Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,66
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 this story now. Maybe because he’s saved the saddest part of all until the end. Maybe because I’m the only person in the world who can lift it from his shoulders now that he’s carried it for so long.
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘The soul has a home of its own, and I want to live in that one.’ Some line from a movie. I had her write it down for me, eh, but I lost the paper. It knocked me out—this beautiful girl in a polka-dot dress sitting there on the sidewalk, selling her paintings and pulling out lines like that. Every single day, I told her to go home. Every goddamn day.”
“Why didn’t she?” I say, even though I know the answer.
Another car passes by with its stereo blasting, this time a nattering top forty host whose words I can’t make out. I’d never realized how loud the world was, how filled with cold and impersonal noise. It’s a wonder we ever find each other at all in its clamoring thickets. It’s a wonder we still try.
The mattress groans as Doug leans over to get his crutches “Come on, honey,” he says. “I got something to show ya. It’s maybe not what you wanted, but I bet Sukey-girl would have liked you to see it.”
He maneuvers himself up from the mattress. I watch him warily, my tears drying up but my cheeks still hot. I don’t think I’m ready for more surprises, no matter what they are. I want to be home with my head under a pillow, muffling as much of the world as I can. Doug works his way across the room, lurches past me, and goes into the hall. “Down this way,” he grunts. I follow him at a distance. “I’ve already seen her old room,” I say, remembering the porn magazines and the stench of old cigarettes.
Doug shakes his head in disgust. “Sukey-girl never spent hardly any time in that shithole anyway.”
He crutches down the hall quickly, as if he’s afraid I’ll find some excuse to leave if we don’t get there fast. The floor creaks beneath us like something that’s already breaking, even though the demolition notice taped to the door of the hotel when I came in this morning pins the date a few weeks away. Doug stops when he gets to the fire door at the end of the hall and leans on it with his shoulder.
“Isn’t the alarm going to sound?” I say.
Doug ignores me. “Give that door a push, honey.”
He shuffles out of the way, and I reluctantly take his place. The door scrapes open when I shove it, revealing a rickety fire escape. Doug blinks at the blueness of the sky like he’s seeing an alien landscape. I gaze out apprehensively, my eyes wandering down through the metal slats to the alley four stories below.
“I don’t know what you’re going to find up there,” he says with a rueful glance at his crutches. “Maybe nothing. But Sukey-girl was always sneaking up to that rooftop, so you may as well have a look around.”
I glance at the spindly staircase climbing up the brick wall, and my stomach