Wild Awake

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.
    “—said he took a puck in the face during a game. His nose pointed straight to the