Chapter 23 Levi
I come up out of the nightmare already drowning.
There’s no in-between. No swim up from sleep into the room. One second I’m down under the dark with no bottom, and the next I’m awake on the floor, heart going like a fist on a door.
The dream’s gone. It leaves nothing behind but the knocking, and the knocking’s in my chest, and it won’t stop.
I try to breathe and the breath won’t go down. It gets partway and stops. Welded shut at the bottom.
The more I chase it the further it runs. I’m hauling at air like a rope tied to nothing.
The floor’s solid under me. The wall’s solid at my back. I still can’t get a full breath in a room I know.
I’m in my jeans. Shirtless, jeans on, boots by the wall where I can reach them.
I sleep dressed in strange rooms, always have.
A man should be able to be on his feet and gone in the time it takes to stand.
And right now the one thing my body’s sure of is that I’m dying, and I’m dying with my boots off.
I get a hand flat on the carpet. The other presses my own chest, like I can force the air in.
It doesn’t go. I’m soaked through. The sweat came up out of nowhere and ran me through, hair stuck to my forehead, the sleeping bag damp under my palm.
I’m burning up. Somebody set the room on fire while I was under.
My heart’s slamming hard enough to feel in my throat, in my wrists.
The thing I’ve spent years staying ahead of has caught up and sat down on me with its full weight. And I’m sure this is the one that finishes me.
And here’s what does the most damage, while I’m fighting to pull one clean breath.
It happened here at Dante’s.
I know where I am. The gap by the wall, the flannel under me, the boxes of his face stacked to my left, the door down the hall standing open like he leaves it.
Safest floor I’ve put my body down on in years.
I had the best night I’ve had in a long time.
The bar, the long baseball game neither of us would turn off. Dante asleep down the hall.
I let my guard down for the first time since I crossed the line into this state. And this is what came up through the floor the minute I did.
I’ve got to get out of the room. My body knows it.
I can’t stay folded against this wall. I get up off the floor in a lurch, one hand clawing at the boxes for balance, and the room tips and rights and I’m moving for the only opening. The sliding glass door and the screen behind it.
I shove the glass and the screen goes with it, no catch to fight, and I’m out on the little lip of balcony. The metal rail in front of me, the hot dark of the parking lot below, the hum off the highway.
I lean over and get both hands on that rail and haul at the air. As if out here will have more air than in there did.
It doesn’t.
The night’s thick as a wet towel. I drag and drag and only the top of each breath comes. I hang on, shaking, and wait to find out if I can die of this or if it only feels like I will.
I hear Dante moving. Thank God, he’s up.
I came barreling out of that room like an animal through a fence. I’d have woken the dead two floors down. I hear him in the hall, quick, and then he’s in the doorway behind me and across the room. And the first thing out of him isn’t what happened, and it isn’t are you okay.
“Levi.” Close now, but there’s an edge run up under the calm. “What did you take? Did you take something? Tell me. Do I need to call 911?”
And even here, even with no air, the question gets in. The small clean cut of it. What did you take? Drenched and gasping on a stranger’s balcony at three in the morning, I look like exactly what he thinks I am. I’ve earned the question. It still nicks me.
I push out the only word I’ve got. “No.” Barely. A shake of the head with it, because the word didn’t have enough behind it to carry. “Nothing.”
And then I hear him walk away.
Footsteps going back across the room. Quick. Away from me. The sound of him leaving.
Whatever was left of the floor goes out from under me then. I get it. God help me, I get it all, in one piece, faster than I’ve ever understood anything.
Dante looked at me. He saw what I am with the packaging off — soaked, shaking, hanging on a rail like a drunk over a gutter — and he couldn’t stand to keep looking.
He asked the one question that mattered to him, got his answer, and left. I’d leave too. I’ve spent years trying to leave this exact man hanging on this rail and I’ve never once managed it, and Dante did it in four steps.
The shame comes up hotter than the panic and folds itself right into it, till I can’t tell which one has my throat. He saw me. Not the version I tried to show him — the fixed-up, useful, holds-his-end version — but this.
The derelict on the balcony.
And it disgusted him off his own porch in the middle of the night.
I want to be gone before he has to walk past me in the morning.
I want to be gone more than I want the air, and I can’t get the air either way.
My hands are the only part of me still working and all they know how to do is hold a rail.
I don’t hear him come back. That’s how far down in a hole I am.
“Levi. I’m here.” His voice is right behind my shoulder, and I flinch so hard the rail rings under my hands. “I’ve got an ice pack that I’m putting on the back of your neck. You’re sweating and I need to get you cooled down.”
He came back.
He didn’t leave me. He went to the freezer.
The story I built and died inside of. He went to the kitchen for ice, and I buried myself with the sound of four steps.
I don’t have air enough to laugh or cry about it, so it just sits in me, huge and stupid, while the cold comes down on the back of my neck.
And Lord, the cold.
It lands like a slap and turns into mercy a half-second later. My burning body tilts toward that one cold spot. The roar in the back of my skull that’s been screaming since I woke up drops its voice a notch, just off the shock of it.
“Levi, wherever your mind is taking you, you’re not there.” He’s right at my ear, talking calm. “You’re here with me. It’s only you and me here, Levi. You’re safe with me. I’m watching over you. I won’t leave.”
He doesn’t ask what happened or why. He just looks at my body that can’t breathe and goes to work on it.
“Breathe in through your nose,” he says. “Out through your mouth. I need you to do this. In through your nose. Out through your mouth. Do it with me. Stay with me, Levi.”
And he does it where I can hear him. On purpose, loud enough to find, slow and long and even, laying it down like a track for me to walk in.
He doesn’t tell me to calm down. Doesn’t tell me it’s fine, it’s nothing, get a grip.
He just breathes, big and slow at my shoulder, the ice steady on my neck, and waits for me to come find the rhythm where he left it.
The first try gets nowhere. The next gets a little. Somewhere four or five breaths in, the welded place at the bottom of my lungs gives a quarter inch.
“Ice is starting to melt on you,” he says after a while. “It’s running down your back.”
I feel it then, now that he’s said it. A thin cold line tracking down my spine, the pack gone soft and sweating in his hand. He steps up closer behind me. I feel him do it, the warmth of him arriving at my back before anything touches.
The ice pack changes hands, right to left, and then his right hand comes down flat on my bare back and rubs the cool water in.
I tense. I feel myself do it, the flinch firing up the back of me toward his palm. A hand coming down on me in the dark. Mid-panic, no shirt, nothing between his palm and my spine.
But I don’t move because it’s Dante.
His hand is on my back and it isn’t going to hurt me.
I know it. And I know something else, even with half a breath to think it in.
Dante touches people. I’ve watched him do it at the Roadhouse with Blondie, the cop, Sheila.
Like touch is just another word he speaks.
He touches everybody he cares about and he has never once touched me.
Not until now.
His hand is on my back and it doesn’t come off. The ice stays on my neck and the hand moves on my back, slow circles, working the cold water into skin gone hot as a pot lid. He keeps breathing where I can hear him, and I keep laying my ragged breath down along the long clean edge of his.
In through my nose. Out through my mouth. Round goes his hand.
The air comes back slowly. It lets go grudging, taking its time about what it gives up first. But the bottom of each breath comes back to me.
I get one down full and hold it a second just to know I can, then let it out long, and his hand never stops, like he’s got all night and nowhere else in the world he needs to be.
“You’re doing good,” he says, when he can hear the difference in me. “Levi. I want you to step inside. Just inside the door. I want you sitting down.”
I don’t move. I tighten my grip. The rail is the only thing I’ve trusted for the last ten minutes.
“You’re pale, you’re sweating, and you’re leaning on an old piece of metal hanging over a parking lot,” he says, same low voice, no push in it, just laying the truth out where I can see it.
“If you go down, I want you going down on carpet. Come on. I’ve got you.
Three steps back. That’s all. The door stays open. Walk with me.”
I let go of the rail. I let him turn me with the hand that’s on my back, and I take the three steps. I get inside the door and go down to the floor, the warm night coming through the open screen, and before I can miss his hand it’s back.
He sits down close behind me. Folds himself down onto the carpet at my back in nothing but his shorts, this polished house-selling man, bare feet, hair loose across his forehead for the first time since I’ve known him.
He gets himself set behind my shoulder and keeps rubbing my back, same motion, and neither one of us says a word about how strange it is or isn’t.
The lot’s dead quiet below. Somewhere across the dark a truck shifts down on the highway and the sound rolls out and is gone. The evil thing that came up through the floor into me has slid back down to hell where it lives.
“Dante, go back to bed,” I say, when I finally get my voice back. “I’m okay now. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
He stops behind me a second. Then the hand lifts, and he gets up. I hear him cross the room. He’s down the hall, and there’s rustling, and when he comes back he’s got both sleeping bags in his arms.
He lays them out side by side in front of the open door, square in the path of the warm air coming through the screen, and smooths mine flat with one pass of his hand.
“Lie down,” he says, patting the sleeping bag. “With your face right there in the doorway. You’ll have the fresh air.”
I look at the two bags on the floor, no space between them. I lie down where he told me. The night comes through the screen and moves over me, and the last of the shaking runs itself out into the floor.
He lies down on the other one, right behind me, between me and everything else in this world.
“You need to sleep,” I say. “You have to be at the house by six.”
“No, I don’t need sleep,” he says. “I need to keep watch over you while you sleep, Levi.”
There’s no answering that so I don’t even try.