Billy Summers

The women’s underwear is on the back wall. Most of it is for ladies who are leaky, but there’s a few other kinds as well. He thinks about the bikinis but decides that would be a little suggestive. It’s funny, in a way; he’s still operating on the assumption that she’ll be there when he gets back. But what other assumption is there? He will go back, because he has no other place to go.

He grabs a three-pack of Hanes cotton boy-leg shorts and takes them to the counter, looking for police cars outside, but doesn’t spot any. Of course they wouldn’t park in front, anyway. He’d clock them and maybe hole up with hostages. The clerk is a woman in her fifties. She rings up his purchases with no comment, but Billy is good at reading faces and knows she’s thinking that someone had a busy night. He pays with a Dalton Smith credit card and walks back out into the rain, now just a fine drizzle, waiting to be taken. There’s no one there but three women, chatting amiably together. They don’t look at him as they go into the drugstore.

Billy walks back to 658 Pearson. It seems like a very long walk because it’s more than a glimmer of hope now, and hope may be the thing with feathers, but it’s also the thing that hurts you. They could be waiting around back or in the apartment, he thinks. But no blue boys come rushing around the old three-decker, and there’s no one in the apartment but the girl. She’s watching Today on his television.

Alice looks at him and something passes between them. He shifts the pharmacy bag and digs in his righthand pocket. He holds his hand out to her and sees her flinch a little, as if she thinks he means to strike her. The bruises on her face are at their most colorful. They shout assault and battery.

‘I found your earring.’

He opens his hand and shows her.

8

Alice goes into the bathroom to put on a pair of the new underpants but stays in the shin-length T-shirt because her skirt is still damp. ‘Denim takes forever to dry,’ she says.

She takes the pill with water from the kitchen tap. He tells her the side effects may include vomiting, dizziness—

‘I can read. Who else lives in this building? It’s as quiet as the … it’s quiet.’

He tells her about the Jensens and how they went on a cruise, neither of them knowing that in another six months the cruise lines will be shut down, along with just about everything else. He takes her upstairs – she comes willingly enough – and introduces her to Daphne and Walter.

‘You’re watering them too much. You want to drown them?’

‘No.’

‘Give them a couple of days off.’ She pauses. ‘Will you be here for a couple of days?’

‘Yes. It’s safer to wait.’

She looks around the Jensens’ kitchen and living room, sizing it up the way that women do. Then she astounds him by asking if she can stay with him. Maybe stay in the basement apartment even after he’s gone.

‘I don’t want to go out until the bruises get better,’ she says. ‘I look like I was in a car accident. Also, what if Tripp comes looking for me? He knows where I go to school, and he knows where I live.’

Billy thinks that Tripp and his friends will want nothing more to do with her now that they’ve had their fun. Oh, they might cruise Pearson Street to make sure the place where they threw her out isn’t a crime scene, and when they sober up – or come down from whatever high they were riding – they will surely check the local news to make sure she’s not a part of it, but he doesn’t point these things out. Having her stay solves a lot of problems.

Back downstairs she says she’s tired and asks if she can take a nap in his bed. Billy tells her that would be fine unless she’s feeling dizzy or nauseated. If she is, it would be better for her to stay awake for awhile.

She says she’s okay and goes into the bedroom. She’s doing a good job of pretending she’s not afraid of him, but Billy is pretty sure she still is. She’d be crazy if she wasn’t. But she’s also still in shock, still humiliated by what has happened to her. And ashamed. He told her she didn’t have to be, but that bounced right off. Later on she’ll undoubtedly decide that asking to stay with him was a bad call, really bad. But right now all she wants is sleep. It’s in her slumped shoulders and shuffling bare feet.

Billy hears the creak of bedsprings. He looks in five minutes later and she’s either zonked out or doing a world-class acting job.

He boots up his laptop and goes to where he left off. You can’t write today, he thinks, not with everything that’s going on. Not with that girl in the other room, the one who may wake up and decide she wants to get the hell away from here, and me.

Only he’s also thinking about Pill’s wet washcloth treatment for panic attacks, and how it worked on Alice. Sort of a miracle, really. But that wasn’t Clay Briggs’s only miracle cure, was it? Smiling, Billy begins to write. The prose seems flat at first, ragged, but then he starts to get the rhythm. Soon he’s not thinking of Alice at all.

9