there’s been a used condom stuck to the bottom of my flip-flop for the last few steps, but I’m too afraid to look. Whatever it is, I can feel its rubbery squishiness every time I put my foot down. A door slams, and a few seconds later a woman comes storming down the stairs, swearing, an orange-green bruise on her jaw.
“Watch it, bitch,” she says as she pushes past me, although I get the unsettling impression she hasn’t seen me at all.
I wonder if Skunk’s still waiting for me. I asked him to give me a ride, not sit in his van all day while I participate in some kind of absurdist play. I should have gotten his number and called him when I was ready to go. I shouldn’t have come in here at all. The only thing keeping me going is my anticipation of what’s waiting for me at the top of the stairs: a box of Sukey’s paintings, maybe, and some of her cool clothes.
Doug grunts and pants. I try not to breathe. We make it to the third floor and start on the last set of steps. The lightbulb has burned out, and we struggle up the trash-infested staircase in watery dimness. It’s too dark to make out what’s on the steps, but I’m pretty sure the mystery condom on the sole of my left flip-flop has been joined by a mystery cigarette butt on my right.
I get a queasy feeling when we pass from the third flight of stairs to the fourth. From this point on, I’ve gone too far to turn back. It’s like that time in ninth grade leadership camp when they made us swim to an island a mile from shore. After the first twenty-five minutes, the beach was too far away to swim back to, but the island was still a green blob in the distance, and I was out there, in the open ocean, way behind the other kids, with nothing to grab on to and the bottom too deep to stand.
Tap-tap-THUMP.
Doug hoists himself up the last step and starts down the hall. The light in the hall is busted too, and the fire door is clogged with trash. The glass box that used to hold a fire extinguisher has been smashed, and there’s a greasy pay phone bolted to the wall with its receiver hanging down by a mangled cord.
Doug reaches out and brushes his fingers against a battered door.
“Sukey-girl lived right here.”
I glance at the door as we go past it. Some of the other doors on this floor are missing their knobs or have a hole in the wood where the deadbolt used to be. Sukey’s door is the only one that has all its parts. Maybe there’s a perfectly good apartment in there, where Sukey hung her bead curtain and set up her paints and easel in the corner. Maybe she lived here because it gave her a morbid kind of inspiration for her paintings. Or because no matter how dingy it was, it beat living in the same house as Dad.
Doug opens his door and goes into his room. I hover in the hallway, fingering the cell phone in my pocket, getting ready to call for help at any moment. I can hear Doug clomping around in there, knocking things over in the dark, trying to call his cat out of the shadows.
“Kit-kit-kit-kit-kit! Kit-kit-kit-kit-kit!”
I glance into Doug’s room. There’s a towel nailed over the window and no bulb in the ceiling fixture. All I can make out is a mattress piled with clothes, a few odds and ends of furniture, and a photo in the kind of cheap plastic frame you can buy at the dollar store. There doesn’t seem to be a kitchen or a bathroom. I wonder how many floors down he needs to go to use a toilet.
A moment later Doug comes back to the door carrying something in the crook of his arm. At first I think it’s some bundled-up laundry, but he hands it to me, and it’s a scruffy white cat with pale red eyes and a stump where its back right leg used to be. It meows and tries to scramble out of my arms. Doug goggles at it fondly.
“This is Snoogie. Sukey-girl found her in the alley.”
I am trying to unhook Snoogie’s claws from my shirt. She meows again and tries to climb me like a tree. She manages to get up to my shoulder, then digs