Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  Meet me in Pittsburgh.

  Livy woke early and glanced automatically at her alarm clock. Its face was still blank, a rectangle of black overlaid with a faint redness. She guessed it was six. She had slept the remainder of the night in the same position, on her side with her face close to the cool plaster, and it took a minute of careful thought to remember what had happened. She felt around cautiously in her mind, staring hard at a drip in the paint on the wall.

  The house was quiet and she needed to be out of it before her parents got up. They might not realize for a few hours that she wasn’t in her room. She pulled her clothes on and hurried out the kitchen door, into the blue shade of a trellis of morning glories. The ground was damp. It had rained overnight. She walked around the corner of the house and looked out at the garage.

  It was a gray pine building with a red tin roof, a storage place for furniture and garden tools, an old motorcycle that her father was perpetually looking to sell, several neglected bicycles, and a few stacks of lumber that had been left to season. They didn’t keep the car in it; there was no room. As a child she had sometimes hidden in the loft and pretended it was her own house. Her parents were neighbors with whom she shared a driveway. When she went in to eat lunch, she was visiting. She was always doing this as a child, laying claim to parts of the house and yard. She loved things that were small and self-contained: dollhouses, crawl spaces. She loved to lock doors.

  The garage looked as it always did. Honeysuckle vines choked the privet beside it. She had no idea what to do, but being alone with what she knew was intolerable. She turned and began to walk the route to Nelson’s house.

  It was very quiet in Lomath that morning; she saw no human movement all the way down Prospect Road. The sulfurous smell of burning plastic came from the far side of the creek. Ron Cash was up early, then, burning his trash.

  She knocked on the Telas’ front door and waited. Dry leaves had started to blow down from the trees. They were silted along the edge of the narrow concrete porch, which was otherwise clean; no one ever sat on it. There were no chairs. Mrs. Tela had asked Livy once about all the “things” in the Marko yard—lawn furniture, garden tools—out there for “anybody to take.” Livy hadn’t been sure at the time whether this was actually a rebuke about neatness or if it was just honest concern from a person who believed thieves were everywhere, a tide of thieves that would sweep away all loose objects.

  There was an indistinct thud from behind the door and Livy heard Mrs. Tela’s sharp voice say, “I said do not.” There was another thumping noise and a quickly inhaled breath, and then the door jerked open and there was Nelson, off-balance, his glasses crooked, his mother a shadow in pajamas behind him.

  “Listen to me!” she cried.

  “It’s just Livy,” Nelson said. He was out of breath.

  “You don’t listen to me!” his mother said. She was crying. She moved right, trying to get past him: one long hand flashed out, reaching for the door. Nelson took hold of Livy’s wrist and pulled her over the threshold. She stumbled into the room, not expecting this, her feet going out from under her. He slammed the door.

  “You don’t listen!” Mrs. Tela said. “It could be anybody out there!”

  Nelson’s sister Janine was sitting up on the sofa, where she had clearly slept: she was covered with a pink sheet, and a large pillow had slipped onto the floor. She stared at the three of them, her eyes half-closed.

  “Stop it, Mom,” she said.

  Mrs. Tela looked at her, her face pink and wet, and then turned and disappeared into the dark hallway.

  “So, we won’t see her until lunch,” Janine said. She lay back down.

  Nelson watched his mother go down the hallway, then turned on his heel. “Hi,” he said to Livy. He was standing with his hands on his hips, his elbows sticking out, catching his breath. “She chased me,” he said.

  “She was yanking on his shirt,” Janine said from the sofa, her voice muffled. She was letting herself sink into the gap between the cushions and the back of the couch, her eyes closed, the bony backs of her wrists somewhere around her face.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Livy said.

  “She doesn’t want us to open the door.”

  Livy felt a sense of doom that was localized very precisely in the pit of her stomach. It was cold, concave. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Do you have cereal?”

  They went into the kitchen.

  “My parents know we went to the pharmacy,” Livy said. “I guess the word got out. Clarence told my dad.”

  “Fuck. Do they know about Mark?”

  “No.”

  He rubbed his face, then took a long breath. “Well, we can’t do anything. They’ll find out or they won’t.” He turned away, rummaging for something to feed her. There was a box of something twig-like on a high shelf and a carton of soy milk—Janine was lactose-intolerant. There was a little yellow radio on the counter, encased in rubber, and he switched it on as he went by. Faint music, crackling and warm.

  “Batteries?” Livy said.

  “I found it in a closet yesterday.”

  “You’re not listening to the news?”

  “I got tired of it. They don’t even know what country he’s from. And the charges are secret.”

  “So what are you listening to? Zip 100?”

  “Power 96. It’s a crappy receiver, I can’t get that much.”

  She listened to the music for a while. It was a song she disliked, but she recognized it without disappointment. She hadn’t heard music in days—all car radios were tuned to the news, all the time. The girl singer sang about oceans of pain. It was so weird, Livy thought, that this rhyming description of vacillation over suicide had been set to a cheerful sing-along beat and was available on the radio for people in their cars. She felt that her normal life was an island retreating in the wake of a boat.

  “Your cereal’s getting mushy,” Nelson said. “And my mom will completely lose her shit if she sees I gave you soy milk. You should eat it fast.”

  “Thanks.”

  He glanced at her from where he was standing in the doorway, keeping watch down the hall. “You’re welcome.”

  “Do you think he’s here?” She realized she had not asked him this yet. It had seemed, in a strange way, beside the point; they had enough to handle with the things they knew for sure. Now the question was a roundabout way of saying Guess what? The big surprises were always hard to spring.

  “Who?” Nelson said.

  “The guy they want.”

  “Not really. Why would he be?”

  “Maybe it’s a good place to hide?” she said.

  “Evidently not, right?”

  “Ha.” She drew her spoon across the bottom of the ceramic bowl, listened to the high tone it made. “But you could see how a person might think it would be.”

  “Eat your cereal, seriously.”

  She lowered her head over the bowl. She didn’t know what her strategy was. She wanted him to know, but the house made her doubt herself. It was both oppressive and flimsy, a drywall-and-fiberglass box on the open hillside with all the shades down. And Mrs. Tela’s fear pervaded it like a gas. She had been right to try to block the door.

  Livy looked at Nelson again, his back to her while he kept an eye on his mother’s bedroom door. It struck her all at once that for days people had been speculating about whether the wanted person was in Lomath and who was helping him if he was, and it was her. Now when they talked in the store about this hypothetical betrayer, they were talking about her.

  “Why’d you give me the milk, anyway?” she said.

  He looked over his shoulder. “You said you were hungry.”

  The radio muttered the forecast: hot, hot, hot.

  “Thanks,” she said again.

  She should have kept him out of the garage somehow. And why had he picked her? She couldn’t think how to tell someone what had happened, and once she had given some of her trouble to Nelson she would not be able to ge
t it back. He would be stuck there with her.

  “Have you seen Mark?” Nelson said. He lowered his voice so Janine wouldn’t hear.

  “I did yesterday. He seemed okay.” He actually seemed like an alien, a baffled organism blinking and shifting quietly in their midst. She rubbed her forehead. Was Mark afraid? The thought of causing anyone real fear was unbearable. “He was just hanging out, smoking on the porch roof. Didn’t seem to think anyone would have noticed he was gone.”

  “Dominic and Brian are probably bored with the whole thing by now,” Nelson said. “Maybe they’ll just let him go.”

  “What’ll happen then, though?” She imagined him walking away from the Spellar house, toward the line of barricades on Prospect Road. What would he say when he got there? How long would it take the police to come back, and who would they go looking for first?

  “I don’t know,” Nelson said. “But the longer it goes on, the worse it’s going to be.”

  “Right.” She saw a chance to do something productive, to diminish slightly the pile of mistakes that had been mounting for the past two days. She could be the one to argue Dominic into ending this idiotic venture. She would talk sense into him. It hadn’t worked yesterday, but today she would be more aggressive. “I’ll go talk to him,” she said, sitting up a little straighter.

  “Okay.” Nelson glanced over his shoulder at the dark hallway. “You want me to come with you? I could try to sneak out.”

  “No, that’s okay.” She drained the bowl and put it in the sink. “I’ll see you later.” She squeezed his arm reassuringly as she went by.

  Livy walked back down the hill and skirted the intersection. She wondered if her parents were looking for her. They might assume for a while yet that she was staying sullenly in bed. Collier Road was all in shade. She noticed in the strengthening morning light that the shirt she was wearing, pulled carelessly from a pile on her floor, had a chain of pink stains across the front of it. She sucked her teeth in irritation at herself.

  She let herself into the unlocked Spellar house, half-heartedly composing innocent explanations in case Lena might appear. Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t want to wake anybody up. It was a reflex to cringe and fawn with adults; her parents had always been so casual with her that she overcompensated with other people’s, fumbling for polite phrases like a traveler in a foreign country, sometimes applying a Mr. or Mrs. She knocked on Dominic’s door at the top of the stairs.

  There was a long silence. She put her mouth close to the doorframe and hissed through it. “Dominic!”

  There was a rustling noise and the door opened. She stepped back without thinking; Dominic’s size sometimes startled her. He was wearing basketball shorts.

  “Sorry, you were sleeping,” she said.

  “No,” he said. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he looked alert, almost painfully so. There was a sleeping bag on the floor, pushed half off a mat. Mark was asleep in the bed.

  “You gave him the bed?” Livy said.

  “Yeah . . .” He looked confused, as if she had caught him out. “He’s, like, a guest.”

  “Is he still wearing the cuffs?”

  “I took them off. They were pinching.”

  Mark suddenly turned on his side and spoke a few low, soft sentences in gibberish.

  “I gave him some pills,” Dominic said.

  “What? What pills?”

  “Klonopin, I think.”

  “What? Jesus, Dom!”

  “He was just sitting with his back to the wall and staring. It was bothering the shit out of me. So I had these pills and I asked him if he wanted some and he said yeah. He’s been sleeping since like eight last night.” He ran his hand over his hair. “He smoked all my fucking cigarettes.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine.”

  She walked around the bed and leaned over him. Her hair swung down over her shoulders and she held it back with both hands. She was very close to his face but wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Breathing? She’d just heard him speak. His skin was pale, a little bluish, but he’d looked that way yesterday. There was a bit of white crust like toothpaste in the corners of his mouth. His brow wrinkled slightly in his sleep, as if he’d perceived her breathy heat. She straightened and turned away.

  “He’s fine,” Dominic said again. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to check up on things. Over here.” She looked at him. “People know we went. I guess you know that.”

  “Yeah, I told my mom. I couldn’t really give her the medicine otherwise.”

  “But you didn’t tell them we stole it.”

  “No, I didn’t tell them we stole it.”

  Maybe he was the person to tell about the man in the garage. He had shuffled over to his dresser and she watched him push things around in the second drawer. He had a broad, square back, freckled like hers at the shoulders, a half-moon of sunburn on the neck. It almost felt like it wouldn’t matter if she told him—he was in worse trouble himself. But that was a bad idea. Dominic would keep things together only as long as it was easier than letting them fall apart. She watched him shrug himself into a T-shirt, cautious with his bulk, like a van backing into a parking space.

  “The state cops are leaving,” he said, heaving the drawer shut. “It’s all federal now, and Maronne PD.”

  “Who said?”

  “My mom. She was out last night talking to people.”

  “Is that better or worse?”

  He looked over his shoulder at her and chuckled.

  “Does that mean you know, or you don’t know?” she said, annoyed.

  “It means it’s a stupid question, I don’t know.” He leaned against the dresser. “You’re scared. So is Brian. He keeps coming over and checking up, too.”

  “The cops are going to find out,” Livy said. “You should just let him go.” She tried to catch his eyes, to communicate how seriously she meant it, but he evaded her easily.

  “I’ll let him go.” He looked at Mark, rubbing his lower lip. “At the right time.”

  Livy laughed. “When is that going to be?”

  “When nobody’s looking. When everybody’s running around losing their shit. Then I’ll let him go and nobody will notice.”

  “What are you talking about?” Livy said. He just stood there, expecting terrible things to happen. She wanted to shove him. “This is your fault, Dom,” she said. “You are more fucked than the rest of us. He’s in your house and it was your gun and your idea. You should let him go now.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t keep him either!”

  “If this is just my problem, then get the fuck out, why don’t you?”

  She stepped back, her feet shuffling in the carpet. “You’re making it—”

  “Get the fuck out, Livy.” He waved at the door behind her. She stared at him, trying to think of something more to say, but he rolled his eyes and turned his back. She left, closing the door with a click behind her.

  A cloud of failure settled over her. She hesitated when she reached the bright front yard, one hand on the latch of the decorative gate, and then edged around the side yard and into the back. The backyard was shaded by tall, ragged walnut trees. She walked down to the water, passing the gazing ball that she liked, and stood still on the muddy bank, listening hard in all directions. A pit bull in the neighbor’s yard stood up with a gentle rattle of chain and came close to the fence, watching Livy with its head down, feet planted, tail wagging slightly. Why is no one in the world afraid of me? Livy thought. Even a dog on a chain doesn’t get its back up. Strange children were always coming up to her and offering their laces for her to tie. She thought that this was why the man had picked her: she looked soft. And he’d been right. It was hard for her to remember now why she hadn’t yelled when he handed her his things, why she hadn’t kept banging on the door until her parents woke up. She was losing the logic of it.

  She waded across the creek, swinging her
hands out in stiff arcs to balance the slog. The far side was covered in a crackle of leaves. She climbed up the steep bank to the road, dirt cascading into her shoes, and stopped in the lee of the bridge wall.

  She could see the police at the turn in the road, and it looked like Dominic and his mother were right: the van was a different color now, dark blue instead of white, and there was another one idling behind it, almost out of sight behind the trailing branches of a lightning-struck tree. More federal people. There was a buzzing in the air. She tried for a while to fix on it, but found that it faded when she tried hardest to hear: a hum of radios, she guessed, coming to her down a favorable corridor of air.

  This was how she could fix the problem of the man in the garage: she could climb out from behind the wall and walk down to where the police were. There were three of them standing around the van, and they looked different today: two were in ordinary clothes, polo shirts and jeans, and the other wore a tan uniform, the shirt unbuttoned, a white undershirt beneath. She could tell them, and they would come get the man, and the whole problem would be over for all of them, maybe.

  Or the police would take an interest in her, they would walk through her yard and question her parents and friends, and they would find Mark.

  She sat down in the leaves. She had a sudden sense of the aloneness of her body, her flesh containing itself: she extended no farther than her shoes in one direction, no farther than her hair in the other. She pressed her shoulders and the back of her head against the wall and braced her arms across her knees. She closed her eyes, trying to think.

  After a while hunger drove her to cross the creek again and walk up to the store. The door was propped open.

  “You look sick,” Jocelyn said. “Are you sick?”

  Jocelyn looked sick herself; her hands were flat on the counter, as if she needed the help to stay on her feet, and her hair was stuck to pale temples.

  “I’m okay,” Livy said.

  “Ron’s talking about doing another house-to-house search,” Jocelyn said. “We could do it better than they can. They’re working from maps, have you seen that? I saw them standing right in front here yesterday”—she pointed at the door—“looking at a map. I wanted to tell them, you can see most of it from where you’re standing, you don’t need a map.”