Page 96 of Levi

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.”