Wild Awake

by Hilary T. Smith

  “Bye, Sukey,” I said, but Leon the Junkie had already twirled her away.

  I paw through the box, eager for more. At the bottom is a painting Sukey and I did together when she came to visit on my twelfth birthday. She was twenty then, almost twenty-one—a semi-adult, and as wondrous to me in her adultness as a movie star. I lived for Sukey’s visits, basked in them, and clung to each murmured confidence as proof that I was the person Sukey trusted most in the world.

  “Artists need their own space,” she said, flicking her paintbrush across the paper we’d spread out on the kitchen table. “As soon as you can, Kiri-bird, get yourself a room just for making music. You’d like that, right? You can’t make good art in Mom and Dad’s living room. It’s scientifically impossible.”

  There’d been some kind of drama with the art collective a few months back and Sukey had moved into her own place, a little studio where she could paint in peace. I’d never been there, but she’d told me all about it. She’d been working on a big painting ever since she moved in, and was already talking to some underground gallery about showing it when it was done. We hadn’t been to any more of her openings since the one at razzle!dazzle!space, but maybe Mom and Dad would let me come to this one. Denny could drive me; he was sixteen. Sukey promised she’d let me know as soon as she found out when it was going to be.

  “I’ve been working on a very avant-garde composition,” I informed her, pronouncing it avant-grad.

  Sukey laughed, a slow-motion twinkling of the vocal cords. I had a garage-sale Casio keyboard then, not even a real piano, and I was always making up songs with dramatic titles like “Heartstorm” or “Prelude for a Broken Wing.”

  “You gonna play it for me before I leave?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “Come on, Kiri-bird. I don’t know when Dad’s going to let me see you again.”

  Technically, Sukey was banned from even visiting our house after Dad found out she’d stolen some money last time she was here—for paint, Sukey told me. For jars of gold and arsenic and ochre. This birthday visit had taken some high-octane pleading on my part, and even then Sukey was only allowed in the kitchen and living room and not upstairs.

  “It’s not finished yet,” I said.

  Just then, Dad appeared to let Sukey know it was time for her to go home, which was no longer the same thing as our home.

  “Can’t she stay for dinner?” I said, playing the birthday card for all it was worth.

  “That’s okay, babe, I have to get going anyway,” said Sukey, which probably meant she was fiending for a cigarette. “But let me give you your present.”

  I fidgeted with anticipation, wishing Dad would leave the room. He was standing there with his hairy arms crossed, watching her warily, like he thought she was going to give me something inappropriate he was going to make her take right back—birth control pills or a stolen piece of jewelry.

  “I didn’t have time to wrap it,” Sukey said, pulling something out of her bag, but when I saw what it was, I was too happy to care. It was one of her bird paintings—she’d done this matching pair while she still lived here, and I’d been begging her to let me have one forever. The one she gave me had the words we gamboled, star-clad spiraling out over the birds in silver paint. The other one said, simply, daffodiliad.

  “You’re the BEST!” I kept saying over and over as I danced around the kitchen with the painting in my hands. I was still squealing my thanks when Mom came downstairs to talk to Sukey—or try to—before she left.

  I didn’t open the card taped to the back of the painting until after Sukey was gone. It said:

  Hey, k-bird. Hang this in your room, and I’ll keep the other one hanging in my studio. Be cool and don’t be a faker. Love, S.

  For the next few weeks, I worked furiously on my new composition. Hunched over my keyboard, I made up strange chords, bold rhythms, soaring melodies. Maybe I could play it at Sukey’s art opening—we could even put my name on the card, feat. kiri byrd on keyboard.

  I called and called Sukey’s cell phone to tell her about this idea, but she must have lost it on the beach again, because she didn’t pick up. Mom said not to worry; Sukey would call me back soon. I lay on my bed planning the details of our show: the crackers and lemonade, the clothes we’d wear.

  When she died, it was like my house burned down.

  chapter seven

  The next morning I dress carefully, putting on ripped jeans, a vintage blouse, and the dangly beaded earrings that used to belong to Sukey and that have lived on my dresser ever since. If Doug Fieldgrass was calling from razzle!dazzle!space, he’s probably the curator. I want to look hip and mature and artistic when I meet him; I want to look like Sukey.

  Why’s the gallery closing? I’ll ask sympathetically. It’s such an interesting space.

  I try Doug’s number three times, but he doesn’t answer. I sit at the piano, telling myself to be patient, but after practicing for ten minutes, I decide to ride my bike downtown anyway. Maybe he’ll be at the gallery, and if he isn’t, at least I’ll know where it is for next time.

  In daylight, Columbia Street seems way less sketchy. The Chinese grocery store is open, and there are wooden trucks of produce out on the sidewalk in front of it, long, hairy daikon radishes and bundles of bok choy and mountains of tangerines for fifty-nine cents a pound. The white lettering on the awning says MONEY FOOD ENTERPRISES, which I find impressive in its bluntness. In my neighborhood, even stores that sell nothing but lotto tickets and flavored cigars have names like Willowtree Natural and Organic Market. As I ride past on my bicycle, I can see old people with canvas shopping bags moving around the bins of dried fish and mushrooms, chatting in Mandarin.

  Past MONEY FOOD ENTERPRISES, Columbia Street extends into Chinatown proper, with the pagoda-style roofs and dragon flags and a zillion little stores selling paper lanterns and mysterious plastic cooking utensils of indeterminate function. There’s a restaurant piping out the twangs and trills of Chinese opera, and old ladies in floppy hats pushing fold-up trolleys down the sidewalk.

  I ride up and down the block a few times, looking for the gallery. When I can’t find it, I cruise down East Pender. No dice. There’s a vacant lot that worries me, surrounded by a newly erected chain-link fence. I wonder if they’ve relocated, if the old building’s been torn down. I pause next to the curb and call Doug’s number, which I carefully programmed into my phone before leaving the house. It rings interminably, just like the three other times I tried to call him this morning.

  Where Columbia meets East Pender, there’s a small grassy park with cherry trees, an overflowing garbage can, and a few benches. I put away my phone and ride past the park very slowly, trying to figure out what to do. There are some people lounging on the grass under the cherry trees, two men and a woman, listening to music on a yellow plastic waterproof radio and passing around a tall brown bottle in a paper bag. Their shopping carts are parked next to the bench, piled high with clothing and recyclables. I’m biking so slowly it’s obvious I’m either lost or looking for something, and one of the men calls out, “Whatcha looking for, honey?”

  I stop and put one foot on the curb to stay upright. The sun’s so bright I have to shield my eyes to look at them.

  The man looks me up and down and chuckles. His skin is tanned to the color of old pennies, and he has ropy muscles like when he’s not busy boozing he spends all his free time pumping iron.

  “Your boyfriend run off on ya, sweetie?”

  The woman sitting beside him punches him on the arm.

  “Don’t give her a hard time, Don. She’s a baby.”

  She’s wearing a pink corduroy jacket with fake fur around the collar, and she has the same round face and big boobs as my mom.

  “I’m trying to find this art space,” I say.

  “The what? Speak up, baby.”

  “There’s supposed to be an art space here. Somewhere on this block.”

  I feel awkward standing on the curb like
this, squinting into the sun, shouting at her over the traffic noise like a dumb tourist asking for directions to Stanley Park. But I don’t feel comfortable going onto the grass, either. It somehow feels private, like a front porch or a living room, and I’m reluctant to get any closer without an invitation.

  Fake Fur Woman nudges her companion in the ribs.

  “She’s looking for the art museum, Don. You’re in the wrong place, baby. You gotta take the number nineteen bus all the way downtown and get off at Granville. The bus stops right over there. You can stick your bike on the front, they got racks.”

  She’s giving me directions to the big modern art gallery downtown. I squirm. It would be useless to explain. Instead, I nod and look where she’s pointing.

  “Okay, thanks. You guys have a good one.”

  “Take care of yourself, baby.”

  The guy named Don says something I can’t make out, and I hear Fake Fur Woman telling him to shut up and be nice to that little girl. “She’s looking for the art museum, Don!”

  I wave good-bye to them and go a little farther down East Pender, scanning the storefronts for anything resembling the brick warehouse where Sukey had her show. There’s a smoke shop and a convenience store, but nothing with the scuffed white door I remember. Then I come to some apartment buildings and a parking garage.

  A parking garage like the one we circled the neighborhood for half an hour looking for on the night of Sukey’s show.

  I hurry back to the convenience store and ask the old Punjabi guy at the counter if he knows of an art space in the area. He glares at me like I’ve just asked if I can use the employees-only bathroom and shakes his head, muttering, “No.”

  I wander down a few alleys and even get excited at one point and knock on the door of what turns out to be a shelter for runaway teens. The spiky-haired woman who answers the door says the Freedom from Drugs Group doesn’t start until one p.m., and I back away awkwardly, mumbling something about coming back later.

  I look up razzle!dazzle!space on my phone’s crappy internet browser, but either it doesn’t exist anymore or it’s too hip to have a website. I’m just about to ride home in defeat when I hear someone shouting at me.

  “Hey! HEY!”

  For a second I think I dropped something. I brake hard, feeling my pockets for phone, wallet, keys. All present and accounted for. I scan the busy street until my eyes locate the person shouting.

  He’s lurching down the sidewalk on crutches, one denim pant leg pinned shut below the knee. His face is partly shadowed by the brim of his baseball cap. He has the body of a retired gym teacher or a summer-league soccer coach: square build, with strong-looking arms gripping his crutch handles and a sagging belly.

  I’m still sitting on my bicycle. I warily dismount and lift it onto the sidewalk, already preparing my defense: No, I don’t have any spare change, I don’t want to answer a personal question, no, no thank you, no.

  He catches up with me and I manage to sneak a quick glance at his face before looking back at the road, which I am pretending to scan for a friend’s car. He has grizzled cheeks, lips so stained from smoking they’re almost gray, and eyes too big for his head, like golf balls stuffed into sockets intended for marbles. When he speaks, his breath is sour with beer.

  “You the kid came down here on the bike Tuesday night?”

  I blink at him uncomprehendingly. He wobbles closer, his eyes flitting over my face, my clothing, and lingering on my earrings.

  “I’ll be damned,” he mutters. “You are Sukey’s sister, aren’t you?”

  When he says her name, my nerves light up. Those two syllables coming from a stranger’s mouth, coming from this stranger’s mouth, disorient me completely.

  “Doug Fieldgrass,” he says, extending a petrified claw. My ears ringing, I reach out and shake it.

  “Kiri Byrd.”

  chapter eight

  I don’t like the way Doug smells, or the tattoo on his left arm identifying him as a member in good standing of the Hells Angels. I don’t like the tallboy of Coors Light sticking out of his pocket, or the fact that he’s as tipsy as a turtle at eleven a.m. I don’t like the way he stands too close to me, breathing into my face like a boy at an eighth-grade dance. I don’t like the reproachful tone of his voice, as if I’ve done something shameful and I don’t even know what it is.

  This is not the Doug I came here to find.

  The Doug I came here to find is an artist who’s been running razzle!dazzle!space for years, who knew Sukey back in the day, who will lead me through the white door to the echoey gallery and hand me a stack of canvases wrapped in brown paper that he just happened to find in the storeroom the week before.

  This Doug lets a loud fart rip and says, “It’s about goddamn time.”

  We shuffle down the street together, Doug with his crutches and me with my bike. I feel agonizingly conspicuous, like the sole, towering twelve-year-old at a day camp overrun by seven-year-olds. I can feel people looking at me, wondering what I’m doing here, what I’m doing with him. He has some kind of rash on his neck, the mottled purple-blue of uncooked sausage. As we walk, he talks nonstop.

  “They’re closing down the building, and I can’t hold on to her stuff no more. We’ve all gotta move out by the middle of July. I say it’s horseshit.”

  He cracks his Coors Light and takes a swig. I smell the warm, watery beer and struggle to keep my voice conversational.

  “Are you from razzle!dazzle!space?”

  “Razzle what?”

  I try again: “How did you know Sukey?”

  Doug swallows his beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “We were neighbors, eh. She was down the hall from me.”

  The knot in my chest unclenches. Sukey’s art studio. It all makes sense. But why would he wait five years to call? And why does he have stuff that belonged to her, anyway? Didn’t Mom and Dad clear out her studio themselves?

  Questions flit around the corners of my mind, but I bat them away. Stop being such a Lukas, I tell myself.

  “Are you an artist too?” I babble, eager to make the pieces fit together.

  “Whassat?”

  “Sukey said there were lots of other artists in the building.”

  “She did, eh?” Doug chuckles, a rusty sound like a pair of scissors left out in the rain. “Good old Sukey. What a kid.”

  Doug jerks his chin at the brick building to our right. “This is the one. I saw you down there with your bike the other night, eh, but you ran off before I could come down and meet ya.”

  We’re back at the intersection of Columbia and East Pender, across from MONEY FOOD ENTERPRISES, standing in front of that creepy hotel. Doug lifts a veiny hand and points at one of the windows on the fourth floor.

  “Sukey-girl lived in that one. Four-oh-nine.”

  He takes another swig of beer and eyes my bicycle.

  “Don’t you got a boyfriend with a truck or something, honey? You won’t get much home on the back of that thing.”

  I hardly hear him. The window Doug pointed at is a jagged spiderweb of splintered glass. There’s something pushed up against it, a mattress or a piece of furniture, blocking the room from view. As I gaze at it, my elation at finding Sukey’s studio turns into a cold lump at the pit of my stomach.

  This can’t be right.

  Sukey wouldn’t have lived here. Not in this building. Not down the hall from someone like Doug. And especially not behind that evil-looking window, four stories up from a piss-smelling sidewalk where even the pigeons look strung out.

  I look back at Doug.

  “Where’d you get my number?”

  Doug turns his oversized eyes on me and lowers his beer.

  “Looked it up in the phone book. Guess I shouldn’t have bothered, eh?”

  We stare each other down. I have the same swimmy feeling in my guts as I get before a piano recital. That trapped feeling, when there’s still technically time to run away, slip out the back door, but at the same tim
e I know I’ve come too far and invested too much to back out.

  “She really lived here?” I say.

  “Right here.”

  It occurs to me that Sukey might have moved here because it was the only place she could afford. Struggling artists always live in cheap places: drafty garrets, crumbling country estates, pay-by-the-week hotels in the Downtown Eastside. . . . But by the looks of the decaying humanoids slumped in the doorway of the Imperial Hotel, there hasn’t been any art happening here in a long, long time.

  I cast another glance at Sukey’s window. “Can I come back in a few weeks?”

  In a few weeks, Mom and Dad can deal with this. In a few weeks, I won’t even have to get involved. The thought soothes me. Yes. I’ll bike home and practice piano, then go to Lukas’s for dinner.

  Doug spits.

  “I don’t know, honey. Building wasn’t supposed to come down until September, but now they’re saying it might be sooner. And anyways, I’ll be long gone before then.”

  “Can’t somebody else hold it till I get the chance to—”

  Doug crumples his beer can.

  “You don’t want to deal with it, guess it’s going down with the rest of this dump. I told myself I was only going to try calling her family one more time. We’re not interested,” he says, mimicking my dad’s clipped syllables. “I don’t think so,” he continues in the voice my mom uses with telemarketers.

  A blaze of shame burns my cheeks. They must have thought he was crazy. I glance at his beer can.

  Maybe they were right.

  “Wait,” I say. “I’m just thinking.”

  I could see if Lukas’s mom would come pick me up. But she doesn’t get home from work until six, and she’d ask too many social-worker questions anyway. I guess I could drag everything on the bus. . . .