Don’t Let Me Go(80)

“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.