“Talk normal, Billy.”
“It means it’s too late.”
They heard the front apartment house door bang open, hitting the wall in the hallway with a crack that made them both jump.
“Grace!” Grace’s mom screamed.
Literally. Screamed.
Grace started to cry. “I don’t like this,” she said.
Billy put his arm over her, and pulled her close, just as her mom screamed again.
“Grace! Don’t do this, baby! You still love your mommy, right? You know Mommy still loves you. Right, Grace?”
Grace cried harder, but silently.
“Grace! You want to be with me, don’t you, baby?”
“Tell me again,” Grace whispered. “Tell me again why this is a good idea.”
“Grace! I can do better, baby! I’ll do better now!”
“She’ll do better now!” Grace whispered, desperately, sounding as though she knew she was grasping at straws.
“Fine. If she does, then things will be OK. But she has to do better first. She can’t just promise to do better later.”
“Why not, again?”
“Because that never works.”
“Oh. You were going to tell me again why we’re doing this.”
“Because it might be the one thing we can do that could maybe, just maybe, shock her back into getting sober.”
“You’re supposed to call it clean, not sober,” Grace said between sniffles.
“Doesn’t really matter what we call it. We want her to get better. That’s why we’re doing this.”
“Right,” Grace said. “But this sucks. I didn’t know this would suck so bad.”
“Grace!”
This one was a full-on bellow. The scream of a person fully devoid of options. It reminded Billy of Stanley Kowalski in a ripped tee-shirt, bellowing up to Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. Because he’d bellowed that line every night for two months, on stage, when he was only twenty-two years old.
It sent a shockwave through both of them. Billy could feel it conduct, between himself and Grace, like emotional lightning.
Then they heard the door to the basement apartment slam.
Grace just kept crying.
Rayleen came over at five thirty, just as she would have done if she’d been at work all that time. Billy recognized her knock — her one, two, three…pause…four knock — even though he’d never heard it sound so quiet before.
He opened the door for her. Then he pointed to his couch, where Grace was sprawled, sleeping, snoring slightly and drooling quite a bit.
“Now that’s a new one,” Rayleen said, quietly, as Billy closed and locked the door behind her.
“She cried herself to sleep,” Billy said. “Literally. She just lay there and cried for more than an hour. Went through almost a whole box of tissues. And then, well…I guess it just took too much out of her.”
Rayleen sat on the couch beside Grace and stroked the sleeping girl’s hair.
“Poor baby,” she said. “Since she’s asleep and all, I was wondering…well, I didn’t know she was asleep until I got here, of course, but I was wondering anyway…can she stay here longer today? Not to freak you out or anything, but…you know.”
“Um. No. Not really, I don’t. I don’t know the end of that sentence, if that’s what you mean.”
“Just in case Mom does call the cops.”
Billy sat next to Rayleen on the couch, his hip up against Grace’s. The girl did not wake up. He hadn’t so much planned to do it. It was more that he suddenly lost the use of his knees.
“Do you mean to tell me that if the cops showed up right now you’d claim not to know where she is?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds bad.”
“It sounds like a jailable offense. I mean, as opposed to just saying, ‘Yeah, here she is, I’m her babysitter and she refused to go home.’”
“Holy crap, Billy, don’t say jailable offense. You’re right, though,” Rayleen said. “You’re absolutely right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess today took a toll on me, too.”
“Lot of that going around,” Billy said.
Rayleen stood, reached down for Grace, and lifted her off the couch, settling the girl into a fireman’s carry over her shoulder. Grace hung limp, still out.
“What did you say to her mom?” Billy asked, half wanting to know, half not wanting to.
“Just pretty much what we agreed on.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Oh, she had a few choice names for me. And she kept saying she didn’t believe it was really Grace’s idea. But I think she might be closer to believing it now.”
Rayleen began to move toward the door, and Billy ran quickly to unlock it for her.
“Are we doing the right thing?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Billy,” she said. “Hope to God we are.”
She looked both ways before carrying the girl out into the hall and then unlocking her own apartment.
Billy watched them go, then locked up tight himself.
“God,” he said out loud. “A concept like shine. We remember it, but it just seems so distant now.”
? ? ?
He sat up all night in front of the TV, watching old movies. To avoid the beating of wings. But he drifted off about four thirty in the morning, halfway through Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and so they caught him just the same.