The sound of heavy furniture scraping across the floor came to them through the screened front door. Livy’s mother winced, which the policewoman noticed. “Most places, they put everything back the way they found it,” she said.
“You really can’t tell us anything about this person?” her father said.
“There are just a lot of security concerns,” the young woman said, pressing her lips together.
Nelson knocked on the Markos’ kitchen door softly, with two knuckles. Livy was standing at the stove, making hot chocolate. It was inappropriate for the season but the stove was the only appliance in the house that worked the same with or without electricity, and it was soothing to use it. The kitchen had been left mostly undisturbed in the search; some things had been pulled out of closets upstairs, and the beer cases and sacks of lime in the basement had been moved away from the walls, but that was all.
“Your mom let you out?” Livy said, as Nelson maneuvered around the counter and sat at the table. Livy was wearing a pair of cotton shorts that were too small to be seen in outside the house, and she would have been self-conscious about them if not for the darkness of the candlelit kitchen. They revealed the white of her upper thighs where normal shorts covered them, the faint blue veins, the dark sideways hairs that she didn’t bother to go after with a razor.
“She’s been asleep since eight,” Nelson said.
Livy glanced up at the battery-operated clock on the wall. It was eleven thirty. Her own parents had gone to sleep at ten, looking run-down, hardly saying good night.
“She’s been in bed since this afternoon.” He picked up the saltshaker, rolled it back and forth along its edge on the surface of the table.
“Is she acting weird?” Livy said, turning to watch him answer. Livy had once seen Nelson’s mother throw a candlestick through a picture window. “Acting weird” was a code phrase they had used for years to refer to his mother’s problem: the fact that she sometimes wouldn’t get out of bed for days and seemed both blind and deaf to people who came into her bedroom to try to make her eat, and that when pressed, in that state, she could inflict astonishing violence on the inside of the house. She broke plates and put holes in the drywall. She had knocked Nelson down a few times.
“Yeah, she’s getting weird,” Nelson said. He was picking at the holes in the top of the saltshaker with his thumbnail.
“Okay,” Livy said. “We can play checkers.”
Livy’s room was a loft, open to the kitchen below on one side. The Marko house was tall and narrow and regular as a cake, three small stories stacked on top of each other, built into the side of the hill so it had front doors on two different levels. There were few interior doors, and a quiet knock on the kitchen door was plainly audible in Livy’s room, though it would not carry into the master bedroom where her parents slept. Their room was on the ground floor, half underground, and had a heavy door. Nelson had been coming and going from the Marko house at night for years without disturbing her parents.
When they were thirteen and fourteen Nelson would tell Livy at school that his mother was acting weird, and Livy would understand that she should take the cordless phone with her when she went to bed in case he called in the middle of the night to come over. Livy would bring the cushions from the living room couch up to her room and arrange them on the floor for him to sleep on. He was electrified with tension and fatigue when he appeared at those times, so much so that he would whisper jokes the whole time, sexual jokes, which was not normal for him—filling the late-night silence with innuendoes about sharing a room, treating the whole thing as a ruse by her to get him alone, or the other way around. Livy had been surprised the first time by this bewildering edifice of just-kidding, but she had learned that he wouldn’t refer to it later and everything would be back to normal the next day. So she played along, insinuating back at him. She enjoyed those times, even though they were bad times. They were bubbles of intimacy that appeared and then vanished and left everything just as it had been before. He would sleep a few hours and then get up before dawn to put the cushions back and slip away to his own house. Livy’s parents never knew.
Around the time they turned fifteen, he stopped making late-night rescue calls. Livy suspected that he had learned to be embarrassed.
She finished the hot chocolate and made a cup for him too, and they went looking for the checkers set. It was missing a third of its pieces, so they found a pack of cards instead and played by candlelight in the middle of Livy’s bedroom floor. Through the open windows they could hear occasional sirens over the hills. There was a fire station in Parna that had a government-grade siren, an enormous aluminum concavity under a little shingled belfry roof, and it went off frequently in the summer. It meant there was a fire that needed extra trucks in one of the neighboring townships, and despite its hysterical pitch it frightened neither of them.
“Aces low,” Livy said.
“You didn’t say that before.”
“Come on.” She made a give-me-a-break gesture, palms up.
“You didn’t,” he said, laughing. “You are such a cheater. This is why I don’t trust your line calls.”
“You can’t see my line calls.” They sometimes played badminton on the sandy lot in front of the mill when they got tired of watching pirated movies in the dark, and he always took off his glasses to play, which led to a lot of disputes about what was out of bounds. The sand and the net were there because the carpenters who owned the mill met once a week to play volleyball and drink beer on the mosquito-livened lawn. They had even set up lights on tall rusted poles so they could play after dark. When she was little, Livy and the other carpenters’ kids would play a parallel game on those evenings, a literal shadow game, in which each child picked an adult shadow and strived to stay in it while it moved up and down the court.
“Cheating a blind man at badminton,” Nelson said, shaking his head.
Livy laughed. “You could always keep your glasses on.” She put down a nine of hearts, and Nelson reconsidered his hand. “Doesn’t this feel like camping?” she said, watching him stare at the four cards he held. “That’s the only time I do boring things like this. Cards, for God’s sake.” She thought boredom was definitely the way to go, if they were going to be discussing their feelings. There was a certain bravado to it.
“Camping or a long car trip,” Nelson said. “Or a train ride. Or the guy in the bubble over Times Square for a week.” He scratched his chin. “Those Russian soldiers who were trapped in the submarine.”
“They all died, Nelson, it’s not quite like that.”
“How long do you think it’ll be?” he said. He was studying his cards.
“I don’t know,” Livy said.
“Let’s do bets, though.” He glanced up. His glasses were sliding down his nose, and he pushed them up. “Over-under.”
“Hmm.” She studied the ceiling. “Tomorrow morning. Before noon.”
He nodded, looking at his cards again. “That’s optimistic.”
“Well, they’ve already searched most of the houses and they haven’t found anybody. So they have to go soon, right?”
“But maybe it’s the opposite,” he said. “They haven’t found him, so they can’t leave.”
She thought about that. “So you want to take afternoon.”
“Yeah. They leave before noon, you win. They leave after noon, I win.”
“So if things are okay, then I win, and if everything is terrible, then you win,” Livy said.
Nelson laughed. “I guess that’s my system, yeah.”
“It’s not going to take that long,” Livy said, trying briefly to push her voice into a tone that was serious and reassuring. She was thinking of his mother again. “It’ll be all right.”
“Hm.” He laid down a jack of diamonds. It was an indifferent play. The sirens stopped, started, stopped again.
At one o’clock they exhausted the deck and he stood up to go. He patted his pockets absently, making sure he had his keys
; delaying, shifting his weight. He went over to the skylight and looked out, as if he would be able to assess the circumstances at his own house from there.
“You don’t have to go,” Livy said.
He turned quickly and she regretted it for an instant, as if she’d accidentally used an obscenity in a foreign language. “I don’t mean it in a weird way,” she said, but that made it worse. There was a glare on his glasses from the candle, and she couldn’t tell if he was staring at her or not. “You know what I mean. You used to.”
“I used to be more scared,” he said.
“You’re not scared now?”
He rubbed his nose and glanced out the skylight again. “I used to be smaller,” he said.
She was appalled. “You don’t have to go.”
“Thanks,” he said. He sounded sincere.
“It’s fine if you do,” Livy said. “But you don’t have to.”
He brushed his fingers over the top of her head, just barely disturbing her hair, and she started but did not move back. “Thanks,” he said again.
She watched him go down the stairs, and heard the kitchen door open and close; it would lock automatically behind him. She thought about the phones being down; he couldn’t call. She hoped everything was quiet when he got home.
She was sitting opposite a mirror that leaned against the wall, and when she glanced at it she saw that her shirt had come down in front while she was hunched on the floor, and the edge of her bra was visible. It occurred to her that Nelson had been sitting right in front of the mirror, and it was likely that she had been chatting with him and playing cards while giving him a clear view down the front of her shirt. That was embarrassing. She pulled the shirt back up, but it was old and had been washed too many times and didn’t lie flat against her skin anyway. She edged up to the mirror on her knees and stared herself in the eyes, recalling how easy it had been to give herself vertigo that way when she was a child. She looked all right. She looked kind of nice in the candlelight.
Nelson had had a nervous, humorless girlfriend when he was fifteen, an eleventh grader with her own car who’d had sex with him in it after stopping at his house on her way home from a field hockey meet. She wasn’t nice to him, and she wouldn’t let him talk to Livy. They’d broken up after three months. Livy was still a virgin. She had pressed Nelson for sexual details, but he’d turned red and said nothing.
“So everything, then,” she had said.
He was pink all the way to the roots of his hair. “Not—no. Not everything.”
“But you did—”
“Yeah. But that’s, you know. Not everything.”
She was annoyed that he wouldn’t tell her more, but she could also see that he was being decent. She felt a little left out.
“You’d tell me if I was a boy,” she said.
“No, I wouldn’t,” he said.
She abandoned the mirror and went to bed without brushing her teeth. She was too keyed up to fall asleep. She was listening for people moving in the dark, the police or the man they were looking for, or anything else. How did she not listen every night? How was it that a person could feel so safe, so much of the time?
Revaz was settling in for an uncomfortable night. The woods were full of mosquitoes, and they seemed even thicker in the deer blind, attracted by the heat it trapped, maybe, or the old sour smells of the wood. He had come to the conclusion that animals had lived in the blind since its last human use. That would explain the rancid, biological liveliness of it. He was a city dweller and had never had romantic ideas about nature. He had not slept in the open since he was a boy.
He had been expecting his old friend Davit’s cousin that day, the one who drove a truck for a living. That was the plan: after flying into Philadelphia and taking the commuter train out to Lomath, he would meet Davit’s cousin on the highway over the hill. Then they would drive west. He was not sure how far he would go with the cousin; he was simply anxious to get far away from the airport. On the highways a person could disappear. He understood that in this spectacular run of favors he had used up his friendship with Davit, burned it out like a candle.
Just after dawn that morning he had walked down out of the woods to the bleached and neglected-looking road that ran along the creek, and after going the wrong way for ten minutes he had made it to Prospect Road, intending to climb up to the rendezvous point on the highway that Davit had marked for him on the map. He saw the police cruiser at Somersburg Road before the policeman in it saw him, and was able to climb over the guardrail and retreat undetected. This was good luck, although it had crossed his mind, for a few brief minutes while he tried to catch his breath on a rock beside the creek, that he might have been spared arrest only to die of a heart attack. He was already faint from hunger, and the shock of seeing the police car made his heart race horribly. The rush of adrenaline made him sweat, too: his shirt, creased and dirty from sleeping on benches and train platforms and finally in the deer blind, was now marked with dark circles under both arms and a damp plume down the back.
He had brought an empty plastic water bottle with him, and he had the presence of mind to fill it in the creek before he headed back. The thing was that the less you had, the harder it was to get anything. The light-headedness of hunger made this seem very profound. He had nothing. After paying off the cousin through Davit and buying his plane ticket, he had $232 in cash left in the world. He was afraid to try buying something to eat. And buy it where? He had a cell phone, a pay-as-you-go that he’d bought in Philadelphia before he got on the train so that he could call the cousin—a number that he had committed to memory, not wanting it to be found on him in case he was arrested—but if the police were here then they might be monitoring cell phone calls coming out of the area. And sometimes phones had GPS trackers in them, didn’t they? He took the phone out of his pocket and stared at it for several minutes, trying to remember how the chips worked from spy movies he’d seen on television. Finally he risked a single text message, not identifying himself by name, hoping that the cousin would deduce who he was from the language: Delayed, try tomorrow. Then he took the battery out of the phone and put both in his pocket.
Back in the deer blind, his heart beating at close to normal pace again, it occurred to him that the police car might have nothing to do with him. It was possible. He nodded to himself, crouched on the platform a mere six feet off the ground. Possible, but a useless possibility, too risky to act on. He drank the water, and his headache receded a little. He worried about parasites. There might be cows shitting in the stream, for all he knew. He had seen some on the hillside at the far end of the valley.
He had no idea what to do. He was able to fall asleep for a while, though the sun was high and it was hot in the blind. Hunger woke him close to noon, and he climbed down out of the tree and took a piss in a clump of bushes a few feet away—some decorum, even if he was alone. A baby’s changing table stuck out of a blackberry bush nearby, its wood panels warped and delaminated from exposure.
He chewed experimentally on some grass in an especially succulent-looking clump, and was shocked to discover that it tasted like onions. It made his mouth burn but it was comforting to have the scent on his breath—it was homey and he thought of dumplings. It tempered, also, the bitter empty-stomach taste of his saliva. He investigated the blackberry bush, but it was well past the season. The crevices in the bedrock that reared up out of the top of the ridge were filled with rotting walnuts, golfball–sized green globes that flaked to black, but he had no idea if they would make him sick if he ate them raw. From the top of the bedrock he could catch glimpses of a long view through the trees: the farm at the top of the valley, the sweep of the ridge opposite, the white house with the garden directly below him.
There was a person sitting on the chimney of the white house. A woman or girl, probably, with long hair. She was crouched there like a gargoyle, absorbed.
He watched her for a little while, discerning the open hatch in the roof that she had app
arently come through. He was unsettled by the sight of her in a way he couldn’t name.
Then he saw the police on the road below him. One was in uniform and the rest were not, but it was clear they were police: two were talking into radios. They ambled from the road toward a house at the bottom of the same slope he perched on, a house mostly hidden from him by the trees. He ran for the safety of the deer blind. He felt his leg scrape on something as he climbed the boards nailed to the trunk of the tree. He collapsed against the front wall of the blind and checked his leg: he’d torn his cuff, and he was bleeding a little from a spot just beside his Achilles tendon. He must have gotten caught on a nail. He untucked his shirt and wiped his sweating forehead with the tail. He understood now why he’d been disturbed at the sight of the girl on the chimney: she had been keeping vigil, and it was the police she was watching for. What were these people thinking, as the police hemmed them in? It made him dizzy to imagine it. What a great distance there was between them and himself, and yet here they all were.
The next morning Livy got out of the house with the excuse of fetching bread from the store. They were down to a single curving heel-end. It was cloudy that morning, the birds hushed. The OPEN flag hung limply by the door, half covering the Dempsey Market sign. Livy was relieved to see it. She had been thinking that Jocelyn might stay closed, given the lockdown, and retreat to her apartment upstairs.
Years ago, when Livy was small, it was Noreen who owned and operated the store. The neighborhood children lived their summer hours in an orbit between the creek and the store, and Noreen was Aunt Noreen to most of them. It was delightful to children to be able to walk to a place of business and make purchases. They fetched milk and eggs for their mothers, and spent their allowances on penny candy and ice cream bars. When Noreen felt she was too old, she sold it to Jocelyn, who kept it much the same—the same freezer cases, pinball machine, occasional yard-sale items along the windowsills—but filled it with a nervous energy that Noreen had never had. Jocelyn talked fast and smoked on the steps, and she smiled at the kids a lot in a way that suggested she was afraid they might not like her. Still, her store was the place where people went when they wanted to get out of the house for a minute. They went barefoot, sometimes, or in bathrobes.
Relief Map Page 5