Don't Let Me Go (31 page)

“Tell me if I look like I’m smiling,” she said.

Then the deeply satisfying sound of the tapping put Billy right to sleep.

• • •

“Rayleen is late,” Grace said, startling him awake.

“Maybe one of her clients was running behind,” he mumbled, trying to sound as if he’d never been asleep.

“I don’t think so,” she said, sitting on the couch against his hip. “I’m pretty sure I heard her come in at the usual time. But that was like twenty minutes ago.”

“Oh. Maybe she’s talking to Jesse.”

“Why would she go talk to Jesse? She hates Jesse.”

“Hmm,” Billy said. “Not sure. Everything changes.”

Grace raised her eyebrows and stared at him. “Something happen that I don’t know about?”

“I might’ve had a conversation with Rayleen about it.”

“You fixed it!” she shouted, excitedly. “You’re magic, Billy! You fixed it!”

“I didn’t do a damn thing,” he said. “She just needed to talk it out.”

“Oh, now I can’t wait. Now I’m all excited, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out. I have to dance now. I have to dance when I’m excited. Watch me. I’m going to do those Buffalo turns now. Watch me and see if I end up in the right place, and if I smile. Don’t fall asleep this time.”

Billy sat up as a way of behaving more like a proper audience.

Grace shuffle-skated across the rug and took her position. But before she could even lift a tap shoe, someone knocked on the door.

“Rayleen’s here!” she shouted, and ran for the door, skidding perilously.

She threw the door open wide, blocking Billy’s view.

“Oh, it’s not Rayleen!” he heard her shout. “It’s Jesse! Hi, Jesse!” Then, after a slight pause, “Billy, he wants to talk to you!”

“I’m in my pajamas,” Billy said, but it didn’t help.

Grace had already grabbed him by the elbow and begun dragging him to the door. He finger-combed his hair as best he could with his one free hand. This was not the way he wanted to be seen. But it was too late. He found himself standing in front of the open door, looking into Jesse’s face, which was even more open and soft than usual.

Billy waited for Jesse to say something.

Instead Jesse threw his arms around Billy and held on tightly. Squeezed him. Billy felt tears at the backs of his eyes, as if tears were being squeezed out of him. Then Jesse let go just as suddenly.

“Gotta go,” he said. “Gotta get ready.
Thank you
.”

Then he bounded up the stairs two at a time and disappeared.

“So what was that all about?” Grace asked, tugging on his pajama pants.

“Not sure.”

“He seemed happy.”

“He did.”

“You think it means he has a date with Rayleen?”

“It might.”

“I sure hope so. But you still have to watch my turns.”

Billy closed the door and sat on the couch, once again prepared to serve as an appreciative audience. Grace raised one foot and tapped it back down again. And someone knocked on the door.

“Damn it!” Billy shouted. “It never stops. I just can’t seem to get my old, quiet life back again.”

“You really sure you want it?” Grace asked as she shuffled to answer it. “I don’t think it’s Rayleen. It wasn’t the signal-knock.”

“Sometimes she forgets when she has a lot on her mind,” Billy said.

Grace threw the door wide, blocking his view again.

“It’s Rayleen! Billy! She wants to talk to you!”

Billy sighed for what felt like the hundredth time that day. He could feel how little energy he had to get up and walk to the door. He did it anyway.

“I have to talk fast,” Rayleen said. “I have to get ready. I’m taking you up on your offer to watch Grace. Here. Take this twenty.”

She pressed a bill into his hand.

“You don’t have to pay me to look after Grace.”

“No. I know. It’s not that. It’s that I know your food supply is kind of tight, and I thought you guys could order a pizza on me.”

Wow, Billy thought. When Rayleen said she was going to talk fast, she wasn’t kidding. He’d never heard so many words per second tumble from her lips.

In the background of his apartment, he heard Grace piping about the joys of pizza.

“Grace can come over to my place and order it on my phone,” Rayleen rushed on. “If I’m already gone by then, she has the key. But here’s a piece of advice. Don’t tell her to get whatever she wants. Tell her she wants cheese and pepperoni, period. Otherwise it’ll never fit into that twenty. Her bedtime is nine o’clock. So probably I’ll be home by then, but if for some reason I’m not, maybe you could just put her to bed on your couch and I’ll come get her in the morning. OK?”

But before he could even say whether it was OK or not, she had grabbed him into a bear hug and kissed him on the cheek.

“Gotta go,” she said. “Thank you. I think.”

“You’ll be fine,” he said as she disappeared into her own apartment.

Billy pulled a big, deep breath and shut the door. Grace looked up at him expectantly.

“Are they going out on a date?”

“Apparently.”

“Yea, yea, yea,” Grace sang, jumping up and down and swinging her arms over her head in a dance-like way. “We get a pizza and they get a date, and I’m happy, and this is my Happy Grace Dance,” she sang, just before slipping and falling on her butt.

“And that last move was your Sad Grace Dance, right?”

“Got that right,” she said, still down and rubbing her butt. “You’re magic, Billy. Not magic magic, but like Jesse is magic. Because you make stuff happen. Like you made that date happen.”

“I didn’t do anything. I just listened. She just needed to talk it out.”

“So? That’s how you made it happen. It’s still magic.”

• • •

“We studied the stars in school,” Grace said. “Like space, and the solar system and black holes and stuff. It was freaky. It was really weird.”

They lay on their backs on Billy’s tiny front patio, looking up at the stars. At least, the dozen or so that could be seen in spite of the smog and the city lights.

“What was weird about it?”

His exhaustion had mellowed him, making him feel deliciously sleepy and almost safe. He savored the feeling of the night air on his face, and his own lack of panic.

“Well, first of all, my teacher said space goes on forever. But that’s impossible.”

“How do you know it’s impossible?”

“It just is.”

“Maybe it’s possible, but it’s one of those things our brains aren’t good at grasping. Look at it this way. You’re in a space ship. And you’re traveling out and out and out. Looking for the edge of space. For the place it stops.”

“Right. And there has to be one. Somewhere.”

“So what’s on the other side? When you find the place where space stops, what’s on the other side of it?”

They lay quietly, side by side, for a minute or so.

“Nothing,” Grace said, around the time he thought she might have dozed off.

“But that’s all space is. Nothing. So if nothing ends, and there’s nothing on the other side of it, then that’s really just more space on the other side.”

“Aaagh!” Grace shouted. “Billy, I think you broke my brain. OK, let’s say space goes on forever, even though it doesn’t really make any sense. My teacher said there’re supposed to be billions of stars. Or trillions or something. So, look up there. Where are they all?”

“The city lights wash them out. If you’re out in the desert or up in the mountains you can see a lot more.”

“I’ve never been out of the city. Have you? Have you ever been up in the mountains or out in the desert?”

“Yes,” Billy said. “Both.” He could hear distant music. He’d heard it all along, he realized, but had only just then become conscious of it. It sounded Middle-Eastern. Someone was having a party somewhere. Everyone, everywhere was having a life. Even him. Even Billy. “When I was dancing, I used to travel all around the country.”

A long silence. Billy listened to the music and felt warmer than he should have on a cool night like this.

Then Grace said, “What
happened
, Billy? What
happened
to you?”

And he didn’t even feel the urge to fight it. It was bound to find him sooner or later, and tonight seemed as good a night as any.

Still, they lay in silence for a long time.

“It’s a little hard to explain,” he said at last. “But I’ll try. I’ll try. I’ve just always had panic attacks. And I know you want me to tell you why, but I don’t
know
why I have panic attacks and other people don’t. I’m not sure if anybody knows that. I grew up in a weird, scary house, but other people did, too, and they don’t all have panic attacks. But I’ve had them ever since I was…oh, I don’t know…maybe even your age. Maybe first or second grade. But then they just kept getting worse. For years I could keep them away by dancing. Or keep them at bay, anyway. As long as I danced regularly. But then after a while I had to literally be in the very act of dancing to stop them. So I’d have panic attacks when I traveled, and on the way to the theater. And then during curtain calls. So I started going to fewer auditions. But when I was inside, I was always OK. So I just started staying inside. Like I told you before, it gets to be an addiction. You want to be OK right now, so you trade that for having a good life in the long run. It’s a bad trade, but people do it all the time. That’s all addiction really is. It’s trading away the future so you can feel OK right now. That’s what your mom is doing. And that’s what got me. There’s really quite a lot of it going around.”

Billy wondered if Grace had understood any of that. But she was a smart kid, so he figured she probably understood enough. As much as she needed to.

Billy heard her snore lightly, so he scooped her up and carried her in and laid her down on the couch, covering her with the afghan, which had never been put back on the bed.

He looked at the clock. Ten fifteen.

It brought a little pang of pain to his gut to think of Jesse and Rayleen out together, talking, or looking into each other’s eyes, or whatever they were doing. But he brushed it away again. They had a right to find happiness, if indeed it was there for them. It benefitted Billy nothing if they failed.

Just as he was climbing under the covers, Grace spoke to him from the living room.

“Billy?”

“You OK?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to tell you something.”

“All right. What?”

“You can’t tell anybody.”

“OK.”

“I’m going to be a dancer when I grow up.”

Billy breathed three times, consciously. As much as he could bring himself to believe in prayer, he prayed that the life would not wound her beyond repair.

“Why wouldn’t you want anyone else to know that?”

“Because they wouldn’t believe me. They’d think I was just being a stupid kid. But you believe me, right? You believe I can really do it, don’t you?”

“Yes. I do. But, like I said last time you asked, you’re going to have to work incredibly hard. But I believe you can, if you want it badly enough.”

“I do. I want it bad. And it’ll all be because of you. You’re the one who taught me to shine.”

“There’s a lot more to it than I’ve taught you so far.”

“I know. But you’re not done teaching me. Are you?”

“No,” Billy said. “I’m not.”

Grace

“Someone is knocking on Rayleen’s door,” Grace said. “Billy, do you hear that?”

Grace paused her dance rehearsal to listen, standing balanced with one leg in the air. Her balance had gotten a lot better since she’d started with all the dancing. Still, she hoped she didn’t look too much like one of those bird dogs you see in the movies and on TV, helping hunt pheasants. Or…then, on the other hand, those were really pretty dogs.

“Maybe we should go see who it is, so we can tell them Rayleen won’t be home till five thirty.”

“I’ll go along,” Billy said, lifting the cat up off his lap.

“Why? I can open a door, you know.”

“But we don’t know who’s on the other side.”

“Some protection you’ll be,” she said as they approached the door nearly elbow to shoulder.

“Hey.”

He sounded hurt.

“Sorry.”

It was so natural to take those little shots at Billy, and he was around so much of the time, that Grace had to keep reminding herself that it was easy — too easy — to hurt his feelings.

Billy undid the locks and Grace opened the door, a team effort.

There was a lady at Rayleen’s door, and Grace remembered her, but just for a second she couldn’t remember from where. Then the lady turned around and smiled at her, and Grace’s tummy did a little flip-flop. It was that lady from the county. The one who’d come already, once before, to check on her.

“Oh, there you are, Grace,” the lady said. “Do you remember me?”

“Yeah.” Grace was surprised by how little her voice sounded. “Just not your name.”

“Ms. Katz.”

“Right. I wonder how I forgot that. Because I really like cats.”

“It’s not spelled the same,” the lady said, still smiling that smile that didn’t seem real. It looked more like something she might have put on earlier that morning with her make-up.

“Doesn’t matter how it’s spelled,” Grace said.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Billy ripping at a thumbnail, but she wasn’t sure how it would look to slap his hand in front of Ms. Katz. She wasn’t sure about any of the things you were or weren’t supposed to do in front of a county lady, and that was just the problem. Somebody should have given her lessons, but they hadn’t, and now it was too late.