Don't Let Me Go (23 page)

Grace got right between them, fast, so there couldn’t be any trouble. Well, not too much, anyway. “It was all my idea,” she said.

“
Yours
? You
wanted
to be taken away from your mother?”

“We wanted to…not…oh, crap, now I forgot the word again. Guys, what’s that thing we wanted not to do with my mom?”

“Enable,” Rayleen said, still standing. Still looking aware of the fact that Yolanda was pissed. “We wanted to stop enabling her.”

“OK. Now how ‘bout you explain to me how letting her raise her own kid is enabling her.”

“I will!” Grace shouted. “Please let me! I know this one real well! It’s because she was doing nothing but sleep all day long, and all my nice neighbors here were taking care of me, but then we figured out that if they just kept taking care of me, she could take all the drugs she wanted and still know I’d be OK. And so we knew that was no good. So we figured sometimes people get better when they know they’re about to lose something, if it’s something they really, really don’t want to lose. Like me. So we told her she couldn’t see me again until she got clean.”

A brief pause, during which it was hard to guess what Yolanda was thinking. She wasn’t giving anything away so far.

“Oh, my God,” Yolanda said. “That’s brilliant.”

“It is?” Grace asked, surprised that Yolanda liked it.

“Grace, you thought that up all by yourself?”

“Not really. I got a lot of advice from Mr. Lafferty.”

“Actually, she put a lot of it together on her own,” Rayleen said.

“OK, tell you what,” Yolanda said. “I’ll go back down there right now and tell her she’s shit out of luck, because I’m on your side. She’ll be pissed, but oh, well. Life’s like that sometimes. So, how long does she have to stay clean before she gets Grace back?”

Silence.

“Oh,” Rayleen said. “We didn’t set a time.”

“We should set a time,” Yolanda said. “Because she keeps cleaning up for a day or two. Getting everybody’s hopes up for nothing. I say we make her get thirty days. I’m right there with her at the meetings, and I’ll know if it’s the real deal.”

Everybody looked at everybody else.

“OK,” Rayleen said.

“Done,” Yolanda said, and rushed out.

“That was kind of weird,” Felipe said.

“Yeah, but it worked out OK,” Grace replied. “And it doesn’t get us out of having our meeting.”

“I think we should put off the meeting,” Rayleen said. “In case your mom gets upset. I don’t think we should be sitting here with the doors open after Yolanda has this little talk with her. Besides, we lost Billy again.”

Grace looked across the hall to see Billy’s apartment door closed, apparently with Billy inside it. She sighed.

“I better go over there and talk to him,” she said.

• • •

“You know,” she said to Billy, who was sitting on the couch, looking shorter and more curled-up than usual, and hugging the cat, “I need you to be at my school when I do my dance. You know. In the audience. Clapping for me and all.”

Billy snorted laughter. As if he really thought it was a joke. As if he hadn’t seen this coming.

“No, seriously,” she said.

She watched the color drain out of his face, suddenly. At least, what little color he’d had to begin with.

“Grace. You know I can’t do that.”

“No. I know you
can
.”

“Grace, I—”

“Look. Billy. Do you want to just do the easy thing, because it’s what you always do? Or do you want to shine?”

He turned his eyes to her, looking bruised.

“That’s not fair.”

“It was fair when you asked it to me.”

“That was different.”

“How was it different?”

“Because that was
me
asking
you
.”

“Just think about it. OK? Promise me you’ll think about it. I know you’ll come up with the right thing.”

“Overconfidence is a wonderful attribute of youth,” Billy said, quietly.

“I’m not even going to ask you what that means.”

“Probably just as well,” he said.

• • •

In the morning, Grace ran into the new lady, Emily — almost literally — in the hall on her way to school. Rayleen was walking behind Grace, half putting on her coat, and Grace was walking ahead, and nearly collided with the new lady at the bottom of the stairs.

She was carrying that same suitcase again.

“Where are you going?” Grace asked. “To get more of your stuff?”

“Moving out,” Emily said, as if she didn’t want to slow down to talk.

“But you just moved in.”

“I’m not spending one more night in that horrible place.”

“What’s horrible about it? It has a very nice new carpet.”

“I can’t explain it. There’s something wrong with that place. With the energy in there. It’s just a really bad vibe.”

Then she hurried out fast, too fast for Grace to keep up even if there had been more to say.

“Who was that?” Rayleen asked, when they met up at the front door.

“She was our neighbor,” Grace said. “Just not for very long.”

Billy

“We should mark this day on our calendar,” Billy said, out loud, because he was changing out of his pajamas.

It was about a week later, a Saturday morning. He slid into his stretchy dance pants and then threw on a sweatshirt, because dance pants and a pajama top was just too weird a combination, even for Billy. Even for Billy with no one around to witness the fashion faux pas.

Then he turned on the light inside his closet and worked his way back to the standing chest of drawers. He reached into the top drawer, identifying his tap shoes by feel.
His
tap shoes. Not the ancient, archival pair from his childhood that he’d loaned to Grace. His regular adult tap shoes, the ones he’d worn at his most recent tap performance. Which, of course, had been none too recent. He pulled them out, and held them under his nose, remembering the subtle but distinctive smell of the old leather, and every memory that came along for the ride.

All the memories, as a package deal. No picking and choosing allowed.

He put them on in the living room, Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat watching with uncharacteristic fascination, as if even she could smell the momentous atmosphere of this occasion.

Then he stretched. Got down on the worn-out old carpet and assumed familiar old positions, and cried out with unfamiliar pain when his muscles didn’t yield to the acrobatics they had used to perform so easily.

In a moment balanced halfway between succeeding and deciding it was all pointless, Billy levered to his feet, walked carefully on the slippery taps to Grace’s plywood dance floor, and began to choreograph a dance suitable for her school performance.

He would have done it sooner, but Grace had needed a full week to rest her injured hip.

“I guess she can at least
start
with a time step,” he said out loud. “Just to work into the rhythm slowly.”

He knew from experience that it was best to start a big performance with something easy and familiar, because the first few seconds were the hardest. If you were going to freeze, or make a mistake, it would be on the first couple of steps. If your mind was going to go blank, it would be right up front. After the first few seconds of dancing, a sort of autopilot would kick in, and everything would fall into place.

So, he believed, if you’re lucky enough to be in charge of your own fate on the subject, you start with a step you can almost literally perform in your sleep.

He began the strange process of slowly reminding his feet how that time step phenomenon had used to go. It was a weird feeling. His mind picked the step up again immediately. Everything from his brain through the nerve signals he sent to his muscles felt exactly the same. But the response from those muscles reminded him of a certain category of terrible dream, the one where you try to run from the monster, but your legs suddenly weigh hundreds of pounds or feel as though they’re mired in warm tar.

He stopped, and stood still a moment in disheartenment, staring at the cat, who stared back.

“Relax, Billy,” he said after a time. “We could get it back in a few months if we wanted to.”

Well, some of it, he could. But he was twelve years older now. And there was no getting that back. If there were, someone would have bottled it and sold it to the public years ago.

“She’ll need turns,” he said, trying out a few. “She could do some triple Buffalo turns, that would look flashy. Not too flashy. Just flashy enough.”

He slowly plotted them out on the six-foot-square dance floor, just to be sure they wouldn’t send him flying off on to the rug. There was barely enough room to execute a series of turns, which he began slowly to move through.

Grace was smaller, and her legs were shorter, so if he could do it, so could she. She’d have to pay almost perfect attention, but that was good. The practice in discipline would serve her well. Then, on the school stage, she wouldn’t lose track of her arc of turns and fall right into the orchestra pit. The six-foot dance floor would teach her to keep her turns tight and crisp. It would be the dancer’s equivalent of swinging three bats around.

Billy stopped suddenly, struck, without warning, by an echo of something he had said out loud much earlier. He’d said, “We could get it back in a few months if we wanted to.”

He stood nearly still, rhythmically tapping the toe tap of his right shoe and hearing the question in his head as if for the first time.

Then he held completely still, not even tapping.

“Do we want to?” he asked out loud.

But no answer seemed to present itself, and there was more choreography to be done, and changing the subject again sounded attractive.

“Maybe something syncopated,” he said, trying out some wings, some traveling wing steps with toe hits, because they were more sophisticated.

He’d spent several minutes, and worked out quite a fancy routine, before realizing the flaw in his thinking. He stopped dead and thought it over more deeply.

“No,” he said out loud. “Big mistake there, Billy Boy. You’re visualizing
your
audience. Visualize
hers
. They don’t want something that sophisticated. In fact, they might even think she was making mistakes, falling off her rhythm. No, they’ll want something dependable. Balanced. User-friendly. Yet flashy! Everybody likes a little flash.”

“I’ve got it,” he said, and moved into something different.

A series of trebles. Treble hops. Seven on one side, seven on the other, then bring it in tight, maybe down to four on each side, then two, then tighten up for a nice ending…

He counted it out as he danced it.

“One, two, three, four, five, six seven, hop…one, two, three, four, five, six seven, hop…one, two, three, four…one, two, three, four…one and a two, and a one and a two, and a one and a two, and a three and a stop.”

He ended suddenly with one foot smartly raised. A sudden burst of ending. The applause moment. He stood still, just for a split second expecting to hear it.

Instead he heard a signal knock at his door.

He walked carefully across the carpet to open it.

On the other side of the door was Grace, and a man Billy had never met. An African-American man with a shaved head and a full beard shot through with gray. He wasn’t terribly old, though. Maybe mid-forties. He had eyes that Billy could only describe as sparkly. He had a single ruby stud-earring in his left lobe.

“Oh, my God, Billy!” Grace shrieked. “Look at you! You’re all dressed!”

“Don’t make it sound like such a rare occasion,” he said, flipping his chin subtly in the direction of the stranger.

It was a hint that sailed well over Grace’s head.

“It’s only the very first time since I’ve known you, Billy, so that’s pretty rare, don’t you think?”

“Who’s your friend?” Billy asked, hoping his face wasn’t obviously red.

“This is Jesse. He’s our new neighbor.”

Jesse looked right into Billy’s eyes, causing him to look away. He wondered if Jesse was smart enough to sense that Billy did that with everyone. Equal opportunity evasion.

Then Jesse reached out a hand and Billy shook it, bearing up under the pressure of the nerve signals, which he felt as shards of glass in his brain and gut, warning him against skin contact with any stranger.

In fact, he suddenly wondered, should Grace be hanging around the building with a man none of them knew?

Billy took a deep breath. He’d always prided himself on being a good judge of character. Remembering this, he forced himself to look directly into the stranger’s eyes for a fraction of a second. Then he looked away again, and let out a long breath of air.

It was OK. Jesse was OK.

“So,” Billy said, wanting to normalize the conversation, “you moved in upstairs? Mr. Lafferty’s old place?”

“Yeah,” Grace said. “He did. The apartment where Mr. Lafferty shot himself. But it’s OK. Because Jesse doesn’t scare so easy. Not like our last new neighbor.”

“What last new neighbor?”

“Oh, right. You never even met her, did you? She was here for, like, one day. Then she said there was a creepy vibe in there and she moved out. I told Jesse but he didn’t care. He said he had some…what did you say you had, Jesse?”