Billy didn’t sleep well that night. Not at all. He wasn’t able to prove definitively that the massive, unspeakable act of going outdoors had caused the upset and the bad night, but it seemed reasonable to think it had. It was a place to which he could direct blame, at least, which was better than nothing.
When he did drift off, usually for just a few minutes at a time, he experienced the flapping of the wings. A recurrent dream, or half-dream, or illusion. Or hallucination. The more disturbed by life he felt on any given day, the more the wings would beat in his sleep by night.
They tended to startle him awake again.
He did finally, eventually, get to sleep for real, but not until an hour or two after the sun came up. And by the time he finally woke, stretched, and rose — for it didn’t pay to hurry these delicate issues — it was well after three thirty in the afternoon.
He rose, and tied back his hair in the usual manner — a long, narrow ponytail down the middle of his back. Then he leaned over the bathroom sink and shaved by feel, sometimes keeping his eyes closed, sometimes gazing into the plain wood of his medicine cabinet as if it contained a mirror, as it probably had at one time, and as most medicine cabinets did.
He made coffee, still halfway hearing the rustling of those wings in his head. A kind of non-macabre haunting. But a haunting, nonetheless.
He opened the refrigerator, only to remember, just as he did, that he was out of cream. And groceries would not be delivered again until Thursday.
He dumped three spoonfuls of sugar into his sad black coffee, stirred without enthusiasm, then carried the mug to his big sliding-glass door. He pulled back the curtains in order to peek at the spot where he’d seen the little girl the previous evening. Maybe she’d only been a dream or a vision, like the beating of wings, only louder.
She was still there. So apparently not.
Well. Not still, he told himself. Inwardly, silently, he corrected his own thinking. She had slept inside. Of course. She must be out there again. Yes, again. That felt at least slightly less disturbing.
He looked up to see old Mrs. Hinman, the woman who lived in the attic apartment of his building, make her way down the sidewalk toward home.
“Good,” Billy said, out loud but in a whisper. “Tell her to go inside.”
The old woman moved in a slow but determined waddle, paper shopping-bag clutched tight, the neck of her single bottle of red wine protruding over the top of the bag. There was always a bottle, Billy had noticed, and it always protruded. Only one bottle, so it wasn’t that she drank all that much. Was she advertising? Or, as seemed more likely to Billy, keeping it close at hand in case it should be needed as a weapon?
This had been a decent working-class neighborhood once, even as recently as twelve years ago, and Billy could not forget that. He could not release the observation. Some inner part of him always felt he should have grown accustomed to the situation, but it was a habit. And the breaking of habits was not Billy Shine’s strong suit.
Wanting to know what, if anything, Mrs. Hinman would do regarding the girl’s situation, Billy cracked open the sliding-glass door, as quietly as possible. Then he secured a post behind the curtain, still holding his pathetic black coffee, and watched and listened.
His heart pounded, but he wasn’t sure why. Then again, in what situation was he sure of…really…anything?
The old woman stopped at the bottom of the gray concrete stairs and looked up at the child, who was playing with a cheap-looking hand-held electronic game. She didn’t earn Grace’s attention immediately. But in time the girl grimaced, as if she had just lost the game anyway, and looked down to meet Mrs. Hinman’s eyes.
“Hello,” Mrs. Hinman said.
“Hi,” the girl said in return. That voice again. She had a voice that seemed capable of doubling as a glass-cutting device.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Inside.”
“Why are you out here all by yourself?”
“Because my mother’s inside.”
“Don’t you think it’s dangerous? This isn’t a very good neighborhood, you know. What if some bad man came?”
“Then I would run inside and lock the door.”
“But maybe he will run faster than you can.”
“But I’m closer to the door than he is.”
“I suppose that’s true. But it still troubles me. What’s your mother doing in there that’s so important?”
“She’s asleep.”
“At four o’clock in the afternoon?”
“I don’t know,” the little girl said. “What time is it?”
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Then, yes.”
Mrs. Hinman sighed. Shook her head a few times. Then she made her way up the stairs, one apparently difficult step at a time, as though climbing an alp, and disappeared from Billy’s view. He heard her come through the outer door and into the foyer.
And still the little girl stayed.
? ? ?
A few moments later he was washing his coffee cup in the sink, having poured most of the nasty stuff down the drain.
“Only a barbarian drinks coffee with no cream,” he said out loud, “and we may be many things, and we deny none of them, but we are not a barbarian.”
Perhaps he’d make himself a cup of tea later, to replace the caffeine his body had come to expect. But when he checked the refrigerator again, he found he had no lemon. And only a barbarian drinks tea with no lemon.
He heard a pounding on the door of the basement apartment, just underneath his. It was the apartment where the little girl lived with her mother.
He waited, still and silent, wanting to hear if the mother would answer. But nothing and no one moved below him — at least, not that he was able to hear.
Then a much larger pounding startled him, and made him jump, and set his heart to hammering again. It was the sort of pounding a policeman will exact on a door just before breaking it down and entering without the occupant’s permission.
Silence.
Maybe the mother wasn’t even home. Maybe the little girl had been instructed in the art of making excuses for her mother while she worked, or ran around with men. It seemed incomprehensible, but Billy knew it happened as a matter of course these days. Motherhood was nothing like what it had used to be.
Then again, what was?
? ? ?
One more unusual thing transpired on that day.
It was only a few minutes later. Billy had been hearing the murmuring of voices in the hall, near the mailboxes. But that was nothing unusual, so he didn’t make a point of listening.
It sounded like Mrs. Hinman and Rayleen, that tall, pretty African-American woman who lived right across the hall from him. The one Billy sometimes envied through the glass, because she had style, and presented herself well. She always seemed sad, Rayleen. But Billy reasoned that to add happiness to your wish list would be to put the whole list of requests out of feasible reach. In the real world, style and appearance would have to do.
“Take what you can get from this life,” as he had told the little girl. As he would tell other people, if he knew any.
But then, suddenly, voices were being raised.
He heard Rayleen say — shout — with an agitation that seemed unlike her, “Do not call Child Protective Services on that poor little girl! Promise me you won’t! Promise!”
And Mrs. Hinman, obviously alarmed by being shouted at, raised her voice and said, “Well, what would be so wrong about that? It’s what they’re there for.”
Billy slunk to the door and pressed his ear against it.
“If you really hate that poor little girl so much,” Rayleen said, still distraught, “you might as well just shoot her. I swear it would be a million times more humane than putting her in foster care.”
“Now why on earth would you say a thing like that?” Mrs. Hinman replied.
And Rayleen said, “Because I know. Because I know things. Things you don’t know. Things you’ll never have to know, and just be grateful for that.”
“Are you a social worker?” Mrs. Hinman asked.
Rayleen snorted, and then said, “No, I’m not a social worker. I’m a manicurist. You know that. I work at that hair and nail salon down on the boulevard.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. Of course you do. I’d just forgotten.”
And then, frustratingly, they moved off in the direction of the stairs to Mrs. Hinman’s apartment. And, though they continued to converse, their voices now came through Billy’s door as nothing more than a muffled buzz.
? ? ?
Nearly two hours later, Billy looked out his glass door on to the gray winter day. Looked down on to the porch to see if the girl was still there.
She was.
He could have looked sooner. He’d thought of looking sooner. But he knew she would be, and he knew it would frighten him to see that she was.
He made a mental note to ask, for a second time — that is, if he ever got up the nerve to talk to her again — why she didn’t sit inside.