Billy
Knock. Knock. Knock. Pause. Knock.
Billy glanced into the kitchen to read the clock over his stove. Rayleen was home early. He scooted Ms. Lafferty the Cat off his lap, and she ran into the bedroom.
He opened the door, and stared out into the hall, at no one. But of course it was not no one. With the possible exception of one plywood dance floor he’d overheard, it’s quite rare for your door to be knocked upon by no one. He was just staring at the wrong level, the Rayleen level. He could see, in his peripheral vision, that someone was there. It was just someone lower. Someone closer to the floor.
He turned his gaze down to Grace’s ruined face. She was crying, her nose slightly runny, her face streaked with tears. She was wearing a blue dress, one Billy had never seen before. In fact, he had never seen her in a dress of any kind. And this one was brand-new, and fit her perfectly.
He reached down and picked her up, and she wrapped her arms and legs around him and cried on his shoulder. Rather sloppily, but he really didn’t mind. The warmth of her in his arms, and the impact of her emotion, made his knees feel runny and weak, so he took her to the couch, where they sat down as one.
She did not let go.
Her tears made Billy feel as if he might cry as well, even though he was not yet specifically sure what they were crying about.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t let you know where I was,” she said in a blubbery voice.
“Well. You did. Sort of. You did that signal-knock on my floor.”
“But that was so long later. You must’ve been going crazy.”
“I felt better after you knocked.”
“Did you bite all your nails away?”
“I didn’t really have much of any to begin with.”
“Does that mean yes?”
“Pretty much.”
“You know I would’ve let you know where I was. If I could. Right?”
“I never once doubted it. Where’s your mom now?”
“Three guesses.”
“Oh.”
They stayed that way for a moment or two longer. Billy had passed the point of too much human contact, and felt the need to withdraw. But he didn’t withdraw. He just sat still with the feeling.
Suddenly a shriek pieced his eardrum on the Grace side.
“My kitty! My kitty! My kitty!”
Grace launched off his lap, hurting his thigh and leaving one ear literally ringing.
Ms. Lafferty the Cat had strolled into the room, and the cat was headed toward Grace, and Grace was headed toward the cat. But something was wrong, Billy noted. With Grace. Physically wrong. She wasn’t walking correctly. She was favoring her right hip or leg. She was limping.
“Grace. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m just saying hello to my cat.”
“You’re limping.”
“Oh. That. That’s nothing.”
“Did you have an accident?”
“Sort of. Hello, Mr. Lafferty the Cat. I missed you. Did you tell Billy thanks for taking such good care of you?”
“What kind of accident? What happened?”
“Oh, it really wasn’t anything. Well, I mean, it wasn’t much. My mom and I just had this big fight.”
To his surprise, Billy found himself standing on his feet, with no memory of having risen from the couch.
“Your mother hurt you?”
“Well, yeah, sort of, but I don’t think she…”
But Billy was out the door and down the hall before he could hear the end of the sentence. He trotted down the basement stairs and pounded on that awful woman’s door.
Pounded!
As he did, a place in his gut began to tremble, the way it would if someone else had been angry, or creating a disturbance. But this wasn’t someone else. This was Billy. It never had been before, not once in his life that he could recall, but now it was, and he was unable to stop the process. It felt as if he were being frightened by the angry behavior of someone else entirely.
“Mrs. Ferguson!” he screamed. Screamed. He felt the strain in his throat from raising his voice so sharply. “Mrs. Ferguson! I need you to come to the door! Now! I know you’re not really awake but, frankly, I don’t care! I wish to have a talk with you! Right now!”
He paused, still and trembling. For quite a long moment. He pressed his fingertips to the wood of her door to steady himself.
Apparently she was not going to answer.
But he had passed a point of no return in this horrifyingly new territory, and he needed to have his say. So he spoke his piece anyway, right through the door, hoping it would somehow enter her consciousness through a rear entry the way a person in a coma knows when you’ve been reading to her. And he said it in a loud and aggressive voice, which frightened him, even though the voice was his own.
“You may not hurt Grace. Do you hear me? You may not. Ever. Not ever again. I’m right here. Right upstairs from you. And I will not allow it. You hurt this girl again over my dead body. Do you understand me?”
No answer.
Billy turned to see Grace standing at the top of the stairs, holding her cat, her mouth gaping open, her eyes wide. A mirror of sorts. He turned back to face the door.
“I hope you’re listening to me, Mrs. Ferguson.”
“She’s not really a Mrs.,” Grace half whispered from the top of the stairs.
“It doesn’t matter,” Billy said evenly. “The rest applies.”
He pounded on the door one more time, three pounds, each one ricocheting like gunshot in his sore and shaky gut. The inside of him felt sandpapered, skinless, like a raw and open wound exposed to additional damage.
“Never again!” he screamed.
He felt a tug on the leg of his pajama pants, and it made him jump.
“Billy,” Grace whispered, in a voice quieter than a normal Grace whisper. It would have been whispering for anybody. “Billy. You’re out in the hall.”
The sandpapered expanse of his gut returned an exhausted pang.
“Actually,” he said, “I knew. This time I knew.”
He felt both of her hands wrap around one of his.
“You better come back in,” she said. “Come on. I’m taking you home.”
? ? ?
“I feel like a wet dishrag,” Billy said.
He sat slumped on his couch, Grace sitting next to him, cat on her lap. Both Grace and the cat stared at Billy constantly, as though he might be about to spontaneously combust.
“You look pretty bad, too. I can’t believe you said all that stuff.”
“It needed saying.”
“All kinds of stuff needs saying, all the time. But it’s not usually you saying it. Even Mr. Lafferty the Cat was surprised. Weren’t you, Mr. Lafferty the Cat?”
“We changed the cat’s name,” Billy said weakly.
“You can’t change his name. And who’s ‘we’?”
“Felipe and I.”
“You can’t change his name. I promised him.”
“Well, see, the problem is, she’s not a him. She’s a her.”
“He’s a girl?”
“She is. Yes. So we’ve been calling her Ms. Lafferty the Cat.”
“You can’t change his name. I mean her name. I promised her that was her name. So her name is just going to have to be Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat.”
“Oh, I think not,” Billy said, feeling as though these simple words were exhausting his last crumb of energy.
“Why not?”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit long?”
“I’ll ask him if he minds. I mean her. I’ll ask her if she minds.” Grace held the cat up to her ear, pressing her face against the soft fur of the cat’s side. “She says she doesn’t mind.” A long silence. Then Grace said, “She couldn’t even stay clean for three days.”
Billy said nothing, having no idea what to say.
“I meant my mom, not the cat.”
“I knew what you meant.”
“She knew I’d be gone again the minute she got loaded. And what did she do? She got loaded. I guess she loves drugs more than she loves me.”
“Addiction is a weird phenomenon,” Billy said, barely over a whisper.
“Have you ever been addicted to anything?”
“I’m addicted to staying inside my own apartment.”
“Oh. Right. But you just went out.”
“True.”
“Because my mom not hurting me was more important.”
“I guess so.”
“So why can’t my own mom do that?”
“I wish I knew.”
“It sucks.”
“It does. Yes.”
“Don’t tell Rayleen I complained.”
“I think she would agree that you’re entitled in this case,” he said. “Some things just require complaint.”
But, meanwhile, Billy was thinking, Sure, I broke my addiction for a minute or two. That doesn’t mean I could do it from here on out. But he didn’t say that out loud to Grace, because he didn’t want to strip away her last shred of hope. If she had one.
? ? ?
Billy looked up sometime later to see Rayleen standing in his living room, holding and hugging Grace. Grace must have let her in. Had he fallen asleep, or just slipped into a coma of emotional exhaustion?
“What’s wrong with Billy?” Rayleen asked Grace.
“He yelled at my mom, and now he’s all wiped out from it.”
“Billy yelled at your mom?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think she heard him or anything. But you should have seen him. He was plenty mad. I think even if she’d come to the door, I bet he would’ve yelled right into her face. And he knew he was out in the hall and everything.”
“Hmm,” Rayleen said, setting Grace down on her feet.
“Ow,” Grace said.
“You OK?”
“I hurt my hip. That’s what Billy was so mad about.”
Billy looked up to see Rayleen towering over him, looking down with a soft look of concern in her eyes.
“Are you OK?” she asked. “You look like you have the flu or something.”
“It just took a lot out of me,” he managed to say, the words mushy at their edges.
“Well, I would stay and tell you volumes about how proud I am of you. But my throat is starting to close up. So we’ll have to do this some other time. Come on, Grace, let’s go.”
“Don’t take Grace,” Billy said, at a surprisingly strong volume.
It startled everyone.
“Why not?” Rayleen asked.
“Yeah, why not?” Grace asked.
“Couldn’t you just leave her here for a while? I missed her. Oh, but that’s selfish, isn’t it? You probably missed her, too.”
“No, it’s OK,” Rayleen said. Billy could hear an alarming wheeze growing behind her voice. “I mean, yeah, I did. I missed her. Of course I did. But she can stay here for a while if you want.”
“Thanks,” Billy said.
“But aren’t you worried about…what if her mother…”
“I don’t care. I’m a kidnapper. Call the police.”
Rayleen stood a moment longer, looking down at him. He couldn’t quite read the look on her face, but it didn’t appear to be any type of insult.
“All righty, then,” she said, and turned to go.
“Don’t forget the meeting,” Grace called as Rayleen let herself out. “Tell everybody. We’re having another meeting. Soon.”
“You never told me what—” Rayleen began.
“That’s why you have a meeting,” Grace said. “To tell everybody what the meeting’s about. I told you that once already with the last meeting.”
“Yeah,” Rayleen said. “I guess you did.”
? ? ?
Grace sat on the couch with Billy for a few more hours, watching cartoons on his tiny TV, her head leaned on his shoulder, Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat between them, where they could both pet her at any time.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Grace said, without bothering to mute the volume on the cartoons. “I’m going to dance at my school.”
Billy was too tired to listen to Grace and the cartoons at the same time. It was just too hard to separate out the sounds. But he was also too tired to say so, or to do anything to try to change it.
So he just asked, “When?”
“Three months.”
“Good. Because we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
She didn’t answer initially. In time Billy looked over to see that he had offended her, or hurt her feelings, or more likely both.
“I do a good time step,” she said, her bottom lip poking out a little farther than usual.
“Yes. You do. But I figured you’d want to do something more elaborate for a big school performance. A person’s first public performance is no small thing. It’s a defining moment. It’s something you’ll not soon forget, let me tell you. But it’s up to you. It’s your performance. Do you want to fall back on the time step because it’s easy and safe and you know it best? Or do you want to really shine?”
Grace stroked the cat’s back in silence for a moment or two. Billy felt as though he could look through her and watch the thoughts spinning in her brain. Tumblers waiting to fall into place.
“I want to shine,” she said at last.
“Good choice,” Billy said.