Billy
“Oh, dear,” Billy said. Then he froze for a long moment, as if a simple “Oh, dear” might be enough to heal the situation.
But the person on the other side of the door knocked again.
“There seems to be someone at our door,” he said.
He spoke the words quietly, and in a reasonable tone, then took a moment to congratulate himself on his ability to stay calm.
People knocked on his door. It wasn’t an entirely unknown phenomenon. It happened. But that was always on grocery delivery days. And this was not.
“Oh, dear,” he said again, in response to the third knock.
It was a polite knock. Did robbers and muggers, and other sorts of miscreants, knock politely? Probably. Probably they did. They would do that sort of thing. Just to lull one into a false sense of security.
He slipped over to the door as if darting through sniper fire without benefit of cover, and stood with his back to the heavy wood.
“Who’s there?” Billy called out, careful to monitor his voice for steadiness. Unfortunately, the effort was a complete and utter failure, and his voice broke as if in the process of changing with puberty.
“It’s your neighbor from across the hall. Rayleen. And Grace. You know Grace, right? She says she knows you.”
“Yes, we — I know Grace,” he said, a bit more steadily. Then he lowered his voice. “But we don’t know you,” he muttered, much more quietly. “Seeing you out the window, and thinking you present yourself well, is hardly knowing.”
“I’m sorry,” Rayleen said through the door. “Is there someone there with you right now? Should we come back another time?”
Good question. Should he make them come back another time? But if he told them to, they surely would. And then he’d have to live for days in the knowledge that the same axe was about to fall on him again. The prospect seemed unpalatable. No, the least painful time to deal with this situation would definitely be now.
Billy undid two locks and opened the door a few inches, the safety chain still in place.
He looked down at Grace, who waved at him. He could definitely see the middle part of Rayleen, the part that hovered at about Grace-level, but he couldn’t bring himself to look up at her face. She might try to look into his eyes, or commit some other unbearable act of human relations.
“Hi, Billy!” Grace shouted. Well. It wasn’t shouting by Grace standards. But for anyone else it certainly would have been.
“Hey, Grace.”
“We came to ask you a favor!” Grace made favors sound fun, like ice cream cakes, or being the one who gets to whack the pi?ata with the stick.
Billy bent down to Grace’s level, hands on his knees, and, through the crack of the open door, addressed her in what could only be called a stage whisper.
“Grace, I thought we talked about this,” he said.
“Right. I know. But this is different.” Grace imitated his stage whisper, landing at just about the volume most people would use in normal conversation.
“How is it different?”
“Because Rayleen is really the one helping. You’d just be helping her help. Which is so much easier.”
“I’m right here,” Rayleen said, causing Billy to jump. “I can hear all of this.”
“I know,” Grace said. “I hate that, too. People do that to me all the time, like I don’t have good ears or something, but I can always hear them. You even did that to me, Rayleen, just today, and Mrs. Hinman did it, too. It’s silly, I think. I have very good ears. I hear just about everything. I mean, unless it’s so far away that nobody could hear it. I bet I even hear as good as a dog, but I don’t know for sure, though, because we’ve never had a dog. My mom says it’s hard enough just taking care of me.”
Rayleen sighed, and then said, to Billy, “May we come in?”
Billy sucked in a deep breath and tried to calm his heart.
“It’s a bit of a mess. I haven’t had time to do much with the place.”
“Sure,” Rayleen said. “Yeah. I can relate. My housekeeping staff has been on vacation for days, and I’m very unhappy with my current interior designer. So I know just how you feel. Let’s get real, OK? These apartments are all just about the same level of dump. And this is a little on the life-or-death side, or I wouldn’t be asking. We’re really not going to be doing much in the way of judging. I promise.”
Billy straightened, and, unable to think of any graceful way out, pressed the door closed, undid the safety chain, and opened his door to them.
“Do come in,” he said, his hands and voice shaking.
He perched on the very edge of his couch, working at the nail on his index finger with his teeth. Rayleen didn’t sit, just walked into the center of his living room and stood. And spoke.
“Grace needs a place to be for about two hours in the afternoon. Just until I can get home from work. And it’s probably just for a little while. I hope. But, look…it’s a big deal. Huge. The county opened a file on her. So if somebody comes by to check…well, she has to be supervised. I’ll just leave it at that.”
Meanwhile Grace was walking around his apartment, looking at the framed photos of Billy’s younger years. She didn’t appear to be listening, but Billy sensed that she was, anyway.
He tore more deeply than intended at the nail on his index finger, ripping it below the quick and drawing blood.
Grace walked up to where he sat on the couch and stood alarmingly close. Just inches from him. He froze in that closeness, pressing a finger over his torn nail to hold back the bleeding.
“What are you doing to your nails?” she asked.
“Biting them,” Billy said.
“Why?”
“It’s what I do when I’m nervous. What do you do when you’re nervous?”
“Nothing. Just be nervous, I guess.”
“Everybody has something.”
“Sometimes I eat candy when I’m nervous.”
“Aha! Classic case.”
“But sometimes I eat candy when I’m not nervous, too. So I’m not sure if that counts.”
Then she peeled away again, as if fresh out of interest, and headed in the direction of Billy’s kitchen.
Still not wanting to make eye contact with his adult visitor, Billy lit into a thumbnail.
Not a second later, Grace was back in his face, almost literally, shaking one finger at his forehead and chastising him.
“Billy Shine, you stop that biting your nails this very minute!”
Time stood still. Billy breathed in once, aware of the girl’s nose almost close enough to touch his. Then, without advance notice, he burst out laughing. To his further surprise, Grace launched into spontaneous giggles, as if his own laugh had infected her.
“Don’t spit on me or anything,” Grace said, wiping off her face.
Then Billy burst into another round of laughter, and Grace caught the giggles again, immediately. A stubborn case, this particular giggle fit. She had a hard time pulling herself together.
“OK,” Billy said, rising to his feet, a slight hint that the visit could be over now, or at least soon.
“OK?” Grace asked.
“OK what?” Rayleen asked.
“OK, Grace can stay here for a couple of hours a day for a little while,” Billy said. Then, unexpectedly, the next thing he said was, “Oof.”
Because Grace hit him full in the stomach with her whole self, throwing her arms around his waist.
He put one hand on her head, marveling at the slight warmth of her scalp. An actual live human being. How long had it been since he had touched another person, or been touched in any way? A dozen years? Fifteen?
He felt as though the sensation was melting him. Almost literally.
He sank to his knees, which made him just her height, and hugged her back. From the outside, he figured — hoped — it appeared as a deliberate move. In truth, his knees had simply melted.
“You said yes,” Grace said, in something bizarrely akin to a whisper. “Everybody else said no. That must mean you like me.”
“I do, actually,” Billy said, learning the information the exact moment he imparted it.
“What do you like about me?”
“You’re brave,” he said, pulling back from the embrace and holding her at arms’ length by her shoulders. Enough of any type of closeness was enough, especially for one day.
“How am I brave?”
“Well. You go outside.”
“Duh. Yeah, me and everybody else on the planet.”
“How about when you stopped those two big men fighting?”
“What two big men?”
“Jake Lafferty and Felipe Alvarez.”
Grace’s face lit up. She did not ask how he happened to come by that information, or even how he knew the names of all the neighbors he’d never met.
“Yeah. Wow. I guess I am brave, huh?”
She hit him again, another projectile hug.
“I knew you weren’t useless,” she whispered into his ear. Then, more loudly, “Well, see you tomorrow, Billy.”
And, with that, she marched out the door.
“Thank you,” Rayleen said, just before letting herself out.
She closed the door behind her, leaving Billy to ponder what he’d just gotten himself into. But there was really no dissecting it from the point of view of the present. Tomorrow would tell. Right at the moment there wasn’t much to be done about it. He’d said it, and that was that.
He decided to take a nap. He was feeling wrung out, and needed the rest.
? ? ?
Billy woke to a banging on his door.
He lay in bed for an extended moment, pulling the covers up tightly under his chin. But the banging repeated itself, startling him, even though this time he’d known to expect it.
He took a deep breath and accepted that there was only one way to make it stop.
He rose, delicately, and tiptoed through the living room to the door.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s Jake Lafferty, from upstairs.”
“Oh,” Billy said.
If he’d said more, the shaking in his voice would have come through too strongly, too obviously. It would have given him away, in a potentially dangerous manner, like a prey animal showing blood or a broken leg to its predator.
“I want to ask you one question. Before you start looking after that little girl.”
“OK,” Billy said, betraying his trembling, in spite of the brevity of his answer.
“Are you going to open the door, or what?”
“Probably not.”
“Any special reason why not?”
“I find you a little…threatening.”
“Ah, geez,” Lafferty said. “Which brings me back to my question. Are you a homosexual?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is it really that you didn’t hear the question?”
“No, not really. It’s more that I’m having trouble believing it.”
“Look. I got a right to ask, in this case. Because you’re going to be looking after that little girl. Right? And everybody knows homosexuals are more likely to be child-molesters. Otherwise it would just be your business. But that’s why I have to ask. Because everybody knows that.”
The room spun slightly around Billy’s head. He reminded himself to breathe, quickly, before he passed out.
“Um. No. Not really. Everybody doesn’t know that. Because it’s nowhere even close to the truth.”
“Are you kidding me? Then who do you figure is molesting all those little boys?”
“Um. A bunch of married guys about your age.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Just that you’re wrong. About pretty much everything.”
“I notice you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Let’s just say, for the sake of the argument,” Billy said, still openly trembling, “that you were right about everything. You’re not. But just for a second, let’s imagine a world where you were. Have you met Grace?”
“Of course I’ve met her.”
“Is she…a boy child? Or a girl child?”
“Oh,” Lafferty said. “Yeah, OK.”
Billy heard the first few of Lafferty’s footsteps as he headed down the hall, and then one word muttered under Lafferty’s breath. The word was, “Fruitcake.”
Billy went back to bed, in spite of his knowledge that the chance for more napping had long ago evaded him.
? ? ?