Don't Let Me Go Read online

  “I’m glad you like them,” Rayleen said.

  “I know how to speak Spanish,” Grace said, still looking at the nails.

  “Since when?”

  “Just since today.”

  “You learned Spanish just today?”

  “Some. I know como you dice en Español…dog. It’s perro. You dice ‘dog’ in Español by saying ‘perro.’”

  “OK, I stand corrected. That’s a lot of Spanish to learn in one day. I’m impressed. Oops. Look out, Grace. Look where you’re going.”

  Grace looked up just in time to zig-zag around two young women walking toward them on the sidewalk.

  “Sorry,” she said to them. Then, to Rayleen, “Maybe when we get home we can order a pizza.”

  “Maybe,” Rayleen said. “But it’s not going to be like the last pizza. I could barely carry that thing into the house. I didn’t know a pizza could even cost that much. When the guy told me the bill, I thought he was kidding. Who orders pepperoni and sausage and Canadian bacon and meatballs all on one pizza?”

  “Me.”

  “And triple cheese? I mean, I’ve heard of double cheese, but…”

  “I’m sorry if it was too much money. But you said to order what I wanted.”

  “Right,” Rayleen said. “I did. So, live and learn. But this time I’m making the call. And this time I’m telling you in advance that you want cheese and pepperoni. Period.”

  Grace smiled to herself. Because it was still pizza. And it was still a million times more pizza than she was about to get from anybody else besides Rayleen.

  “Have you thought of what you like about me yet?”

  “Yes,” Rayleen said. “As a matter of fact, I have. You’re a survivor. And you don’t complain. Now, that’s just off the top of my head, and it’s just so far. Like I said before, I’m sure when I get to know you better, there’ll be tons more.”

  “It’s good for now,” Grace said, sneaking a quick look at her nails again. One had a little crescent moon charm stuck on — her right pinky one. “That and a pizza’s plenty good enough for today.”

  Billy

  Billy swung his apartment door wide and leaped out into the hallway, landing right in front of Rayleen and Grace.

  “Why did you not tell me Grace wasn’t coming today?” he bellowed, alarmed by the sound of his own anger. “I was beside myself with worry. I mean it. I had a miserable afternoon. Absolutely abysmal. I thought something had happened to her. I was a mess. My fingernails are bitten right down to the quick. And beyond. Every single one of them. Look at this.”

  But he didn’t literally offer them for inspection.

  Rayleen stood a moment — her mouth open wide — while he spoke. Then she looked down at Grace.

  “Grace,” she said. “You didn’t tell him. You promised you’d tell him.”

  Grace looked up into Rayleen’s face. “Oooooops,” she said.

  Then all Billy could do was stand there like a fool, all the passion and fire drained out of him, because you can’t very well stay mad at a kid Grace’s age for forgetting something.

  “I’m sorry,” Rayleen said. “It’s all my fault. I take total responsibility. I shouldn’t have put it all on Grace. Next time I’ll tell you myself if we change the plan.”

  “I’m sorry, too, Billy,” Grace said. “I didn’t mean to make you bite your quicks.”

  Billy sighed deeply, pushing out a whole afternoon of abject panic.

  “Can I still get a dancing lesson?” Grace asked.

  “Oh, no. No, not today. I’m afraid not. That was just too exhausting an afternoon. I couldn’t—Oh, my God! Would you look at you! Look at your hair!”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Like it? Girlfriend, you are a changed woman! I mean, girl. You are a new girl. You are styling! I am very impressed!”

  “And look at the nails.”

  She held her fingers out, proudly, for Billy to see.

  “Amazing,” he said. “Absolutely amazing. You have been reborn.”

  She smiled up at him for a moment.

  Then Billy’s spell broke, unexpectedly, like a bubble popping.

  “Oh, my God, I’m out in the hall,” he said, and scrambled back inside.

  “Yeah, and in your pajamas,” Grace said.

  He closed the door most of the way, peering out through an inch of crack.

  “We sort of figured you knew,” Grace said.

  • • •

  Grace said to Billy, “I’m still really sorry about yesterday.”

  She was standing in his kitchen — because there was no place to sit in his kitchen — leaning her back against the washer-dryer, and trying to pull Billy’s special tap shoes over three pairs of socks without bunching up the socks.

  “You don’t still have to be sorry about that.”

  “But look at your poor nails. They’re so sad.”

  “No, don’t look at my poor nails,” Billy said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his old bathrobe. It hurt, because all of his fingers were still sore.

  “Why not look at them?”

  “Because they’re sad.”

  “I just feel like it’s my fault,” she said, getting the first shoe in place at long last.

  “Look. Baby girl. It’s not your fault if I’m such a freak that I can’t handle a little mild tension.”

  “Don’t call yourself that,” she said, frowning as if for the cameras. Dramatically. A girl after Billy’s own heart. “I don’t like that.”

  “Besides,” he said. “It was an honest mistake. The past is the past. It’s gone, thank God.”

  “I thought you liked your past.”

  “Some of it, yes. Some of it, no.”

  “But you have all those pictures around to remind you of it.”

  She set her one shod foot down on Billy’s kitchen linoleum. The tapping sound drove clean through every one of Billy’s defenses and found a feeling place. A little like bumping into an ex-lover, suddenly and without warning, someone who’d hurt you beyond repair, but whom you still loved.

  How much of his life had he devoted to that tiny, but absolutely singular, sound?

  “I like to remember the good parts and forget the rest.”

  “I don’t think that works,” Grace said.

  “You don’t think what works?”

  She tested the sound of her taps once, on purpose, doing a slow flap step, remembered from her first lesson. Then she set about to pull on the other shoe.

  “It’s like people who want to feel only happy but not sad,” she said. “It never works. You either feel things or you don’t. You don’t get to pick and choose. At least, I don’t think so.”

  Billy didn’t answer straight off. He just stood, his shoulder leaned on the door frame, and watched her work on the second shoe, admiring her intense concentration.

  After a few seconds, she looked up at him.

  “You got quiet.”

  “Kids your age shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “Why? Was it stupid?”

  “No. It was smart. Too smart.”

  “No such thing as too smart. Aha! Got it!”

  She laced up the second shoe and strode out into the middle of the kitchen floor, tapping her way through the time step routine Billy had taught her, and managing to get every single step in the wrong order. But it was danced with good feeling, at least in the lower half of her body.

  The sound, though not perfect against kitchen linoleum, again filled Billy’s stunted gut with memories. They could not, he noticed, be sorted out into two groups, those to be kept and those to be discarded. They came as a package deal.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Billy said, focusing back on the dance performance itself. “You forgot a few things.”

  “Well, I didn’t have a lesson yesterday.”

  “Let’s not work on the time step right now.”

  “But I want to learn it!”

  “You will. I promise. But I want you to
have arms. Remember when I told you I want you to have arms?”

  “I have arms,” she said, holding them up as proof.

  “I told you what that means. Remember? When I say I want you to have arms?”

  “Oh! Yeah! Um. Let me think. Nope. Sorry. I don’t remember.”

  “It means you’re concentrating so hard on getting the steps right that you’re only thinking about your feet. Which I understand, because the time step involves some remembering, especially after just one lesson. But I want you to get off on the right foot, no pun intended.”

  “You did so intend that.”

  “Actually, I really didn’t. Here’s what I’m saying. I don’t want you getting into a bad habit of moving your feet correctly but holding the rest of your body stiff, like a statue. This is not Riverdance, you know. Not that there’s anything wrong with Riverdance. Only that this isn’t it.”

  “I don’t know what that river thing is.”

  “Right. I might have predicted that. Let’s do something really basic with your feet. Let’s do a series of stamps and stomps, and when you get into a simple rhythm with that, you can start to focus on your torso and arms.”

  “What’s a torso?”

  “Upper body.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “No talking. No giving the teacher a hard time. Especially not at these prices. Now. With your right foot. Stamp.”

  Grace brought her right foot down with a satisfying sound, then raised it again, looking up at him and smiling.

  “That’s not a stamp. That’s a stomp.”

  “Darn it,” she said, smile fading. “I always get those two confused.”

  “I told you how to remember the difference. Remember what I taught you about that?”

  “Not really.”

  “Like a stamp on a letter?”

  “Right! I remember! When you stamp a letter, the stamp stays down. Right. So a stamp is when I stamp down, with both taps at the same time, heel tap and ball tap, and then I leave my weight on that foot.”

  “Right. Stamp with your right, shift your weight right, lift up your left, stamp with your left, shift your weight left, repeat.”

  “This is easy,” Grace said, after the third or fourth stamp cycle. “Too easy.”

  “That’s why now you’re supposed to think about the rest of your body.”

  “Oh, right. My arms,” she said, still stamping. “What should they do?”

  “Ask them.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  “Try it before you say it’s dumb.”

  Grace’s arms came up to about waist level and began to shift in rhythm with the stamps. Billy smiled inwardly.

  “Good thing nobody lives downstairs except us,” Grace said.

  “Indeed a good thing,” Billy replied.

  Except, just at that moment, someone knocked on the door. All motion froze in the kitchen, and they waited there in silence for a beat or two, staring through the open kitchen entryway to Billy’s front door.

  “Damn it to hell!” Billy said, under his breath. “Why do people keep knocking on my door? Nobody ever knocked on my door except delivery guys. For years. And now all of a sudden this is like a daily occurrence.”

  “It’s my fault,” Grace said, in a surprisingly restrained whisper.

  “Not really.”

  “It started when you said you’d look after me, though.”

  “True enough.” Then more loudly, Billy called out, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Eileen Ferguson. Your downstairs neighbor.”

  Billy exchanged a look with Grace.

  “Is she supposed to know you’re here?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Billy took a deep breath, walked to the door, undid all of the locks except the safety chain, and opened the door several inches, hoping he was the only one able to hear the pounding of his heart.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Too loud?”

  “Yeah, kind of. I’m trying to take a nap, and whatever you’re doing up here sounds like that dance company that does the stomp dancing with trash cans on their feet.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t realize anybody would be trying to sleep at this hour.”

  If she caught the mild dig, she chose not to let on.

  She looked bad. Billy knew he was a fine one to judge, yet he couldn’t surgically remove the judging from his nature. It was simply too much a part of him now. Sure, he probably looked like hell, too. Then again, he hadn’t gone out to knock on a neighbor’s door. If he had, he would certainly have freshened up a bit first.

  Well, he wouldn’t have gone in the first place. Let’s be real. But theoretically.

  “Well, I was. Have you seen my daughter? Grace? Do you know Grace?”

  “Everybody in the building knows Grace.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I…know she’s OK.”

  She shot him a skeptical look.

  “If you don’t know where she is, how do you know she’s OK?”

  “Because we have something of a schedule,” Billy said, wondering if he’d just revealed too much. “Grace is at school, and then somebody picks her up, and then somebody takes care of her until Rayleen gets home, and then she’s with Rayleen. So she’s either at school, or with Felipe, or with me, or with Rayleen.”

  “But if she was with you, you’d know it.”

  “So true!” Billy said, jokingly, making light of the gaffe as best he could.

  “Hmm. I didn’t know about that schedule thing. I thought it was all just Rayleen. But that’s nice, I guess. That’s good. For Grace. I guess. Well, if you see her, will you tell her to come home?”

  “I will. If I see her I will.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and peeled away down the hall.

  Billy closed and locked the door again, then stood with his back leaned against it, breathing out the excess stress.

  He rejoined Grace in the kitchen. The girl was still halfway practicing stamps, but without ever lifting her feet.

  Just shifting her weight and bending her knees. And having arms.

  “Good arms,” he said.

  “Thank you. It sucks that now I can’t dance. Why did it have to wake her up? Nothing ever wakes her up except maybe an hour a day. And it has to be now.”

  “She wants you home.”

  Grace sighed.

  “OK,” she said. “This shouldn’t take very long.”

  She unlaced and pulled off Billy’s tap shoes as if saying goodbye to an old friend.

  • • •

  Not two minutes later, she was back.

  “She was already out again. I bet it wouldn’t wake her up this time.”

  “Not willing to risk it,” Billy said.

  “We could go outside.”

  “You could go outside.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot. Maybe we could just go out on your patio. Your patio isn’t right over my house.”

  “It’s broad daylight, baby girl.”

  “So?”

  She waited for him to answer. For a surprising length of time. Billy was amazed by her patience. But, of course, she did give up eventually.

  “You can’t even go out on the patio?”

  “Let’s just say I choose not to.”

  “But I saw you out there twice.”

  “But the first time it was nearly dark. And the other time it was dusky. And I was slithering on my stomach, if you’ll recall.”

  Once again, Grace didn’t say anything for a long time.

  So long, in fact, that Billy began wishing she would. Almost anything she could say at that point would be better than nothing at all.

  Finally Billy couldn’t stand it any more, and filled the silence.

  “I never claimed to be normal,” he said.

  “I guess that’s true,” she said. “Well. Whatever. I like you anyway. How ’bout if I go out on the patio, and you stand right here and watch me through the glass, and if I do somet
hing wrong you open the door and tell me so?”

  “That could work,” Billy said.

  • • •

  By the time Rayleen got off work and came to get her, Grace had put in a solid hour of dancing with no break of more than a minute or two. Her face glowed red, her short hair dripped, but still she danced.

  She not only had arms, but she returned to practicing her time step, slowly, and in proper order, and when she memorized it and brought it up to normal speed, she somehow managed to bring her arms along.

  She could be a dancer, Billy thought. If she cared enough, and took the time, and didn’t get distracted by boys or ego or the world, or all of the above, she could. If she didn’t get beaten down by the savagery of the life, maybe. It made Billy ache — a fine line of pain through his solar plexus — just to think of it, but he couldn’t tell if the ache meant he was proud of her, jealous of her, or scared for her.

  Probably all of the above.

  When Rayleen showed up, Grace pulled her into Billy’s apartment and over to the sliding-glass door, and made her watch while she performed her time step out on the patio. Rayleen stood shoulder to shoulder with Billy, playing her role in their audience of two.

  “Impressive,” Rayleen said. “You know she’s learning Spanish, now, too.”

  “Good for her. I wish I knew more Spanish. So useful in L.A. Although…probably more utilitarian for people who go out of the house.”

  Rayleen glanced over at him, then back at Grace before Grace could notice the shift in her attention.

  “I owe you an apology, I guess,” she said. “I didn’t say it straight out, but…I had my doubts about leaving her here.”

  “Sounds like normal thinking,” Billy said.

  She glanced over again, eyebrows raised.

  “Hey,” Billy said. “Just because I don’t think normally doesn’t mean I don’t know normal thinking when I hear it.”

  She placed one hand on his shoulder. And just left it there. And so it happened again. The melting. Only this time it wasn’t appropriate to fall to his knees, and there would be no way to cover for himself if he did. So he worked hard at keeping his knees solid and unmelted.

  A moment later Grace finished her dance with a broad flourish, and bowed at the waist. Rayleen took her hand back to applaud, and Billy was both relieved and disappointed to feel it go.