Chapter 57 Levi
The thunder’s a long way north now. The count between flash and sound has gone generous again. I lie on the couch, watch the gap in the door, and breathe.
Dante’s fingers are in my hair. Gentle and patient. He hasn’t asked me one thing. Not in the trailer, not in the car. He’s just been here, propping doors open. Nobody’s ever done that much for me without knowing why.
It’s time to tell him why I’m so fucked up.
My heart goes off again at the thought of letting it out.
“Don’t talk for a minute.” My voice comes out scraped raw. “If you say something, I’ll stop. I can’t stop, so don’t.”
“Okay.” He waits, his fingers moving through my hair.
I can’t look at him for this.
“I can’t be anywhere I can’t get out of.
You figured that out. The terrace. The car windows.
Your balcony door, right there. I can’t— a shut room, a closed-up space, I start to go.
You’ve seen me go.” My hand grips the edge of the couch cushion as if I’ll fall off right onto the floor. “There’s a reason.”
He doesn’t say anything, just keeps a steady hand on me.
“My dad. He was a big man. Bible on the table, belt on the wall, and a solid idea in his head about what a son was supposed to be. He wasn’t a drunk. That’s what people might want to blame it on. No, he was a believer. He was stone cold sure he was doing right by me every single time.”
The thunder rolls, far off. I count it in my head without meaning to. Plenty of time.
“There was a shed out back on the farm. Aluminum. One of those kit ones, bolts together, sits flat on the ground. On a Tennessee summer day, that thing was an oven by ten in the morning.” My breath’s getting shorter.
I make it keep going, because this is what I’ve told nobody, and he needs to have it.
“He’d put me in it. Lock it with a heavy padlock on the outside. Leave me.”
“Levi,” Dante whispers.
“It wasn’t once.” This is what I need him to understand.
I turn my head and make myself look up at him.
“That’s what— people hear a thing like that, they think it’s a night.
One bad night. It was a system. It was the rule of the house.
Any time I went soft. Any time I did something with my hands or my voice or my face that he read as— as the wrong thing.
The gay thing. I didn’t even have the word.
I was seven, eight, nine, but I knew there was a thing in me that turned his face into a monster, and the thing inside me was the reason for the box.
Show it, go in the box. To teach me. To make me a man.
” My voice cracks down the middle and I keep going through the crack.
“Over and over. Years. You learn a rule well that gets taught that many times. Your body learns it. Your mind doesn’t even need to think about it. ”
I stop a minute to close my eyes and breathe.
“There was a boy. Later. I was fourteen. We weren’t even doing much.
Holding his hand. That’s most of what I’ve kept of it, his hand in mine, and then my dad in the doorway.
” I make the next words hold steady. “That was the longest one. The box, after. I thought I was gonna die for sure. I passed out from the heat. To this day, I don’t know how I didn’t die in there.
After that he didn’t have to teach me anymore, because I had the lesson learned all the way through.
I took what was in me and buried it down deep.
And then I kept burying it more. A new second name, a hundred songs about girls.
Nobody ever found it again. Including me. ”
Dante hasn’t moved. No flinch, none of the, oh you poor thing, I’ve watched cross every face that ever got even a tenth of this. He just listens. His eyes are wet, steady on me. Like his hands. Always steady.
“The worst times.” I have to stop. Clear my throat. Start again. “The worst times were the storms.”
Outside, right on cue, the lightning flickers once, weak, and the light crosses the ceiling and is gone.
“Aluminum box. Lightning coming. You ever— no. You haven’t.
A kid, locked in a metal box, in a thunderstorm, dead certain the next one comes through the wall.
That’s it, that’s how I die. I’m way out back in a field behind the house, where nobody ever came.
No neighbors close by to hear me. I’d count.
Flash to crack. Trying to tell how close.
Screaming for somebody to come let me out. Counting and screaming.”
The next words cost the most, so I give them to him straight up.
“I counted tonight. On the stage. The second the thunder started I was twelve years old in the box, counting. Up there praying for the lightning to come and stop the show, because it was the only door anybody was going to open for me, same as it was the only one then. The storm that’s going to kill me being the one and only way out.
I’ve been running that count my whole life. ”
The apartment’s so quiet I can hear the rain thinning out on the railing.
“My mother knew everything. The window over the sink looked right out on the field. In the summer everything was open. She heard me yelling.” I make myself say all of it.
“She never came to help me. Not once. Because he believed it. He believed it to the bone, that it was right, that it was what he needed to do for me, and she— I don’t know what she believed.
I just know what she did, which was the dishes. ”
“And I never got to ask her.” I have to stop again there a second.
“She died when I was nineteen. Cancer. Six weeks, start to finish. I was on the road for most of it and I got there for the funeral and not one hour before it. Freddie made me go. Said it would look bad if I didn’t show for my mother’s funeral.
I didn’t want to. I sat on the front row of that church next to my daddy with my hand on a Bible.
I never asked her one single question. Not why she didn’t come out.
Not what she thought was happening out that window every summer.
Nothing. She’s been gone six years and I never found out. ”
I wipe my eyes and I hear Dante sniffle above me.
“That was the last time I spoke to my daddy, too. After the service. He put his hand on my shoulder in front of everybody and told me he was proud of what I’d become.
” It cracks again. “He meant it too. He wasn’t being mean, he was congratulating himself.
Far as he’s concerned, he built me. The shed, the belt, all of it — that was his work, and I’m the living proof it took.
He looked at the music and the money and the name on the radio and he saw a job well done. ”
Dante’s thumb wipes away a tear sliding down my cheek without a word.
“We haven’t spoken in six years. Not a call, not a card, nothing. And here’s what I can’t get around, even now. If I went back tomorrow, he’d be glad to see me. He’d shake my hand and he’d be proud all over again. He’s never in his life thought he did anything wrong.”
Dante’s crying too now. I can tell. He’s not trying to hide it.
“There was nobody in that house who ever said it was wrong. Not one person, ever, who looked at it and said that’s wrong, stop.
I grew up knowing it wasn’t wrong what he did to me.
That the bad thing in me was what earned the box.
Even if I’d told another adult, they would’ve agreed.
The preacher, the choir director. They were all the same. I had nobody.”
I run out of words then. I’ve said all of it. It’s out of me and between us now. What’s left is just the emptiness.
Dante doesn’t tell me it’s over, not to worry, that I’m safe, that none of it was my fault. He doesn’t bury my pain in all the right sentences. He lets it stay true. He lets it be as big as it actually is, out in the open with us, and he doesn’t look away.
“That’s why I leave the doors open for you,” he says.
The thing he’s done blind for me every night finally fitting the reason it was always for.
“Yeah. That’s why.”
“Thank you for telling me, Levi. I’ll never close the doors.
Any room you’re ever in. The door stays open.
I can do that for you. It’s all I’ve got.
I don’t have anything that fixes it. I’m not going to insult you by pretending I do.
But I’m here for whatever you need from me. I’m here, Levi. For you.”
And that undoes the last bolt in me. I sit up and wipe my face. He opens his arms wide and takes my full weight against him.
I’m not fixed. I know that even now, with the worst of me finally out in the air. The box is in me way down deep. Tomorrow I’ll still need the door open, still count when it thunders.
But there’s somebody else holding all of it now with me. Dante knows my story. The box, the boy, the thing they tried to beat out of me. And he’s still here with the door open at my back.
I’ve never once not been alone in it.
I’m not alone in it now.