Billy
It was nearly the end of June, the morning when Billy heard a soft knock on his door.
Nobody knocked on Billy’s door any more. No one. He had gotten his wish about that. Felipe still came once a week to take him to the grocery store, but at such a set time that Billy always waited for him in the hall. And no delivery person had come by here in ages.
“Who’s there?” he called through the door, trying not to sound edgy. Not realizing, until his words fed back to him, how badly he had failed.
Such a soft knock. Filled with something like trepidation, or even humility. If Billy had to venture a guess, he’d say the spooky, incredibly young couple upstairs needed something. Probably something he didn’t have anyway.
“Eileen Ferguson.”
“Oh,” Billy said, realizing deeply within himself how desperately he did not want to open the door for her. “What do you want from me?”
“I was hoping I could come in and talk.”
Her voice sounded lifeless and droopy, and it hit Billy hard that something might have happened to Grace.
He ran to the door and threw it wide.
“What’s wrong? Where’s Grace? Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. She’s downstairs.”
“Oh,” Billy said, his heart still hammering. “All right. You want to come in. All right. Come in. I guess. Should I make a pot of coffee?”
“Oh, my God, that would be great. I could so use some coffee. It’s near the end of the month and I’m out.”
She did not follow Billy into the kitchen. She just sat on the couch while Billy started the coffee. In his head, he tried on a dozen different ways to ask why she was there, but did not succeed in asking any of them.
“Black with sugar, right?”
“How do you know how I take my coffee?”
“Long story.”
Then he couldn’t decide whether to stand there and watch the coffee drip or go back out and sit with Eileen. And the decision locked him up so completely that he knew he had to break in one direction or another. So he rejoined her in his living room.
She did not speak.
“So, how’s Grace?”
“Medium,” Eileen said. “Still a little droopy.”
“Is she still dancing?”
“No. She says she got sick of doing that same dance over and over. She asked me if she could take lessons, but I said no. Because we don’t have the money. Seriously, we don’t. But all the time I was saying it I knew she could get lessons for free if I would let her, and I just felt like such a total shit.”
On the word “shit,” tears began to leak from Eileen, despite an obvious effort on her part to prevent them. Billy brought her a box of tissues. He’d had them for nearly a year. A box of tissues didn’t fly away, not like it had used to. Nobody came over to Billy’s and cried any more.
“I’m not sure how much you know about twelve-step programs,” she said.
“Really nothing.”
“You have to make amends to the people you hurt.”
“Oh. I would think you’d want to make amends to Grace, not me.”
“I already made amends to Grace. Why? It didn’t hurt you when I took her?”
“Oh, no. It did. Quite a lot. Still does.”
“Then why would you say Grace and not you?”
“Oh,” Billy said. “I don’t know. Good question. I guess because I care more about Grace than I care about me.”
After that conversation-stopper, a long silence reigned.
Finally Billy popped up and said, “Let me just go get us that coffee, and then you can do whatever this thing is you came to do.”
He noticed, as he handed her the mug, that his hands were shaking. Eileen must have noticed it, too.
He sat across from her, and nothing happened for a truly excruciating length of time. Billy sat stock-still, weirdly aware of the slant of morning light through his thin curtains, and the way tiny dust motes danced in it, performing in front of his nose.
“It was mostly humiliation,” Eileen said, startling him.
Billy did not dare speak.
“You know that feeling, like you’re a total fraud, and the world is going to find out, and then everybody’s going to judge you?”
“Yes,” Billy said. “I do.”
“That’s how I felt when you guys took Grace away from me.”
“Oh,” Billy said. “I can see that must have been hard. I’d say we didn’t mean for you to feel that way, but I’m not sure that would be the whole truth. I think everybody knew it would be terrible for you, and we hoped the pain would inspire you to go back to being Grace’s mom.”
“You mean you really were trying to get her back with me?”
“Oh, yes. It was mostly Grace’s idea.”
“You see, I never believed that,” Eileen said, picking up volume and emotion.
“I know you didn’t. But it’s the truth.”
“Why would Grace want you guys to say she couldn’t see me at all?”
“Because she thought if you lost the most important thing in the world to you, it might wake you up. She thought it might drive you to get better. She wanted you to get better. Didn’t Rayleen tell you that?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. Probably. Honestly? If she did, and maybe she did, I don’t think I would’ve really heard it. At the time. I would’ve just thought, ‘Losing Grace’ll make me worse, not better, so that’s stupid.’”
They sat for a painful length of time. Dust motes swirled.
“I’m still humiliated in front of you,” she said.
Billy laughed out loud.
“Me? No one is humiliated in front of me. How could you be?”
“Because I was such a horrible parent, and you saw it. And I know you’re judging me for it.”
“Look. Eileen. I don’t judge. I don’t have the right to judge. I don’t have that kind of standing. I’m an agoraphobic with an anxiety disorder and a strong tendency toward panic attacks. I spent twelve years of my life refusing to even go out on my front patio, or out in the hall to get the mail. Nobody is so low that they think I’m looking down on them. There is simply no space underneath me.”
They sat in silence for another painful length of time, during which Eileen drained her mug of sweet coffee.
“OK,” she said, rising suddenly to her feet. “I’m glad we had this little talk. It was good.”
She headed for the door, so Billy ran ahead and unlocked it. And she walked out. Just like that. No further thoughts. No formal goodbye. And, Billy couldn’t help noticing, no real amends. He didn’t know much about twelve-step programs and how they handled amends, but he knew enough English to know the definition of the word.
It usually involved mentioning that you were sorry. That or better. That or actually doing something to make it right again.
? ? ?
It might have been two or three minutes later that he began to hear it, or it might have been five or ten. A sound. A very familiar, yet ancient, yet exhilarating, memory.
It was Grace. Shrieking with joy. Billy had no idea what she was feeling so joyful about, but it filled his chest nearly to breaking with emotion. He had heard nothing from Grace through his floor of late. For well over a year, Grace seemed to have forgotten that to be Grace was, by its very nature, a noisy proposition.
He heard the door to the basement apartment fly open, and a shriek big enough to fill the emptiness of the entire building.
“Billy! Billy, open your door!”
He ran to the door, undid the locks, and threw it wide. Just in time, too. Grace was literally off the ground, launching herself in his direction. She landed squarely in his arms, pushing a great “oof” out of him, and nearly sending them both flying on to his rug.
Then she jumped down and looked up into his face, eagerly, her eyes fully alive. Just the way he remembered them.
“When do we dance?” she fairly shrieked, hurting Billy’s ears in the most gratifying way.
Grace
“Whoa!” Grace shouted. “Wow, wow, wow!”
They stood in a stretch of sandy dirt at the side of the road, Grace keeping one hand on the car for balance. Felipe cut the engine and the headlights, and then it was dark. Real darkness, which Grace had never seen. She hadn’t known she’d never seen real darkness, but she knew it in that moment. Just fake city-dark.
And she’d never seen the stars. Not for real.
“That’s amazing!” she shrieked.
“Ouch. My ear,” Billy said.
“Sorry.”
Grace pried her gaze away from the stars and looked around. Nothing. Not as far as her eyes could see. No buildings, no other people, no streetlights, no nothing. Just a dark road, her friend Billy, and her friends Felipe and Clara, who had driven them more than an hour out into the desert surrounding LA. Until they found this beautiful nothing.
They stood beside the car together, Grace and Billy, in this brand-new blackness, their necks craned back.
“That’s so amazing,” she said again. More quietly this time.
“What, you didn’t believe me?”
“I believed you. You said there’d be more stars and I listened. But I didn’t know there’d be this many more. And I didn’t picture it right. You didn’t tell me they’d be all around us, like a dome. Like we’re in a globe. It makes me really see how the world is round. I mean, I know it is, cause we learned that and all, but it never seemed like it is until now.”
Billy lifted her by the waist and set her on the hood of the car, and she leaned back against the cool windshield, wondering why the desert gets cold at night if it’s known for being so hot and all.
Billy sat next to her on the hood. On the driver’s side. And they looked up. Together. Grace held her hands out and made a ring, like the lens of a camera, to see if she could count the stars in just that tiny circle of sky. But even the stars through her lens-hands seemed infinite. So she set her hands in her lap again and took it in as a flabbergasting whole, breathing in deeply and then sighing.
“What’s that?” she asked after a while, pointing. There was a tiny, tiny light in the sky, moving. Not a plane. Something way, way farther away. “Is that a space ship?”
“I doubt it. Where are you looking?”
“Right there.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Right where I’m pointing. It’s real little, though.”
“Your eyes are probably better than mine.”
“It looks like it’s about a billion miles away. But it’s moving.”
“Fast?”
“No. Kind of slow.”
“Maybe it’s a satellite.”
“Oh. Maybe. But don’t they go right around the Earth? Kind of near it?”
“As distance goes, yes, that would be fair to say.”
“So if that’s a satellite, and satellites are in the orbit-thingy around the Earth…wow. Makes you wonder what else is even farther out there. You know. If we could see it.”
“Now you see what your teacher was trying to tell you.”
“Don’t break my brain again, Billy. I just got it all put back together.”
They lay side by side in silence for a time. Then Grace started to glance over her shoulder at Felipe and Clara, who were still in the front seat of the car. But she stopped herself, deciding that might be embarrassing. Depending on what they were doing.
She elbowed Billy lightly.
“Hey. Are they making out back there?”
Billy looked over his shoulder.
“No. Just looking into each other’s eyes.”
Felipe’s voice came through. “We can hear you in here, you know.”
“Lo siento, Felipe,” Grace said. “Lo siento, Clara.”
“Esta bien,” Clara called back.
They sat in silence a while longer.
“You seem pretty relaxed,” she said to Billy.
“Pretty relaxed. For me. I’ll be a lot more relaxed when we get home, of course. Don’t forget I’ve gone to the supermarket every week. For more than a year.”
“Is this the first place you’ve been that’s not the supermarket?”
“No. I went to the dentist.”
“You did? When?”
“Not too long after…Pretty early on in that year when I didn’t see you.”
“Yuck. Dentist.”
“I didn’t have too much choice.”
“So how does it feel to be so far from home?”
Billy didn’t answer for a time. Grace was beginning to wonder if he maybe never would.
Then he said, “Remember the time when we were out on my patio watching the stars? I was just now thinking…these are the same stars.”
“No way! There are so many more!”
“No. Same amount. We’re just seeing more.”
“Oh. Right. So they’re the same stars. That doesn’t really answer my question.”
“I meant it to. I was just thinking, if I’m under the same stars, then I can’t be too far from home. From a larger perspective, I mean.”
Grace wasn’t positive she knew what the word perspective meant, but she got the general idea.
“Hey. That’s good. For Billy.” They gazed a while longer, and then Grace said, “You still want to get home as fast as we can, though, huh?”
“More than you know.”
“How does it make you feel? I don’t mean being so far from home, I mean looking at all the stars there really are. How does it make you feel?”
“Hmm,” he said. “Like the world is big again. No. Not again. Like I only thought it had gotten small while I was inside, but now I see it was big the whole time, just waiting out there. Waiting for me to come back. How does it make you feel?”
“Kind of excited. But I don’t know how to say why.”
“And insignificant,” he said.
“In English, Billy.”
“Like I’m not important.”
“You are to me.”
“Thanks. Can we go home now? I’m running out of brave.”
Grace sighed theatrically.
“Oh, OK. I guess that’s about all I can expect from you for one time, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know why you put up with me.”
“It’s not easy,” she said, and jumped off the hood, silently wishing the stars goodnight. Reminding herself that when she got home, they’d all still be there. Whether she could see them from home or not.
THE END