Page 97 of Levi

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.