Don’t Let Me Go(59)

“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.”