Chapter 36 Dante
The text comes in a little after eleven o’clock Sunday night.
I’ve got the Mitchell packet spread out, a closing checklist, the Atlanta buyer’s second-look notes. The phone lights up. A week ago that light would have pulled me out of the chair. Tonight it just sits there.
Levi: There’s a big problem with the house. You need to come. Now.
Then, before I can answer, a second one.
Levi: Pull into the garage. Don’t park out front. I’ll have it open.
Now I’m his property manager too? I’m already picking up my keys. If something’s wrong with the house I need to know about it.
I go out the door in shorts and an old t-shirt, and am on 30A in ten minutes. I pull through the gate and there they are.
Teenagers.
Herds of them, roaming through the gated community’s narrow streets. They came in from the public beach access down the beach below the dunes. The blue glow of phones moves through the dark, along with the sound of kids laughing.
Several of them are up in the sea oats on the dune, which is a fine no one’s going to pay. A pack of girls runs the beach walkover, shrieking, and the motion sensors on the walkway fire one after another.
I almost turn around and go home. I know what this is. It’s a normal July night on 30A. Every weekend all summer the teenagers pour onto the beaches after dark and run from bonfire to bonfire, until the sheriff’s deputies stroll through around midnight and push them along like the tide.
It’s a noise complaint and it’s the most ordinary thing on this coast.
I’ve talked buyers past it a hundred times — seasonal, gone by Labor Day — and I’m halfway to being angry, hauled out at night for the summer swarm, when I see the house.
Every floodlight burning bright. Every blind down. The big glass face of it sealed up blank, lit like a listing photo with the life pulled out of it.
That house has stood open to the Gulf every night since he arrived because Levi can’t breathe any other way.
I don’t slow down out front. I take the side lane, and the garage door is already rolling up as my headlights hit it.
Levi’s watching for me. He’s got it open before I’m stopped.
I pull in, it comes down behind me, and the noise drops by half.
That’s when the parking instructions make sense.
That was him keeping my car off the front of this house, where fifty phones are pointed at everything.
I’m out of the car in a flash and into the house.
Every door is shut. The sliding glass door is closed and locked with the vertical blinds dragged across it. Levi has fought me, the AC, and the laws of physics to keep that door standing open, and now it’s shut.
Levi is on the floor.
He’s down against the end of the sectional with his knees up, one hand flat on the marble like he’s holding it down, the other pressing an ice pack to the back of his own neck.
Sweated through. Chest going too fast and too shallow, the breath snagging at the top the way I’ve heard it snag once before, on a balcony at three in the morning.
The face is Lee Streeter’s. The bare jaw off the poster, the haircut.
The panic is all Levi’s.
“Levi.” I cross the room and get down on the floor in front of him, hands where he can see them. “It’s me. I’m here. Look right here.”
“They found—” His voice is shredded. “They’re on the walkways, they keep tripping the lights, I had to shut the— I had to close it all up, they found the house—”
“Levi. Listen to me. Those are kids. They do this every weekend, all summer, up and down this beach. They’re not here for you.
They’re chasing each other and climbing dunes and they’ll be gone after midnight.
You’re not out there with them. You’re in here, with me.
No one’s coming through that door, and I’m not going anywhere. ”
“You don’t—” He shakes his head hard, eyes still moving. “I can’t. I can’t, it won’t—”
“You don’t have to do anything but stay with my voice.”
It doesn’t reach him. His eyes keep moving, blinds to shut doors. Whatever has him worked up, it isn’t out on that beach. It’s in here. It’s the doors he closed, the sightlines gone, walls in, nowhere out.
“Hey. Eyes on me. Just me.” I stay down at his level, hands open, not touching him yet. “You don’t have to do this alone. I’ve got it. Give it to me.”
“The ice—” He heaves it out in pieces. “It’s not working. It’s not — last time it worked. Last time you—”
He doesn’t have the air to finish it. Last time I was the one holding the ice on his neck. Last time there was my hand on his back and my voice laying down a rhythm, and the ice was never the medicine. I was.
Something in my chest flips over like a wave, and the cold I tried to carry in here goes with it.
“Okay.” I’m up. “Come on. We’re not staying. You’ll be in my car in ninety seconds and we’ll be gone. Keys, wallet, whatever you need. Thirty seconds. Let’s go.”
I need to get him out. I get him up off the floor and moving toward the garage door.
“There you go. Up. I’ve got you.” I keep a hand under his arm and I keep talking, because the talking is a rope and he needs something to hold. “We’re just walking to the car. That’s the thing. One foot, then the next.”
There’s a phone on the kitchen island. The one connected to Freddie. He glances at it, then turns away and comes with me.
I put him in the backseat, down low on the floorboards, low behind the tinted windows, because the second that door rolls up there are fifty phones within a hundred feet of this driveway. I’m not driving past them with him sitting in the passenger seat.
“Stay down. Head covered, stay there till I say. I’m right here. Sixty seconds and we’re through the gate, then it’s just road and me. You’ve got nothing to do but sit tight.”
He does it without asking why I’m telling him to hide. He folds himself down small on the floor of my car so a pack of drunk teenagers won’t see him leave his own rental house.
I hit the opener. The door rolls up. I back out slow and ordinary, a man in an SUV leaving a house, nothing to see. A kid slaps my hood. Another one is ringing the doorbell for no good reason.
“Still with me? We’re almost out. Don’t move yet. Nobody out there sees a thing but a car. You’re doing good. Ten more seconds.”
None of them pay attention to the SUV. Then I’m finally past them, onto the road.
“You can come up,” I say, a quarter mile clear. “It’s done. You’re out. Put a seatbelt on.”
He comes up off the floor and gets himself onto the seat, and I hear it immediately. The breathing hasn’t let go. It’s worse, if anything, now that the running’s over — ragged, high, catching on nothing, a man hauling at air in the back of my car.
I check the rearview and he’s got the ice pack pressed to his neck again with a shaking hand. He’s doing it to himself because it’s the only move he knows. It isn’t working this time, and we both know why.
I can’t drive with the sound of him gasping behind me.
There’s a restaurant coming up on the right, closed since nine, the lot empty, one security light with moths going at it. I pull in and take the car all the way to the dark end, nose it at the fence, and kill the headlights. The AC stays running. I get out, and I get in the back with him.
He’s wedged into the corner of the seat, trying to be small. I take the ice pack out of his hand.
“Lie down,” I tell him. “Put your head here.” I pat my leg once.
Even with no air in him, he looks at me, and I watch him decide. Then he folds himself down onto the seat of my car, boots hanging over the edge, knees bent to make himself fit, and lays his head on my lap.
I put the ice on the back of his neck and hold it there.
“Match my breathing. Same as last time. In through your nose. Out through your mouth.” And I do it where he can hear it, big and slow and even, laying the track down. “That’s all you’ve got to do. I’ve got the rest. We can do this. We’ve done this before.”
We breathe while the moths work the security light. The first tries get nowhere, same as the balcony, and then somewhere in it the bottom of a breath comes back to him, and he holds it a second like he’s checking it’s real, and lets it go long.
“That’s okay. It doesn’t have to work yet.” I keep mine going under his, slow, like we’ve got all night, because we do. “You’re not doing it wrong. There’s no wrong here. Just keep walking into it. In. Hold it if you can. Out. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.”
Something in me lets go at that one long breath. I keep mine slow and unhurried over him, but the steadiness is a thing I’m doing with my body, not something I feel. Underneath it my heart is racing. One of us needs to be calm and steady.
That’s when I notice his thick hair. Soaked. Sweated all the way through, stuck to his forehead.
“Levi, you’re burning up again.”
I brush the wet hair back off his forehead with my fingers.
Just to move it. And I feel it happen under my hand — his entire body gives, all at once, like an exhale.
I don’t stop. I keep running my fingers back through his hair, front to crown.
Then again, the ice on his neck with my other hand, my breath running loud and even above him for his to walk in.
“There you go,” I say, when a breath comes and goes without catching. “You’ve got it now. That’s you doing that, not me.” I don’t stop moving my hand.
I’m in shorts. His head is on my bare leg. And after a while I feel moisture on my thigh, one hot drop and then another.
It takes me a second to realize, because his breathing never changes to tell me.
He’s crying. Flat on his side in the back of my car with his eyes squeezed shut.
No sound in it at all, crying the way you learn to cry when the sound of it was never safe — silent, rationed, the tears just running sideways off his face onto my skin.
My own eyes go hot so fast it shocks me. I squeeze them shut to keep my own tears from sliding down my face.
What are we doing?
I keep my breath big and loud so he can’t hear what mine wants to do. I keep my hand moving through his hair, because the hand is the only thing I’ve got that won’t shake.
Here we are. Two men in a dark parking lot behind a closed restaurant, one of us coming apart silently and the other one pretending not to, and not one word between us about the poster, or the name, or any of it.
There’s no word important enough to be worth the air it would cost him.
I don’t know how long we stay there. His breathing comes down out of the rafters a notch at a time until it’s just tired, wet breathing, and the tears stop somewhere in there too. I keep my hand going a while past the point it’s needed, because neither of us was ready for me to stop.
Then he pushes himself up off my lap, and sits back against the seat. He wipes his face once with the collar of his shirt, matter-of-fact, the way you’d wipe off sweat.
“I’m okay,” he says, destroyed. “I’m okay now.”
“Are you sure?” I say, and I don’t move to go anywhere. “There’s no rush. None at all. We can sit here as long as you want.”
He holds my eyes a second, then he nods, and I let that be enough.
I look at him, then I take the ice pack, gone soft and sweating, and I get out and climb behind the wheel.
I don’t take him back to the house. There’s nothing to take him back to tonight but a closed-up house with a herd running loose below it till two in the morning. I’m not putting him inside a closed door again while I’ve got another one to offer.
I point the car at the apartment.