Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  Livy’s face was red and damp. Heat radiated from her armpits. How could her body be so obvious? “Ron wants to search the houses?”

  “Yes he does.” Jocelyn leaned against the wall. Her eyes narrowed when she drew on her cigarette; Livy could see some deep satisfaction in her face that could have been either the cigarette or the prospect of action. Jocelyn tilted her head from side to side, slowly, as if trying to loosen her muscles, and placed her hand on the back of her neck. “Get this over with, you know.”

  “Right,” Livy said. Her sweating and blushing were becoming indiscreet. She turned abruptly and walked out, stumbling on the steps outside. The weeds at the side of the road scratched at her legs, left burrs in her jeans. She fell into a breathless, knock-kneed run down the slope of Collier Road, a kind of controlled fall, her hands paddling the air. She was alone in the bright morning. The vast, still roof of the Sportsmen’s Club glittered in the sun. She was too hot. She ran for the water.

  There was a catwalk along the Black Rock Creek at the foot of the club wall. She turned onto it and ran to the end. Her legs were hot, and cold, and twitching. She pulled off her shoes, climbed over the iron railing, and dropped into the water. Her knees buckled and she sat down hard on the stones and fell back, drawing in a breath. She let the water drag her down, fill her clothes, and lift her up again. When she raised her head a squirrel was watching her from the top of the wall.

  She kept still and the fish came almost immediately. She felt them slipping past her feet. A mouth bumped gently, quizzically, against her wrist. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t tell the police. She couldn’t stomach it; he looked so afraid, and she didn’t trust any of them, the Maronne Police Department or the FBI or the CIA, all the people Ron Cash said were there. She couldn’t tell her parents because they, being adults, would tell the police. And she couldn’t leave him there, pretend she was unaware of him, and hope he would leave, because Ron would be coming with a search party.

  Her mind cascaded with other things she couldn’t do. This was her strong suit. She was good at seeing pitfalls. But then, of course, she went and did things anyway. Her fingers dug between the stones. She held herself in place.

  She stood in the creek just behind her parents’ garden, listening hard, in case her father or mother was nearby. She had waded up through the shallow rocky stretches of the Black Rock so she might reach the garage unobserved.

  The back of the garage provoked her with its stillness, its largeness and grayness. Sometimes in life, she thought. And, you know, you just have to— She didn’t finish the thought. Her inner voice chattered in a fitful, ill-tempered shorthand. A yellow cat, matted and plodding, appeared on the surging sycamore roots at the top of the bank. He belonged to one of the neighbors up the road. He glanced at her and then walked away around the trunk of the tree, causing a shiver in the jewelweed as he disappeared.

  There seemed to be no one else around. She climbed the bank on her hands and knees and sat up cautiously at the top. She was half-hidden behind a stack of bricks covered with a tarp. The yard was miraculously empty.

  She darted for the back of the garage and edged around to the door, which was visible from the house. The latch clattered open in her hands and clattered shut behind her. Inside was the familiar creosote smell, the cool scent of damp undisturbed gravel, the spider webs backlit against the windows.

  It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, and in that time she stood in near-total darkness, unable to hear over her own breathing. The room appeared around her by imperceptible degrees. There was the rototiller, the stacks of lumber. The man wasn’t there. She edged to the back of the garage to be sure, peering into the deeper darkness under the loft. There was nothing there but rakes and shovels and coils of hose hung on a nail.

  She felt a wave of relief. Her tight breathing relaxed and she took several deep gasping breaths that came out like guffaws. There was a noise in the loft above her.

  The ladder was there. Ordinarily it leaned against the back wall, but here it was, propped against the edge of the loft. Her breathing ceased again. “Hello?” she said.

  She heard nothing. “Hey,” she said, her voice meandering in pitch like a saw blade bending. “Come down, please.” There was no response. She argued with herself for several minutes at the foot of the ladder, trying to think of an alternative to climbing it; she had to talk to him but the prospect made her nervous. She went up anyway, awkwardly bowlegged, keeping her knees out of the way. He was there, in front of the ladder, an arm’s length away.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He was sitting against an old dresser, a pink-and-white thing with tiny flowers that had been in her room when she was little. His eyebrows were raised behind his round glasses and his hair was still standing up.

  “Hi,” she said again.

  “Hello,” he said. He had to try it twice; the first time it caught in his throat, as if it were the first time he’d spoken that day. It probably was. He glanced at her wet hair. She pushed it back out of her face.

  “You’re still here,” she said.

  His tense, open expression did not change. He shifted his gaze from her left eye to her right, then back again, then stopped.

  “Can you understand me?” she said.

  “No English.”

  “But you understood what I just asked you?”

  “No understand.”

  “You don’t understand?”

  “No English,” he said. He splayed the fingers of one hand in the air, frowning down at it.

  “You have to go,” she said. “People are coming.” Again he looked at each of her eyes in turn, then appeared to control the impulse and returned to a general observation of her face. He was frowning, focusing.

  “They’re coming, you have to go,” she said again. Why repeat it? Why keep talking at all? “Are you hungry?” She put her hand on her stomach, made a face of discomfort, pointed at him. “Hungry?”

  He put his hand on his stomach. “Yes.”

  Her skin prickled. There was something dislocated here, something unfamiliar to her. Then she realized what it was. “Are you scared of me?” she said.

  His expression, again, did not change. She pointed at him, then at her own chest. “Scared? Afraid?” She laughed, a too-loud trill. “Okay.” She rubbed her forehead. That was what it was before, when she let him give her his money and ID for a minute: it was the fear in his face. She was slight and narrow-wristed; people often backed into her in the hallways at school without seeing her, stepped on her feet, knocked into her with elbows, looking over her head. Even skinny Nelson was broader than she was in the shoulders and could, without comment, open stuck doors and lift window sashes she had no effect on. Revaz was trying to read her face. He was looking clearly and intently at her, and it was because she spoke the language and knew the terrain and could ruin him if she wanted.

  “You have to go,” she said again.

  “Go,” he said. He took a cell phone from his pocket, which surprised her. “I go this,” he said, tapping the glowing screen, and she saw a scramble of letters and then Pittsburgh, emerging from the chaos. He underlined the city’s name with his finger. “This.”

  “You need to go to Pittsburgh? That’s hundreds of miles away.”

  “This.” He tapped again.

  “Do you know people there?”

  He leaned back against the dresser.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll help you.” She was trying it out. He didn’t understand her anyway, and couldn’t hold her to it. “There’s a train. You could get the train in Cooverton and take it to Pittsburgh. Where are you from?”

  He shook his head.

  “How did you get here? How long has it been since you ate anything?”

  He unclasped his hands from his knees and sat back against the dresser. He appeared to be drifting away from her, perhaps understanding that she was not really speaking to him anymore.

  “I’m hungry too,” she said. “I can’t
go in my house.” She dug in her pants pocket, holding on to the ladder with her other hand. “I have four dollars,” she said. “But I don’t want to have to talk to Jocelyn.” She felt the inertia of the garage, the heaviness in the air. The two of them were a stone that had rolled to the bottom of a hill. Nothing would shift without an enormous effort on her part, a long push up a slope.

  “Stay here and be quiet,” she said. She put her finger to her lips. “It’s just me.” She squinted at him, as if this would convey her meaning. “But maybe I could tell my friend. Should I tell my friend? You don’t know.”

  A mouse stared at her from beneath the dresser. She saw it just to the right of the man, its perfect black eyes, its perfect composure beside the scalloped wooden leg. Then it was gone.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I have to think. I’ll be back later.”

  This seemed important, this last thing, and impossible to express. How could you mime the future tense? How could you suggest return? She pointed to herself, walked her fingers away in the air, made them pause and consider and come walking back. His face was inscrutable.

  “Nelson,” she said. She was standing outside his bedroom window, having decided not to brave the front door again. “Are you there?”

  There was some rustling, cloth on cloth, and then he appeared in the window.

  “Were you sleeping?” she said.

  He rubbed his eyes. “Just lying in bed.” Liar, she thought. He leaned closer to the screen, squinting at her. “Are you wet?” he said.

  “Yes.” She crossed her arms.

  “Why are you all wet?” He laughed and started to tug at the screen, which squeaked as the flimsy metal pieces scooted over each other. It occurred to Livy that her whole day was animal-like, the way she’d been creeping through backyards and huddling in the water. Like a groundhog or muskrat or mouse. The creek had always been the most direct route from her house to the neighbors’, safer than the roads, and shorter. Nelson, now that she thought about it, was the only friend she’d ever had in Lomath whose house wasn’t next to the Black Rock Creek. Her childhood friends, at the age when nothing really mattered in a friendship beyond proximity and whether you were the kind of kid who threw rocks or the kind of kid who didn’t, were the Green twins and the DiLorenzos next door and the Caffertys on the other side of the driveway—the Black Rock winding past all their doors. They wore paths into the weeds along its banks, walking between their houses. The Caffertys and DiLorenzos had moved a few years ago and the Green twins were no longer friendly at school; mysterious divisions arose between white kids and black kids in junior high and did not diminish as the years passed. Around the time the Caffertys and the DiLorenzos and the Green twins were disappearing, there was Nelson, stranded on his hill. An encore friend, childhood part two, the boy who’d come to keep her company when everyone else had gone.

  “I was hot.” She looked down at her wet jeans. “These are uncomfortable, actually. Can I—”

  “Yeah, hold on.” He stepped away from the window, and then he was back, pulling the screen out of the frame, holding a pair of gym shorts. “What’s on your shirt?”

  She looked at the stain. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not from today.” She reached for the shorts.

  “You’re going to change out there?”

  She glanced behind her, down the bright empty slope of the yard. “Maybe I should come in, actually,” Livy said. She climbed over the sill and worked her feet out of her shoes without undoing the laces. She thought to ask Nelson to turn his back, but he had already done it, and seemed engrossed in the covers of the books in a cascading pile beside his door. She worked the wet jeans down her cold thighs. The creases in the fabric were printed on the backs of her knees in pink and white.

  “I’m taking this shirt, too, if you don’t mind,” she said, picking one up off the floor.

  “Go for it.” He knelt down and began to read the back of the stumpy copy of David Copperfield sticking out from under his bed, which Livy knew was an assigned text from their English class two years ago and of no interest to him at all. She looked down at herself, wobbling on one foot with the other stuck in the lining of the borrowed nylon shorts: bluish goose-bumped flesh and a bra that had turned from tan to pale orange in the wash. She pulled the shirt on over her head.

  “You can turn around,” she said.

  He glanced at her.

  “I want to tell you something but I don’t know if I should,” she said.

  “Did something happen with Mark?” His eyes were wide.

  “No, it’s not him, he’s fine.” She rubbed the hinge of her jaw with the tips of her fingers. It was sore, as if she’d been hit, or had ground her teeth all night. “It could be a lot of trouble,” she said. “So if you don’t want me to tell you, just say so now, please.”

  Nelson’s shoulders were slack and his hand hovered near his chin. This was his most attentive expression. The pause stretched out. “How much more trouble can it be?” he said finally.

  “The guy the cops are looking for is at my house,” she said. “I was out in the yard and he came out of the woods and gave me everything in his pockets and then just walked into the garage.”

  They stared at each other as if each were equally surprised. There was a rush and hum in the walls as someone turned the water on in the kitchen. A scratch sounded at the door, and Livy jumped, feeling the muscles tighten all down her back.

  Nelson recovered his power of speech. “It’s just the cat,” he said. He glanced at the door, moved to open it, decided not to. “You’re sure it’s him?”

  She nodded.

  “Fuck,” he said. “What are we going to do?”

  She absorbed the word we. He took his glasses off. He did that when people argued near him, she had seen him do it many times. The tension would rise in the room and he would reach up casually and blind himself.

  “I have to get him out of there,” Livy said, her voice quavering a little. “Ron wants to search all the houses again.”

  “He does? What are we going to do about Mark?”

  “Christ, I don’t know.”

  He put his glasses back on. “What is he like? Beni or Deni or whatever his name is?”

  She made a vague arc in the air with her hand. “He’s like the picture. He looks like a businessman. Or a teacher. He doesn’t speak English.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “He doesn’t speak English, I said.”

  “Yeah, but—” He flung his hand out, splayed his fingers.

  “He didn’t. He was begging me, basically.”

  “You can’t tell where he’s from?”

  “No.” She went over to the window, where she had dropped her shoes on the carpet. “I have to get him out. I don’t want to give him to the police, I just—I just don’t. But they can’t find him here either. I already let him stay overnight in the garage. That’s bad. He wants to go to Pittsburgh.”

  “Do you think he did something serious?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She stared at the dark computer monitor on the other side of the room. She closed her eyes. “I’m just going to get him out. I’m going to put him on a bicycle.” She had been turning this single idea over in her mind for an hour, waiting for a better one to come to her.

  “A bicycle?” Nelson said, looking up. “He’ll . . . pedal away?”

  “Well, it’s better than walking, and it’s not like I can drive him out. My mom never rides her bike. I can pump up the tires and take him over the hill with it and put him on the trail, and then from there he can get onto 72 and he won’t be our problem anymore. I’ve done it myself a couple of times.”

  “So you’re going to go over the hill with him? In the dark?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’ll catch you with him,” Nelson said, alarm in his face. “You know how much trouble you’d be in? That’s jail, that’s real jail.”

  “There might not be any cops over that way
,” she said. It seemed important now that her plan be deemed solid and reasonable. “There’s no road there, just the trail.”

  “I’ll take him,” Nelson said. His eyes were very wide, dense and dark.

  “What? That doesn’t make any sense. Why should you do it instead of me?” They were dressed alike now, both in T-shirts and gym shorts. She saw herself for a second as a squeaking, presuming child, arms crossed, advancing a dubious strategy.

  “So we’re both going, then,” he said.

  Something in her shoulders relaxed when he said it. She realized now that this was why she had come. She was hoping for the company, even though she couldn’t have asked, because it was an outrageous thing to ask for. “What if your mom catches you leaving?” she said, hedging, looking just to the right of his face.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  She hugged him abruptly. She smelled sweat and an edge of lemony deodorant. “I need a flashlight,” she said into his T-shirt. “Do you have an extra one?”

  He went to his desk and produced a key chain flashlight. “I’ll come meet you when it gets dark,” he said, palming it into her hand.

  “Okay,” she said. She shrugged as she said it, but tears were stinging her eyes. She pretended to examine the light. “Thanks.”

  She saw them as she came down Collier: her parents on the front steps of the store, talking to Jocelyn and Noreen. Her mother was biting her lip. Livy backed behind a boxwood hedge and sank down into the grass. Jocelyn was pointing up Collier and Noreen was rubbing Livy’s mother’s back. Livy’s guilt rose up again; she hated to make her parents worry. They were so reasonable most of the time. She backed away from the hedge and ducked around the side of a small yellow house and into the woods.

  There was no cleared path there and she got herself tangled in a multiflora rosebush only a few feet into the trees. It took several minutes to get herself unstuck from it, tearing her shirt, leaving powdery white scratches on her arms. This close and meticulous work, unhooking the thorns, calmed her down, and once she was free of the rosebush she sat down on a stone to wait. Twenty minutes, half an hour, and her parents would have knocked on the Telas’ door, found she wasn’t there, and gone off someplace else to look for her. She would only have to wait. She wished she had a watch.