“You shouldn’t even ask her that much. It’s a crazy world. Everybody’s suspicious about everything. Guy your age shouldn’t even get that near a little girl to ask anything at all. It could be taken the wrong way.”
“A guy my age? You sure my age is the problem here? What about you? You asked her.”
“That’s different. I’m older.”
“Oh. Right. I forgot. Guys in their fifties are never child-molesters.”
“You got a mouth on you, son.”
“I’m not your son.”
“You’re sure as hell not. If you were my son you’d treat me with respect.”
Just then Grace appeared again, and the two men jumped back, as if the little girl were their parent or their teacher, and they’d been caught fighting. It seemed ludicrous to Billy from the outside, from the observer’s stance, but in another way he could imagine how such a thing could happen in the confusion of the moment.
“She won’t wake up,” Grace said.
Lafferty looked at Felipe, who looked back.
“That doesn’t seem right,” Lafferty said to Felipe. Then, to the girl, “Did you see any bottles lying around?”
“No. What kind of bottles?”
“Like the kind of bottles you drink from.”
“She wasn’t drinking.”
“Is she OK? Should somebody call a doctor?”
“She’s not sick. You just can’t wake her up when she’s sleeping.”
She sat back down on the stairs, as if planning on staying a while.
Lafferty looked back at Felipe again. Then he took the young man by the sleeve and pulled him across the weedy grass and out of the earshot of the little girl.
And that, unfortunately, put them squarely out of the range of Billy’s ears as well.
But they weren’t fighting now. That much Billy could tell from their body language. They had their heads together, conferring about something, deciding something. Occasionally Lafferty would glance over his shoulder toward Grace.
“Have a wonderful solution,” Billy said, out loud, but quietly enough so as not to give himself away to Grace, who was still quite close by on the stairs. “Because this is certainly a problem.”
But a moment later Felipe peeled away and strode down the sloping lawn, out on to the sidewalk, and down the street.
Lafferty came up the stairs, and Billy waited hopefully, still thinking his neighbor might have a perfect idea up his sleeve. But he walked right by Grace, as if some alien force field had suddenly rendered her invisible.
Just as his foot touched the top step, he looked up and saw Billy watching — caught his eye — which was as close as possible to the only part of Billy peeking around the curtain. He stopped in his tracks.
“What’re you looking at?” he bellowed.
Billy leaped backwards into his own apartment, folded over himself and sank to the rug, his heart fluttering in panic. He remained in this highly protective posture until he’d heard his neighbor come through the front apartment house door, close it behind him, and move along the hall and up the stairs.
Then he jumped up and slammed the glass patio door closed, quickly and gingerly, as if the door itself had been the source of all this upset.
He did not look out again at any time that morning.
He knew the girl must still be out there, but he could not bring himself to check.
• • •
It was almost dusk when he began to debate the issue with himself. Out loud.
“We don’t want to know that badly,” he said.
Then, upon some reflection, “We do want to know. Of course. Of course we do. Just not that badly.”
“Besides,” he added a moment later, “it’s not dark enough.”
He glanced out his sliding-glass door again.
“Then again, when the streetlights come on, it will be too late. Won’t it? And then we’ll have to wonder all night. And wondering tends to keep us awake.”
He sighed deeply, and tied on his old robe. But not really because he wanted to ask the question so badly as to brave the outdoors for his answer. More because there was simply no other way to end the utter exhaustion of wrestling with himself on the issue.
The little girl looked up when he slid the patio door open.
Billy did not initially step out.
It was a little earlier, a little lighter, than it had been the last time he’d gone outside. A shocking thought, he suddenly realized. Had he, really? He’d really gone outside? Maybe that had only been a dream.
He shook such thinking away again, forcing his mind to focus. Back to the issue at hand: that it was not as dark this time. And darkness served, if need be, as a rudimentary form of cover.
He wanted to step backwards, into his safe home, and slide the door closed again. But the little girl was watching him, waiting for him to come out. How insane would she think he was, if he backed up now? How much of the truth was he willing to let her see?
He took one step out into the cool late afternoon, then immediately dropped to his knees. He moved on his hands and knees for a step or two, then hit his belly and slithered to the edge of the patio. It had not been a move thought out in advance. Yes, he knew it was much weirder than just going back inside. But it happened that way. And it was too late to either fix it or mourn it by then.
He looked over the edge of the patio at Grace.
“Why are you crawling on your belly?” she asked, in her famous voice.
“Shhhhh,” he said, instinctively.
“Sorry,” she said, with only the tiniest bit less volume. “I always have trouble with that.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell it.”
“Maybe some other time. I came out here to ask you a question.”
“OK.”
“Why are you sitting outside?”
“You asked me that the last time.”
“I know I did. But you didn’t answer me.”
And, at least for the first few moments, she didn’t answer this time, either.
“I mean, I know your mom is somehow doing something other than looking after you. That much is clear. But you have a key. You could still sit inside.”
“Right.”
“So, why?”
“Maybe you should tell me the story about crawling on your belly first.”
“I don’t think so. I think we do my question tonight.”
“Why yours?”
“Because I asked first.”
“No, you didn’t. I asked first.”
“I asked the other night. You said so yourself.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Grace said, solemnly, as if accepting that the rules were quite clear on that. “You did. Well, it’s like this. If I sit inside, then nobody will know I’m in trouble. And so then nobody will help me.”
Billy’s heart fell. Literally, from the feel of it. He felt physically aware of the sensation of it falling, hitting the organs in his poor lower belly. None of which could have happened, of course. But all of which carried a felt sense of itself all the same.
“Oh, you’re in trouble, huh?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I guess I knew.”
“See, it has to be somebody who lives here. Because that way I can still stay with my mom.”
A silence. Billy could see and feel where this train was headed, which is why he offered no reply.
“Can you help me?”
Another long silence fell, during which Billy was aware of the pebbly nature of the patio surface against the front of his chest and legs.
“Baby girl, I can’t even help myself.”
“Yeah. That’s what I figured.”
It was a low and very dark moment, even by Billy standards. Not only had it just been firmly established that he was utterly useless, but clearly this little girl had been fully able to see for herself how useless he was, even in advance of being told.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m s
orry I’m useless. I wasn’t always. But now I am.”
“OK,” she replied.
“Well, goodnight,” he said.
“It’s not very late,” she said.
“But I won’t see you again before bed. So that’s why the goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” she said. Rather flatly.
Billy slithered back inside for the night.
Grace
Grace missed one day of school, but then the next day Yolanda came and got her, and took her to school in a car. It was too bad, in Grace’s view, because, really, she could miss every single day of school from now until the end of time and it wouldn’t hurt her feelings even one tiny little bit.
“How am I supposed to get home?” Grace asked Yolanda. “I’m not allowed to walk by myself.”
“Your mom’ll come and get you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I had a long talk with your mom, and she promised me.”
“What if she breaks her promise? It happened before.”
“I’ll keep an eye out. But this time I’m pretty sure. She told me she’s ready to pull herself together.”
“That would be nice,” Grace said.
But it was just a thing you say. Maybe it would happen, and that would be nice, but maybe it wouldn’t. And Grace knew it would be extra-hard if she spent all day thinking how nice it was going to be, and then it wasn’t. Grace hated that worse than anything.
So she tried hard not to think too much about it all day, but she thought about it a lot while she was waiting for the bell to ring. It made her feel nervous and weird. It made her want to eat the very last chocolate bar she had hiding in her backpack; but she didn’t, because she figured the teacher would catch her, and if the teacher caught her, she’d take the candy away. And that was Grace’s last one. If she’d had more money she’d have spent it on more chocolate, but that was her allowance, and it was all gone for the week. Grace always said she’d make the candy last, but then she never did.
When the bell rang, it made her jump.
She ran out into the hall, dug out the chocolate, and unwrapped it while she was running. Well, walking fast. She ate it on the way to the back door, where her mom always met her.
She was there. Her mom was there! Grace was surprised. At least, a little bit surprised.
“What are you eating?” Grace’s mom asked. She didn’t sound too slow, and she seemed pretty much awake, at least, as best Grace could tell.
“Nothing.”
“Now don’t lie to me, Grace Eileen Ferguson. You still have some of it on your lip. It looks like chocolate.”
“Oh. Yeah. That. We had that last period.”
“I’m going to talk to your teacher, then, about not giving you junk food. You know I don’t like it when people give you junk food.”
“Please don’t. This is the first time I’ve seen you in days. I mean, not seen you, but seen you. I mean…you know what I mean. I mean, I wish we didn’t have to fight.”
Grace knew her mom felt guilty, so she was pushing on that guilt button just a little bit.
“OK, you’re right,” Grace’s mom said. “Let’s just go home.”
While they were walking home, Grace was thinking, Wow, she’s all pulled together, and that’s nice. But she didn’t say so, because she didn’t want her mom to know that she’d only just then started believing in it.
Her mom made Grace macaroni and cheese and hot dogs, which was the favorite of all her mom’s dinners. Sometimes when her mom was guilty…well, it was not always such a bad deal. While they were eating, Grace’s mom asked if she wanted to go to that nice AA meeting at the rec center, and Grace said, “Definitely, yeah.”
So, after dinner, they rode there on the bus.
There was this weird guy on the bus who kept staring at them. He was sitting right across from their seats. He didn’t look weird on the outside, Grace noticed. He had on a nice coat and a wedding ring, and his hair was clean and all, but she could tell he was weird on the inside because of how he was staring.
Her mom didn’t seem like she noticed.
Grace’s mom had this little plastic bottle of water between her knees, and after a while she put her head back and dropped something in her mouth and washed it down with a slug of the water, but Grace couldn’t see what it was she dropped in.
So she said, “What was that?”
“It’s nothing,” her mom said. “I have a headache, that’s all. Don’t forget who’s the mom and who’s the kid.”
“Right,” Grace said. “Got it.”
“I’m trusting you to stay out of the candy basket tonight, OK?”
“I can have one piece of licorice, right?”
“You can have one piece of anything you want. But one is enough.”
Grace’s mom said that every time, but she couldn’t really watch the candy basket every minute, so usually Grace ended up with more.
But this time the way it played itself out was all different. It was good, in a way, but not so good, all at the same time.
The candy basket situation worked like this: the basket was passed around the table, and everybody took one piece (unless you didn’t want a piece, which some people didn’t, and Grace always found that impossible to understand), and then it made the rounds again so people could take one piece of whatever was left over. But Grace was not sitting at the table with them. Grace walked around wherever she wanted, just being quiet so they could have their meeting. So she could pop up wherever the basket was, and just keep getting more candy. And the only thing that could stop her was her mom.
Only, that night, Grace’s mom wasn’t stopping her. So that’s why it was good and not so good at the same time. Good, because Grace snagged a record amount of candy; but not so good, because her mom was getting sleepy again, and that’s why she didn’t put a stop to the situation.
So then Grace started to get mad, because she was beginning to know that her mom took drugs for the headache, real drugs, big drugs, and it made her mad because when other mothers got a headache they just took aspirin. At least, all the mothers of all the kids she knew from school. And the more Grace saw her mom leaning on her hand and then falling asleep and falling off it again, the more Grace decided to eat candy.
So she popped up where the basket was, and reached in front of a lady, and just grabbed every single piece of the red licorice. She could get her hand around all of it at once.
Then she went and sat in the corner, with her back up against the wall, and ate licorice and felt mad.
Then the meeting was over, and people were putting on their jackets to go, and some of them kept smiling at Grace like they were feeling sorry for her, which Grace hated more than anything.
After a while a tall man came over, and he had a gray mustache, and he squatted down to be the same tallness as Grace, and then he said, “That’s your mom, huh?”
By now Grace’s mom was resting with her head down on the table.
“Yep,” Grace said, like she wasn’t too happy about it, but then she reminded herself to be careful about things like that, because her mom was still the only mom she had.
“She’s in no shape to drive you two home,” the man said.
“We don’t even have a car,” Grace said. “We came here on the bus.”
“Oh. Maybe Mary Jo can drive you home. Mary Jo?”
This woman came up to them, pretty short and little, with gray hair and a wrinkled face, and the tall man got Grace’s mom on her feet and sort of steered her out to this lady Mary Jo’s car. It was a very small car, the kind with only two seats, and they belted her mom into the passenger seat up front, and Grace had to fold herself up small in that space behind the seat-backs.
While they were driving home, Grace had to tell the lady which way to go to get to their apartment house, and also she had to answer a lot of questions, all at the same time.
Like,
the lady asked her, “Do you know who your mom’s sponsor is?”
And she said, “Yeah, it’s Yolanda.”
And the lady said, “I don’t know a Yolanda.”
And Grace said, “She’s from the other program.”
The lady looked surprised, and said, “She only has an Al-Anon sponsor?”
And Grace said, “No, not that other program, the other other program. The narcotic instead of alcoholic one. That one.”
“Oh, right,” the lady said, after a minute. “That explains why she doesn’t smell like she’s been drinking.”
And then all of a sudden Grace minded the lady, and the questions, and the whole night, and the everything. She just suddenly minded everything in the whole world, and wouldn’t talk to the lady any more, and was in a bad mood. She wanted more licorice, but she’d already eaten it all.
She had to help get her mom into the house, and it wasn’t easy. Then she thought that would be the last worst thing to happen that night, but it wasn’t, because the lady wouldn’t leave. She made Grace find Yolanda’s phone number, and she called Yolanda and told her she wasn’t going to leave until Yolanda came over there, because she couldn’t see fit to leave a child alone like that. That’s how she said it. She couldn’t see fit. Grace had no idea what that meant, but it made her mad. But, at that point, pretty much everything would have.
After a while Yolanda showed up, and Mary Jo went away, which was a relief. Grace was supposed to say goodbye to her, and thank her for the ride, but she didn’t want to, and she was feeling extra-stubborn, so she wouldn’t.
After she left, Yolanda looked down at Grace with that pity look Grace hated so much. She hated that look more than anything.
And Yolanda said, “Well, kid. Looks like we have ourselves a situation here.”
• • •
Yolanda stayed the night, and took Grace to school the following morning. Grace didn’t think about it too much during the school day, because if Yolanda wanted to…sort of…add herself to the situation…that was OK. That certainly wasn’t the end of the world. Yolanda was a little scary-bossy on a few rare occasions, usually when dealing with Grace’s mom, but mostly she was pretty OK.
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