Wild Awake

sounds normal, then suddenly it’s BLARING LOUD, then normal again before I can be totally sure the loud part even happened. I pinch myself on the leg, annoyed. Just quit it .
    Doug gazes down at his speckled yellow hands and says nothing. I pick up a chunk of pomegranate and sink my teeth into it, tasting the bitterness and the rush of sweet. When I’ve finished sucking the juice out I look around for a place to spit the seeds. I settle on my hand.
    “Don’t worry,” I say between spits. “I won’t be mad if you wanted to keep it for yourself. But you can’t not show it to me at all. I have to see it.”
    I pick up another chunk of pomegranate and go to work on it. The pile of seeds in my hand is growing into a warm, chewed-up heap. I tip it out onto the floor.
    Doug looks up, sees the pomegranate, and scowls.
    “Put that thing down, you’re getting crap everywhere. What the hell kind of fruit is that, anyway?”
    “Pomegranate.”
    Doug sighs. “I don’t have no painting,” he says.
    “What do you mean, you don’t have the painting?” I say, my voice false-cheerful. Even as I hate myself for asking, hate the sound of my own pathetic hopefulness like the tinny jingling of cheap bells, I can’t help but push on. “Did someone steal it? Did you give it to a gallery?”
    Doug scowls down at his blanket, avoiding my eyes. I keep at him, pleading. “You said she painted all the time. You said she used to lock herself in there for days. Artistic privacy. Come on, Doug. You at least saw her last painting, didn’t you? Can’t you at least tell me what it looked like?”
    In the room below us, someone throws something heavy onto the floor and starts shouting, a long caterwauling invective that makes the floor vibrate. Doug says nothing. The silence hanging between us is thick and awful and spreading in size like a stain.
    “Forget it,” I say quietly.
    “Oh, honey.”
    I get up, brushing pomegranate seeds off my jeans, and pick my way toward the door. The strange feeling in my head is getting stranger. The utter bizarreness of my presence here, in this dingy hotel talking to this dingy old man, presses on me with an urgency akin to panic.
    What the hell am I even doing here?
    I fumble for my phone so I can text Skunk on my way down the stairs.
    “Aw, hell,” says Doug. “Honey, wait.”
    I trip over something and almost bail, but catch myself and keep heading for the door. Denny was right. I guess I know what Sukey was really doing when she locked herself in her room for days at a time, and it didn’t involve a paintbrush.
    “ Wait ,” says Doug, and there’s something so raw and urgent in his voice I turn around.
    “What?” I demand. He motions for me to sit down, but I remain standing, hands on my hips. Whatever he has to say had better be quick.
    “Your sister—,” he begins. He stops and looks at the floor. I make an exasperated noise and turn to leave, but Doug starts talking again and I freeze, the promise of a story a drug I can’t resist.
    “The first time I saw Sukey-girl,” he says, “I’ll never forget it. She was wearing a blue polka-dot dress, and she was sitting on the sidewalk with a stack of paintings she was trying to sell. It looked like she’d been on the streets for three-four days tops. I was guessing she was one of those runaway kids from the suburbs, Surrey or Burnaby. She didn’t look a day over sixteen. ‘Go on home, honey,’ I said. ‘You look like you come from a real nice family.’”
    The image catches me off guard, and in my surprise and bewilderment I burst into tears. On Columbia Street, a car drives past pumping rap music. The beat carries through Doug’s window, boom, boom, boom , a disorienting reminder that in the world outside this hotel room, the words Doug is passing to me like tarnished silver mean nothing at all. The car recedes, its noise like a fly that alighted on Doug’s shoulder and is buzzing off again. I strain my ears, but I can’t hear its thumping anymore.
    “We got to chatting,” Doug says. “Some tourist had just bought a painting off her for fifty bucks. It was the first time she’d ever sold anything, and she was so happy she had this glow. She asked me if I knew about a cheap place to stay. I said, ‘Go home, girl. You’re having fun now, wait until you end up like me.’ You want to know what she said?”
    I’m really crying now, tears silently licking my cheeks. I’m not sure why Doug has elected to tell me