Chapter 18 Dante
I tell myself it’s about the humidity in the house. It needs to be checked.
The day ran long, and it’s night by the time I clear the gate. A meter reading is a morning errand, not a night one. I do it anyway. Every number on that house is mine to know every day until Saturday. I have every right to be here any hour of the day or night.
I knock. Levi doesn’t answer. I count to thirty to be polite and use the code.
“Levi?” I call out.
The sliding glass door is pulled shut. That’s new. The kitchen’s empty. The pink box is where I left it yesterday, three donuts gone.
He’s not here. If he was, the door would be wide open.
I came to read a meter, and the meter is down the hall.
I check out the rest of the house while calling it a walk-through.
The bed upstairs hasn’t been touched. Benji made it up Friday night, fourteen pillows in three sizes laid out in rows.
Not one of them has been moved. He hasn’t slept in it.
It lines up with the sectional downstairs, the throw bunched at one arm where he leaves it.
His duffel is on the floor, half-zipped, packed. I recognize the clothes I folded for him. He’s here for a month and he still keeps everything packed and ready to move in a hurry.
In the kitchen the only food I find is the snacks I drove him to buy. Chips, a sleeve of cookies torn open, soda going warm and flat on the counter. The key lime pie is gone now.
A month paid in full in a twenty-million-dollar house, and Levi only owns chips and a duffel bag.
I check the meter under the supply vent. Sixty-six. Not great, but nothing’s warped. That’s the reading, the one I drove out here for. I decide to tidy up a bit while waiting to see if the humidity goes down.
Starting with the kitchen, I sweep the cookie crumbs off the counter into my hand.
I wipe the stone down. I bag the trash, tie it, and set it by the door to take out when I leave.
I square the donut box to the edge of the island.
I check the washing machine to see if there are any clothes in it.
Nothing. Not in the dryer either. Nothing that needs folding.
I check the meter again. Sixty-six. Five minutes and it hasn’t moved.
I fold the cashmere throw that’s turned into Levi’s permanent blanket.
I’ve checked the meter three times for a number I already have. I’m folding a blanket in a house that gets professionally cleaned Friday.
Where is he?
The edge of his phone is peeking out from under the corner of a cushion. Wherever he is, the phone didn’t travel with him. I dig it out. It lights up under a cracked face and asks me for a code I don’t have. That’s the end of it. I put it back in the couch, screen down, the way it was.
I know he’s not here. The terrace door is closed. I’ve been watching that door all week.
Standing here now, with him gone and the Gulf right past the rail, the closed door says one thing only. He walked out. Closed the door. Went down the long wooden steps to the beach. Across the sand.
Toward the water.
My heartbeat picks up. I grew up on water in Miami. The calmness is the danger. There’s no surf at night to warn you, no line where the safe water quits. It doesn’t knock you down. It takes you out sideways, while you’re still feeling safe.
Someone who’s been drinking doesn’t feel the pull until it’s already pulled him past the point of no return.
Levi drinks until he’s unconscious. That’s a fact.
I try to force myself to stand still at the rail and I can’t do it.
I’m down the first rung of steps before I stop, because running the beach in the dark solves nothing.
A quarter mile of black water and which direction, and how long has that door been shut, an hour?
Three? A day? Why didn’t I check on him earlier?
I run back up and take out my phone. I’ll give it a few more minutes and then I’ll call someone.
I don’t finish the thought of who, because the who is the beach patrol.
They’re good, they’re fast. I’ve seen them in action many times.
If I make the call, they’ll be here in minutes.
Then I’ll be standing here waiting on them to report a body.
No, not a body.
Levi.
He’s gone for a walk on the beach. That’s the answer. The boring one, the right one. He’ll be back soon. I keep my eyes on the line where the sand goes black then I go back inside.
I dig his phone out from under the cushion again and hold it, cracked screen up, waiting for it to tell me something.
It lights up for me. No missed calls. No messages sitting on the lock screen.
Whoever tracks his phone thinks Levi is exactly where he’s supposed to be, home, stationary, accounted for — a dot on some man’s map, sitting on a couch.
That should settle me. A man slipping past his guard for an evening is the opposite of a man in trouble. It settles me for about a minute. Then I’m back at the rail, because a man can slip off and still walk into black water. If he needed help tonight, he has no way to ask for it without his phone.
Maybe he went out again. To Tex’s. Or another place. He has my number. He called me before when he was in trouble. I check my phone again. Nothing. I turn the ringer up as far as it goes, in a silent house, and then I double-check the screen anyway, twice more inside five minutes.
The few minutes I gave it come and go. I renegotiate.
Ten more minutes, because the bonfire crowd down toward Rosemary Beach is still throwing light on the water.
Kids build those fires and kids draw wanderers.
A walk to a fire and back is thirty minutes on sand, easy.
I build him an innocent evening out of a glow of orange a quarter mile down the beach.
My legs are tired. I don’t sit down. Sitting down is for men who aren’t watching for someone in the water.
Then, down the beach, where the dark’s the thickest, a figure is walking. Coming up the beach, unhurried, without a care in the world. I would recognize his gait in a crowd of thousands.
My knees start to go. I get a hand on the rail and keep my feet. It’s Levi. He’s walking toward the house. On the sand, not in the water. For a split-second that’s the only fact in the world that matters.
Then he’s close enough to see. Cap pulled low, bare feet, the loose walk of a man back from somewhere good. Barefoot in the sand, moving the way he moves. Relief and unjustified anger arrive in the same breath.
He’s fine. Been fine all along while I stood here losing my fucking mind.
The last hour comes due all at once, and I let it. Everything I didn’t let myself feel while it could still be true arrives now that it isn’t.
He hits the bottom of the steps, glances up and sees me.
“Where the hell have you been?” I ask.
I hear it go out wrong, and there’s no taking it back across the space between us. There’s too much in it.
He stops on the steps and studies me.
“There’s a bonfire.” He’s careful with it. “Down the beach a little bit. College kids. I walked down to it.”
I can’t stop taking him in, one detail at a time. One detail snags and won’t let go.
“Your clothes are dry,” I blurt out. I didn’t mean to say it out loud.
“Yeah.” He’s already there, already ahead of me. “Dante, where did you think I was?”
“In the water. Gone.”
Four words, and everything I’m not saying stacked behind them. Now he’s looking at me like I’m the one who needs handling. He comes up two steps slowly, the way you’d approach a spooked animal, and I hate that I can see him deciding to do it that way. He thinks I’m angry. That I might hurt him.
“Dante. Look at me.” I do. “I grew up near a lake. I’m a good swimmer.
I wasn’t drinking tonight. I didn’t want any of what those kids had, and believe me, they offered.
” A small tilt of his mouth, offering me the joke, and when I don’t take it, he lets it go.
“I left the phone here on purpose. You know why. I didn’t think—” He stops.
Starts again. “There wasn’t anybody to tell I was leaving the house.
It didn’t occur to me that leaving a door shut would put you on my terrace looking like that. ”
“Like what?”
“Like how you look right now. How long have you been standing up here?”
“I came by to read the meter.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“An hour, maybe. A little more. I’m not mad. I was worried.”
“Nobody’s ever done that,” he says. “Waited on me because they were worried.” He shrugs one shoulder. “I’m sorry I scared you. I mean that. But I’m not sorry I went.”
“I don’t want you sorry you went.” It comes out rough.
“Walk the beach every night if you want. But make me one promise. You don’t swim in the dark.
Not ever, not sober, not any way. And you check the flags before you go in during the day.
Rip currents kill tourists on this stretch every year.
Multiple people, every single year, and most of them thought they could swim fine. ”
“Okay,” he says finally, nodding. “I promise. No swimming in the dark. I’ll check the flags.”
“Thank you. On Friday the housekeeping crew arrives at noon. You need to be out by then. You can go to my place if you want.”
“Alright. Friday. Noon. I’ll plan to be gone.”
There’s nothing else left to say. He moves past me up the steps, and his hand comes up and lands on my arm. Light. Barely a weight at all, fingers just above my elbow.
Days of dealing with him and we have never touched, not even a handshake, except when I put him against a refrigerator. His hand is warm and that’s the detail I’ll be carrying out of here.
“Hey,” he says. I make myself keep direct eye contact with him as if his hand on my skin isn’t what I’m thinking about. “I’ll be careful. I hear you. Thanks for standing watch for me.” Then the hand’s gone.
The warm print of it isn’t. Five fingers above my elbow, through one layer of linen, and my skin is feeling it.
I don’t answer. He heads inside and I cross the drive to the car and he lets me go.