Page 51 of Levi

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.”