Don’t Let Me Go(84)

“I can only hope your mother will come up here to yell at us,” he said. “I could use a word with her.”

Grace smiled a little in spite of herself. She still wasn’t really used to hearing him say stuff like that.

“Now line up with me,” he said. “No, a little farther away. We have to make room for each other in the turns. Now I want you to see how all the anxiety flies away when you dance.”

So, having nothing to lose the way she figured it, Grace ran through the dance with him, half watching him from the corner of her eye. She wasn’t perfect this time, and she forgot to smile, but it was so interesting to see how their movements matched and timed, and then all of a sudden she was in the present, dancing, just like Billy said she would be, and feeling like things would work out somehow. Because…well, because they just would.

“You’re the best dancer,” she said, after the turns.

“I’m not ten per cent of what I used to be.”

“You must’ve been good.”

“Yeah. That’s me,” he said, apparently not even needing to count out his treble hops. “A ‘must’ve been.’ That’s like a has-been or an also-ran, only worse.”

“Didn’t understand a word of that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, and then they did their grand finish.

And then they heard the knock on Rayleen’s door.





Billy



Grace sniffled in Rayleen’s arms, nested with her on Billy’s couch. Billy handed her tissues.

“At least I got her to give us another month,” Rayleen said to Grace, sounding falsely upbeat, yet sounding at the same time as if her heart was breaking. And just when she needed to sound strong, Billy thought.

“But that’s not enough time!” Grace wailed. “My dance for school is in more than a month! So if they come take me away in a month, then I’ll miss the dance at school, and then even if it’s OK in the long run, and you get to turn into a foster mom and come back and get me it’ll still be too late for my big dance!”

Billy reached over and wiped tears off her face, accidentally streaking the tissue with traces of blood from his bitten nail beds.

“But at least that’s another month for your mom to get clean,” he said, “and if she does, then there’s no problem. So we have to work on that. We have to think what we can do to help her get clean.”

“We have to get Yolanda,” Grace said, seeming to calm down somewhat.

“We could try to—”

“No,” Grace said. “We can’t try to do anything. It has to be Yolanda. Because Mom won’t talk to you guys because she’s so mad at you, and I can’t be going down there again, because we said she can’t see me till she gets clean.”

“Again?”

“At all. At all, I meant.”

“This might be worth an exception,” Rayleen said.

Her voice sounded flat and deadly calm to Billy, like the glassy surface of the ocean when the wind suddenly stops blowing. Like the sailing ships that lie stranded until it blows again. She also sounded as though her throat had begun to close up.

“No,” Grace said. “It was a promise, and a promise is a promise. Besides. We all tried, and it didn’t get us anywhere. It has to be Yolanda. Yolanda is scary. Not always, but she can be when she needs to be. She’s one of those scary sponsors.”

The dead calm struck again, and none of their ships moved. Not a flapping sail among them.

“I have to get out of here,” Rayleen said. “Or I won’t be able to breathe. Grace, run home…I mean, run over to my apartment and call Yolanda while I talk to Billy. You still have her number, right?”

“I don’t know where I put it,” Grace said, wiggling down off Rayleen’s lap, “but I think I can remember it by heart.”

She ran out the door and disappeared.

Rayleen looked up at Billy, utter defeat and panic somehow coexisting in her eyes. Billy would never have guessed that the two could occupy the same moment, not to mention the same eyes.

“Just when everything was going so well,” she said.

“Yeah, watch out for that. Sometimes I think that’s God waiting to drop the other shoe.”

“God doesn’t wear shoes,” she said, and Billy had no idea if she was serious or not. He couldn’t imagine her joking at a time like this. “I have to get out of Cat Land here. My throat is closing up. Come over to…no, Grace is over there. I need to talk to you alone. Walk to the end of the hall with me.”

Billy followed her out of his door and down the dingy hall, his heart drumming. At the back end of the hall was one depressingly small window. Billy wondered if he had even known it was there. It was crusted over with dirt, but through it Billy could vaguely see the dead branches of a once-flowering tree scrape lightly in the wind.

Rayleen lost her balance — or so it seemed — and pitched forward on to the hardwood. Billy grabbed to catch her, but missed. Only when she stayed down, curled up with her back against the water-stained wall, did Billy understand that her knees might just have gone out from under her.

Shades of me, he thought. Did other people react so violently to the overwhelm of their emotion? News to him. He’d lived his life quite sure he was the only one.