Wild Awake

money. I would have begged Mom and Dad to let her move back in. Anything so she didn’t have to live in a place like this.
    Step fourteen. Doug plants his crutch in the middle of a half-eaten egg salad sandwich that’s lying on the step. He doesn’t notice and swings himself up anyway, then pauses to take a rest. The stale, eggy stench of the sandwich fills up the entire stairwell. Doug burps.
    “Almost there, honey.”
    I roll my eyes. Almost there, unless you count a million more steps full of belching, dirty jokes, and rogue egg salad sandwiches.
    Doug interprets my expression correctly for once and scowls.
    “What’s a matter? You got a TV show to watch?”
    He squints at me reproachfully. When he looks at me like that, I do feel kind of ashamed for being impatient with an old disabled man trying to climb a million stairs on crutches, even if he is an obnoxious drunk. I bite my lip.
    “Sorry. It’s just, my friend’s waiting with the van.”
    “I know, curly. You got somewhere to be.”
    He lifts the crutch that was on top of the egg salad sandwich and we start climbing again. The sandwich, horrifyingly, sticks to the bottom of the crutch and rides along until four steps after the second-floor landing, when it finally peels off. To make things worse, Doug clams up and proceeds in wounded silence while I drag along behind him. I never thought I’d wish for Doug to start talking, but now that he’s not, there’s nothing to distract me and I start to notice things I’d rather not notice, like the sound of a violent argument taking place a few floors above us.
    Once we leave the stale sandwich behind, the stairwell smells sweet and rank, like a recycling bin full of soda cans gone syrupy in the heat. There’s trash everywhere: food wrappers; nasty, scrunched-up paper towels; shoes and clothing that look like they were dredged up from a murder scene at the bottom of a swamp. I’m pretty sure there’s been a used condom stuck to the bottom of my flip-flop for the last few steps, but I’m too afraid to look. Whatever it is, I can feel its rubbery squishiness every time I put my foot down. A door slams, and a few seconds later a woman comes storming down the stairs, swearing, an orange-green bruise on her jaw.
    “Watch it, bitch,” she says as she pushes past me, although I get the unsettling impression she hasn’t seen me at all.
    I wonder if Skunk’s still waiting for me. I asked him to give me a ride, not sit in his van all day while I participate in some kind of absurdist play. I should have gotten his number and called him when I was ready to go. I shouldn’t have come in here at all. The only thing keeping me going is my anticipation of what’s waiting for me at the top of the stairs: a box of Sukey’s paintings, maybe, and some of her cool clothes.
    Doug grunts and pants. I try not to breathe. We make it to the third floor and start on the last set of steps. The lightbulb has burned out, and we struggle up the trash-infested staircase in watery dimness. It’s too dark to make out what’s on the steps, but I’m pretty sure the mystery condom on the sole of my left flip-flop has been joined by a mystery cigarette butt on my right.
    I get a queasy feeling when we pass from the third flight of stairs to the fourth. From this point on, I’ve gone too far to turn back. It’s like that time in ninth grade leadership camp when they made us swim to an island a mile from shore. After the first twenty-five minutes, the beach was too far away to swim back to, but the island was still a green blob in the distance, and I was out there, in the open ocean, way behind the other kids, with nothing to grab on to and the bottom too deep to stand.
    Tap-tap-THUMP .
    Doug hoists himself up the last step and starts down the hall. The light in the hall is busted too, and the fire door is clogged with trash. The glass box that used to hold a fire extinguisher has been smashed, and there’s a greasy pay phone bolted to the wall with its receiver hanging down by a mangled cord.
    Doug reaches out and brushes his fingers against a battered door.
    “Sukey-girl lived right here.”
    I glance at the door as we go past it. Some of the other doors on this floor are missing their knobs or have a hole in the wood where the deadbolt used to be. Sukey’s door is the only one that has all its parts. Maybe there’s a perfectly good apartment in there, where Sukey hung her bead curtain and set up her paints and easel in