Off-Season Devotion

The apartment had been quiet for eleven days. Ling had counted. Not the good kind of quiet, either, the kind you get after a deadline ships and you finally sleep. This was the other kind, the kind where the fridge hums and you hear your own swallowing and you think, is this it? Is this what twenty-three looks like?

Eden had moved out on the first of the month, some guy in Somerville with a dog and a lease in his name. Which was fine. Ling was happy for her, honestly. But then the second bedroom went back to being a place where the door stayed shut, and the whole place started to feel like it was a waiting room.

So she did the impulsive thing. She never did impulsive things, which is maybe why it worked. She was scrolling listings at two in the morning, working on a packaging mockup she hated, and there it was. Off-season rental, Port Blossom, furnished, weekly rate, "quiet, best for focused work." Quiet. She booked it before she could talk herself out of it, and then she sat there with her thumb on the confirmation email thinking, well. Okay then.

Her mother asked why she was going to a beach town in November. Ling said the rent was cheap and she needed to finish a rebrand alone. Both true. Neither was the real reason, and she figured the real reason was nobody's business, including her own.

* * *

Port Blossom in the off-season was gray the way old photographs are gray. Not sad exactly. Just waiting. The boardwalk had cones on it. The ice cream place was boarded up with a hand-painted sign that said SEE YOU IN MAY! with the exclamation point half faded, which Ling found weirdly moving.

Her rental was a second-floor unit in a converted house with four other units, and by day three she knew two facts about her neighbors. One, the wifi was terrible. Two, one of them was a retired trucker named Jeffery who sat on the shared porch in a canvas coat and narrated the weather to anyone within range.

"You caught the season right," he told her when she carried her laptop bag past him that first morning. "Nothing out here but gulls and me. Town empties out like a bathtub."

"Is it always this empty?"

"Always, this time of year! You get the storm chasers in October, then nothing till the daffodils. Where's your people?"

"No people. I'm working."

"Good, me too. Work is sitting here. Hey, you need anything, I'm the one with the fancy antenna on the roof, so if the internet goes, come holler."

The internet went. Of course the internet went. On day four, around nine in the morning, right as Ling had a client call at noon, the little wheel on her laptop spun and spun and gave up. She tried the coffee shop two streets over. Locked, off-season hours posted in the window, hours that appeared to be a suggestion. She tried the library and found a handwritten sign: NO SERVICE, CREW WORKING ON THE LINE, SORRY!

Back at the house, Jeffery was on the porch looking personally betrayed.

"Whole street's down," he said. "Guy on the line said the depot's got its own line, some old commercial hookup from when they plowed the roads out of there. Fella lives there now, teaches dancing. Vinnie. Tell him Jeffery sent you, he'll let you borrow his hotspot."

"The snowplow depot?"

"Big gray building, back end of Larkspur. You'll hear the music before you see it."

He was right. Ling heard it half a block away, some slow accordion thing pushing out through a rolled-up garage door. She walked in through a side entrance that smelled like sawdust and floor wax, and stopped.

The main floor had been cleared into a dance studio, mirrors on one wall, and in the middle of it a man was dancing with nobody. He was maybe twenty-eight, dark hair pushed back, sleeves rolled, and he was doing something with his legs and shoulders that Ling had no vocabulary for except that it looked like argument and apology at the same time. He hadn't noticed her yet. She stood there like an idiot with her laptop bag, watching, until he caught her in the mirror and grinned.

"Sorry! Didn't hear the door." He wiped his face with a towel. "You lost?"

"Kind of. Are you Vinnie? Jeffery sent me, from Larkspur. The whole street's wifi is out and I have a client call at noon and he said you had a hotspot."

"Jeffery with the antenna, yeah! Come on, plug in, it's slow but it works." He led her to a folding table by the wall with a kettle and a laptop on it. "Coffee's old but it's hot."

"I'll risk it. God, this place. Did you do all this yourself?"

"Me and a sledgehammer, mostly. It was the depot till the town moved the trucks out to the highway. Now it's my studio and eleven rentals, I keep the place for the landlord and teach in the winter when nobody's watching." He said it lightly but Ling caught something under it. "Renters come back in June. Right now it's me and the mice."

"Who's your partner?" she asked, nodding at the empty middle of the floor, because apparently she was going to be nosy today.

"Nobody right now. Tango's mostly a partner dance, so." He shrugged, poured her coffee. "You need the password, it's taped under the kettle, very high tech."

She got her laptop out and the call hadn't started yet, and that was when she noticed it. A warmth. Not from the kettle. It was coming from the back corner of the building, past a stack of old pallets, where an elevator shaft stood behind a sagging rusted chain and an out of order sign so old the letters had gone orange.

She didn't decide to walk over. Her feet just did it, which she noted, distantly, the way you note a typo in someone else's document. The shaft was dark and the cable had been cut and coiled long ago, but the air coming up out of it was warm the way a hand is warm, and it moved. Not wind. There was no wind down a dead shaft. It moved in a slow rhythm, four beats out, four beats in, and Ling stood there with her coffee getting cold and thought, that is a waltz. That is absolutely a rhythm. Why do I know that?

"You feel it too, huh?"

She jumped. Vinnie had come up quiet behind her, towel over his shoulder.

"I feel something. What is it, a furnace vent?"

"No vent. Everybody says vent. There's nothing under there but the pit and forty feet of dark." He leaned on the chain, careful not to touch it, Ling noticed. "It's been warm since before I moved in. And it likes music. That's the weird part. Some nights I practice late and the air gets, I don't know, interested. Like it's counting along."

"Counting."

"Hey, I know how it sounds. Off-season, alone in a plow depot, man talks to the elevator shaft." He laughed, but he was watching her face, not laughing at all. "You felt the beat though. I saw you stop."

"I felt a beat," Ling admitted. "Which is insane, because I'm a graphic designer, I make soap labels, I don't feel beats in empty shafts."

"Soap labels. Okay, that's a real job, my cousin does that." He checked his phone. "You've got like forty minutes till your call. Want to see something?"

"Is it the scary shaft?"

"It's the shaft. Come on, you can hold the chain, I'll show you where it's warmest."

Ling looked at her laptop, at the little wheel that would be spinning soon enough anyway, and at the dark square in the floor breathing its slow four-count. She was twenty-three, she had rented a room in a ghost town to escape her own quiet apartment, and the last sane thing she'd done was pay for the rental.

"Show me," she said.

She followed him around the pallets and he put one hand flat on the stone lip of the shaft, like a man testing a radiator. "Feel that? Warmest right here, at the corner. I figured it was some old boiler line for years. Then I stuck a thermometer down there on a string."

"And?"

"And it read sixty-eight degrees at forty feet. In February. In an unheated shaft." He grinned at her. "You tell me."

"You're messing with me."

"I wrote it down. February fourteenth, sixty-eight degrees, and the air was doing that thing, out and in, out and in." He pulled the string back up and shook his head. "Anyway. Wifi. You've got a call."

The call went fine, more or less. The hotspot dropped twice and the client wanted her third revision of a soap label that already looked like every other soap label, and Ling said sure, absolutely, no problem, and smiled at a screen the whole time. When she packed up, Vinnie was stretching at the barre, and she stood at the door longer than she needed to.

"Thanks for the internet. Seriously. You saved a client and possibly my whole month."

"Anytime. Literally, anytime, I'm the only guy in Port Blossom from October to May." He waved the towel at her. "Tell Jeffery his antenna still looks terrible."

She walked back up Larkspur with her coat pulled tight and the wind shoving her sideways, and Jeffery was on the porch like he hadn't moved since morning, canvas coat, hands around a thermos.

"Get your signal?"

"Got it. He's a nice guy. Weird building though."

"Oh, that building." Jeffery laughed, a dry smoker's laugh even though she'd never seen him smoke. "I hauled freight through forty states, honey, and that building is the only place I ever felt like the floor was listening." He unscrewed the thermos cap. "That elevator shaft especially. Been wrong since long before Vinnie took the lease. Old man Delfino, who lived in two before me, he wouldn't take his trash past the corner. Said the shaft breathed on him."

"Breathed on him."

"That's what he said. Four beats out, four beats in. I counted it myself one night when the power was down. Sure enough." He sipped. "Vinnie thinks we're all crazy."

"Vinnie said he put a thermometer down it."

"See, that's the trouble with Vinnie. He'll take a measurement, and then he'll dance at the thing, like that's better." Jeffery shook his head, but he wasn't scared, Ling noticed. He was lonely and the shaft was at least a topic. "You get any funny dreams tonight, you come knock on my door. Number one. I'm up anyhow, my back thinks it's still in a sleeper cab."

She did get a funny dream, dozing off early that evening, or something near a dream. She was on the studio floor, and the floor was warm, and someone was holding her right hand very seriously, the way you hold a hand when the hand is the whole point. She woke at eleven at night with her phone dead and the outage still going, and the unit silent except for the baseboard heat ticking. Fifteen days since Eden left, she thought. Fifteen days of nobody's dishes but hers.

The rental had a coffee maker and no coffee, so she put her coat over her pajamas and went out into the cold, and her feet, again, made the decision. Down Larkspur, past the shuttered ice cream place, past the bait shop with the hand-lettered CLOSED FOR SEASON sign, to the big gray building at the back end where one window glowed yellow.

Vinnie opened the door before she knocked twice. "Jeffery's antenna guy said the whole grid's down till Friday."

"I know, I heard it on the porch, from Jeffery, who also told me the shaft breathes on people."

"Oh, Delfino's old story. Come in, it's freezing." He stood back. "You want coffee, or you want to admit why you're really here?"

"Is there a third option where I pretend I came for coffee?"

"That's the first option, it just comes with coffee."

***

The studio at night was different. The work lights were off and he'd turned on two clip lamps, so the mirrors held soft orange copies of the room, and the floor, the big sanded planks he must have laid himself, went on forever in the dark. Ling sat on the folding chair with her coffee and felt the warmth from the corner reach her like a hand on her shoulder blade.

"So here's my thing," she said. "I haven't danced since a wedding in twenty-one. I'm bad at it. I'm a person who makes soap labels and eats dinner standing up."

"Perfect. Nobody in tango ever started good." He rolled his sleeves higher, which she noticed, and then noticed herself noticing. "Walk with me. That's it, that's ninety percent. Tango is walking with opinions."

"Opinions."

"Confident opinions. You walk, you pause, you decide you meant to pause. Watch." He walked four steps, sharp, then stopped on the fifth as if the floor owed him money. "See? Now you."

She walked and stopped and felt like a flamingo and he laughed, not mean, and said do it again, and she did it again, and the fourth time the stop didn't feel like falling. The coffee went cold on the chair. The clip lamps buzzed. And somewhere in there, maybe the tenth pass, the air from the corner changed.

She felt it before she heard it. The warm current on her back picked up, quickened, the same count but faster, matching her steps, and then under it, low, like a truck idling three streets over, came a hum.

"Vinnie."

"I hear it." He wasn't smiling. "It doesn't usually do that till after midnight. Okay. Okay. It's fine, it's friendly, probably."

"Probably is carrying a lot of weight there."

He looked at her. She looked at him. And then, because what else do you do when a