“I know,” she said.
“You can’t go on alone. You have to come back with me.”
“I know.”
“You can wake up Felipe. He’ll walk you.”
“Maybe I should stay home with you today.”
“It’s fine. It’ll stop bleeding. Ask if they want their towel back.”
“I don’t know how to say ‘Do you want your towel back?’ in Spanish.”
“OK. Whatever. Help me up, OK?”
He was still using both hands to hold the towel to his nose, which left no hand to grab him by, so Grace took him by the elbow and pulled. But he didn’t budge. But then the nice grandfather guy took the other elbow and they got him on his feet, even though he swayed hard partway up, and Grace thought he might pass out or something. She couldn’t figure out if he was really hurt that badly, or if looking at tons of his own blood made him feel a little faint, but she figured it was something she could sort out later on.
Billy stood swaying on the sidewalk for a minute, all by himself. Then he held the towel out to the woman, questioningly. As if she might want to take it from him. As soon as he did, a bunch more blood ran down his lip, and he had to wipe it away.
“No, no,” the woman said, waving off the idea. “Is your.”
“Thank you,” Billy said.
“Gracias,” Grace said. “Muchas gracias.”
And they headed off in the direction of home. But then Billy swayed again, so the old grandfather took him by the elbow and walked with them.
Grace could tell Billy was embarrassed and wishing the old man wouldn’t be so helpful. But he was, and there was no way Billy was going to fix that.
The old guy walked them all the way to their front door.
“Gracias,” Billy said.
• • •
“Go wake up Felipe,” he said to her.
He was lying propped up on his couch, still holding the towel to his face. The cat was sniffing all around him, like she was worried and wanting to know what was wrong.
“Why? Do you need him?”
“No. You do. To get to school.”
“I’m late anyway.”
“So? Be late. But you have to go.”
“I’m not leaving you, Billy. You need me. Here. Let me get you some ice.”
“Don’t you have a big rehearsal today?”
“Nope,” she shouted from the kitchen. “Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yesterday was our last rehearsal.”
She scooped two double handfuls of ice cubes into a paper napkin and ran them back to Billy. He pulled the towel away, slowly. Like he was scared what would happen when he did. Nothing happened. It didn’t bleed any more. It had finally, finally stopped.
“Oh, my God. Billy. You look terrible!”
Somehow it had seemed like a reasonable thing to say. At the time. She couldn’t have imagined he would take it too personally. Wouldn’t most anybody look bad after falling flat on their nose?
“What does it look like?” he asked quietly.
Grace hated to tell him. The bridge of his nose was swelling up, but that wasn’t the worst of it. His eyes were both going black all the way around. And he had veiny red blood showing inside the corner of one of his eyes. It was horrible. It was hard even to look at him.
“I’ll bring you a mirror. Where’s a mirror?”
“I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have one? Who doesn’t have a mirror?”
“Me,” he said.
He touched the ice to his nose and yelped.
“Have you got any aspirins to take?”
“I doubt it. If I do, they’re probably years old.”
“I bet Rayleen has aspirins. I’ll go look.”
She ran across the hall and opened the door with her key. She took two aspirin from the bottle in Rayleen’s medicine cabinet. Then she thought better of that, and took another two. On the way out of the bathroom, she grabbed Rayleen’s hand mirror as an afterthought. Then she locked up fast and ran them back over to Billy.
“Here, I brought you four aspirins,” she said.
She quietly set the mirror upside-down on the coffee table, hoping Billy wouldn’t notice. She’d begun to doubt whether it was good thinking, presenting him with a mirror.
“Let me see,” he said, pointing to it.
“You sure?”
“Let me see.”
Grace handed him the mirror and stepped back. Billy raised the mirror and stared into it for a long time. Grace wondered what he was thinking, and wished he would hurry up and say.
“Oh, dear God,” he whispered, after a long pause. “How did I get to be so old?”
• • •
“I think I should check to see if it’s broken,” Felipe said. “But I gotta warn you. This is gonna hurt like a sonofabitch.”
“Are you going to the hospital if it’s broken?” Grace asked.
“No,” Billy said. “If it’s broken it’ll just have to heal itself.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t even hurt him, then,” Grace told Felipe.
“It’ll heal bad,” Felipe said. “I had a cousin got his nose broke in a towing accident. And he wouldn’t do nothing. He was stubborn like you — no offense — but prob’ly for different reasons. Anyway, it still looks real bad. It healed with a hook, and a big knot. That’s never gonna go away, either.”
“I guess you should check it.”
“OK, now grab hold of my hand and squeeze it really hard. I’m gonna take my other hand and put it on the bridge of your nose and just wiggle it a little bit to see if the part that shouldn’t oughta move moves.”
Grace closed her eyes, because she couldn’t bring herself to watch. She heard Billy yelp. Then she heard nothing, so she opened her eyes. It was all over, thank God.
“It’s not broken,” Felipe said. “Come on, Grace. Let’s get you to school.”
“I need to stay here with Billy.”
“I’ll come back and stay with Billy. You need to go to school.”
Part of Grace had been worried that if she didn’t show up to school that day, and with no explanation, then her teacher might think she wasn’t showing up Monday, either. And Felipe would be good to Billy while she was away.
But then she thought of a really good reason to argue.
“But I can do reiki on his nose all day. And you can’t.”
And that was when Grace heard it. That smooth, nice, calming voice that she liked so much. That everybody liked so much.
“Or I could stay with him and do the reiki,” it said.
Grace whipped around to see that the door to Billy’s apartment was still standing wide open. And in the open doorway she saw Jesse and Rayleen.
Grace literally shrieked with pleasure, and from the corner of her eye she saw Billy stick his fingers in his ears.
“You’re back! I thought you might not get back on time! But you got back!”
She threw herself wildly at Rayleen, startled by how much she had missed her. She nearly bowled Rayleen over when they made contact.
“I’m so glad you’re back!” she shrieked.
Somewhere at the bottom of her mind, she wondered briefly if her mom was downstairs, really clean and awake, sitting up and listening to all this, and, if so, how it made her feel. But her curiosity about Jesse’s mother knocked the thought away again.
She ran at Jesse, and he picked her up so she was just his height, and she rubbed his beard as if it were some kind of lucky charm.
“Jesse,” she said, her voice hushed with respect. “Did your mother die?”
“She did.”
“That’s terrible. I’m really sorry.”
“It wasn’t that terrible,” he said. “It was freeing in a way I probably couldn’t explain. Besides, she was in a great deal of pain. So it was something of a blessing.”
“So…then…is it sort of a little bit OK that I was hoping that, if she had to die at all, she’d die soon enough so you and Rayleen could come see
me dance on Monday? Because I felt really bad about that.”
“I think it’s OK,” Jesse said, setting her back on her feet again. “I also think you should let Felipe take you to school now. I’ll stay here and take care of Billy.”
“OK,” Grace said. “That’s good enough. If Jesse’s here to take care of Billy, then I think it’s OK if I go.”
And she marched off with Felipe, satisfied that all would be well in her absence.
It wasn’t until they were nearly halfway to school that Grace noticed she had a good bit of Billy’s blood on one of the sleeves of her sweater.
Billy
“Tell me what happened, neighbor,” Jesse said, leaning over him and touching the ice pack gently to first one of Billy’s eyes and then the other. “Somebody on the street do this to you?”
Rayleen had already gone home, in search of better, non-cat air to breathe. It made Billy edgy to be so completely alone with Jesse, but of course he didn’t say it.
“No,” he said in barely over a whisper. He had entered into a state of utter surrender. “I did it to myself.”
“But not on purpose.”
“No. I was dancing Grace to school, and I tripped on a big crack in the sidewalk.”
“The dangers of crack,” Jesse said.
Billy surprised himself by laughing. Or, actually, something between a snort of laughter and a cry of pain. It wasn’t only his nose he’d hit, it was his ribs, too. But he hadn’t shared that with anybody yet. For some reason he wanted that to be his little secret. At least until the more obvious wounds had been assimilated.
“Well, good,” Jesse said. “Good to know it was only you, and not on purpose. Now I don’t have to kick anybody’s ass for hurting my friend Billy. Not even yours. So, what else did you bang up? Your ribs?”
Oh, my God, Billy thought. He really is magic. He’d heard Grace say so, but had assumed she was speaking figuratively.
“How in God’s name did you know that?”
“It wasn’t hard. I could hear how much it hurt you to try to laugh. Now come on. Let’s see.”
He moved to lift Billy’s sweater, and Billy exploded.
“No!” he shouted. “No,” he said again, gathering calm around himself like an old blanket. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. But no. I don’t want to be seen like this.”
Jesse took his hands back, and they sat in silence for a moment.
“OK, fine. Here,” Billy said, and raised the sweater himself.
Jesse looked, and Billy looked at the same time. He hadn’t looked yet. There had always been somebody around, somebody who was already too worried. It was bad. Worse than he thought. A road map in black and blue. His head ached imagining how it would look in the morning, or in three days. Well. His head ached anyway.
Meanwhile Jesse’s hands moved in the direction of his naked, unguarded torso.
“I just want to feel around and see if anything’s broken.”
“No,” Billy said. But this time he was careful to keep it to a whisper. “No, please don’t touch me. I mean, putting your hand on my shoulder is one thing. But not that. I couldn’t bear it. I love you and I just couldn’t bear it.”
He could feel a tingling sensation along his scalp, a sort of tangible feedback from the words he had just spoken.
He noticed his eyes were squeezed shut, but could not remember closing them. He heard Jesse’s hands rubbing together, and he waited for something to happen, but nothing did. Except that, in a few moments, he felt a sort of warm tingling in the area of his damaged midsection.
“Are you doing reiki on my ribs?” he asked, eyes still shut.
“I am. Is that OK?”
“Yes. It’s fine. Thank you.”
He received the blessing in silence for what might have been several minutes.
“It seems to be helping not just with the pain in my ribs. It seems to be helping a little with the anxiety. Not like it isn’t there any more. More like it isn’t stuck. Like a chunk of it wants to move up and out of me.”
“Let it,” Jesse said.
Oh, God. That voice.
“I don’t know if I can go on Monday,” Billy said.
He still did not open his eyes.
“But you have to,” Jesse said. “You have to, for Grace. And you know that. So I know you will. Because you promised her, and she’s depending on it.”
“But what if I can’t?”
“I think you have to anyway.”
“Literally can’t.”
“Not sure there’s any such thing,” Jesse said.
“See, this is why I was by myself all those years. Because as soon as you let people in, they start depending on you. And then, if you can’t be everything they think you should be, you’ve let them down. It’s easier not to have anybody around at all.”
“Too late, though. You got Grace already. Like it or not. So, look. Try this on for size. Let’s say I’m magic like Grace thinks, and I can wave my wand and make Grace disappear from your life. Retroactively. Like she never existed for you. Then you don’t have to go to her school on Monday. Want me to do it?”
He tried it on. Amazingly. He was in so deep, feeling so desperate, that he actually tried it on for size. Disappearing Grace.
“No,” Billy said. “Don’t disappear her.” He sighed. Jesse was right. He was stranded. “I can’t stand to be seen in public looking like this.”
“Hat and sunglasses.”
“I don’t own a hat or sunglasses.”
“I do.”
“And there’s another thing. I haven’t been inside a school since I was in school. And it was the most dreadful, most traumatic era of my entire life, and I just have to add here: that’s a tough competition to win. And I think I’m going to freak out when I get inside. I think I never should have shot off my mouth and said I could do this. I thought I could learn to walk her to school, but now look what happened. Look what happens when you go out in the world.”
“Yes,” Jesse said. “I see. The world gave you a bloody nose. It’ll do that from time to time.”
His eyes still closed, Billy felt the energy from Jesse’s hands move to his forehead, eyes and nose.
“So how do I get back up?”
“With help from your friends. There’s an upside to having people depend on you. Life turns around, and then you get to depend on them. You get to say, ‘I’m in over my head and I need your help.’”
“I could never say that to anybody.”
“You already did,” Jesse said.
• • •
Grace came over three times on Saturday, once on Sunday morning, and then again on Sunday evening, when she brought Billy homemade chicken soup.
“Did Rayleen make this?” he asked.
“No. Jesse made it,” she said, scooping up the cat. “So…I came to ask you a question that I keep wanting to ask you, but then I get scared. You’re still coming tomorrow, right? Even after what happened?”
“Seems like I have to find a way,” he said, quietly, from the kitchen, where he had gone to get a soup spoon.
“That doesn’t feel like a definite, definite yes.”
He took a spoonful of the soup, which was intensely good. On top of everything else, Jesse was a good cook. Amazing. It bordered on the unfair.
“I’m going to tell you the most honest thing I can possibly tell you. I feel like I can’t. Like I just don’t have it in me. But I promised you I would. So I’m going to see if it’s possible to do something even though it’s impossible. Jesse says he’ll help, but I’m not sure what he can do.”
“Jesse can do it. Jesse can do anything. So, here’s how it’s gonna go. The assembly is last period. So you guys’ll get there a little before two. You have to go to the office and get a visitor pass. And then you just go into the auditorium. First there’s going to be this really stupid little play. See, not all the kids can do a talent, so they had to find a part for everybody. So then after the play this kid named Fr
ed is gonna play the trumpet, and then Becky sings a song, and then me. I’m the big finish, which I think is a good sign. Saving the best for last, and all that. And then school’s over and I can go home with you guys. I know you’ll be there, Billy. I just know you will.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Are you going to sleep tonight?”
“I hope. Jesse said he’d teach me a meditation for relaxing. Are you going to sleep?”
“I doubt it,” Billy said.
And, of course, he didn’t.
• • •
At noon on Monday, Jesse came to his door. It hurt to get up to answer it, but Billy did anyway. He was already clean, dressed and ready to go. Too ready. Too early.
“Grab some water to take these with,” Jesse said.
He dumped about twelve capsules from his hand into Billy’s. Billy stared at them as if they might identify themselves verbally.
“Not drugs,” Jesse said on their behalf. “Herbs. But pretty strong ones. Valerian root and kava kava. In large dosages. They should have a calming effect. They might make you a little drowsy.”
Billy barked a short laugh, and it hurt his ribs.
“Right. In public, in a school, relaxed enough to doze. That’ll be the day.”
“They can’t hurt.”
“True. Thank you.”
“You might want to go across the hall in about an hour. Rayleen wants to put some make-up on your black eyes and bruises. So you’ll feel more presentable.”
“Well, it’s a nice thought, but I don’t think we’re the same shade.”
“She made a special trip to the drugstore yesterday to buy foundation and concealer in a shade she thought would be a good match for you.”
“Oh. Then I’m incredibly sorry I just made that rude comment.”
“Don’t be. Don’t waste any energy on anything but what’s in front of you.”
“Good advice,” Billy said, feeling even more sobered by the terror of the day.
He swallowed all twelve of the capsules standing at his kitchen sink.
• • •
Billy sat at Rayleen’s kitchen table, awkwardly unsure of where to look as she tenderly applied make-up to his nose and around his eyes. Now and then he winced, and she apologized. And he had to tell her over and over again to stop apologizing.
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