Even though I know there are a million other things I should be worrying about—like the Showcase, and how to explain the fact that our magazine-perfect house is now home to an irascible three-legged cat that I am starting to suspect is an alcoholic—the azaleas seem to overshadow it all.
“We can’t buy new azaleas bushes at three a.m.,” says Denny. “Get some sleep. Anyone would go nuts if they slept as little as you.”
A wave of dread rolls through me. “But what about—”
Denny’s hands are calm and even on the steering wheel. “Tell you what,” he says. “You go to bed and let me worry about the azaleas.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
My body untenses when Denny says this, like the matter of the azaleas was a big hairy spider on my shoulder and Denny just flicked it off. I’m safe, I think, drawing a deep, rattled breath. The azaleas. Thank God.
It turns out that when you unsubscribe from sleep, it’s actually rather hard to get started again. The sleep gods don’t just let you back into the club after you’ve snubbed them. You need to make some kind of sacrifice or penitence or offering to get back in. I light a stick of the incense Skunk gave me and wave it around my bed, singing a wheedling sleep chant as my room fills up with fragrant smoke. I say a little prayer, Oh sleep gods, please let me in, and climb under the covers. The first few minutes seem promising. I snuggle into my pillow and try to let my brain go still. For a moment, it seems like I might really fall asleep, and if I can really fall asleep, then maybe there’s no problem after all.
But a few seconds later, my brain’s at it again. I start thinking about all the complicated things I need to explain to Mom and Dad—Sukey’s things, the Showcase, Skunk—and spend the rest of the night wide awake, planning for their arrival.
First I think it might be best if I’m sitting at the piano practicing when they show up, and I can twist around with a pleasantly surprised expression on my face as if I hadn’t heard the cab in the driveway.
Then I think I should lay out Sukey’s things in the living room and stage a family catharsis, talk show–style, and we’ll all weep and hug and confess our wrongdoings and emerge from the house hours later, bleached by forgiveness and scoured by tears.
Then I start worrying that Mom and Dad are going to be angry at me for embarrassing them in front of Petra and Dr. Scaliteri. In that case, perhaps a vulnerable approach would work best. They’ll walk in and I’ll be curled up on the couch, frail and frightened, with Snoogie the cat in my arms, their poor hardworking daughter who nearly practiced herself to death just to make them proud.
The clock on my nightstand glows red, and even though I try all sorts of different sleeping positions and pillow configurations and chants and spells and prayers, the sun comes up in the morning and I haven’t slept at all.
My parents materialize like sunscreen-smelling aliens, all rolling luggage and breathable clothes. There’s a brightness about them that doesn’t seem real, a sanitized freshness like cut flowers gazing out at the world through cellophane.
I come out of the bathroom after brushing my teeth and Mom and Dad are just there, as crisp and neat and color-coordinated as people clipped out of a catalogue. The various scripts I’d run through in my head scramble themselves into a dizzying triple helix and instead I just stare at them, raw-eyed from lack of sleep, as they bump around the kitchen, talking at me so fast I can only process a quarter of what they say.
“Kiri,” they keep saying like a pair of chirping birds.
They want to know what happened to the azalea bushes.
And where I put the mail.
They have spent their last three days on the cruise ship doing Research on various teen mental health websites. They tell me it’s a good thing Petra and Denny observed the Warning Signs, or I might be in real trouble.
My dad pushes a pile of books into my hands that they apparently bought on the way home from the airport. I scan the titles. The Adolescent Depression Workbook.
You’re fucking kidding me, I think.
My parents chatter on and on. Petra has recommended a Hip Young Counselor with whom I will be having an appointment tomorrow morning to discuss a possible future in monomania. Petra has also recommended an acoustic guitar–wielding music therapist, who is supposed to be very, very skilled with troubled teens. Since I am so musical, we are sure to be great friends.
They dig out a few little presents for me: the shampoo and soaps from the cruise ship, a necklace made of some sea creature’s crushed-up bones. I twist the little pink shells between my fingers, wondering when they’re going to ask me what happened, how I’m feeling, what I think’s going on. Petra’s right, Lukas is right, Denny’s right, Skunk’s right, they’re all right—I’m Thingy, I’m having a Thing. I’m exhausted and cracked out and not entirely okay. But I don’t even care about that anymore. That seems like something that will get better. It’s right now I’m worried about: It’s standing here together with so much to say, and not saying anything at all.
I hover there a moment longer, waiting for them to ask me about something, anything, that actually matters.
Dad busies himself with the plugging-in of cell phone chargers.
Mom checks the fridge for milk.
There’s an exaggerated kind of industriousness to their movements, bright and false, like kids pretending to be absorbed in taking notes so the teacher doesn’t call on them. Mom is unscrewing a giant bottle of vitamin pills that gives off a scent like rubber flowers, Dad’s pouring himself a glass of water at the sink, and for the first time since Sukey died I can see us clearly, hovering at the intersection of love and avoidance like lost tourists who can’t decide which road will bring them home.
My shoulders start to tremble and my chest swells up like a hot-water bottle filled too fast.
“Mom?” I warble. “Dad?”
They both spin around at once.
“Can we talk?”
It comes out strange and strangled, like words in a foreign language I’m only beginning to learn.
Then they’re hugging me in their sunscreeny arms and breathing in my hair with their mouthwashy breath, and I feel like a firewalker who’s just crossed hot coals to collapse, on the other side, into cool grass.
“There was a phone call,” I mumble into the sleeve of my dad’s shirt.
We start from there.
chapter forty-three
That night, I do my incense ritual standing over my bed, and I’m just about to swallow the melatonin Mom left on my dresser when I realize I haven’t checked my phone all day. I fish it out of my purse and see three missed calls from Skunk, and two texts from this afternoon: JUST BIKED PAST IMPERIAL. ALL BOARDED UP. ??? And: TALKED 2 CONSTRUCTION GUY. DEMOLITION 2MORROW!!!
I spit the melatonin into my hand and press call back. Skunk answers on the twenty-millionth ring, his voice thick and groggy from his medication.
“Huhllo . . .”
“They’re tearing it down tomorrow?” I whisper.
“Mmmmmmm.”
I don’t think he’s really awake, or even physiologically capable of being awake. The pills he takes are basically elephant tranquilizers.
It occurs to me in a flash that starting tomorrow, the Hip Young Counselor might try to put me on elephant tranquilizers too.
Skunk makes a sleepy, confused moan. I whisper lovingly, “It’s okay, Bicycle Boy, go back to sleep.”
I press the end button and sit on my bed, my body straining between rival impulses like a chew toy being pulled in six different directions at once. I know I should go to sleep. I should take the melatonin and get into bed. But when I think about everything that’s happened this summer, I can’t let it end like this, with a pill and eight hours of chemical oblivion. It would be like skipping Sukey’s funeral all over again. It would be like I never went out to find her at all.
The house is quiet. The only sound I hear is the barking of a distant dog through the open window, blocks an
d blocks away.
Just one more night, I say to myself.
I get up and pad down the hall, pausing outside my parents’ door to make sure they’re asleep. They kept yawning during dinner and making comments about being on “Canary Island time,” and I’m pretty sure they’re conked out on melatonin themselves. When I don’t hear anything, I tiptoe into Sukey’s old room, avoiding the squeaky floorboard by the door. I find what I’m looking for and hurry back to my room. I throw on a sweatshirt and sling a canvas messenger bag over my shoulder, tucking the contraband inside.
Two minutes later I’m silently wheeling my bicycle through the side door of the garage.
For the first few blocks of the bike ride, my senses are on high alert. Every car that passes is my parents coming to bring me home. Every pedestrian is a neighbor or acquaintance who will call them to report my escape.
She’s out of control!
She’s gone berzerk!
She’s biking in her pajamas!
But I feel more solid than I have in a long time, and more certain. My grip on the handlebars is steady. My wheels roll straight and true. The contents of the messenger bag clink softly against my body, their weight reassuring. By the time I get to the bridge, I’ve stopped worrying about being caught. Ahead of me, the city is still and quiet, the only motion the private dances of the sidewalk trees.
I reach into my bag and pull out the first paint jar from Sukey’s set. Anchoring it against the handlebars with one hand, I unscrew the lid with the other, my bike swerving slightly beneath me. When I get the lid off, I hold my arm out and tip the jar over the sidewalk, and a thin stream of paint pours out in one long thread. I look behind me. A trail of marigold yellow follows me down the bridge.
Hey, Kiri. An echo.
I hear you’re in a band.
“It’s just me and my boyfriend,” I say out loud, then laugh at the weirdness of my voice, after midnight, on the bridge.
I screw the lid back onto the yellow paint jar and drop it back into the messenger bag, steering my bike one-handed as I rummage for another jar. I paint a pink dot on Sukey’s magnolia tree, and twin streams of cobalt and crimson along the bike trail where Skunk and I raced at Stanley Park. I leave an emerald splatter on the pavement in front of the Train Room and a tiny white blossom on the patio outside Skunk’s door, hurrying away on tiptoes before I get caught.
Each time I dip my hand into the messenger bag, my fingers close around exactly the right color. The paints shine up at me like little wet faces from the bottom of the jars.
That’s rad, Kiri. You got a demo for me?
As a matter of fact, I do.
The fire hydrants stand stout and friendly on the street corners, and the sly little breezes push me forward through the city, and closer, closer, closer to my goal.
When I get to the Imperial, the doors and first-floor windows are boarded up. There’s a new chain-link fence blocking the building off from the sidewalk, with a flimsy plastic sign that says PARAMOUNT PROPERTIES. I roll to a stop, clenching the brakes so hard, my knuckles whiten. There’s something scary about seeing a building boarded up, especially if you know who used to live there—it makes you think about your house and all your friends’ houses, and imagine the people erased. I gaze up at the dark windows, and the nothingness I see there terrifies me more than the hotel ever did when it was full.
Where did Jasmine go, and Larry and Fink, and Jojo, the dog who trembles all over? Where would Doug have gone? They’ve been swept out like spiders, scattered to the streets. But even as my heart aches of think of it, another truth drops into my mind as clearly as a stone into a pool of water: If Sukey was alive, she would be right here beside me. She’d point to a fourth-story window and say, “I used to live in that one. Four-oh-nine.” I’d follow her gaze, hardly believing that my sister the painter had lived through such a time, when her only friends were an old man named Doug and a three-legged cat, and her studio was the rooftop of a derelict hotel.
We’d stare at that window for a long time, me on my red bike and Sukey on her green one.
“Let’s do this,” Sukey would say.
And we’d do what I’m doing now:
We’d hop the fence.
We’d scurry up the fire escape without looking down.
And we’d paint one last picture, together this time, in the place where Sukey had always stood alone.
I lock my bike to a lamppost and clamber over the chain-link fence with a clumsiness that would make a ninja cry. It snags at my pajamas and rattles more noisily than a half dozen garbage cans knocked over by raccoons. I land with a thump on the other side and hurry down the alley without pausing to investigate the scratches on my arms and the tear on my sleeve. This time, I don’t hesitate on the fire escape. It’s like the critical moment in capture the flag when you spy a spot of color on a tree branch and there is nothing to do but run, no matter who is chasing you or how the rocks tear at your feet, to grab it and claim it for your own. The fire escape clangs, my bag bounces against my hip, and I swallow the night air in gasping lungfuls.
Just when I’ve launched myself over the last few rungs of ladder and onto the roof, a car pulls up and a door slams. I drop to a crouch, my pulse a roar I am certain you could hear six stories down. A walkie-talkie crackles.
Security guard.
My body reacts instantly. Before I know it, I’ve flattened myself against the roof, my arms and legs splayed out. Whoever’s down there walks up and down the block, leaving the car idling by the curb. My ears strain to catch every footfall, every scratch of static from the walkie-talkie. Should have locked my bike farther away. I think of all the places I’ve marked with paint—the bridge and the bike trail and the tree. Does that count as vandalism? Am I about to get arrested? I press my face into the roof, as if that could hide me any more than I’m already hidden, thinking, please please please please please.
The footsteps move back toward the idling car. The door opens and slams again, and after a thirty-second pause during which I am sure the person inside is dialing for reinforcement, the car drives off and the street is quiet.
The breath I was holding scrapes my throat coming out, as if it had been sharpened into a knife blade in my lungs. My first instinct is to grab my bag and climb down before I have any more close calls. But when five minutes pass and the car hasn’t come back, my tensed muscles relax. If Sukey painted here in broad daylight without getting caught, what are the chances of anyone checking the rooftop tonight?
I ease myself up and brush myself off, my ears buzzing faintly from adrenaline. Grabbing the bag, I fumble my way to the place where the drips from Sukey’s paintbrush have collected like the petals of an enchanted flower. When I crouch to touch them, the paint splatters are smooth under my fingers, distinct from the roughness of the roof. I unscrew the last of the paint jars, the arsenic and ochre and gold, colors I would have hardly believed existed if she hadn’t brought them into my world. They splash onto the rooftop and scatter into a hundred different shapes, joining the cacaphony of colors. I don’t know what she would have painted with them and I guess I never will, but for now, like this, they are beautiful.
I sit on the rooftop all night long, cradled in the broken lawn chair like a ramshackle bird in a plastic nest. Below me, the neighborhood tosses and turns like a person in a fever. The lamps burn too bright. The street sweats. A bottle breaks on a sidewalk. A police car howls through an intersection.
I wrap my arms around my knees and cry and laugh for a very long time, but mostly I just hold myself very, very tightly, like a piece of dandelion fluff you’ve finally caught in your fingers after chasing it, leaping for it, again and again on a windy day. The universe, I realize, is full of little torches. Sometimes, for some reason, it’s your turn to carry one out of the fire—because the world needed it, or your family needed it, or you needed it to keep your soul from twisting into a shape that’s entirely wrong.
So you go, and you come back with paint a
ll over your hands and scabs on your knees and the lingering traces of a song few people have ever heard, echoing in your ears.
I stay until the sky turns pale pink and a flock of small brown birds alights on the edge of the roof, chirping and whistling and flapping their wings. There’s a rumbling from the street as someone rolls up a metal screen. The sweetness of steaming buns fills the air: the Chinese bakery. I push myself up from the lawn chair and go to the place where the paint forms a brilliant carpet beneath my feet. The soul has a home of its own, Sukey said, and I want to live in that one. I feel, as I gaze down at the shining colors, that I am standing in a place I have been forever. A place I will leave without leaving. A place I will find, and yet search for, for the rest of my life.
As I climb onto the fire escape, a blueness catches my eye, so slight and far away, I almost don’t turn my head.
But I do stop.
And I do look.
And this is what I see: There, on the horizon, two ships.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my editor, Molly O’Neill, who was a lighthouse in the stormy seas of revision and a great mentor; and to my agent, Laura Rennert, without whose wisdom and encouragement this ship might have capsized many times over. I’m grateful every day to have fallen into such good hands and am deeply indebted to you both.
Thank you to Lara Perkins and everyone at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency; my foreign rights agent, Taryn Fagerness; Barb Fitzsimmons, Lauren Flower, Tom Forget, Brenna Franzitta, Esilda Kerr, Casey McIntyre, Amy Ryan, Valerie Shea, Megan Sugrue, Katherine Tegen, Joel Tippie, and all the other wizards at HarperCollins who do the magical stuff that makes a book a book; Lynn Lindquist for encouragement in the early drafts; all the INTERN readers whose friendship has been an inspiration and an unexpected delight; and to friends and loved ones in too many cities to name.
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