Wild Awake (12 page)

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 through me.
Hey, k-bird. Hang this in your room, and I’ll keep the other one hanging in my studio
. I try to fill my brain with the pattern on the Formica table.

“What did they do?”

Doug looks around the diner as if he has only now become concerned about being overheard. He lowers his voice. “They bashed his head in with a pipe. Threw his body in the Dumpster.” He drains his coffee. “No more kid.”

“Kiri,” says Dr. Scaliteri, leaning forward
on her exercise ball and gripping my wrist. “You
must
get serious about this piano. We worked on these problems on Monday and there’s no change. No change at all.”

I am sitting on the piano bench, wearing a short green wrap skirt, a black tank top, and a cowrie-shell necklace. This morning I showered and brushed my teeth and even put on makeup. Securing the perimeter goes for appearances, too.

On the bus ride here I almost cried, imagining Billy barging into Sukey’s room at the Imperial while we were safe in our house, a ten-minute drive away. Even though I’ve taken the same bus a hundred times, I looked out the window and didn’t recognize a thing—as if I’d been seeing the whole world wrong, as if I’d never really seen it at all. I panicked and thought I’d missed my stop, but ended up getting off a stop too soon and walking the last ten blocks, arriving at Dr. Scaliteri’s house sweaty and five minutes late.

I force myself to meet her eyes.

“I’m sorry. I’ve been—something came up.”

Dr. Scaliteri glowers. She turns to her desk, and it looks like we’re about to go through the old calendar routine again, but instead she picks up a piece of mail. She waves the envelope at me.

“Your name has come up for the master class with Tzlatina Tzoriskaya,” she says.

The sweat freezes on my skin.

The master class is this elite inner Showcase-within-the-Showcase, whereby qualified Young Pianists are given the opportunity to learn an extra piece selected by the judge for its extreme difficulty and announced just weeks before the big event. It’s supposed to test your ability to learn music quickly—that, and your ability to not have a nervous breakdown under circumstances almost clinically designed to produce one.

Dr. Scaliteri enunciates slowly.

“For this class, Tzlatina has selected the Prokofiev.”

“Which Prokofiev?”

“The Concerto Number Two.”

Only one of the hardest piano pieces ever written. My jaw drops.

“I can’t have that ready that in time for the Showcase. It’s a hundred pages long.”

“For the master class, it must not be ready. It must only be memorized. Tzlatina will give you instruction on how to polish. It is a very big opportunity for you.”

“I know, but—”

“Tzlatina is on the faculty of music at the Royal Conservatory. You will be auditioning there in the fall, yes? So you see that it is very important for you to make an impression.”

My palms inexplicably start to sweat, and my eyes dart to the floor.
Get it together, Kiri
, warns a voice in my head, but that only makes me sweat harder. The piano’s pedals shine back at me, dainty brass paws, and its smell of felt and lacquer presses at my nostrils. I wish I was outside, on the sidewalk, somewhere with air. I wish I was riding a bus with its windows open.

“You will not audition for the Conservatory?” says Dr. Scaliteri.

I look up. “What? Of course I’m going to audition.”

Dr. Scaliteri crosses her arms. “What’s happening with you, Kiri? You used to be so full of focus, and now it’s distraction, distraction.”

Dr. Scaliteri says the word
distraction
like she’s talking about hard drugs. I recognize that tone. It’s the one Dad used to use with Sukey. I blush. “I’m not losing my focus.”

“Okay,” Dr. Scaliteri says with an exasperated flutter of her well-groomed hands. “Okay. But you know, the other students in the competition, they come from all over the country, all over the world, from all the best teachers. They are serious piano students.”

“I
am
serious.”

“Then you will stop mooning around with this boyfriend of yours and you will memorize the Prokofiev.”

When she’s finished this little pep talk, Dr. Scaliteri calls in Nelson Chow, who has just walked in the door looking dapper in his khaki pants and a yellow T-shirt, and has me play my entire repertoire over again.

“Now, Nelson,” says Dr. Scaliteri when I’ve just deployed the last deafening atonal slam of the Khachaturian, “do you have any suggestions for Kiri?”

Nelson puffs out his lips while he thinks. Dr. Scaliteri waits, tapping her pen on her knee. He scratches his arm.

“It sounds like she’s afraid of the music.”

Dr. Scaliteri turns to me brightly.

“That’s interesting, isn’t it, Kiri? Tell us why, Nelson.”

“She’s rushing through a lot of places.”

“Aha,” says Dr. Scaliteri, widening her eyes as if Nelson Chow has just pulled a live rabbit out of the piano and set it, hopping, on the floor. “What do you think of that, Kiri?”

I don’t know what I think. My mind is in space. My sister was killed by a kid with a sideways nose.

Snap out of it
.

I try to look Serious.

“What?”

Dr. Scaliteri claps her hands.

“Switch places. Up, up, up.”

This is one of Dr. Scaliteri’s favorite tricks, the old switcheroo. I peel my thighs off the leather seat and stand to the side while Nelson takes my place at the piano.

“Nelson, give us the Khachaturian.”

Not
play
us the Khachaturian.
Give
us the Khachaturian. As if Nelson in his insufferable yellow T-shirt is some kind of saint from whom all music floweth. He starts playing my piece—
my piece
—his hands blitzing over the keys. My heart sinks. It sounds completely different from when I play it. There’s something powerful in it I can’t put my finger on, something commanding and deep. Nelson must have stronger fingers than I do, or better technique. By the time he finishes his piece and reverts to Standby mode, I’m so embarrassed I want to melt into the floor.

Dr. Scaliteri turns to me and displays her fangs.

“What did you notice about Nelson’s playing?”

I try to think, but she doesn’t wait for me to answer.

“Nelson
listens
,” says Dr. Scaliteri triumphantly.

Bitch, please.

Dr. Scaliteri gives me one last long look, as if to gauge my level of Seriousness. She picks up a stack of sheet music that was sitting on her desk and hands it to me. My eyes skate over the cover page: Concerto No. 2.

Dr. Scaliteri nods at the door.

“Next Thursday or nothing,” she says.

The next week is simple
.

I don’t think.

I don’t sleep.

I don’t have endless looping nightmares about a kid with a sideways nose.

I just practice and practice until the world dissolves and anything that’s not piano fades away. Pretty soon, reality takes on the clean, sharp simplicity of a training montage. Cut to Kiri playing the Prokofiev, turning up the metronome one more notch, playing it again. Cut to Kiri fumbling with the sixteenth note section, frowning, and starting over, her eyebrows knit in an attitude of grim determination. Kiri tapping out notes on the kitchen counter while she waits for her instant oatmeal to microwave, Kiri doing sit-ups on the living room floor while Prokofiev plays on the speakers. Kiri working. Kiri getting Serious. Kiri practicing as if her whole life depends on it.

The kitchen sink fills up with milk-slimed cereal bowls and spoons studded with dried Grape-Nuts. My life consists of the safe little triangle between the fridge, the bathroom, and the piano. When my shoulders start to droop, I drink some coffee and keep going. There simply isn’t time to stop. I have more than one hundred pages of music to memorize by next Thursday. One hundred pages in six days.

Each time I make a mistake, I pounce on it with my claws extended and wrestle it to death.

Each time I feel like resting, I think about the master class with Tzlatina Tzoriskaya and force myself to go on.

Each time I feel like crying, I tell myself to knock it off.

I think about all the money that’s gone into my piano lessons, and the days and weeks and hours. I have to get this right, I just have to, or else—

I don’t want to think about the “or else.” Or else is a blank. A big gaping canyon. And on the other side of it is a person I don’t know how to be.

By the third day, I don’t have eyes anymore—I have orbital cavities. My hair hangs limp and greasy like I’m an actress at a haunted house. My back aches like I’ve been dragging the piano across the floor, not playing it, and my mouth tastes like caffeine. When my friend Teagan calls from physics camp to tell me a convoluted but hilarious story about the second law of thermodynamics, she stops halfway through to ask if she should, like, call me an ambulance. When Lukas’s mom calls to check on me, I carry the phone to the piano and play her part of the concerto.

“It is incredible what you do with this piano,” says Petra. “I am wishing we had started Lukas when he was young.”

Her approval is a gold star I use to hold up all the ones whose edges have started to curl.

The metronome ticks. I lose track of days. My clothes start to smell like I just ran a marathon. Several nights pass where I don’t see my bed, don’t even go upstairs at all. Sergei Prokofiev starts talking to me, a constant internal chatter, critiquing my technique and making grim Russian noises whenever I miss a note. I can feel the music growing on me like a graft on a plum tree, the new leaves shooting out, becoming a part of my brain.

At one point, my parents call long-distance from Brazil to give me a detailed update on the state of the lemur population at the Sao Rodrigo Wildlife Preserve, which they visited on a recent excursion from their cruise ship. My mom gives me a full report on the distinct habits, personalities, and dietary preferences of all six members of the lemur family showcased in the little pen at the visitor center. My dad’s contribution is a scathing condemnation of the boldness of the Brazilian homeless person. I pace around the kitchen while they talk, and eventually set the phone on top of the fridge and wander away.