Loss (2 page)

Billy was sick of being different, too. Maybe others wanted to stand out, to define themselves with proud, loud colors that screamed their independence. He wanted only to blend in with the crowd, because then he’d finally,
finally
not be the guy that anyone and everyone would push around.

By the time he walked up the front steps to his house, he was ready to shut himself away from the real world, ready to deal briefly with Mom and Gramps and then escape to his bedroom—except something pale green caught his eye.

Hugging the screen door was a sticky note, the sort used by deliverymen when no one was home to sign for a package.

Curious, Billy pulled off the note. He couldn’t read most of the text on the paper; the ink was barely visible, like it had faded. The company name was all but nonexistent. Actually, the only things he could clearly make out were his own name and the checked message.

WILLIAM BALLARD

SORRY I MISSED YOU—WILL TRY AGAIN LATER!

For no good reason, a shudder tripped up his spine. He had no idea what someone would have mailed him—he wouldn’t be sixteen for another two months, and the winter holidays were long gone. Maybe he’d won a contest.

A whisper in the back of his mind—a memory, a dream, something tangled between fact and fiction—and he pictured a man in white, filthy and yet pristine. Billy couldn’t see his face, and a part of him (the same part that so desperately wanted to stand up to Eddie Glass) was grateful. It was too soon to see that face, to know why the man’s brow gleamed silver.

Billy distinctly thought:
The Ice Cream Man wants me to wear the Crown.
And then it was gone, snuffed out like a spent match.

He shivered again, and then he frowned at the slip of paper in his hand. It probably wasn’t even real. Just some joke waiting to be told, a prank not yet pulled. And if it
was
a real message about a real package, then the deliveryman would return. He crumpled the note and shoved it into his front pocket, and then he unlocked the front door. Stepping inside, he called out a hello.

No answer. His mom and grandfather must have been out on an errand. Or maybe they were at the doctor’s again. Fine by Billy. He relished the silence of an empty house.

He shut and locked the door, then stepped back to make sure the full-length poster was still in place, that it wasn’t ripped anywhere and the black tape covering the doorknob didn’t need to be changed. He stared at the poster critically and decided it was fine—where there had been a door was now a two-dimensional overstuffed bookshelf. The handle to the world outside was nothing but dead black.

Satisfied, he shuffled down the hallway, barely noticing the reflective tape on the carpet that led to the bathroom, or the barren walls that once had teemed with family photos. Outside his bedroom, he took out a second key to unlock the door. A memory teased him: Marianne a couple of years ago, marveling over the locked bedroom door and telling Billy how cool it was that he had so much privacy.

If the lock had been for privacy, Billy would have agreed.

He entered his room and shut the door, not bothering to lock it because Gramps was out of the house. The bedroom was standard fare: the bed, of course; the desk that had once been his dad’s, complete with a computer that Billy had bought with birthday money; the closet with a hamper that only partially succeeded in housing clothes, whether dirty or clean. Bookshelves, overstuffed with paperbacks. Television seated on top of the bureau. And posters decorating the walls: various sports stars and bikini babes and rock legends all competed for attention in eye-straining colors and contrasts. Maybe his room was nothing out of the ordinary, but to him it was a sacred place. Here, he didn’t have to worry about what lurked around corners, waiting to pounce. Here in his room, Billy was free. It was a gilded cage, perhaps, but he was grateful for the bars.

He dumped his backpack by his desk and pulled out his cell phone. His fingers glided over the keys and summoned Marianne’s number, and he texted her an apology for not meeting her. He gave her a tried-and-true excuse: his mom needed him home because his grandfather was giving her fits. Not a lie; it just hadn’t happened yet. Billy was used to making sacrifices to help out with Gramps.

Marianne texted back right away. No worries, she wrote; the pizza was lousy today anyway. But tomorrow, he was buying.

Reading her answer made him smile. For a moment, he imagined Marianne not as his best friend but as his girlfriend, imagined telling her how he felt . . .

That would be a mistake.

No, mistakes could be fixed. Telling Marianne Bixby he wanted to kiss her would be bad. Horrifically bad. The sort of bad from which there was no return.

He sighed as he pocketed his phone. Feeling more battered than he did when Eddie Glass was kicking him, Billy grabbed his iPod and flopped down on his bed. He didn’t plan on falling asleep, but five minutes later, he was out cold.

Thirty minutes after that, he woke to his mother’s screams.

Chapter 2

Billy Lurched Out of Bed . . .

. . . and ripped the buds from his ears as he staggered to the bedroom door. He was on autopilot, his body reacting to his mother hollering “Dad!” again and again while his brain tried to process that he wasn’t still sleeping. He’d been dreaming the sort of dream that felt like it was really happening. The images were already fading—the threads had begun unraveling as soon as his mom had started screaming—but one memory remained: the man in white.

The
Ice Cream Man
, Billy thought muddily as he opened his door,
the Ice Cream Man’s going to let me ride the white horse . . .

His mother raced down the hallway, screaming for her father. “Dad! Dad, where are you? Martin! Come out!”

Billy had to shout to get her attention. “Did Gramps get out again?”

“I don’t know,” she said too fast. “He might have, or he could be here in the house somewhere, there’s so many places he could be if he jimmied the locks and . . . oh God, the kitchen cabinet!” She bolted down the hallway, banking the corner and heading for the kitchen.

Billy’s heartbeat thundered in his throat, his ears, behind his eyes.
Here we go again
, he thought bleakly, even as he patted down his pockets to make sure he still had his keys and phone. The last time Gramps had been alone, he’d almost set the house on fire. When Billy had gotten the matches away from him, his grandfather had slugged him in the eye. The rest of the night, Gramps had screeched at Billy, calling him horrible names and threatening to kill him.

“It’s not him,”
his mom had told Billy all that night, the next morning, the next week.
“It’s the Alzheimer’s talking, not him.”
As if that magically made everything better.

Billy locked his bedroom door and joined his mom in the kitchen. She was tugging on the cabinet under the sink, testing the child-safety lock. It was still on, so his grandfather couldn’t have gotten into the drain cleaner. Billy asked, “Any doors open?”

His mom didn’t answer. She was still pulling at the cabinet door, fixated on it, as if breaking the lock would somehow produce Gramps.

Billy tried the back door, but it was locked tight. Same with the door to the garage. But the front door, the one masked by the wall poster of a bookcase, was slightly ajar—the same poster that usually hid the door also camouflaged how the door hadn’t been completely closed.

Gritting his teeth, Billy called out, “Front door!” And then he raced outside, looking around for any sign of his grandfather. “Gramps!” he yelled, then switched to cries of “Martin! Martin Walker! Can you hear me?” His voice echoed back at him like music.

That was when he realized the block was oddly quiet. Usually, midafternoon on a weekday, cars streamed up and down the street; on a warm afternoon like today, kids should be hanging out, riding bikes or skateboards. But today, the street was barren. Dead.

No, not quite. Down at the end of the block, a guy was playing a guitar.

Thank God
, Billy thought, racing down the sidewalk. When Gramps escaped the house, he tended to walk a straight line, so there was a good chance he’d gone right by the street musician. The guitarist was blond and lean, doing the grunge thing like he’d sprung out of a Seattle 1990s brochure. Not bad at the guitar, either. The musician started singing as Billy approached—a familiar tune, but Billy couldn’t quite place it. He stumbled to a halt in front of the guitarist’s open case, which was lying open on the pavement and sparkled with coins reflecting the sunlight.

Pennies. All of the coins were pennies. Billy thought that was both odd and, for some reason, strangely appropriate.

“Years and years I’ve roamed,” the blond guitarist sang.

That had to be a good omen. “Hey,” Billy said, huffing from his sprint. “Did you see an old man walk this way?”

The guitarist stopped singing, but his fingers kept strumming, keeping the tune alive. He smiled lazily. “What, walking hunched over and gasping for breath? Nope. But I did see a man wander past not even five minutes ago.”

Billy blinked, absorbed both the joke and the information, then asked, “Did he keep going straight?” He pointed farther down the street.

“Yep.”

“Thanks,” said Billy, then reached in his pocket for some change, just a small tip to thank the guy. But before he could toss the money into the guitar case, the musician grabbed his arm. Billy was stunned by the contact, and even more by the strength and chill of the guitarist’s fingers. It felt like frozen branches had wrapped around his wrist.

“No need for that,” said the musician.

Billy stammered, “Wanted to thank you.”

The guitarist kept his smile, but now there was an edge to it. “Then give thanks instead of coin, William Ballard. Otherwise, you’ll get what you pay for, and there’s no time.”

Shocked speechless, Billy couldn’t ask how the musician knew his name.

“You have only three minutes before your grandfather causes a rather messy accident,” said the guitarist. His blue eyes glinted wickedly in the sunlight. “He’s walking in the street, and the driver’s about to text his girlfriend.”

Billy’s mouth worked silently, gaping like a fish suffocating in air.

“Go,” commanded the guitarist, releasing Billy’s wrist. “Less than three minutes now. You’d better run.”

Billy ran.

***

The pale horse shook its head, as if shaking away a fly.

“What?” said Death. “It was just a little friendly advice.”

The horse snorted.

Death smiled at his steed. “You’re just annoyed that he didn’t see you.”

If the horse had a comment, the steed kept it to itself.

Still smiling, Death began to play the guitar once more.

***

Rushing forward, Billy’s thoughts were a mad jumble as he wondered how the street musician knew his name.
Not a musician. A Rider. He’s the Pale Rider and he says Gramps is going to be in an accident, have to hurry, hurry, find Gramps . . .

Lost in his mind’s free flow, Billy sprinted down the street. He was thinking now about his grandfather, of the man who’d read him bedtime stories and chased away any monsters crouching in the closet. Martin Walker had been a bear of a man when Billy was young, a towering presence that had filled the house and made Billy feel safe—

(
even after the Ice Cream Man,
a voice whispered in the back of Billy’s mind)

—even after his dad had gone away. Without Gramps, he never would have learned to ride a bike, or catch a fish, or so many other things. He vividly remembered the feeling of his grandfather’s calloused fingers over his smaller, softer ones as Gramps taught him how to swing a baseball bat; he heard pride in the memory of his grandfather’s voice, pride and love as Gramps encouraged him and congratulated him every time the bat connected and sent the ball sailing across the sky.
Just believe you can do it,
Gramps would say.
Believe, and stand tall.

He had to find his grandfather.
Had
to.

You have only three minutes before your grandfather causes a rather messy accident.

How long had Billy been running? A minute? Two? Surely not three. Only three minutes, the guitarist had said, and never mind how the blond man knew that his grandfather would be in an accident; the street musician had declared it, and Billy believed him.

Of course Billy believed him; he was the Pale Rider, and he knew when people were scheduled to die.

Oh my God,
Billy thought, wind-tears stinging his eyes,
I’m going crazy.

No, he had no time for that. Muscles screaming, chest burning, Billy raced across the neighborhood, his feet slapping the ground in a backbeat to his labored breathing. No air to waste calling his grandfather’s name. No air, no time, no . . .

Yes!

Up ahead, his grandfather was threading himself between parked cars. Each time he looped around, he wandered into the middle of the street and paused, then continued on, moving to another car and circling it before heading back to the center lane once more. His open jacket flapped around his body like a cape.