I wish I’d stayed at the party. This time, I’d cooperate. I’d watch people play Guitar Hero. I’d pretend Kelsey Bartlett had even slightly tolerable taste in music. I wouldn’t make a scene in the hot tub.
Bad thoughts snake through my brain. Stupid thoughts. I wonder if those boys in the car figured out where I live, if they know I’m home alone, if they’re planning to come by later and break into my house. I wonder if Sukey’s murderer is still on the loose. I wonder if he knows where I live. I wonder if Sukey did something bad or got in trouble with some gang or stole something her murderer is still looking for.
Once I start thinking about the murder, I can’t stop, and horrifying scenes reel through my mind, all these scenarios, all these reasons. I go to the computer and type the words Sukey Byrd murder into the search box. The back of my neck heats up, and I minimize the window, as if I’m afraid someone will walk in and catch me snooping. It feels like I’m doing something forbidden—pawing through my parents’ dresser or reading Denny’s email. It’s public information, I remind myself. I’m allowed to know.
But part of me knows that I’m not allowed. That I’m breaking a rule. When I reach for the mouse again, my hand is shaking. I can feel the computer screen’s glare on my face. Be brave, I tell myself. I click the window open again.
The first few hits are for some other Sukey Byrd, a criminal lawyer in Cambridge, England, with a specialty in murder trials, but the last one’s an article from the Sun.
I click.
The page takes a moment to load. When it does, a pop-up ad blocks most of the screen. I close it and scan the page for her name.
It’s not even a real article, just a news brief: name, age, address. Ms. Byrd, 21, was estranged from her family. There have been two other murders reported since the hotel changed ownership in 2001.
Estranged from her family. It sounds cruel and primitive, like a tribe booting one of its members out into the desert to die.
“She wasn’t estranged from me,” I whisper at the screen.
I comb through the search results to see if there’s anything else, but there’s nothing. I don’t get it. Where’s the murder trial, the conviction, the lifetime in prison? Does this mean they never found out who did it?
Just chill, I tell myself. Newspapers don’t turn every single murder into a big story. It doesn’t mean anything.
I click the window shut and clear the search history, like I’ve been looking at porn or instructions for how to build a bomb. My skin is hot and I’m sitting up too straight. I feel conspicuous in the same way as when I came home from Lukas’s house after we kissed on his birthday—like the truth of what I’ve just done is written all over me, obvious as a clown wig, and everyone can see.
You’re allowed to know, I tell myself again, but already a fine mist of guilt is settling over me. I think of my parents and shake it off. You don’t owe them anything.
I try smoking weed again, but instead of mellowing things out it gives my worries tiny fangs and bright yellow eyes and hairy feet and sets them marching like trolls. I sit on my bed with the lights on and my cell phone at the ready, my thoughts sliding back and forth between paranoia and self-recrimination. If you weren’t so self-absorbed, you would have noticed that things weren’t okay with Sukey. You would have helped her. But no, all you cared about was whether she would take you for milkshakes when she came to visit. You selfish little brat. You knew she didn’t die in a car crash, didn’t you?
I didn’t, I swear I didn’t.
But you cared more about keeping Mom and Dad happy with your stupid piano playing than about knowing the truth.
I curl up into a toxic ball of grief and self-loathing, the ceiling light hot and accusatory on my back. In the morning, I promise myself, I’ll get Doug to tell me the details, even the horrible ones, even the ones that will break me in ways I will never be able to fix. It’s what I deserve for being such a coward. And it’s the only way I can start to forgive myself for hiding from the truth for so long.
chapter seventeen
“He was a kid, eh. Young guy. Stupid. Hooked on junk.”
Doug and I are sitting in a sticky, distinctly sneezed-on booth at the Sunshine Diner, one of those all-day-breakfast places in Chinatown. He agreed to put down his early-morning beer, pull a shirt on over his speckled torso, and talk to me when I showed him the wooden bear. We’re the only ones here except for a table of twentysomething hipsters wearing plastic sunglasses and those really tight cardigans that make skinny people look anorexic and everyone else look morbidly obese. They’re reading the menus and laughing about the spelling mistakes, debating loudly whether to order the chocorat milk or the rapefruit juice. They project this aura of gleeful self-awareness that makes me feel awkward sitting with Doug while he pores over the menu like a sacred text, hungrily and with complete lack of irony.
I clamp my hand around my glass of syrupy orange juice. “What was his name?” I say.
“Billy.”
Billy. I handle the word warily, like an animal that might bite. My head has been swarming with questions all morning, but now that Doug is here in front of me, I’m too nervous to speak. I wish he would just talk, just tell me things. I tear at the edge of my napkin and twist the little white shreds into spirals, my mind shouting, Ask! Ask! Ask! but my lips refusing to move.
The waitress comes to take our order, staying just long enough to leave a disinfectant breeze that lingers over our table. I take a sip of my orange juice, as thick in my throat as cough syrup.
“So this Billy,” I force out, my fingers working the napkin. “Um. How—um.”
Doug lets out a long, hoarse sigh.
“She helped him out a couple times. Sukey-girl could never say no to anyone who needed help, even a junkie. She said he was just a kid. Said he just needed to get on his feet.”
My stomach turns.
“She knew him?”
I’d been imagining a stranger or distant acquaintance—some random brute, senseless as a dump truck. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that it was a friend. Someone who knew her. Someone she’d helped. Someone who had seen how small she looked in her denim jacket and realized how easy it would be to break her body with a fist, a knife, a pair of scissors. I feel the orange juice burning in the back of my throat and force myself to swallow.
The waitress comes again with our food but I don’t see her, I just hear the clink of plates on the table in front of me and smell the suddenly unwelcome aroma of scrambled eggs. Doug reaches for the grubby ketchup bottle next to the napkin dispenser. He turns it upside down and whacks it. Dark red blobs of ketchup plop out, and I have to look away before it calls up images I’d rather not have in my head.
“I told her to stay away from that kid,” he says. “He was dangerous. Shifty-eyed. Rob his own mother for a fix. Sukey used to let him stay at her place when he had nowhere to go. She’d tell me, ‘Doug, he’s just a baby. He’s just a baby, Doug. He’ll be all right once he gets clean.’”
I pick up my knife and fork as if to eat, but I’m remembering the way Sukey always gave change to the crusty punks sitting outside the McDonald’s with their enormous dogs, all spikes and grunge and attitude. Some of them were nice, but there were scary ones, too, and Sukey never seemed to notice the difference. I remember one guy in particular, with long, dirty dreadlocks and a barbed-wire tattoo around his neck. When Sukey gave him our change, he asked her for a cigarette, and while she was digging one out of her purse, he walked his eyes all over her body as I half-hid behind her, unnerved.
It was him. I know it was him. I remember the faded black spikes around his neck and the way his dog growled.
“What did he look like?” I whisper.
“Crooked nose,” says Doug. “Blond hair. One of those hockey players, eh.”
Something like relief sweeps over me. It wasn’t the guy outside the McDonald's. It wasn’t anybody I’ve seen.
Doug’s still talking. I struggle to catch up.
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“—said he took a puck in the face during a game. His nose pointed straight to the left, like he wiped it on his sleeve and it stuck there, just like that. Made him look tricky. Sukey told him he should go play hockey for some college, after he got clean. She was always trying to tell him to go play hockey. Said he looked just like Bobby Orr.”
I thought I wanted to know these things. I really did. I wanted someone to hate—a name, a face. But instead of feeling angry, I feel sicker and sicker, imagining the boyish face and bent nose, the short haircut, the pale skin. This is the person who killed Sukey? This Billy? This kid? Out of all the people in the world, what gave him the right to play with her life like a beer bottle he smashed on the pavement?
I take a bite of my toast. It scrapes my throat going down. The pain is a strangely welcome distraction. I push another dry, jagged bite down past my teeth.
“Did they have a fight?” I squeak before it’s all the way down.
Doug shakes his head.
“What happened?” I say.
“Kid came in one night looking for money to pay some people back. She was in her room, painting.”
“She was painting?”
“Oh yeah. When Sukey-girl got her hands on some paint, she’d close her door and stay in there for days. Artistic privacy, eh. But that kid busted in there anyway. He didn’t care about nobody’s privacy.”
My heart stops beating.
She was working on a painting. The one she told me about on my birthday. The big one, her best one yet, the one that was going to be finished soon and shown in a gallery.
“What happened next?” I say.
“Oh, honey.”
“Tell me.”
“You’re a good kid.”
“I’m her sister.”
Doug takes a sip of his coffee. He puts his mug down and closes his eyes.
“I heard the kid shouting. He said he knew she was hiding money somewhere. He knew she had a hundred bucks somewhere. She had some boyfriend who used to give her money now and then. I went to get my bat from behind the mattress. I was going to go in there and knock his lights out.”
Doug pauses.
“I could hear her talking to the kid, trying to make him calm down. Then she started screaming. I was down on the floor getting my bat, and when I tried to stand back up, my crutch slipped. I fell down hard, eh. She was screaming and screaming, and I could hear him knocking around in there, knocking things over, looking for her money. I yelled, ‘Get out of there, you lousy son of a bitch!’”
Doug says it loud. The hipsters at the other table glance at us and snicker, and the waitress casts us a dirty look from across the room.
“Doug,” I say, but there’s no stopping him now.
“I got back on my crutches and started for the door. Sukey was screaming her head off, and I heard a thud like someone falling down. I got out to the hall just in time to see the kid run down the stairs. I shouted, ‘I’m gonna kill you!’ Then I hurried into Sukey-girl’s room to make sure she was okay.”
Doug stops talking and shakes his head.
I’m frozen in place, literally frozen. I can’t swallow or blink or breathe. The food on the table looks lurid, surreal. Beside us, the hipsters’ chatter rises above the noise of plates clanking in the industrial dishwasher. Doug’s face has become impenetrable, as if we’ve come to a gate beyond which only he can proceed, a room only he can enter. Our waitress whisks by with the bill on a plastic tray and clears away our barely touched plates. Neither of us moves.
“What happened to him?” I say.
I imagine police sirens, blue lights flashing on Columbia Street. The kid being led away in handcuffs, his body twitching from adrenaline and withdrawal. An ambulance idling outside while the paramedics carry Sukey’s body down four flights of stairs on a stretcher. Someone at the police station calling, Dad reaching out to answer his cell phone as he’s driving home from work.
But this isn’t the picture Doug leaves me with, this tidy TV ending of ringing phones and flashing lights. He dips his head to put on his baseball cap and lays one hand on his crutches like he’s planning to get up. With his cap on, all I can make out of his eyes is a dark glitter, like water at the bottom of a sewer.
“After he did what he did to Sukey-girl, he went down to the second floor. The dealer was waiting for him with a few of his buddies. Kid went in there trying to give ’em a painting he grabbed out of Sukey-girl’s room—the only one she still had, the purple one she always kept up there on her wall.”
Pain lances through me. Hey, k-bird. Hang this in your room, and I’ll keep the other one hanging in my studio. I try to fill my brain with the pattern on the Formica table.
“What did they do?”
Doug looks around the diner as if he has only now become concerned about being overheard. He lowers his voice. “They bashed his head in with a pipe. Threw his body in the Dumpster.” He drains his coffee. “No more kid.”
chapter eighteen
“Kiri,” says Dr. Scaliteri, leaning forward on her exercise ball and gripping my wrist. “You must get serious about this piano. We worked on these problems on Monday and there’s no change. No change at all.”
I am sitting on the piano bench, wearing a short green wrap skirt, a black tank top, and a cowrie-shell necklace. This morning I showered and brushed my teeth and even put on makeup. Securing the perimeter goes for appearances, too.
On the bus ride here I almost cried, imagining Billy barging into Sukey’s room at the Imperial while we were safe in our house, a ten-minute drive away. Even though I’ve taken the same bus a hundred times, I looked out the window and didn’t recognize a thing—as if I’d been seeing the whole world wrong, as if I’d never really seen it at all. I panicked and thought I’d missed my stop, but ended up getting off a stop too soon and walking the last ten blocks, arriving at Dr. Scaliteri’s house sweaty and five minutes late.
I force myself to meet her eyes.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been—something came up.”
Dr. Scaliteri glowers. She turns to her desk, and it looks like we’re about to go through the old calendar routine again, but instead she picks up a piece of mail. She waves the envelope at me.
“Your name has come up for the master class with Tzlatina Tzoriskaya,” she says.
The sweat freezes on my skin.
The master class is this elite inner Showcase-within-the-Showcase, whereby qualified Young Pianists are given the opportunity to learn an extra piece selected by the judge for its extreme difficulty and announced just weeks before the big event. It’s supposed to test your ability to learn music quickly—that, and your ability to not have a nervous breakdown under circumstances almost clinically designed to produce one.
Dr. Scaliteri enunciates slowly.
“For this class, Tzlatina has selected the Prokofiev.”
“Which Prokofiev?”
“The Concerto Number Two.”
Only one of the hardest piano pieces ever written. My jaw drops.
“I can’t have that ready that in time for the Showcase. It’s a hundred pages long.”
“For the master class, it must not be ready. It must only be memorized. Tzlatina will give you instruction on how to polish. It is a very big opportunity for you.”
“I know, but—”
“Tzlatina is on the faculty of music at the Royal Conservatory. You will be auditioning there in the fall, yes? So you see that it is very important for you to make an impression.”
My palms inexplicably start to sweat, and my eyes dart to the floor. Get it together, Kiri, warns a voice in my head, but that only makes me sweat harder. The piano’s pedals shine back at me, dainty brass paws, and its smell of felt and lacquer presses at my nostrils. I wish I was outside, on the sidewalk, somewhere with air. I wish I was riding a bus with its windows open.
“You will not audition for the Conservatory?” says Dr. Scaliteri.
I look up. “What? Of course I’m going to audit
ion.”
Dr. Scaliteri crosses her arms. “What’s happening with you, Kiri? You used to be so full of focus, and now it’s distraction, distraction.”
Dr. Scaliteri says the word distraction like she’s talking about hard drugs. I recognize that tone. It’s the one Dad used to use with Sukey. I blush. “I’m not losing my focus.”
“Okay,” Dr. Scaliteri says with an exasperated flutter of her well-groomed hands. “Okay. But you know, the other students in the competition, they come from all over the country, all over the world, from all the best teachers. They are serious piano students.”
“I am serious.”
“Then you will stop mooning around with this boyfriend of yours and you will memorize the Prokofiev.”
When she’s finished this little pep talk, Dr. Scaliteri calls in Nelson Chow, who has just walked in the door looking dapper in his khaki pants and a yellow T-shirt, and has me play my entire repertoire over again.
“Now, Nelson,” says Dr. Scaliteri when I’ve just deployed the last deafening atonal slam of the Khachaturian, “do you have any suggestions for Kiri?”
Nelson puffs out his lips while he thinks. Dr. Scaliteri waits, tapping her pen on her knee. He scratches his arm.
“It sounds like she’s afraid of the music.”
Dr. Scaliteri turns to me brightly.
“That’s interesting, isn’t it, Kiri? Tell us why, Nelson.”
“She’s rushing through a lot of places.”
“Aha,” says Dr. Scaliteri, widening her eyes as if Nelson Chow has just pulled a live rabbit out of the piano and set it, hopping, on the floor. “What do you think of that, Kiri?”
I don’t know what I think. My mind is in space. My sister was killed by a kid with a sideways nose.
Snap out of it.
I try to look Serious.
“What?”
Dr. Scaliteri claps her hands.
Wild Awake Page 9
