Don't Let Me Go

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “What’s wrong with Billy?” Rayleen asked Grace.

  “He yelled at my mom, and now he’s all wiped out from it.”

  “Billy yelled at your mom?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think she heard him or anything. But you should have seen him. He was plenty mad. I think even if she’d come to the door, I bet he would’ve yelled right into her face. And he knew he was out in the hall and everything.”

  “Hmm,” Rayleen said, setting Grace down on her feet.

  “Ow,” Grace said.

  “You OK?”

  “I hurt my hip. That’s what Billy was so mad about.”

  Billy looked up to see Rayleen towering over him, looking down with a soft look of concern in her eyes.

  “Are you OK?” she asked. “You look like you have the flu or something.”

  “It just took a lot out of me,” he managed to say, the words mushy at their edges.

  “Well, I would stay and tell you volumes about how proud I am of you. But my throat is starting to close up. So we’ll have to do this some other time. Come on, Grace, let’s go.”

  “Don’t take Grace,” Billy said, at a surprisingly strong volume.

  It startled everyone.

  “Why not?” Rayleen asked.

  “Yeah, why not?” Grace asked.

  “Couldn’t you just leave her here for a while? I missed her. Oh, but that’s selfish, isn’t it? You probably missed her, too.”

  “No, it’s OK,” Rayleen said. Billy could hear an alarming wheeze growing behind her voice. “I mean, yeah, I did. I missed her. Of course I did. But she can stay here for a while if you want.”

  “Thanks,” Billy said.

  “But aren’t you worried about…what if her mother…”

  “I don’t care. I’m a kidnapper. Call the police.”

  Rayleen stood a moment longer, looking down at him. He couldn’t quite read the look on her face, but it didn’t appear to be any type of insult.

  “All righty, then,” she said, and turned to go.

  “Don’t forget the meeting,” Grace called as Rayleen let herself out. “Tell everybody. We’re having another meeting. Soon.”

  “You never told me what—” Rayleen began.

  “That’s why you have a meeting,” Grace said. “To tell everybody what the meeting’s about. I told you that once already with the last meeting.”

  “Yeah,” Rayleen said. “I guess you did.”

  • • •

  Grace sat on the couch with Billy for a few more hours, watching cartoons on his tiny TV, her head leaned on his shoulder, Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat between them, where they could both pet her at any time.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Grace said, without bothering to mute the volume on the cartoons. “I’m going to dance at my school.”

  Billy was too tired to listen to Grace and the cartoons at the same time. It was just too hard to separate out the sounds. But he was also too tired to say so, or to do anything to try to change it.

  So he just asked, “When?”

  “Three months.”

  “Good. Because we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  She didn’t answer initially. In time Billy looked over to see that he had offended her, or hurt her feelings, or more likely both.

  “I do a good time step,” she said, her bottom lip poking out a little farther than usual.

  “Yes. You do. But I figured you’d want to do something more elaborate for a big school performance. A person’s first public performance is no small thing. It’s a defining moment. It’s something you’ll not soon forget, let me tell you. But it’s up to you. It’s your performance. Do you want to fall back on the time step because it’s easy and safe and you know it best? Or do you want to really shine?”

  Grace stroked the cat’s back in silence for a moment or two. Billy felt as though he could look through her and watch the thoughts spinning in her brain. Tumblers waiting to fall into place.

  “I want to shine,” she said at last.

  “Good choice,” Billy said.

  Grace

  Grace stood at the bottom of the stairs, cupped her hands, and let loose with her best (or worst, depending on your prejudice in that area) Grace voice.

  “Mrs. Hinman! Hurry up! Don’t be late to the meeting!”

  She thought she heard a muffled cry from the stairs, and, in the silence that followed, something hard and noisy began bumping its way down the staircase, one thumpy step at a time.

  Grace waited and watched until it came into view. It was a suitcase.

  A moment later it was followed by a very spooked-looking girl. Well, lady. But a very young lady. Maybe twenty, or maybe only around eighteen. But definitely spooked. She had long blonde hair and big eyes, and she looked like a nervous horse listening for noises that would make her want to run away.

  “You scared me,” the girl-lady said.

  “Sorry,” Grace said, but apparently she said it too loud, because the lady jumped again. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m moving in,” the girl-lady said. “Upstairs.”

  “Oh! You’re moving into the apartment where Mr. Lafferty killed himself!”

  The lady’s eyes got wider and more spooked. If such a thing were even possible.

  “Somebody killed himself in there?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Lafferty,” Grace said, thinking it was weird that she should have to repeat herself so soon. Maybe scared people had trouble holding on to basic information.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “And now you do. So, what’s your name?”

  “Emily.”

  “I’m Grace. Are you alone? Because if you’re alone, you should come to our meeting.”

  “I don’t know what you mean…alone.”

  “It’s pretty simple,” Grace said. “I thought everybody knew what it meant.”

  “Alone…how?”

  “Like, do you have a bunch of family and friends?”

  “I have a family.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “In Iowa.”

  “Oh. Bad.”

  “I have friends. Well. A couple. I guess.”

  “In L.A.?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “You should come to our meeting.”

  “I don’t even know any of you.”

  “Duh. That would be the point, wouldn’t it?”

  “I have to unpack.”

  “Is that all your stuff?” Grace asked, pointing to the suitcase, still lying on the stairs at her feet.

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “So how long do you figure it’ll take you to unpack it? We could wait for you. We don’t mind.”

  “I’m awfully tired.”

  “Right,” Grace said, knowing by feel that it was time to give up. “We’re going to have a meeting every week. Maybe you could come to the next one.”

  “Maybe, yeah.”

  Just then Mrs. Hinman appeared on the stairs, causing Emily to jump again. She picked up her suitcase and ran upstairs, brushing by Mrs. Hinman before Grace could even introduce them.

  Mrs. Hinman eased her way down the stairs to the spot where Grace was standing, and the two of them very slowly walked along the hall to Rayleen’s, because there was no point hurrying Mrs. Hinman, and Grace knew it.

  “Who was that?” Mrs. Hinman asked.

  “Her name is Emily,” Grace said. “She’s moving in upstairs, where Mr. Lafferty used to live.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Why is everybody scared of everybody else?”

  “Hmm. A good question. One of those mysterious aspects of the human condition, I guess.”

  “You sound like Billy,” Grace said, making it clear by her tone that it was no compliment in this case. “What did all that mean, what you just said?”

  “I suppose it’s a fancy way of saying some things just are.”

  Grace sighed noisily, thinking that was a terrible answer, but not wanting to insult Mrs. Hinma
n by pointing it out.

  “I guess maybe we can talk more about that at our meeting,” she said.

  • • •

  “Who wants to go first?” Grace asked. Then, before anybody could answer, she added, “Billy, can you hear us?”

  Grace, Felipe, Mrs. Hinman and Rayleen were gathered in Rayleen’s apartment, the door standing wide open. Billy sat on a chair across the hall, just inside his open doorway. Sitting on his hands. Probably to keep from biting his nails, Grace figured. She’d already caught him at it once, and put a stop to it.

  Billy wouldn’t come over to Rayleen’s, for obvious reasons, and Rayleen wouldn’t go over to Billy’s because of the cat. So, silly as it seemed to Grace, this was the only way to make a very important meeting happen.

  “I’m fine,” Billy said.

  “That doesn’t answer the question, Billy.”

  “Well, I heard you ask, didn’t I? Or I wouldn’t have answered.”

  “Oh. Right,” Grace said.

  “Go first and say what?” Rayleen asked. “We’re still not too sure what this meeting’s all about.”

  “It’s about how people shouldn’t be alone. Especially when there are so many of us. Look at all of you. You’re all alone, and there are four of you, and that’s really stupid, because there are four of you. So why be alone?”

  “So what are we supposed to say when it’s our turn?” Felipe asked.

  “You’re supposed to say why you’re alone. All except Mrs. Hinman. She doesn’t have to go, because she’s only alone because she lived longer than her husband and all her friends.”

  A silence fell, during which Mrs. Hinman cleared her throat and shifted uncomfortably on Rayleen’s couch.

  “Well, that’s not entirely true,” Mrs. Hinman said.

  “But I heard that from you.”

  “I know. Yes. I know you did. But what I’m saying is…really, if I were being completely honest, it’s not entirely true.”

  Another long silence. This was the other thing Grace had noticed about grown-ups. In addition to being afraid of each other, it was hard to wring any information out of them. At least, if it was information about them. If it was about what kids ought to do, then they were nothing but words.

  “Marv and I were very close,” Mrs. Hinman said, her voice quiet. Probably too quiet for Billy to hear. “And, even though I don’t suppose I would have seen it this way at the time, I might have used that as an excuse to let some of my friendships go. Some very old friends, too. I just let them drift away. Can’t even say why, for a fact. It was just so much easier. Just me and Marv seemed like less trouble. Fewer arguments and hurt feelings and misunderstandings and whatnot, all the things people bring into our lives. But then, at the end, even Marv and I weren’t as close as we used to be. Oh, I don’t know. I guess in some ways we were. On the outside you wouldn’t have seen that anything had changed. But there was something missing in there somewhere. Something hollow about it. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that.”

  The silence that followed seemed to make everybody uneasy except Grace. Rayleen looked at her fingernails, and Felipe bounced his knee up and down. Grace looked across the hall at Billy, and he had that anxious, stressed look on his face, even though Grace was pretty sure he hadn’t heard most of Mrs. Hinman’s speech.

  Mrs. Hinman sat weirdly upright, hands clasped in her lap, a shocked look on her face, as if someone else had said all those things, and she hadn’t approved of any of them.

  “This is a good meeting so far,” Grace said, to correct anyone who might be thinking otherwise. “Who wants to go next?”

  No one made a sound.

  So it startled everyone, even Grace, when someone appeared in the open doorway and banged hard on the door, causing it to slam back against the wall.

  Grace looked up to see that it was Yolanda, and that Yolanda was pissed.

  Rayleen said, “Oh, hi, Yolanda,” and stood up to greet her.

  And Yolanda said, “What’s this I hear about you taking Grace away from her own mother?”

  Grace got right between them, fast, so there couldn’t be any trouble. Well, not too much, anyway. “It was all my idea,” she said.

  “Yours? You wanted to be taken away from your mother?”

  “We wanted to…not…oh, crap, now I forgot the word again. Guys, what’s that thing we wanted not to do with my mom?”

  “Enable,” Rayleen said, still standing. Still looking aware of the fact that Yolanda was pissed. “We wanted to stop enabling her.”

  “OK. Now how ‘bout you explain to me how letting her raise her own kid is enabling her.”

  “I will!” Grace shouted. “Please let me! I know this one real well! It’s because she was doing nothing but sleep all day long, and all my nice neighbors here were taking care of me, but then we figured out that if they just kept taking care of me, she could take all the drugs she wanted and still know I’d be OK. And so we knew that was no good. So we figured sometimes people get better when they know they’re about to lose something, if it’s something they really, really don’t want to lose. Like me. So we told her she couldn’t see me again until she got clean.”

  A brief pause, during which it was hard to guess what Yolanda was thinking. She wasn’t giving anything away so far.

  “Oh, my God,” Yolanda said. “That’s brilliant.”

  “It is?” Grace asked, surprised that Yolanda liked it.

  “Grace, you thought that up all by yourself?”

  “Not really. I got a lot of advice from Mr. Lafferty.”

  “Actually, she put a lot of it together on her own,” Rayleen said.

  “OK, tell you what,” Yolanda said. “I’ll go back down there right now and tell her she’s shit out of luck, because I’m on your side. She’ll be pissed, but oh, well. Life’s like that sometimes. So, how long does she have to stay clean before she gets Grace back?”

  Silence.

  “Oh,” Rayleen said. “We didn’t set a time.”

  “We should set a time,” Yolanda said. “Because she keeps cleaning up for a day or two. Getting everybody’s hopes up for nothing. I say we make her get thirty days. I’m right there with her at the meetings, and I’ll know if it’s the real deal.”

  Everybody looked at everybody else.

  “OK,” Rayleen said.

  “Done,” Yolanda said, and rushed out.

  “That was kind of weird,” Felipe said.

  “Yeah, but it worked out OK,” Grace replied. “And it doesn’t get us out of having our meeting.”

  “I think we should put off the meeting,” Rayleen said. “In case your mom gets upset. I don’t think we should be sitting here with the doors open after Yolanda has this little talk with her. Besides, we lost Billy again.”

  Grace looked across the hall to see Billy’s apartment door closed, apparently with Billy inside it. She sighed.

  “I better go over there and talk to him,” she said.

  • • •

  “You know,” she said to Billy, who was sitting on the couch, looking shorter and more curled-up than usual, and hugging the cat, “I need you to be at my school when I do my dance. You know. In the audience. Clapping for me and all.”

  Billy snorted laughter. As if he really thought it was a joke. As if he hadn’t seen this coming.

  “No, seriously,” she said.

  She watched the color drain out of his face, suddenly. At least, what little color he’d had to begin with.

  “Grace. You know I can’t do that.”

  “No. I know you can.”

  “Grace, I—”

  “Look. Billy. Do you want to just do the easy thing, because it’s what you always do? Or do you want to shine?”

  He turned his eyes to her, looking bruised.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “It was fair when you asked it to me.”

  “That was different.”

  “How was it different?”

  “Becau
se that was me asking you.”

  “Just think about it. OK? Promise me you’ll think about it. I know you’ll come up with the right thing.”

  “Overconfidence is a wonderful attribute of youth,” Billy said, quietly.

  “I’m not even going to ask you what that means.”

  “Probably just as well,” he said.

  • • •

  In the morning, Grace ran into the new lady, Emily — almost literally — in the hall on her way to school. Rayleen was walking behind Grace, half putting on her coat, and Grace was walking ahead, and nearly collided with the new lady at the bottom of the stairs.

  She was carrying that same suitcase again.

  “Where are you going?” Grace asked. “To get more of your stuff?”

  “Moving out,” Emily said, as if she didn’t want to slow down to talk.

  “But you just moved in.”

  “I’m not spending one more night in that horrible place.”

  “What’s horrible about it? It has a very nice new carpet.”

  “I can’t explain it. There’s something wrong with that place. With the energy in there. It’s just a really bad vibe.”

  Then she hurried out fast, too fast for Grace to keep up even if there had been more to say.

  “Who was that?” Rayleen asked, when they met up at the front door.

  “She was our neighbor,” Grace said. “Just not for very long.”

  Billy

  “We should mark this day on our calendar,” Billy said, out loud, because he was changing out of his pajamas.

  It was about a week later, a Saturday morning. He slid into his stretchy dance pants and then threw on a sweatshirt, because dance pants and a pajama top was just too weird a combination, even for Billy. Even for Billy with no one around to witness the fashion faux pas.

  Then he turned on the light inside his closet and worked his way back to the standing chest of drawers. He reached into the top drawer, identifying his tap shoes by feel. His tap shoes. Not the ancient, archival pair from his childhood that he’d loaned to Grace. His regular adult tap shoes, the ones he’d worn at his most recent tap performance. Which, of course, had been none too recent. He pulled them out, and held them under his nose, remembering the subtle but distinctive smell of the old leather, and every memory that came along for the ride.