Wild Awake

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