Don’t Let Me Go(32)

Rayleen stopped dead, and Grace kept walking until she hit the end of the reach of Rayleen’s arm, and then she bounced back again. Rayleen was looking back at Mr. Lafferty, but not saying anything.

Then after a second, Rayleen said, “I heard about it, yes.”

“Did you lie to her and tell her I was wrong?”

Another long pause. It made Grace nervous. She kept wondering why Rayleen didn’t talk faster. The way she usually did.

After much too long a time, Rayleen said, “No.”

Then she took Grace by the hand and they went back downstairs.

? ? ?

Grace knocked on Billy’s door and said, “It’s me, Grace,” all at the same time, so he wouldn’t get nervous.

He opened the door. Really opened it. No chain or anything, because it was only Grace. Well, Grace with Rayleen standing right behind her, but that was still OK by Billy standards. At least, these days it was.

His eyes went wide when he saw the wood.

“So that’s what you guys were chattering about out there.”

“Help us bring it in, OK?”

Billy’s eyes changed. They got darker, and more closed off.

“I know, I know,” Grace said. “It’s the hall. But it’s just for a minute. It’ll only take a minute.”

Billy looked up at Rayleen.

“I’ll grab this side,” Rayleen said. “If you’ll just come out real quick and get the other side, we’ll have it inside in just a couple of seconds.”

Billy stood. He breathed. A lot. Like he was under a blanket and couldn’t get enough air. He counted to three. Out loud.

“OK,” he said. “One. Two. Three!”

At the same time as he said three, he leaped out into the hall and grabbed the other side of the wood. Then he ran back inside with it so fast that Rayleen almost couldn’t keep up with him. She nearly fell down trying.

“Close the door! Grace! Close the door!” he said, when they were all inside.

So she did.

“Now I can still dance today!” she said. Shrieked, actually.

“Oh, I don’t know, baby girl. It’s awfully late.”

“It’s not late! It’s only about six thirty.”

“But I only have you from three thirty to five thirty.”

“So? Today you have me a little later.”

“But I’m used to three thirty to five thirty.”

They stood looking at each other for a moment. Grace knew what Billy meant. She was asking him to do something different, new, and he wasn’t good at that, and when you ran into something Billy wasn’t good at, it didn’t seem to help to argue.

Grace looked at Billy, and Billy looked back at Grace, then up to Rayleen, then back to Grace.

“Oh. Baby girl,” he said. “Don’t look so crestfallen.”

“Can’t help it,” she said.

“OK, fine,” he said. “Dance.”





Billy



Billy was asleep. A deep, blessedly dreamless sleep, with no rustling of feathers. No flapping of wings.

Then, suddenly and without notice, he was standing on his feet, wide awake, gasping for breath, heart pounding, wondering if there had really been a gunshot, or if that had only been part of a dream.

“But we weren’t dreaming,” he said out loud.

Still, when unexplained things happened in the night, they often happened as part of a dream, whether you’d thought you were dreaming at the time or not.

Then again, there really had been a drive-by on this block just a handful of months earlier. Ten bullets had sliced through the windows of a first-floor apartment two buildings down, thankfully killing no one. Hitting no one. But Jake Lafferty had run all through their building, pounding on doors at two in the morning, asking if everybody was OK. With a shotgun on his shoulder. Billy had seen it through the peephole, while refusing to open the door.

But this gunshot…this gunshot had sounded, if anything, louder than the drive-by gunshots had.

“Maybe because we dreamed it,” Billy said.

After all, Jake Lafferty wasn’t doing his night-time messenger Paul Revere number. So it must have been a dream.

Except, just then, somebody knocked on his door.

“That’s not so much a Jake Lafferty knock, though,” Billy said out loud. “More than Rayleen Johnson but less than Jake Lafferty.”

He turned on the bedroom light and checked the clock. It was only barely past ten thirty.

“Billy, are you OK?” he heard Grace call through the door.

He hurried to the door and threw it open wide.

Rayleen was standing there in the hallway with Grace in her arms. The little girl looked sleepy and scared all at the same time. Well, they both did. Well, all three of them probably did, actually, but in the absence of mirrors — and he owned none — Billy could only guess about himself.

“What was that?” Rayleen asked. “Are you OK?”

“Drive-by?”

“I don’t know. I would think Lafferty would have been down here with his shotgun by now.”

And Billy smiled, just a little, in spite of himself.

“It’s not funny,” Grace said, still clutching Rayleen, legs wrapped around her waist, head down on her shoulder. “It’s scary.”