He lay awake for all but maybe forty-five minutes of that night. And, within that forty-five minutes, he felt himself surrounded, swallowed, by the beating of wings. Longer, whiter, more passionate than usual. A cacophony of wings.
? ? ?
“Who brought you home from school?” he asked Grace.
He sat perched on the very edge of his sofa, watching her look around his apartment. Watching her peer at all of his photos again, as if she hadn’t just examined them the previous day.
He couldn’t focus away from his lack of sleep. It left his nerves raw, and feeling as though they’d been recently sandpapered.
“Felipe did,” she said. “That way Yolanda wouldn’t have to take off from work. Because they don’t pay Yolanda when she takes off from work. She can take off. But then she just loses the money.”
“And Yolanda is…”
“My mom’s sponsor.”
“Sponsor? What kind of sponsor? What does she sponsor her to do?”
“In the program. You know. Like an AA sponsor, except Yolanda is NA.”
“Oh, good Lord, that explains a lot,” Billy said, wishing after the fact he hadn’t said it out loud.
“What does it explain?”
“Forget I mentioned it. Oh — that’s me in an Equity waiver production of The Iceman Cometh.”
“I understood the photo better before you told me that.”
“So how did Jake Lafferty find out I was going to be taking care of you?”
“Oh, that’s easy. Rayleen had to go talk to him. Because Felipe didn’t want to come pick me up at school, because he figured Mr. Lafferty would give him a hard time about it. So Rayleen had to go talk to Mr. Lafferty, and I had to go, because otherwise I would have been alone with just my mom, who was asleep, and then if the county came to check on me, that would be bad. So I went along. And, wow, he was really mad. But Rayleen didn’t act like she was one bit scared of him. She just told him Felipe was gonna pick me up from school, and he better just stay out of it. He didn’t like it much, but he just sort of said, ‘Why should I care? Do whatever you want.’ But then he wanted to know where I’d be after Felipe went to work, which seemed weird to me, because, a minute before that, he’d just said he didn’t care. I told him a lot about you.”
“Oh. OK. That explains a lot.”
“You say that a bunch, did you know that? What does it explain?”
“It explains why he came down here and asked personal questions.”
“What kind of personal questions?”
“Well…how can I tell you…if they’re personal?”
“Right,” Grace said. “Duh. Sorry.”
“What did you tell him about me?”
“That you used to be a dancer and an actor and a singer…”
That explains a lot, Billy thought, but he kept it to himself.
“…and that your name was Billy Shine, but that your first name used to be Rodney or Dennis or something…”
“Donald. Actually.”
“Oh, Right. Donald. Sorry. And I told him your last name used to be Fleinsteen, but you changed it to Shine, because Fleinsteen wasn’t a dancer’s name.”
“Feldman,” Billy said, suddenly even more tired.
“Oh. Feldman. Where did I get Fleinsteen?”
“I wouldn’t venture to guess.”
“There you go talking weird again. I guess I told him wrong. What’s this one? Is this you dancing?”
She held up a framed photo that had been sitting on the end table near the couch. It was indeed a photo of Billy dancing.
“Yes. In fact, it’s me dancing on Broadway.”
“What’s Broadway?”
“It’s a street. In New York.”
“It doesn’t look like a street. It looks like you’re dancing inside.”
“Right. In a theater. On Broadway.”
“Oh. Is that good?”
“That’s about as good as it gets.”
“Too bad you don’t do this any more. I mean, since you loved it so much.”
“Well, look at it this way, Grace. If I were still dancing, I’d be on Broadway right now, and then who would look after you?”
“True. But that’s another thing I was thinking we could talk about, because if you were still a dancer—”
“Maybe we should play the quiet game,” Billy interjected.
“What’s the quiet game?”
“You know. The one where we try to see who can go the longest without talking.”
“Ugh,” Grace said, putting the Broadway photo back in the right place, but at the wrong angle. “Sounds really boring.”
“I’m just so tired, though,” Billy said, leaning over and fixing the angle of the Broadway photo. “I didn’t sleep last night. I’m just not sure how much more energy I have for talking.”
Grace appeared suddenly in front of him, bouncing up and down on her toes, her hands on his knees.
“Will you teach me to dance?”
“That takes energy, too.”
“Please, Billy? Please, please, please? Please, please, please? Pleeeeease?”
Billy sighed deeply. Wearily.
“OK,” he said. “I guess it takes less energy than listening to that.”