Don't Let Me Go (19 page)

“But if—”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought it through, Billy. Don’t think I haven’t run every possibility in my brain, including the ones that are very bad for her…and us. I think I’m just going to have to pound on her mom’s door and tell her Grace is missing, and if she doesn’t know where her kid is, then she better call the police.”

“Which looks very bad to her mom regarding our babysitting capabilities.”

“If she doesn’t have her. If she does, it looks bad for us if we
don’t
go ask. Grace disappears, and we don’t even bother to check and see if she’s home. Besides, it can’t be helped,” Rayleen said. “This is just a bad situation either way. All around. I’m going.”

Billy’s knees felt so mushy that he sank gently down on to them, on the rug close inside his doorway. He glanced over at Mr. Lafferty the Cat, just to be sure he wasn’t about to try to get out. But he’d curled up on the couch again, and was watching Billy with mild curiosity.

He heard the pounding on the basement apartment door, and each knock went through him like a gunshot.

“Ms. Ferguson?” he heard Rayleen call. “Do you have Grace? Because, if you don’t, we need to know. We need to put our differences aside to find her. I mean it. This could be serious.”

Another series of pounds.

Then Billy saw Rayleen come up the stairs again. Her face twisted with curiosity when she saw him kneeling by his door, tearing at fingernails with his teeth, though he hardly had fingernails left to tear.

“Why are you on your knees?” she asked, standing over him now.

Apparently the second part of the observation was self-explanatory.

“Long story. Can I tell it some other time?”

“So, surprise, knocking didn’t answer much,” Rayleen said. “My throat is starting to tighten up.” She took a few steps back from his doorway, defensively. “I’ll let you know when I hear back from Felipe.”

“Wait!” he shouted, pulling himself to his feet, against odds. “Maybe Mrs. Hinman would take the cat. You know. Just for tonight.”

Rayleen stood still in the hallway for a time, looking disoriented. As if she couldn’t pull her head around to such trivial considerations.

“I guess I could ask her,” she said, finally.

Billy sighed with relief.

More fingernails, barely grown out to the quick line as it stood, fell victim.

Rayleen came back downstairs not two minutes later. A long two minutes all the same.

“Sorry, no,” she said. “Mrs. Hinman hates cats.”

“So do I!” he wailed, much more pathetically than intended.

“Well. If Mrs. Hinman had the cat right now and wanted you to take him, you might win with that argument. But you have him. So it’s that possession thing. You know. Possession being…I forget. Most of the law.”

“Nine-tenths,” Billy said, miserably. “Tell me as soon as you hear from Felipe.”

“I will.”

“I still need that litter box. And food.”

“Oh, yeah,” Rayleen said. “I think Felipe has them. I’ll look into that.”

Billy closed and locked the door, then looked at Mr. Lafferty the Cat, who was still staring at him.

“Stop staring at me,” he said. “I’m not that fascinating.”

Predictably, the cat continued to stare.

“This is all your fault,” he said.

Mr. Lafferty the Cat flicked his ears back briefly, but didn’t do much more.

• • •

Felipe fed him a progress report through the door about half an hour later.

“The Lafferty guy doesn’t have her,” Felipe said. “I really think he’s OK. She must be with her mom…I hope.”

“Thank you,” Billy called through the door. “I still need the litter box and the cat food.”

“Oh, yeah. I gave them to Rayleen. I’ll tell her.”

“Thank you,” he called again.

Then he began to cry uncontrollably.

Mr. Lafferty the Cat came closer to investigate his tears, but Billy shooed him away with a startling sound, and the cat ran and hid under the couch.

• • •

It was nearly halfway through the movie
Moonstruck
, on late-night TV, when Billy heard the series of taps. He picked up the remote, stinging his bloodied and swollen fingertips, and muted the sound. He leaned over the couch and listened carefully.

One, two, three…pause…four.

But it wasn’t Rayleen knocking on Billy’s door. It wasn’t anyone knocking on Billy’s door. This was someone knocking on Billy’s floor. From underneath. From the basement apartment.

He released an enormous sound, somewhere between a breath and a shout, and Mr. Lafferty the Cat, who had been sleeping on Billy’s stuffed chair, ran and hid under the couch again.

Billy held still and listened. And he heard it again. One, two, three…pause…four.

He ran to his front door and undid the locks with sore and shaky fingers. Throwing the door open wide, he ran across the hall, planning to knock on Rayleen’s door. Instead he ran into Rayleen, literally, in the middle of the hall between their apartments.

“Did you hear that?” he shouted, radiating joy and relief.

“I did!”

“She’s downstairs.”

“She must have waited till her mom fell asleep. To signal us.”

“Smart girl,” Billy said.

“Such a smart girl!” Rayleen crowed. “I’ll tell Felipe.”

“Maybe I can even get some sleep now.”

Much to Billy’s surprise, she threw her arms around him. And they held each other. For a remarkably long time.

“Careful, don’t let the cat out,” Rayleen said as she let go.

“Oh. Right.”

“By the way…Billy…you do know you’re out in the hall, right?”

“Oops,” he said, and scrambled back inside.

• • •

In the night, Billy felt the presence of someone or something in the bedroom with him. He opened his eyes, and found himself staring right into the face of Mr. Lafferty the Cat, whose gold eyes gleamed in the glow from the kitchen night light.

He screamed.

The cat ran and hid under the bed.

“Shit,” Billy said.

He understood now that the proper move would have been to have closed his bedroom door with the cat still on the living room chair or couch. And it’s not that he hadn’t thought of it. More that he hadn’t been sure about sleeping without the usual glow of light. And he hadn’t anticipated quite such a rude awakening.

He turned on his bedside light and lay awake for several hours, feeling an exhaustion of emotion, in his gut, at a level that could only be described as pain.

In time, without meaning to, he fell back asleep.

When he woke, it was due to a strange, muffled sound in his right ear. A kind of vibration and noise, but also the feeling that something was blocking his hearing on that side.

It was light. He was sleeping on his back, which he never did. He always curled up on his side, in a fetal position, in preparation for sleep. But this had been a sleep for which he’d been unprepared.

When he tried to turn his head, only then did he understand that Mr. Lafferty the Cat was curled against the right side of his face, purring vigorously.

He sat up.

But, oddly, he found himself missing the warmth and the vibration. It was something he’d been feeling all the way down into his gut. And, apparently, he’d been feeling it for much longer than he’d realized. Apparently he’d grown partially accustomed to the feeling before it had even wakened him.

Slowly, gingerly, he lay back down again. The cat did not move.

For the next hour or so, Billy just lay there and listened, and felt.

He thought about Grace, and worried about her. What if she never came over to his apartment again? What if there were no more dance lessons? What if Grace never again yelled at him for biting his nails, or for interrupting? What if they’d ruined that, forever, with what they’d tried to do, with their little kidnapping plot?

There was no real answer to the questions, at least, nothing available. But the purring helped a little.

It wasn’t until the end of the hour, when he finally rose from bed, that Billy realized he had slept without a visit from the wings.

• • •

At the usual time, around three thirty in the afternoon, Felipe came knocking on Billy’s door.

He did not have Grace in tow.

Billy looked at Felipe and Felipe looked at Billy. It was something a little like having a mirror to look into, Billy thought. An emotional mirror, at least.

“She’s definitely with her mom,” Felipe said.

“You saw her?”

“Yeah. I went to pick her up. But her mom was there to pick her up, too. So what was I supposed to do? Can’t you just see this Hispanic guy taking off with somebody else’s kid while her real mother’s standing right there? That would have been a disaster, huh?”

“Did you even get to talk to her? How did she seem?”

“She tried to come over and talk to me, but her mom wouldn’t let her. So I guess she seemed sort of…not free. Like she wants to do something or be somewhere, but there’s no getting around her mom. But she did call out something to me.”

“Yeah? What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Tell Billy I’m sorry about the cat.’ So then that’s why I came by here. I know you don’t like it too much when people knock on your door, but I just wanted to let you know I’ll take the cat. You know. If you need me to.”

“Oh,” Billy said. “That’s nice. How nice. But, you know what? We seem to be getting used to each other. We’ve actually been getting along OK. We’re kind of…settling in.”

“Oh. OK. Good. Fine, then.”

“You realize,” Billy said, “that if her mom stays clean we may never see her again.”

To his surprise, his lip quivered slightly with the words, as if they might make him cry. Which, in front of Felipe, would be quite humiliating.

“I thought of that, yeah,” Felipe replied, not tearful, but equally down.

“Would you like to come in?” Billy asked.

It was unusual behavior on Billy’s part, and he questioned himself regarding the move, both at the time he said it, and later, after the fact. The simplest possible answer seemed to ring true: he was now used to having company at three thirty in the afternoon.

Felipe came in and sat on Billy’s couch.

“Coffee?” Billy asked.

“Great, yeah,” Felipe said. “I’ll be awake when I get to work. That’ll be good.”

Before Billy could even get into the kitchen to start a pot, the cat came walking in from the bedroom, headed straight for Felipe, and sniffed at the cuffs of his jeans.

“Well, well, well,” Billy said. “Here’s Mr. Lafferty the Cat now.”

Felipe looked up quickly, as if to gauge whether Billy was joking or not.

“Are you kiddin’ me? She named the cat Mr. Lafferty?”

“I would not kid about a thing like that.”

“Geez. There’s just no getting away from the guy.”

“At least
this
Mr. Lafferty likes you,” Billy noted, just as the cat jumped into Felipe’s lap.

“Yeah. Thank God, huh? Thank God there’s no such thing as an animal bigot.”

Billy went off to make the coffee.

As he was measuring the grounds into the filter, he looked up to see Felipe leaning in the kitchen doorway, watching. Mr. Lafferty the Cat circled back and forth, around and through legs — first Felipe’s and then Billy’s — rubbing and purring and arching his back.

“I guess you two
have
settled in,” Felipe said.

He indicated with a flip of his head the china cup of water and the saucer of dry cat food, neatly arranged on a cloth placemat on Billy’s kitchen floor.

“Fine china, yet,” Felipe added.

“We all have to eat, and there’s no need being a barbarian.”

“So, I used to have this neighbor,” Felipe said, “years ago, before I lived here. She had this big dog, like a Doberman, I think, and she used to swear to me that this dog was prejudiced. It was such a crock. She told me this story once where she says she’s walking down the street with the dog, and, heading right towards them on the sidewalk, she says, there comes this big black buck—”

“Buck?”

“Right. Exac’ly. I know. This is my point. So she says the dog right away starts growling at the guy. Long story short, turns out this woman is so stupid she doesn’t get how the dog won’t trust black people because it can tell
she
doesn’t.”

“Wow. What do you even say to a story like that?”

“Well, I started making fun of her. Like laughing at her, in a way. I said, ‘You saw a deer on the street? Right here in L.A.?’ And she’s like, ‘No, it wasn’t a deer, it was a man. A big man.’ And then, I’m like, ‘Well, you said it was a buck. And a buck’s not a man. It’s an animal.’ But she never did get it. She just thought I was confused. But this other neighbor of mine, she’s overhearing all this, and she’s laughing her ass off, kind of behind her hand, you know?”

“Except, really,” Billy said, “much as I like a good joke at a small-minded person’s expense, it’s not all that funny.”

“No. I guess not,” Felipe said, picking up the cat and holding him, scratching gently behind Mr. Lafferty the Cat’s ears. “But sometimes you gotta laugh. I mean, what else you gonna do?”

Billy turned on the coffee maker, and, careful to keep looking at it and not Felipe, said, “You know, he came down here. And gave me a hard time, too. Right before the first time I took care of Grace.”

“Lafferty?”

“Lafferty.”

“About what?”

“He wanted to know if I was gay,” Billy said, still pretending the coffee pot required all of his visual attention. “He said he had a right to ask because, as he put it, ‘Homosexuals are more likely to be child-molesters.’”

He sneaked a quick look at Felipe, who didn’t notice, because he was busy rolling his eyes skyward.

“
Oh…my…God!
I swear that guy had child-molesting on the brain! It’s like he never thought about nothing else. What the hell’s wrong with a guy like that?”

“We’ll never know,” Billy said. “Now we’ll never know.”

“Just as well,” Felipe said. “I don’t think I even
want
to know. Less I know about the inside of that guy, the better.”

“Like I could possibly be anything-sexual,” Billy said, purposely regressing the conversation without knowing why. “I mean, look at me. How could I be anything but asexual? There’s nobody here. Just me and this drab little apartment, and a direct-deposit every month from my mother that’s just barely enough to starve on.”