At eleven thirty I hear Denny’s car in the driveway. The house is spotless. I even cut flowers from outside, daffodils and azaleas and bright pink cosmos, and put them in vases all around the room and on top of the piano. When Denny walks in, I’m polishing the wineglasses and placing them back on their shelf in perfect rows. He glares.
“Don’t you pick up the phone? I called, like, twenty times.”
He roves around the kitchen, yanking the fridge open and shutting it, banging all the cupboard doors. “There’s no freaking food in this house. I wanted you to pick up yam rolls before Kits Sushi closed.”
He swipes a pizza coupon off the fridge door and starts dialing the number. I inspect the last wineglass for smudges and carefully lift it into its spot.
“Did you know Sukey used to go watch the ships?” I blurt.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I adjust the wineglass by a quarter degree. “She used to sneak out to Kits Beach and watch the ships.”
“So what?”
I glance back at him. “I just thought you should know that.”
Denny’s expression is unreadable. He pauses and slowly lowers the phone into its cradle.
“I found out,” I warble, a little too loud.
“What do you want, a medal?”
The wineglasses look perfect now, three sparkling rows of three. I gently close the cupboard door and start in on the knives.
“I went to the place where she was living,” I say. “I got that frog that used to sit on her windowsill. And her quilt.”
“Put that knife down,” says Denny. “You’re freaking me out.”
“I’m cleaning them.”
“They’re already clean.”
“Jars of paint, too,” I say. “They’re not even dry.”
I polish the knife and slide it back into the wooden block, its blade as flawlessly reflective as the mirror on a ballet studio wall. Denny leans across the counter and snatches the dishcloth before I can clean any more.
“Quit it,” he says. “Are we talking real life here, or are you still tripping on whatever is it you took last night?” He stares at my eyes, which are admittedly a little red. “Oh my God. You’re on meth.”
“I’m not on drugs, Denny.”
“You were passed out under the piano.”
“I was hungover. It was Battle of the Bands.”
Denny shakes his head. “No. No way. It’s not alcohol. Look at you—you’re all tweaky. You’re hopped up on something. Drinking doesn’t do that. What is it? Coke? E? Your eyes are all bloodshot. You look fucking insane.”
“I smoked some pot. A lot of pot.”
“Oh, really. Speaking of which, where’d you get all that pot?”
I lift my chin. “None of your business.”
He narrows his eyes. I can see the thought forming in his head before he does. I make a grab for the phone, but he snatches it first.
“Maybe I should call Mom and Dad,” he says.
I lunge across the counter, clawing at Denny’s hands as he starts to dial. “The only reason you would ever do that is to be an asshole.”
“They would be so worried if they knew their perfect little pianist was on drugs. They might have to cut their trip short and fly home to take care of you. What a shame. Let me just dial this number, and—”
I pant, the counter edge cutting into my stomach as Denny and I do a slow-motion arm-wrestle for the phone. “You don’t really think I’m on drugs,” I say through clenched teeth. “You’re just trying to avoid the conversation.”
“What conversation?” he says.
“Exactly.”
Denny relaxes his grip on the phone. I swipe it and hold it behind my back, its plastic case hot in my hand. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Denny watches me warily. “You were twelve, Kiri. You hung on Sukey’s every word like she was your guru. You couldn’t have handled it then, and by the looks of it you can’t even handle it now.”
I glare at him, outraged. I know how I must look right now, with my scraped-up knees and bloodshot eyes and the trembly-tense posture of a first-time gangster holding up a convenience store. But it’s not fair. It’s a misrepresentation. I’m the strong person here, the one who stayed nice when everyone else was slamming doors, the one who filled the house with music when grief had drained it to a creeping silence, the one who rode to the Imperial on a freaking bicycle to bring a piece of Sukey home. If there’s something I can’t handle, it’s being told all of that means nothing. My face heats up.
“Well, I know more than any of you now. You want to know who killed her? A kid with a sideways nose. You want to know how I got her stuff? Her alcoholic neighbor kept it in his closet for five years because nobody from our stupid family cared enough to go down there and clear out her studio after it happened.”
Denny sighs and runs a hand through his idiotic haircut like a long-suffering adult trapped in negotiations with a three-year-old. “It’s not that simple. You don’t even know all the details.”
The condescension in his voice hits me like baking soda on vinegar. I erupt.
“‘You don’t know the details. You don’t know the details.’ I’m the one who went down there, so don’t give me that crap about details.”
Denny smirks. “Oh yeah? You know about her tiny little pill problem?”
“Lots of great artists use mind-altering substances.”
“You know she owed people money?”
I don’t answer.
Denny keeps going, his voice oh-so-casual, drumming on the counter with his fingernails.
“You know what great artists with tiny little pill problems do to get money?” he says.
The sentence hangs in the air like a tossed grenade. Denny’s eyes pin me to the spot. I writhe like one of the sea urchins he tortures in his lab, dark possibilities crowding into my mind.
“Mom and Dad should have helped her,” I bleat.
“They did. Do you know how many times Dad tried to—”
“She was working on a painting. A big one. Which you and Mom and Dad would know if you’d actually believed in her.”
Whatever scrap of sympathy was in Denny’s eyes before burns away instantly. “I don’t know what kind of warm, fuzzy story this alcoholic neighbor told you, but she wasn’t there on a freaking art residency.”
“It’s true. She was working on it when she died.”
Denny gives me a look of such utter incredulity that it appears he is considering, for real this time, the possibility that I may actually be insane.
“Oh, right,” he says, his hands dropping to his sides in disbelief. “Our dear, sweet, innocent Sukey was hard at work on a lovely painting in her lovely art studio when this random drug dealer just happened to walk in and stab her to death. If that’s true, where’s the painting? Don’t tell me her alcoholic neighbor saved that stupid frog but let this supposed masterpiece get thrown out.”
“Maybe it got blood on it,” I say, but my mind is already racing to the stains on the quilt. Doug would have saved the painting. Maybe he still has it. Maybe it’s the one thing he couldn’t bear to give away. Or maybe he brought it to an art gallery, just like Sukey was planning.
I must look distraught, because Denny reaches across the counter and pats my hand.
“Hey. She was my sister too.”
I yank my hand away, and Denny shakes his head, his pity giving way to exasperation.
“Come on, Kiri. If you’re going to make a stink about how nobody told you the truth, you should at least stop lying to yourself.”
He stalks out of the kitchen. I stay there smoldering, hating Denny, hating our parents, trying to think up the perfect comeback to prove them all wrong.
But five minutes later, I haven’t come up with one, and I’m still standing in the kitchen alone.
chapter twenty-nine
The next morning, I can’t stand to be in the house. Denny’s words from the night before are like a
stone in my shoe, their truth a grinding presence I can’t ignore. He’s wrong, I tell myself again and again. But there’s a ten-pound weight in the pit of my stomach that says otherwise. The fridge buzzes and tiny spiders crawl out of the flowers I cut from the backyard until there’s nothing I can do but grab my keys and wallet and catch a bus downtown. I tell myself I’m only going to drop in on Doug for a friendly visit, but Sukey’s painting is all I can think about as I hurry to the stop.
The minute I get on the bus, I start to regret it. It lurches along, hardly traveling six feet before an iguana-faced senior citizen pulls the cord and makes it stop again. A tall, pimply boy sits down next to me, takes out a spiral-bound notebook, a pen, and graphing calculator, and starts working on a long and seemingly impossible math equation, breathing loudly through his mouth. I think of Goth Girl from The Adolescent Depression Workbook. Maybe they should date.
“Need some help?” I ask in a friendly way, but he just glances at me with a terrified expression and scribbles more numbers down.
The bus crawls along West Broadway, getting more and more crowded at every stop. It would have been faster to ride my bike, but the front wheel is bent and there are splinters of pain in my kneecaps when I walk, so I can’t imagine trying to pedal. I grit my teeth while people pull the cord and get off at the most mundane and pointless places: the Laundromat, the bank. It seems so petty of them to keep doing that, I can hardly contain my frustration. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Math Boy’s shoulder jostles mine, and the old lady sitting behind me unwraps a breath mint that smells like industrial detergent. The only thing that keeps me from flipping out completely is when Skunk texts me WHERE’S MY CRAZY GIRL? and I text back ON A MISSION and he texts me COME OVER LATER? and I text YES YES and he texts OK BEAUTIFUL.
When I finally get to the Imperial, Doug is sitting on his mattress, his blue fleece blanket gathered around his scrawny legs, beer can plugged into the hollow of his hand. Snoogie’s munching greedily at the cat food I brought for her the other day. I can hear the star-shaped pink pellets cracking between her teeth. I sit down beside her on the dirty floor and break open the pomegranate I bought at MONEY FOOD before coming in. Some days call for strange fruit.
“My brother wants to know what happened to the painting,” I say, doing my best to sound casual and nonthreatening in case Doug really did keep it for himself or sold it for beer money one day when he got desperate.
“Whassat?” Doug burps.
“Sukey’s masterpiece. The one you said she was working on when”—my throat constricts—“when it happened.”
My voice sounds high and cartoonish, like I just took a hit off a helium balloon. I wonder if there’s something wrong with me. I’ve felt strange inside myself since the night under the piano, rushed and dizzy. My thoughts feel like a TV with the volume all messed up: one moment, everything sounds normal, then suddenly it’s BLARING LOUD, then normal again before I can be totally sure the loud part even happened. I pinch myself on the leg, annoyed. Just quit it.
Doug gazes down at his speckled yellow hands and says nothing. I pick up a chunk of pomegranate and sink my teeth into it, tasting the bitterness and the rush of sweet. When I’ve finished sucking the juice out I look around for a place to spit the seeds. I settle on my hand.
“Don’t worry,” I say between spits. “I won’t be mad if you wanted to keep it for yourself. But you can’t not show it to me at all. I have to see it.”
I pick up another chunk of pomegranate and go to work on it. The pile of seeds in my hand is growing into a warm, chewed-up heap. I tip it out onto the floor.
Doug looks up, sees the pomegranate, and scowls.
“Put that thing down, you’re getting crap everywhere. What the hell kind of fruit is that, anyway?”
“Pomegranate.”
Doug sighs. “I don’t have no painting,” he says.
“What do you mean, you don’t have the painting?” I say, my voice false-cheerful. Even as I hate myself for asking, hate the sound of my own pathetic hopefulness like the tinny jingling of cheap bells, I can’t help but push on. “Did someone steal it? Did you give it to a gallery?”
Doug scowls down at his blanket, avoiding my eyes. I keep at him, pleading. “You said she painted all the time. You said she used to lock herself in there for days. Artistic privacy. Come on, Doug. You at least saw her last painting, didn’t you? Can’t you at least tell me what it looked like?”
In the room below us, someone throws something heavy onto the floor and starts shouting, a long caterwauling invective that makes the floor vibrate. Doug says nothing. The silence hanging between us is thick and awful and spreading in size like a stain.
“Forget it,” I say quietly.
“Oh, honey.”
I get up, brushing pomegranate seeds off my jeans, and pick my way toward the door. The strange feeling in my head is getting stranger. The utter bizarreness of my presence here, in this dingy hotel talking to this dingy old man, presses on me with an urgency akin to panic.
What the hell am I even doing here?
I fumble for my phone so I can text Skunk on my way down the stairs.
“Aw, hell,” says Doug. “Honey, wait.”
I trip over something and almost bail, but catch myself and keep heading for the door. Denny was right. I guess I know what Sukey was really doing when she locked herself in her room for days at a time, and it didn’t involve a paintbrush.
“Wait,” says Doug, and there’s something so raw and urgent in his voice I turn around.
“What?” I demand. He motions for me to sit down, but I remain standing, hands on my hips. Whatever he has to say had better be quick.
“Your sister—,” he begins. He stops and looks at the floor. I make an exasperated noise and turn to leave, but Doug starts talking again and I freeze, the promise of a story a drug I can’t resist.
“The first time I saw Sukey-girl,” he says, “I’ll never forget it. She was wearing a blue polka-dot dress, and she was sitting on the sidewalk with a stack of paintings she was trying to sell. It looked like she’d been on the streets for three-four days tops. I was guessing she was one of those runaway kids from the suburbs, Surrey or Burnaby. She didn’t look a day over sixteen. ‘Go on home, honey,’ I said. ‘You look like you come from a real nice family.’”
The image catches me off guard, and in my surprise and bewilderment I burst into tears. On Columbia Street, a car drives past pumping rap music. The beat carries through Doug’s window, boom, boom, boom, a disorienting reminder that in the world outside this hotel room, the words Doug is passing to me like tarnished silver mean nothing at all. The car recedes, its noise like a fly that alighted on Doug’s shoulder and is buzzing off again. I strain my ears, but I can’t hear its thumping anymore.
“We got to chatting,” Doug says. “Some tourist had just bought a painting off her for fifty bucks. It was the first time she’d ever sold anything, and she was so happy she had this glow. She asked me if I knew about a cheap place to stay. I said, ‘Go home, girl. You’re having fun now, wait until you end up like me.’ You want to know what she said?”
I’m really crying now, tears silently licking my cheeks. I’m not sure why Doug has elected to tell me this story now. Maybe because he’s saved the saddest part of all until the end. Maybe because I’m the only person in the world who can lift it from his shoulders now that he’s carried it for so long.
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘The soul has a home of its own, and I want to live in that one.’ Some line from a movie. I had her write it down for me, eh, but I lost the paper. It knocked me out—this beautiful girl in a polka-dot dress sitting there on the sidewalk, selling her paintings and pulling out lines like that. Every single day, I told her to go home. Every goddamn day.”
“Why didn’t she?” I say, even though I know the answer.
Another car passes by with its stereo blasting, this time a nattering top forty host whose words I ca
n’t make out. I’d never realized how loud the world was, how filled with cold and impersonal noise. It’s a wonder we ever find each other at all in its clamoring thickets. It’s a wonder we still try.
The mattress groans as Doug leans over to get his crutches “Come on, honey,” he says. “I got something to show ya. It’s maybe not what you wanted, but I bet Sukey-girl would have liked you to see it.”
He maneuvers himself up from the mattress. I watch him warily, my tears drying up but my cheeks still hot. I don’t think I’m ready for more surprises, no matter what they are. I want to be home with my head under a pillow, muffling as much of the world as I can. Doug works his way across the room, lurches past me, and goes into the hall. “Down this way,” he grunts. I follow him at a distance. “I’ve already seen her old room,” I say, remembering the porn magazines and the stench of old cigarettes.
Doug shakes his head in disgust. “Sukey-girl never spent hardly any time in that shithole anyway.”
He crutches down the hall quickly, as if he’s afraid I’ll find some excuse to leave if we don’t get there fast. The floor creaks beneath us like something that’s already breaking, even though the demolition notice taped to the door of the hotel when I came in this morning pins the date a few weeks away. Doug stops when he gets to the fire door at the end of the hall and leans on it with his shoulder.
“Isn’t the alarm going to sound?” I say.
Doug ignores me. “Give that door a push, honey.”
He shuffles out of the way, and I reluctantly take his place. The door scrapes open when I shove it, revealing a rickety fire escape. Doug blinks at the blueness of the sky like he’s seeing an alien landscape. I gaze out apprehensively, my eyes wandering down through the metal slats to the alley four stories below.
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