Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  “This is it,” she said.

  She put the bike’s kickstand down. Her fingers were stiff. She tried to squeeze the little light on and it flipped out of her hands.

  “The map, the map,” she said. She mimed unfolding, and he stared at her and then produced the map from his pocket again. She tried to flatten it out in the beam of the flashlight. “You go here,” she said. She traced the line with her finger, from the creek to the highway. “Road,” she said, pointing at Route 72. “East, west.”

  The bike was between them. He folded the map and put it in his breast pocket, and then took several bills from his pocket and held them out to her.

  “No, no,” she said. What would she want his money for? He looked at her several times, then put the money carefully back in his pocket. He rolled the bike to the end of the path, glanced back at her again, and then pointed ahead, into the dark.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He looked into the darkness of the trees for a few seconds, holding the bike.

  “Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”

  She’d always imagined a person would know, at a time like this, whether they were doing a good thing or a bad thing. But all she knew was that it was difficult, and that she wished she didn’t have to do it. She looked into the dark with him.

  He got on the bike and it wobbled a little and then he was gone. The noise of the tires persisted, and then that was gone too. She stood for a second and listened. There was nothing: no one was coming. She kept expecting to hear police radios, footsteps from the top of the hill, but there was no sound but the creek and the crickets in the high grass.

  She walked back up the hill instead of running. It was too steep and she felt clumsy and numb. She wasn’t sure how long it had been since she left the garage. Ten minutes? Half an hour? The sky was a strange color, a deep transparent blue to the west, over a distant hilltop crowned with a subdivision.

  At the top of the hill she skirted the open area, walking in the shadow of the trees until she reached the gate. Once she was on the road she relaxed a little. She paused at the Inskys’ fence to spit out a mouthful of dirt and then shuffled down the slope past the Green house, her legs bending and catching, her back on fire. At the bottom of the hill she stopped and stood looking at her own house across the water. She couldn’t go home; she couldn’t face it yet. She would take her punishment in the morning.

  There was only one other place to go, and that was Nelson’s house. She was just about to pass the stand of trees that would hide her own house from view when her eye was caught by a flickering on the far bank of the creek.

  She stopped and turned. She was so tired that her eyes swam in and out of focus, and it took her a few moments to see that the flickering was a small fire half hidden by scrims of vines and bamboo. It burned on the wash of rocks, once a dam, that edged the creek just past her parents’ garden. The little area was overgrown with brambles and inelegant young trees, and though the Markos attempted to reclaim it every few years with clippers and shovels, it maintained a life separate from the rest of the yard, a rocky waste sheltering groundhogs and snakes. A light breeze started up, and as Livy brushed her dirty hair out of her eyes she saw her parents.

  They were standing by the fire with their heads bowed and their arms crossed. The hair stood up on the back of Livy’s neck. They looked very tired, and the breeze was carrying the sharp, piney smell of marijuana.

  Livy stared. Her parents were talking across the fire, and the smell was thick in the air, overpowering, almost comical. She put her hands to her face and the open scrape on her cheek stung at her touch. Livy looked over her shoulder, as if expecting to see someone who might corroborate the scene. Her mother sat down on a stone, her elbows on her knees, and pulled her long skirt tight around her legs. Her father stirred the fire pit. A column of sparks went up. They were burning a pile of uprooted pot plants.

  She’d seen an IMAX movie as a kid, and when they turned on the lights at the end, the screen was transparent and the wall behind it was a mass of machinery. She was jolted in that way now. Were her parents often in the yard at night? Did they take long walks alone? She was awash in obvious connections. Their anxiety from the beginning of the blockade—their weird, abrupt anger. They had to have been growing it here, on the wash, in the gaps between the rocks.

  The argument over her sitting on the chimney clicked into focus. They must have wanted to tear up the plants before the police came to search on the first day of the blockade, but they couldn’t while she was sitting up there—she had a perfect view of the whole yard and would have seen them going into the trees. So they had huddled in the house with a bucket full of diluted Clorox, trying to pass the time plausibly until she came down, and when that hadn’t worked they’d lost their tempers and ordered her into her room. They’d been out of the house, she remembered, for at least an hour afterward, but she was too annoyed to pay much attention at the time. She’d been stuffing old magazines in a bag while they hopped around on the rocks, pulling up the sticky plants.

  It was funny. Christ, it was funny. She sat down on the bank and laughed as quietly as she could, her stomach muscles aching from the effort. They looked so desperately serious. They must have been in a panic all week, trying to figure out how they could hide their crop from the suddenly omnipresent police. Was that the memory from before, as well? The time when, at eight or nine, she had stood with her mother and watched the police cruiser come down the driveway, chewing on the fingers of one hand and holding on to the pocket of her mother’s skirt with the other, feeling the anxiety radiating from her like heat from a stove. These pot plants had been the cause then too. Well, not these, but their ancestors. It was just a guess, but it fit.

  The Inskys probably got high too. As soon as the thought occurred to her, it took on the armature of fact: of course they got high too. All those dinner parties. And when else did her parents smoke? They took long walks together on Sunday afternoons—of course. She pictured them way up at the top of the hill with a bowl and a book of matches, huddling behind a bush to get out of the wind. Livy had always hidden her own stash carefully, guessing she would get a long lecture from both parents and a day or two of silent treatment if it were found. Her stash was a packet of tinfoil inside an old music box on a low shelf, the lid decorated with a Gibson girl, a knowing profile with a little comma of a chin.

  Her mother had once lost patience with the state of Livy’s room and cleaned it while Livy was at school. Livy remembered her panic when she got home. She climbed the stairs to her room with her mother’s airy “I straightened up today” echoing in her ears and went straight for the box. The weed was still there, under a nest of old necklaces and ribbons. But the lid—she was almost sure of this now—had been dusted.

  She and Nelson had always believed that they were good at hiding their smoking. They’d never been caught, after all. Two sets of people squatting in the mud under bridges with jury-rigged pipes. Poking holes in tinfoil for a screen. Both sets thinking they were being enormously clever. Very sneaky! Giggling at each other.

  Livy hugged her knees and straightened her back. She felt strangely exhilarated. Just now, from where she sat in this spot, the world seemed to hang together coherently—a trick of perspective, like a jumble of shapes in a mobile that coalesces into an animal at the right angle. The world hung together on a thread of deception, and any deception she could think of seemed equally, mercifully petty. Her own faults, her own betrayals and omissions and the crimes she had recently committed, were blasted apart into undifferentiated bits. She felt very old, but also very light. She stood up again and retreated.

  The walk up Collier was punishing on her back and legs. Nelson’s house seemed smaller than usual, socketed in the hillside with its two front steps, its protective hedge beside the mailbox. She went around to Nelson’s window and scratched on the screen.

  Some creature chirped in the dark. It was Tilly, Nelson’s cat. She could see her moving, dimly, in the
space below the window.

  “Goddammit, Nelson,” she whispered.

  She pushed the sash up a little and the screen toppled. It fell inward, onto the carpet, and the cat chirped again. The door opened across the room and Nelson was there, hurrying toward the window, whispering.

  “Jesus, I am so sorry,” he said. “She caught me trying to leave. The dog next door started barking and she ran out and got me by the arm.” He was leaning out the window. “Janine finally got her to take an Ativan. She just went to sleep.”

  He pulled Livy over the windowsill, one arm tight around her waist. She gasped at the pressure on her bruised rib. “It’s okay,” she said, her feet finding the carpet. “I figured something happened.”

  “I had to sit with her in the living room for an hour and when she finally went to bed it was too late to come meet you.” He lit a couple of candles on the dresser. His glasses were on crooked and he had no shirt on. “Are you okay? What happened to your face?”

  “I fell,” Livy said. She drifted where she stood, as if drunk. The ebbing of the adrenaline in her blood had left her quivery and indistinct.

  “Do you want some rubbing alcohol for it?”

  “My face? Does it look bad?”

  “Yes.”

  She held up her arm.

  “Well, that’s worse,” he said.

  She giggled hoarsely. He went across the hall to the bathroom for alcohol and cotton pads. She sat on the floor, in the corner made by his dresser and bed, and closed her eyes.

  “Here,” he said, coming back in and taking hold of her wrist. There was something cold on her arm in the semidark and then the burn of the antiseptic. She inhaled through her teeth. “Now your face,” he said. He pressed a cotton pad soaked in rubbing alcohol against her scraped cheek, and it stung. His face was very close to hers. She could see the tiny, precise movements of his eyes, the twitches in the skin of his eyelids. “He’s gone?” he said.

  “I hope so,” she said. “He got onto the trail, anyway.” It was strange to be so close to someone without making eye contact. It was like they were spying on each other. She could examine him: the corner of his lip, the bristle along his jaw. There were tears in her eyes from the sting of the alcohol.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said again.

  He lifted the cotton pad away from her skin, and then put his arm around her neck and kissed her forehead. She froze. She could feel his breath in her hair. She thought he would regret this in a moment, that he would realize what he was doing and be embarrassed—because it was just her, because he must not mean it—but seconds ticked by and he did not retreat. Cautiously, she hooked her arm around his waist. He was warm, leaning into her, and he was balanced very precisely, his weight on one knee and a hand braced against the side of his bed. Soon he would have to shift either forward or back. Livy tensed her arm across his waist.

  He kissed her hair, then her ear. She turned toward him and he kissed her mouth. His thumb was at the hinge of her jaw and his fingers were in her hair.

  For a minute they tried to occupy the same space at the same time. They were chest to chest, he was kissing her neck, and she was putting all her strength into closing the circle of her arm around his back. There was a muteness and blindness to this, a faint ridiculousness. Her face was pressed against his bare shoulder.

  They slid onto the floor and there was a sharp pain from her rib as he put his weight on her. She coughed. “I fell on a rock,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked anxious. He pushed himself up onto his hands.

  “It’s okay.” They were staring at each other. She put up her hand and pulled his glasses off, interrupting their eye contact. He looked worried now, as if he had done something wrong. He was in an aggressive position, crouched over her, and he looked suddenly aware of it, and embarrassed. She squeezed his wrist. “Lie next to me?” she said.

  He lay on his back. She rolled onto her side and put her arm across his chest.

  “Can I sleep here?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I just don’t want to go home yet.”

  “Sure. Yes.”

  She lay with her face close to the side of his neck, and her fatigue compressed her into this tiny space, the cove of his shoulder, the dusty carpet under her head.

  She woke up a little while later and he was kneeling, tugging on her arm. “You should get into bed,” he said.

  The bed was barely wide enough for both of them. They kissed again. She bit his shoulder experimentally; it was salty. He pushed her shirt up to her armpits. His hands were warm and dry but when he put his mouth on her breast she stiffened. “Stop,” she said. He was moving differently, there was something frenzied and impersonal about it, and if he saw too much of her he would forget that they were friends. He pulled her shirt back down and put his arms around her waist.

  She woke up several times during the night and lay quietly, trying to flex her legs without waking him up. She thought of her parents standing by the fire. She hoped they were finished burning it, and it was safely buried and they were in bed, and that the police would have no reason to pick their way into the wash. Nelson murmured in his sleep.

  People she knew at school were always getting the idea of growing their own, and they were always being found out by their parents, or their neighbors, or their younger siblings toddling into the hedges and coming back with handfuls of it. It was an indiscreet plant. It had that prickly, caustic smell. She knew from a couple of boys she worked with at the restaurant that growing it was complicated and time-consuming, and it took the single-mindedness of a person in love with the plant. She thought of her parents going for walks together in the afternoons on her mother’s days off. Livy had always been happy to stay in the house and watch TV while they were gone. It was nice to flip through the channels without their disapproval, moral or aesthetic, hovering in the background through the kitchen door. If she’d been more in the habit of going outside during those intervals she probably would have spotted them a hundred feet from the house, barely hidden in the woods.

  Her parents had always been uncomfortable in groups, at children’s birthday parties, at Girl Scout jamborees, at Parents’ Night. There was an air always coming from them—Livy was just now identifying it—that they expected to be disapproved of, and took some pride in it. She knew people like that at school, too. It was a little childish, this ostentatious claiming of separateness, and so was the large risk they were taking for the small pleasure of getting high and the little bit of money that must come from selling to the neighbors. She felt like a traitor in some way for calling them childish. But it was true. At the same time, she felt a new, sharp imperative to protect them. To keep away trouble like Revaz and Dominic, and the police.

  She rolled over and her knees collided with Nelson’s. He murmured something. She couldn’t tell if he was awake or not. She turned her back to him and he shifted easily into the space she made: his belly to her back, his bent knees to her bent knees.

  4

  When Revaz had been riding for forty-five minutes he risked a stop at an all-night gas station. There were only two other people inside, both men, and they looked just as haggard as he did, just as sluggish, blinking in the same suspect manner in the bright light. There were road maps in a stand by the door. He took one, then went to the counter and pointed to the rack behind the clerk, where hot dogs turned on rollers under a red lamp.

  He ate the hot dog in the dark behind the building, where he had left the bicycle. When it was gone he stood there hesitating for several minutes and then went back in and bought another one. The clerk smiled when he handed him the change, nodded to the hot dog, then pointed at his own face, and Revaz realized he had mustard on his chin.

  The moon had dipped below the trees, and it was quite dark outside. He stood beside the pumps, slowly eating the last of the hot dog, tracing out his route in the light of the filling canopy. Another forty-five minutes on the bike and he would be a
t the train. His stomach was full, and the night was cool. Insects shrieked and thrummed in the trees that edged the lot—sounds of the forest barely held at bay by the highway. The asphalt crumbled at the edges, turning to burr-filled weeds. It seemed entirely plausible, for a minute, that he could run and keep running forever. Pleasant, even. He climbed onto the bike.

  When Livy opened her eyes the room was starting to lighten, gray now instead of black. Nelson had rolled away and was lying with his back to her, one shoulder humped high, the sheet pressed tight under his arm. The weak early light was like a resin that filled the room, fixing the objects in it. During the school year she woke at this time of day but had to get up and dress quickly, and it was rare for her to be still in this stillness. Revaz was far away by now, long gone. Her part was done. Nelson moved beside her.

  “How are you?” he said. His eyes were bright from sleep. He propped himself on an elbow and rubbed his face.

  “Fine,” she said. She noticed she had pulled the sheet up so that only her head and neck were showing over the top of it. It was one thing to go to sleep next to a friend, and another to wake up there. “How are you?” she said.

  “Fine.” He put his arms around her and squeezed her hard, pressed his face against her neck. The bruises on her hip ached. The embrace seemed to press her spine straight, ease out the kinks caused by a night in a narrow space. He had broad, flat hands.

  “I don’t want to go home yet,” she said.

  “You definitely shouldn’t.”

  She laughed. They were lying very close together, which meant they didn’t have to look each other in the eye. His hands moved over her stomach in a friendly way, as if brushing crumbs off it.