“I’m serious,” Grace said. “I’m having a panic attack. I’m seriously having a panic attack here.”
They were three or four blocks from home when she said it. Grace had been holding Rayleen’s hand, but she stopped cold on the sidewalk and pulled free. Jesse ran a few steps to her and got down on one knee, leaving Billy on his own and unguarded in the big world.
Billy went to Grace’s side and knelt down close to Jesse.
“Erase that,” he said to Grace. “Remember how we erase that?”
“Dancing,” Grace said. Breathless. “But I don’t have my tap shoes out here.”
“This is so my fault. I never should have told you I get panic attacks.”
“You didn’t,” Grace said. “You get panic attacks?”
She looked into his face curiously. At least for the moment, she seemed effectively distracted.
“That night on my patio. When we were looking at the stars and you asked what happened to me.”
“But you never answered me, Billy.”
“I did, actually,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder the way Jesse always did for him. “But maybe you were asleep by then. How did you even know to call it that if you didn’t hear it from me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I heard it somewhere, but I think that’s just what it feels like. It’s like I was just walking down the street and looking at this block like every day, because I lived here every day of my life, and then all of a sudden I thought how I might never see it again after next month, and then I got all panic-like and couldn’t breathe.”
“I’m going to help you erase it.”
“How? I can’t dance out here on the sidewalk.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I don’t have my shoes!” she shouted, and a man watering his hedges turned to stare at them.
“So? You don’t think there’s any other type of dance besides tap? There’s all manner of dancing, Grace. I’ll show you a couple of new dance steps and you can dance all the way to school.”
“People will stare at me.”
“So? Let them stare.”
“Will you dance with me?”
Billy swallowed hard. Oh dear God, he thought. People will stare at me.
He looked over to see Jesse watching him, waiting for his answer.
“Yes. I will. Now let’s get started. I’m going to show you a really basic Latin salsa move. You just do it on a six-count. One, two, three…four, five six.” He stepped his feet forward and back in an exaggerated motion, bucked his torso back at the end, swung his bent arms in a Latin rhythm. “Don’t forget to use plenty of arms with this. Try it.”
Grace copied his moves, counting it out under her breath.
“Arms,” Billy said.
“Right. Arms.”
“Smile,” Billy said.
“Right. Smile. OK, so how long do I stand here in the street doing this?”
“Don’t be a smartass,” Billy said, still synchronizing the step with her. “I’m getting there. Now, all you have to do is take very long steps forward and very short steps backward. And we’ll be moving.”
And then they were moving.
They salsa-danced slowly along the front yard of the man still watering his hedge. He had stopped to watch them, an arc of water from his hose flying off into nowhere. As they reached the far edge of his property line, he held the hose in the crook of his elbow and clapped for them.
“Muy bonita!” he called, sounding not the least bit sarcastic. “Miradas buenas!”
Billy could tell the phrases were compliments, but was curious to know specifically which ones.
“What did he say?” Billy whispered down to Grace.
“Well…bonita means pretty. And bueno—”
“Bueno I know. See? He’s not laughing at us. He likes it. Your first applause.”
“Rayleen applauds for me. And the county lady did, too.”
“Your first public applause. How does it feel?”
“Weird. Weirder than I thought it would. I guess I didn’t picture I’d be salsa-dancing down the street at the time.”
About a block later, Billy glanced over his shoulder. Rayleen and Jesse were walking side by side behind them, about ten steps back.
They were holding hands.
? ? ?
It was after six, not long after Grace had gone to Rayleen’s for the night, when Yolanda appeared at Billy’s door.
He opened wide and invited her in, even though she scared him.
He took the coffee pot from her and walked it to his sink, blankly pondering how many times he would have to wash it before he could forgive it for having spent time in that filthy, horrible apartment.
When he got back to the living room, Yolanda was sitting on his couch, petting the cat.
“So this is Grace’s cat, huh? I sure keep getting an earful about this cat. From both sides. So let me not waste your time. It’s like this. I got no idea. She’s walking and talking, and she says she didn’t use while I was at work, because she couldn’t, because I found all her stashes. So I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow she’ll get sick of being clean, or the day after, and she’ll find a way. Or maybe I got through to her with what I said about Grace, how Grace was about to get thrown into the system. That was the main point, I guess, at least for right now, to clean her up enough to tell her that. But I doubt it’ll do the trick, and I’ll tell you why not.”
In the pause that followed, Billy sat on the very edge of the other end of the sofa, his face feeling bloodless and cold.
“It’s because she doesn’t think that would be any worse,” Yolanda said. “She thinks you guys are the devil, and whoever they give Grace to in foster care would be a better deal than what she’s got now.”
Billy noticed Yolanda chewed gum with a snapping motion. An irritating habit in his opinion.
He tested his voice by clearing his throat.
“But we adore Grace,” he said quietly, and it — his voice — worked fairly well. “And she loves us. And she’s thriving here.”
“Addict logic,” Yolanda said, not missing a beat. “Life viewed through resentment. It’s possible it’s still mostly the drugs talking, and a couple days down the road we’ll hear from the real Eileen. You know, I sponsored her for over two years, and she had good recovery. There’s a reasonable person in there someplace. It’s just been a while since I got to see it.”
“What was she taking? What did you find?”
“Oxy, mostly. A little hydrocodone.”
“I’m not familiar.”
“Thank God. Don’t familiarize yourself. Very heavy-duty painkillers. Big abuse potential. Oxycontin is the stuff they call hillbilly heroin. It’ll string you out fast for a legal prescription medication.”
“Oh, she has it legally?”
“No, she doesn’t. But doctors give it, anyway. They just mostly know better than to give it to her. No, she’s getting this on the street. If I knew where, that’d be helpful. But I don’t. Could be anywhere. It’s not exactly what you’d call a rare commodity.”
They sat in silence for a long moment. Too long, by Billy’s internal clock.
“Grace thinks Rayleen will be able to get her right back again if the county takes her away,” Billy said dully.
“Somebody ought to tell her the damn truth, then. Once she’s in the system, she’s gone. Oh, her mom could get her back. But she’d have to prove she was clean over a long haul. At least a year, most likely. It’s not a speedy process. Girl deserves to know the truth. It’s her future. Maybe not right now, though, because maybe we still got a shot. But if we know they’re coming for her, she ought to know what she’s getting into.”
“So you think we still have a chance,” Billy said, reaching into that figurative pool of stinking garbage, and grabbing the one treasure worth salvaging.
Yolanda twisted her long hair around one finger. A nervous habit, maybe.
“I got one little trick up my sleeve. I got five vacation days to draw on. So I’m gonna be here on the day this county lady is supposed to come back, plus two days on either side. I’m gonna be sitting down there making sure she’s clean.”
“That’s great!” Billy piped, startling himself with his own volume.
“Eh,” Yolanda said. “It’s weaker than you think. I can’t sit on her if she tries to go out and buy. I can try to talk her out of it, but I can’t tie her up. Not legally. Alls I can do is hope she’d be too ashamed to do that right in front of me. Plus it’s got another weak spot. Well, a couple, actually. First off, the county lady said she’d give it another month. But maybe she means twenty-six days or maybe she means thirty-five days. You never know with them, and that’s on purpose, I’m sure. She didn’t exactly help us out by making an appointment. But let’s say she shows up right in that nice little window when I’m with Eileen. So she’s all clean, and that’s good, and nobody throws Grace in the system. Great, right? You think the county’s gonna leave it at that? You think this lady’s too stupid to know an addict might be clean one day and loaded the next? You think this is the first she ever met one? No, she’ll be back to check. Regular. So all this effort, and I don’t really know what we’re getting. Just maybe a few more weeks. Unless Eileen gets her ass back in the program and sticks, this is all for nothing. Unless she gets with it again, there’s really only one way this can go.”
Billy sat still for a long time, just breathing. He held a question in there somewhere, struggling its way up through his roiling middle, but he couldn’t yet gather the strength to ask it.
“Sorry,” Yolanda said, and rose to leave.
“Wait,” Billy said. “I just want to ask you one more thing. What are the odds? I mean, not in this specific case, because obviously nobody knows that, but what I meant was…what are the odds in general, do you think? What percentage of addicts really get clean and stay that way? Do you know?”
Yolanda paused a minute with her hand on the door.
“Bout three in a hundred,” she said.
Then she let herself out.
? ? ?
It was nearly two in the morning, though Billy didn’t know its place in clock time until later, after he was awake.
At the very bottom of a dream cycle, he stood uncertainly and looked about himself, seeing nothing but wings on every side. Wide, white, richly feathered. And absolutely still.
It unnerved him, that they should be so still. He felt taunted.
“Flap!” he screamed at the wings, when he could no longer bear the suspense.
The wings remained still.
Billy lost his temper with them.
“Flap, damn you! You know you want to! You know you’re going to! Get it the hell over with and flap already!”
The wings continued to hang in motionless suspension. But something made a rapping noise.
“Billy!” the wings said, distantly.
No. It wasn’t the wings speaking at all. It was Grace.
Billy opened his eyes. He lay still a moment, staring at the cracked off-white plaster of his ceiling in the dim light, trying to clear his head and return from the dream.
“Billy!”
This time he knew. It was clearly not a dream in any way. It was Grace’s hissing voice, a loud stage whisper through his door.
He tied on his robe and stumbled his way to the door to let her in.
“What are you doing up?” he asked, looking down at her.
She stood on the cold hardwood of the hallway, wearing a new-looking blue nightshirt and shifting from one bare foot to the other.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why were you shouting?”
“Oh. Was I? It was nothing. Just a bad dream. You can go back to bed now. Everything’s fine.”
“No, it isn’t! Why would you even say that, Billy? You shouldn’t say everything’s fine when it isn’t!”
She pushed past him and into his living room and hoisted herself up on to his couch. Billy closed the door and sighed.
“Don’t you even want somebody to be with you until you’re done being all scared, and you’re ready to go back to sleep? When I have a bad dream, I run get in bed with Rayleen, and she strokes my forehead, and she asks me what the dream was about, and then she says, ‘Poor Grace, never mind, Grace, it was just a dream, and dreams can’t hurt you.’ Don’t you want somebody to do that for you?”
Tears sprang to Billy’s eyes, but he held them in as best he could. Yes, he did want that. Had all his life. He had just never known it existed until that very moment.
“OK,” he said, and sat down with her on the couch.
“What did you dream?”
“I dreamed there were these wings all around me, these really huge white wings.”
“Like bird wings?”
“Not like any bird wings I ever saw.”
“Like angel wings?”
“I don’t know. I never saw an angel. I don’t think so. Because I think if they were angel wings they’d be comforting. These aren’t comforting. I dream about them all the time, but usually they flap. And it’s very disturbing, the way they flap. This is the first time they ever held still.”
“Oh,” Grace said. “Then why were you yelling at them to flap?”
“Oh. You heard that. Well. Because…I’m not sure. I can’t really explain it. It’s like you know something bad is going to happen, and the suspense is too much. It’s almost better to just get it over with. But I’m not sure if you know what I mean. Maybe you just had to be there.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Grace said. “Dreams are like that. They’re not usually very understandable.”
Grace pulled up to her knees on the couch and stroked Billy’s forehead.
“Poor Billy, it was just a dream, Billy. Never mind about that dream because dreams can’t hurt you.”
“Thank you,” he said, fighting tears again.
“You’re welcome. I think I’m gonna go back to bed. Can I sleep on your couch? Oh, no, wait. Rayleen would get scared cause I was gone. I better get back.”
“I’ll be OK,” Billy said.
“I know you will, cause dreams can’t hurt you.”
She padded across his rug to the door, opened it wide, then stood still with both hands on the knob.
“I just want to tell you something,” she said. “I just want to tell you I’ll always find you. You might not be able to find me, but I know how to find you. So, wherever I go, if I do, which I hope I don’t, but if I do, and Rayleen can’t get me back again…cause, you know, I keep saying she can, but every time I say it everybody looks a little green and funny, so if maybe that doesn’t work out, just remember I’ll always find you, even if I have to grow up to be eighteen first. Cause you’re my very best friend.”
She pulled the door closed behind her with a small muffled thump.
Billy stayed up the rest of the night, watching TV, all the lights on. Because he knew the wings were out there. And that they’d wait for him. And that they would — or would not — flap.