Wild Awake

Aunt Martine gets home from work, but when I knock on the glass door he doesn’t answer, and when I try to open it, it’s locked. There’s a big pile of cigarette butts on the concrete. I go to the Chinese grocery store and buy him a dozen dragon fruit and leave them in front of his door in a circle of pear blossoms with a note that says The Way that takes its meds at eleven is not the true Way . Love, Kiri . There are brown birds chirping in the tree, and Skunk’s van is not in the alleyway. I wonder where he’s gone. I call his phone, but he doesn’t pick up—I can hear it ringing inside.
    Text from Lukas: WHY DID FEDEX DELIVER AMP 2 MY HOUSE?
    Text back: B O B SAT NITE NEED MAX SOUNDAGE OBVS
    “Stop pacing around the house like that,” says Denny. “You’re making me edgy.”
    “I don’t know where Skunk is.”
    “Who the hell is Skunk?”
    I prop up the cream-colored International Young Pianists’ Showcase program on top of the piano and play my entire recital all the way through six times.
    “Stop playing like that,” says Denny.
    “Like what?”
    “Like there’s someone holding a machine gun to your head.”
    I remind him that the Showcase is in sixteen days, Mom and Dad are due back in fifteen days, and it’s my personal responsibility to ensure that they come home to the kind of impeccable performance they have come to expect.
    Petra calls to invite Denny and me to dinner. She assumes my parents finally saw reason and sent him home to babysit me, and I don’t correct her on that point. When I decline the invitation, she asks if she can speak to Denny.
    “He’s not here right now,” I say with a rush of paranoia that makes my hair stand on end. Why does Petra want to talk to Denny? What’s she plotting, anyway?
    “You tell him to make sure you are eating real food,” says Petra. “I can give him instructions for roast chicken, if he doesn’t know how.”
    My suspicion dissolves into relief, and I remember how much I love Petra.
    “He knows how to cook a chicken,” I say.
    As the day progresses, I become more and more worried about Skunk. What if Martine took him to some evil mental hospital and had him committed because he goes to bed at four a.m.? She’s a nurse. They would believe her word over his, even though Skunk is obviously and thoroughly sane. Too bad he doesn’t have his phone, because then he would be able to call me for help.
    I try calling him one more time just in case, but all I get is the same constipated robot voice telling me the subscriber has not set up their voice-mail in-box.
    I start calling hospitals.
    “Is there a Philippe in your psychiatric ward?”
    “Philippe who?”
    “He’s really big. Like a bison. He has tattoos all over his arms.”
    “What’s the last name?”
    “Could you just go look if he’s there?”
    Denny comes home from skimboarding.
    “Denny, can you drive me somewhere?”
    “No, get a license.”
    “It’s extremely, extremely, extremely urgent. I need to go a psychiatric ward.”
    “No shit.”
    “I need to find someone.”
    “If they’re in a psych ward, they’re probably not allowed to see you anyway.”
    “Please.”
    “I told you. Get a license.”
    I go on the internet and look up the symptoms of psychosis. Somehow I end up taking a self-scoring suicide quiz on a mental health website. According to the quiz, I have an 87 percent risk of committing suicide. This sounds serious. I wonder if maybe I’m on the verge of suicide right now. Maybe that means I can join Skunk in the psych ward. The website says there’s a hotline you should call if your score is over 50 percent. I call the hotline. It rings busy. When I hang up the phone, it rings immediately. I think it’s the hotline calling back, but it’s my parents calling from Lithuania, where they are eating herring and snurkleberry jam.
    “I am bringing you and Denny some snurkleberry jam,” titters my mother.
    “Maybe you could study piano in Lithuania,” says my dad. “Then we’d have an excuse to come here all the time.”
    “I haven’t slept in three days,” I say.
    They chortle as if I’ve made some funny joke.
    “There’ll be plenty of time for sleeping after the Showcase,” says my dad.
    “If you’re stressed, you can borrow my gym card,” says my mom. “It’s in the basket on top of the fridge.”
    “I don’t think—”
    “They have something called Hot Yoga. That might be relaxing.”
    I stare at the ceiling. I don’t need to