Wild Awake (9 page)

I pad across the carpet and place the garbage bag in the middle of the tightly made bed, then walk out and close the door.

When I sit down at the piano and turn the metronome on, I feel a wave of relief. The metronome’s metal arm ticks back and forth and I play smoothly and evenly, never missing a note.

Three hours pass quickly, by the end of which I am as calm and steady and reasonable as the metronome itself.

See?
I tell myself as I slip into bed.
Everything’s under control
.

For the next three days, I
am a model of self-discipline. Up at six. Practice until eleven thirty. Eat some leftovers straight out of the Tupperware without even warming them up. Water my mom’s azaleas. Bring in the mail. Drill my pieces some more. When I go over to Lukas’s house for band practice, I tell him what happened and make him promise not to tell his mom.

“I
knew
you should have called your parents before agreeing to meet that guy,” he keeps saying, which is not the reaction I was expecting, but he gives me this sweet, awkward hug and even walks me home at the end of the night, telling me to call if I need anything.

Each time I pass Sukey’s old bedroom on my way to the bathroom, I can hear the garbage bag in there, whining like a ghost. I don’t open it. I can’t open it. I tell myself I’ll open it once I’ve practiced for a few more hours.

I practice for a few more hours.

I still don’t open it.

The piano is a sleek black submarine that carries me deep, deep down, until the surface world is nothing but a muffled shimmer. I practice carefully, paying attention to each note. I polish my pieces the way our neighbor, Mr. Hardy, polishes his vintage Thunderbird. Slowly. Obsessively. As long as I’m sitting at the piano, the entire universe is under my control. Eighty-eight keys, ten fingers. Sheet music is dependable. The notes don’t change when you’re not looking. You don’t open your book one day to discover that your pieces have switched from major to minor, or that the fast ones have gone slow, or that the melody has changed beyond recognition, leaving your fingers to stumble over unfamiliar notes. You don’t have to be brave, just careful.

When my parents call to give me an update on their snorkeling adventures in the Caribbean Sea, I keep my voice bright and interested. While Mom tells me all about the tropical fish she saw in the coral reef this afternoon, I plan out exactly what I’m going to say, how I’m going to bring it up.

I found out about Sukey—
too accusatory.

One of Sukey’s old friends called—
too complicated to explain.

“Your dad saw a giant sea tortoise. How big was it, Al? Three feet? We just bought an underwater camera.”

For some reason, hearing my mom chatter on about their cruise makes my throat go thick and soggy. It’s like they’re on this sunny planet where everyone’s happy and nobody has bad news, and I’m this evil astronaut coming down from outer space to ruin it all. When I finally speak up, I don’t even tell them about going to the Imperial.

What I say is, “What happened to the person who killed Sukey?”—as if I had known how she died all along.

I thought they’d freak out when I said that. I thought they’d say,
Oh, Kiri, how did you find out? Did Denny tell you?
and they’d fuss about how sorry they were for lying to me and ask if I was okay.

But instead they act like I asked if they know where the blade for the blender is because I want to make a banana smoothie. Mom demurs and Dad says something dismissive, and somehow we’re back on sea tortoises and piano. The conversation feels like one of those shopping carts whose wheels lock if you try to push it past the edge of the parking lot. There are things I want to say, but I just can’t.

“Did your program for the Showcase come in the mail yet?” Mom says cheerily.

“No, but—”

“Do you know if you’ll be competing with that Japanese boy?”

“He’s Korean, Mom. I don’t know. Did Sukey—”

“What?”

The connection is bad. Our voices are echoing on top of one another, piling up like cars in a highway wreck.

“I found a bag of Sukey’s things,” I enunciate loudly. “In the basement.”

A little white lie, but whatever. At this rate, it would take about a million dollars’ worth of long distance to explain the truth.

“Don’t make a mess,” says Dad. “I don’t know who was rooting around down there last, but they left a snowboard right in the middle of the floor where somebody could trip over it and break their neck.”

I don’t think he heard me right. I clench the phone in frustration.

“There’s a pianist on the ship who plays during dinner,” says Mom. “You could do that for a summer job when you’re in college.”

I imagine myself in a cruise ship dining room, wearing a sequined dinner jacket and tootling out jazz standards while people like my parents eat lobster.

“Sounds good, Mom,” I lie. “Sounds really, really good.”

I go back to the piano and try to practice some more, but my hands start shaking, and no amount of scolding myself will steady them. I can’t stop thinking about Sukey. I can hear her screaming with every note I play. I can see her face reflected next to mine in the piano’s shiny surface, the same dark hair on our shoulders, the same blood running through our veins, leaking out, spilling on the floor.

I force myself to play the Beethoven.

Then play it again.

Then play it again.

But halfway through the third time, tears pool in my eyes until I can’t even see the keys. I stop playing, peel myself off the piano bench, and stagger to the phone to call Lukas. He’ll come pick me up. Petra will feed me borscht and lemon cake and let me sleep on the fold-out couch in the Malcywycks’ tiny living room. She’ll hug me to her solid, round body and tell me everything’s okay, and later, once she’s gone to bed, Lukas will take me in his arms and tell me the same thing.

I start to dial the Malcywycks’ number, but a little voice in my head sneers at me.

Is that how you want to be? You want them to think you can’t handle things? Go crying to Petra. I’m sure Lukas will find that very attractive
.

I push the voice away and keep dialing. But it comes back.

Okay, fine, you can call—but don’t do it tonight. If you still feel bad tomorrow, you can call. Tonight, take it easy. You don’t even have to practice anymore if you don’t want to. Just don’t call right now
.

My finger hovers over the last digit.

I press the red button and hang up the phone.

I’m just high-strung and need a break. No reason to turn it into a crisis. I stand in the kitchen, trying to decide what I want to do to relax. I could watch TV, or take a bath, or—

It occurs to me that the best way to deal with this situation is to get completely effing blazed.

Five seconds later I’m kneeling on my bedroom floor, pulling the old wooden jewelry box out from under my bed. I pop open the lid. The small plastic bag of weed and papers Lukas gave me a while ago is sitting there, untouched. I’ve never smoked by myself before, but tonight seems like as good a time as any to start.

I sit on the floor for a long time trying to roll a joint, then go downstairs and root through the junk drawer for the stem lighter we use to light the barbecue. I don’t even own a lighter, that’s how big a stoner I am.

The barbecue lighter isn’t in its drawer. I open and shut a few other drawers, but it’s not there either. I bang around the kitchen looking for it until I realize there’s a perfectly good gas stove right in front of me. I switch on a burner and hold the tip of my messed-up excuse for a joint in the blue flame until it lights. I switch off the burner and blow out the little birthday-candle flame that has sprung up on the end of the twisted paper, put it to my lips, and inhale. The smoke tastes sour and pavementy, like a lemon candy dropped on the street. I turn on the kitchen fan for ventilation, mosey into the living room, and turn on the stereo.

This is fun
, I tell myself, turning up the volume dial. The music sounds lush and comical, like something played by elves. I wander back into the kitchen and open a brand-new box of cereal. The flakes make a high ringing sound when they tumble into the bowl that somehow fascinates me. I stand at the counter smoking and shaking cereal into the bowl until I completely lose track of time. When I finally get out the milk, it’s half past midnight.

I take one bite, dump the rest out in the sink, and drag myself to bed.

When I wake up, it’s very
bright and very warm and very twelve thirty p.m. The nightmare I was having about Sukey’s murderer slinks out the back door of my mind. My mouth feels dry and sour like I just ate a gym sock, and I’ve got that throbbing headache that spells dehydration. I haven’t practiced piano and I haven’t opened the garbage bag, and now I have only twenty minutes before I have to leave for my piano lesson. From the second I open my eyes, I feel sick and shriveled and hollow in a way I know drinking a liter of water won’t help.

I go to the bathroom, get undressed, turn on the shower, and step inside. As the water warms up, I remember flashes of my nightmare about Sukey. The part where I’m climbing the stairs of the Imperial Hotel with the massive garbage bag on my back, and I keep getting stuck between the railings. The part where she’s waiting for me to come save her, the part where I can hear her calling me through the walls. The part where I finally get to the fourth floor and she’s already dead. The part where I wake up and a spider is looking down on me from my bedroom ceiling, threatening to drop on my head.

I squeeze shampoo into my hand.

It’s okay
, I tell myself.
You’re okay. Just breathe
.

I press my lips together and work the shampoo into my hair. It fills the shower with a happy floral scent, and for some reason that pushes me over the edge. I buckle over, sobbing, my head resting against the hard shower tiles. I remember crying like this when Sukey died, the tears harsh, devouring, total. I hadn’t known I was capable of being so sad, and the discovery shocked and terrified me. It was like finding an extra door in the house I’d always lived in, and opening it to discover that the grief had carved out new rooms, new hallways, an entire bleak annex of its own. There were dark places in my mind I’d never known existed, and now that I’d seen them I knew they’d always be there, lying in wait, even when the original door had been sealed up.

I let myself cry for a minute or two, then stop as sharply as twisting off a tap. There’s no time for this, no time. I have a piano lesson to get to, after all.
You can put the garbage bag in the basement until Mom and Dad get home
, I tell myself.
And you never, ever, ever have to go back to the Imperial Hotel
.

By the time I’m dressed and putting my piano books into my backpack, I feel a little better, woozy from those endorphins your body pumps out when you cry.

You’re fine
, I tell myself again as I lock the house and walk down the driveway.
You’re just rattled from the nightmare
.

Mr. Hardy waves to me from his front yard, where he stands watering his lilac bushes with a hose. He’s wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt from Run for the Cure—standard retired-person gear. I give him a cheerful smile and wave back.

“Hey, Mr. Hardy.”

See? You’re fine
.

My piano teacher, Dr. Scaliteri, lives way over in Kerrisdale, a forty-five-minute bus ride from my house. The Kerrisdale bus is always full of quiet foreign exchange students listening to iPods and the occasional mom in two-hundred-dollar exercise pants sitting next to a baby in a high-tech stroller. That’s because Kerrisdale is the yuppiest neighborhood in the city. The streets are lined with fussy nail salons, chain clothing stores dressed up to look classy, and shops with names like Giggles and Birdy: An Upscale Baby Boutique that make you want to punch someone in the face.

Dr. Scaliteri’s house is Historic and manicured to within an inch of its venerable old life. She lives on a wide, tree-lined street with brand-new sidewalks and lots of that tall, wavy beach grass in people’s front yards that’s actually an invasive species. The house is all gleaming hardwood and stained glass, and the piano’s an eleven-foot concert grand that looks more like a Hummer than a musical instrument. It even has that new-car smell.

While I’m playing the Bach, Dr. Scaliteri perches on a silver exercise ball, bouncing up and down and writing notes on a spiral-bound pad. She’s wearing a low-cut black leotard, a dark red skirt, and silver ballet shoes. A golden pendant in the shape of a treble clef hangs between her crinkled old-lady cleavage. Dr. Scaliteri is in her sixties, but she still looks like the “piano teacher” in a low-budget porno: heavy mascara and piles of hair. All that bouncing on the exercise ball while she’s giving piano lessons has done wonders for her thighs. Now and then while I’m playing, she hums or whispers something under her breath, which drives me crazy, but on the few occasions I’ve stopped playing and said, “What?” she literally made me wish I’d never been born.

I switched to Dr. Scaliteri from my old piano teacher, Mrs. Benjamin, right around the time my parents bought me the grand piano. She has a reputation as the toughest piano teacher in the city, and she takes only a few high schoolers. Most of her students are performance majors at the university, a tribe of pale, serious, vaguely subterranean-looking twenty-year-olds who look like they’ve been locked inside their practice rooms for weeks. There’s tall Anna Weissberg, who plays for the symphony; Nelson Chow, who has just been accepted to Juilliard; the Fukiyama twins, Jeff and Mark, whose commitment to technical virtuosity is matched only by their commitment to wearing perfectly laundered Ralph Lauren polo shirts in cautious shades of tan and blue. Dr. Scaliteri’s college students generally don’t acknowledge my existence, but who knows? That could change after the Showcase.

I play the first and second movements of the Italian Concerto, a thirty-page baroque extravaganza that Bach apparently wrote to amuse himself while waiting in line to buy a Wiener schnitzel. It’s a hard piece, but I know I’ve got it nailed. My fingers dance over the keys, breezing through one mathematically perfect trill after another. As I play, the despair I was feeling on the bus melts away. This is something I’m good at. This is something I can do.