.”

“I know, curly. You got somewhere to be.”

He lifts the crutch that was on top of the egg salad sandwich and we start climbing again. The sandwich, horrifyingly, sticks to the bottom of the crutch and rides along until four steps after the second-floor landing, when it finally peels off. To make things worse, Doug clams up and proceeds in wounded silence while I drag along behind him. I never thought I’d wish for Doug to start talking, but now that he’s not, there’s nothing to distract me and I start to notice things I’d rather not notice, like the sound of a violent argument taking place a few floors above us.

Once we leave the stale sandwich behind, the stairwell smells sweet and rank, like a recycling bin full of soda cans gone syrupy in the heat. There’s trash everywhere: food wrappers; nasty, scrunched-up paper towels; shoes and clothing that look like they were dredged up from a murder scene at the bottom of a swamp. I’m pretty sure there’s been a used condom stuck to the bottom of my flip-flop for the last few steps, but I’m too afraid to look. Whatever it is, I can feel its rubbery squishiness every time I put my foot down. A door slams, and a few seconds later a woman comes storming down the stairs, swearing, an orange-green bruise on her jaw.

“Watch it, bitch,” she says as she pushes past me, although I get the unsettling impression she hasn’t seen me at all.

I wonder if Skunk’s still waiting for me. I asked him to give me a ride, not sit in his van all day while I participate in some kind of absurdist play. I should have gotten his number and called him when I was ready to go. I shouldn’t have come in here at all. The only thing keeping me going is my anticipation of what’s waiting for me at the top of the stairs: a box of Sukey’s paintings, maybe, and some of her cool clothes.

Doug grunts and pants. I try not to breathe. We make it to the third floor and start on the last set of steps. The lightbulb has burned out, and we struggle up the trash-infested staircase in watery dimness. It’s too dark to make out what’s on the steps, but I’m pretty sure the mystery condom on the sole of my left flip-flop has been joined by a mystery cigarette butt on my right.

I get a queasy feeling when we pass from the third flight of stairs to the fourth. From this point on, I’ve gone too far to turn back. It’s like that time in ninth grade leadership camp when they made us swim to an island a mile from shore. After the first twenty-five minutes, the beach was too far away to swim back to, but the island was still a green blob in the distance, and I was out there, in the open ocean, way behind the other kids, with nothing to grab on to and the bottom too deep to stand.

Tap-tap-THUMP
.

Doug hoists himself up the last step and starts down the hall. The light in the hall is busted too, and the fire door is clogged with trash. The glass box that used to hold a fire extinguisher has been smashed, and there’s a greasy pay phone bolted to the wall with its receiver hanging down by a mangled cord.

Doug reaches out and brushes his fingers against a battered door.

“Sukey-girl lived right here.”

I glance at the door as we go past it. Some of the other doors on this floor are missing their knobs or have a hole in the wood where the deadbolt used to be. Sukey’s door is the only one that has all its parts. Maybe there’s a perfectly good apartment in there, where Sukey hung her bead curtain and set up her paints and easel in the corner. Maybe she lived here because it gave her a morbid kind of inspiration for her paintings. Or because no matter how dingy it was, it beat living in the same house as Dad.

Doug opens his door and goes into his room. I hover in the hallway, fingering the cell phone in my pocket, getting ready to call for help at any moment. I can hear Doug clomping around in there, knocking things over in the dark, trying to call his cat out of the shadows.

“Kit-kit-kit-kit-kit! Kit-kit-kit-kit-kit!”

I glance into Doug’s room. There’s a towel nailed over the window and no bulb in the ceiling fixture. All I can make out is a mattress piled with clothes, a few odds and ends of furniture, and a photo in the kind of cheap plastic frame you can buy at the dollar store. There doesn’t seem to be a kitchen or a bathroom. I wonder how many floors down he needs to go to use a toilet.

A moment later Doug comes back to the door carrying something in the crook of his arm. At first I think it’s some bundled-up laundry, but he hands it to me, and it’s a scruffy white cat with pale red eyes and a stump where its back right leg used to be. It meows and tries to scramble out of my arms. Doug goggles at it fondly.

“This is Snoogie. Sukey-girl found her in the alley.”

I am trying to unhook Snoogie’s claws from my shirt. She meows again and tries to climb me like a tree. She manages to get up to my shoulder, then digs in her claws parrot-style and won’t let go, surveying the world with a look of such extreme cat-paranoia I start to wonder if she knows something I don’t. Doug reaches up and strokes her affectionately.

“Snoogie’s a good cat.”

Actually, Snoogie seems like a very bad cat. But I don’t say this to Doug, whose perception has clearly been warped by love and/or cheap beer. As I watch him pet her, I start to get anxious. What if I’ve come all this way for nothing? What if all he has to give me is a busted old lamp or some moldy bath towel he’s been hanging on to for five years? Maybe there’s a good reason my parents hung up on him the other times he called. My thoughts flit guiltily to my piano, sitting neglected in a dust-spangled shaft of light.
Later
, I promise myself.

“Hey, Doug?”

“Whassat?”

Doug isn’t listening. He’s too busy gazing at Snoogie, who is currently attempting to climb from one of my shoulders to the other by way of my head.

“Are her paintings here?”

“Say ’gain?”

Snoogie hops down to the floor and darts into Doug’s room. He finally looks at me.

“Do you have Sukey’s paintings?”

“There weren’t no paintings left at the end, nah. She got into one of her moods and started giving ’em away until there weren’t none left. She gave one to me, big yellow painting, but those crackheads came in here and stole it. You can’t have nothing nice here without someone coming around and stealing it. Hang on, I’ll grab you what I got.”

Doug closes the door halfway and disappears into the murk. I hear him banging into something, swearing, and pulling open a stuck door. I glance into the room and see him rummaging through a closet packed with garbage—
actual
garbage, soda cups and napkins and cigarette boxes. It’s all tumbling out around his skinny ankles in a mini avalanche of crap.

Great
, I think, stepping back from the door.
He’s one of those crazy hoarder people
.

“Hey, Doug?” I call. “I kinda need to go.”

“Hold on, honey,” he hollers back. “I had to bury the bag real good so those crackheads couldn’t find it.”

I hear cans rattling to the floor, and a grunt of effort from Doug. “Sukey and me were like family,” he wheezes. “People got to take care of each other down here. I woulda called you’s sooner, but I’ve been sick.”

I roll my eyes.
Sure
.
If by sick, you mean hammered
.

I poke my head through the door and see Doug hauling a big black trash bag out of the closet.

“D’you want some help?”

Doug doesn’t seem to hear me. He rests on his crutches to catch his breath. I step into his room and pick my way across the cluttered floor. “What’s in there?”

The cat runs out from under a wooden coffee table and jumps onto the mattress. Doug gazes after it.

“Sukey-girl’s things. The manager sent someone in there to dump all her stuff in the trash after the cops left and I said, that ain’t right.”

Doug aims his foot at the middle of the bag and gives it a push.

“Think you can lift that?”

I eye the bag doubtfully.

“Yeah.”

I grab the garbage bag around the neck and hoist it onto my back. Doug watches me struggle upright.

“You got it, honey.”

“What did you say about cops?” I say, trying to balance the bag so it doesn’t knock over any of Doug’s stuff.

I know Sukey got in trouble with the police a couple times after she moved out, because Dad used to get phone calls late at night and have to drive down to the station. Doug ignores the question.

“Big yellow painting. Size of that window. She did it just for me. Reminded me of wheat fields. I bet your daddy’s got a dozen of ’em, eh?”

“No. She didn’t give him any. I only have one, in my bedroom. I was hoping you’d—”

“We always joked I was gonna be rich someday when she got famous and the paintings were worth money, eh. I said, Sukey-girl, you’re gonna make me and Snoogie into millionaires.”

The heavy bag is pressing into my back. I can feel myself starting to sweat. I know I should head for the stairs, but my feet refuse to move.

“Doug? Why did you say there were cops?”

He’s produced another beer from some hiding spot, and now he cracks it open. His bloodshot blue eyes are wandering.

“Goddamn management didn’t hardly wait twenty-four hours before they stuck the next person in there. They got this rat-faced little tweaker moved in before the blood was even dry on the floor. There’s no respect around here. None at all.”

I wheel around to see Doug better and knock over a half-full can of beer that was perched on top of an unplugged mini-fridge. I really wish there was a light in here, because I’m starting to feel claustrophobic in the dimness with a giant trash bag pressing on my back and my ears buzzing louder and louder with every word Doug says.

“Doug,” I say in my steadiest, untrembliest voice, “what are you talking about?”

Doug reaches out to stabilize the bag before it slips out of my hands. He holds on while I get a better grip. While I’m trying to find the right place to rest the weight of the bag on my shoulder, he leans his face in close to mine and fixes me with his big drunk eyes.

“Oh, honey,” he says. “Don’t tell me you don’t know.”

When I step outside again, the
world feels like it’s been Photoshopped: The colors are supersaturated, and the brightness levels are way too high. The garbage bag containing Sukey’s earthly possessions is a huge sticky lump on my back. I feel like an insect, an ant carrying a crumb a hundred times bigger than I am. Except unlike an ant, I can’t handle this load. It’s too big. I can smell the panic in my sweat. I literally cannot breathe.

I see Skunk’s van parked by the curb. Sunlight is glaring off the windshield. I lurch toward it, the garbage bag riding on my back like a monster, a mountain, a grotesque ball-and-chain.

Don’t-think-about-it-Don’t-think-about-it-Don’t-think-about-it
.

There’s a thin, tight thread running between my heart and the crown of my head that’s threatening to snap. I try to focus on getting to Skunk’s van, but the world is loud and awful and heavy, and the truth is even worse. I don’t know if I can make it to the van. I don’t know if I can make it another step. I can feel the plastic garbage bag stretching and straining, and it’s just a matter of which one of us breaks first.

Don’t think about it
.

I hear a car door slam.

“Kiri?”

Don’t cry
.

Skunk lumbers toward me. Something about the sight of his scruffy T-shirt anchors me, and I shuffle toward him like a duckling imprinting on a backhoe.

“Hang on.”

I stop. Skunk lifts the bag off my back. I wait next to the van while he opens the back door and hoists the bag inside. My back and shoulders are aching from the trip down the stairs, and my heart is beating so hard it feels like it’s trying to dig a tunnel out of my chest.

“You okay?”

Don’t cry
.

My best and most reliable Normal Voice comes out as a high and strangled squeak.

“Yup.”

“You sure?”

Rapid nodding.

“You want a ride home? You look kind of freaked out.”

I decide that Skunk must be very perceptive for a person whose wallet is attached to his belt by a chain. When I get into the van and close the door, I am finally able to breathe.

Just as we’re buckling our seat belts, Doug comes staggering up the sidewalk and knocks on the window. I can’t imagine how he got down the stairs so fast—he must have rolled down, or used someone’s greasy pizza box as a toboggan. I don’t want to talk to him, but the morning has already taken such a gruesome turn it can hardly get any worse. I grab the old-school plastic handle and crank the window down. He sticks his grizzled old face through the window. His beer breath fills up the whole van. I notice Skunk sizing him up, probably wondering whether to step on the gas and rip his head off.

“Hey. Hey!”

Doug’s shouting like we’re across the street from him, not sitting within spitting distance. His yellow fingers grip the edge of the window like he thinks that’s going to stop us from driving away.

“Honey, listen. I didn’t mean to upset you back there, eh? We all loved Sukey-girl.”