Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  “The plane crashed near here,” Koba said at one point, and Revaz didn’t know what plane he meant, but didn’t ask. It occurred to him that Koba was lonely too, driving the truck for weeks at a time by himself. Revaz kept quiet and let the chatter wash over him. He was falling asleep, the broad stuffed seat like a lap to lie in, the road humming beneath, the voice going on and on.

  One night Livy woke at two and knew she wouldn’t go back to sleep. Her mind was going back and forth on its single anxious track, zzt-zzt, zzt-zzt, like the ink carriage in an old printer. It was only five weeks until her court date. Lately she had been thinking about the surveillance video from the pharmacy: What did it look like? An image like an ultrasound, four stuttering figures in light and dark, Dominic’s upraised arm with the gun, and herself: walking around the counter and standing beside Mark. She was the closest to him, the one at his elbow while he counted out the pills, her own arms folded. Could her face be read? Where was Nelson in the frame? After she had gone behind the counter she had lost track of the rest of them, somehow. The world had gotten very small. Did she look cruel, those crossed arms, the invasion of the space behind the counter while the boys stood apart? Mark was all right. The police had gathered him up after the tear-gassing, picked apart his story, sent him home. On television they said it was an ordeal for his family, and she thought about his family often now. A sister and a mother, baffled and afraid. Sometimes she felt sure she was going to jail, and often she thought she deserved it.

  Around the side of the house she could see the surfaceless dark of the clump of trees where she had seen her parents burning their crop. There had been no mention of it since she came home; they didn’t seem to know she knew about it. She wanted to see the campfire up close. She crossed the yard and picked her way into the wash. She found the remains of the fire and rubbed the ash between her fingers: that sharp smell.

  The water was loud and she didn’t hear her mother coming at all. She saw the beam of the flashlight first, searching across the trees.

  “Livy!” her mother called.

  She crouched, shrank against a rock.

  “Livy, come on,” her mother said. The flashlight switched off and she stood at the edge of the yard, motionless, looking over toward the driveway. Livy cursed under her breath. She couldn’t watch her mother look in the wrong direction, straining to hear. She stood up. “I’m here,” she called.

  The flashlight clicked back on. Livy shaded her eyes. “I’m coming out.” She pushed her way back out into the yard.

  “I checked on you and you were gone,” her mother said.

  “You check on me?”

  “Sometimes. Why were you there?” She pointed at the wash.

  Livy wanted the two of them to be having a moment of understanding. She wanted to be able to reassure her mother, say: I know you did something stupid but it’s all right now. They could trade indulgences, one fuckup for another. The plants for everything Livy had done. But there was no real comparison and it was too dark to read her mother’s face anyway.

  “No reason,” Livy said.

  “Can I call Nelson?” Livy said. Her mother was unloading the washing machine and Livy was hovering in the doorway, half watching the television in the next room. Livy’s mother looked up from the laundry basket. “You want to use the phone?”

  “Please.”

  Livy’s mother held up a pair of Livy’s jeans and shook them out. “Did I ever tell you I stole my mother’s car once?”

  “What? You did?”

  “I was fifteen. I had these older friends I was trying to impress. So I took the keys out of her purse and took the car.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She called the police. She knew it was me, but she called the police.”

  Livy’s grandmother was a haughty, ancient woman who flew in twice a year and distributed birthday checks. Livy’s mother became slightly unhinged around her, setting out cloth napkins, harassing her family into more polite versions of themselves.

  “Did they arrest you?” Livy said.

  “Yes, they did. I spent two days in jail while she thought about whether she wanted to press charges. We were already having a tough time there, getting-along-wise.” She shut the lid of the washing machine. “My grandma talked her out of it. So she let me come home.”

  Livy searched for the relevance of the anecdote. “Did she punish you?”

  Livy’s mother sighed. “She knocked my head against a wall, and then she felt so bad about it she never mentioned it again.”

  Livy blinked. She was getting to an age when family information was shared with her that had been hidden when she was little. People were always so casual when they told stories like this; their voices gave you no hints about how to react. “Were you mad?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was fifteen.” Livy’s mother looked at her. “I guess I’m trying to make myself look good by comparison.”

  “You’re way nicer than she is.”

  Her mother laughed. She was quiet for a minute. “I can’t tell if I’m punishing you too much or not enough,” she said. “Go ahead and call him, though. You must be lonely.”

  Livy took the cordless out to the porch and dialed the number. Mrs. Tela picked up.

  “Is Nelson there?” Livy said.

  There was a pause, and then Mrs. Tela sighed. “Is this Livy?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t talk to him, Livy.”

  Livy felt a little hiccup, an interruption in the atmosphere. “He’s not there?”

  “I’m not letting you talk to him.” Mrs. Tela sounded tired and reasonable, like someone correcting an error in her gas bill. “You went to jail together, Livy. I don’t think you can be friends anymore.”

  Livy stared at the trunk of the ash tree by the porch. “Until when?”

  “I’m surprised your parents are even letting you call. Bye now, Livy.” The line beeped and went dead. Livy paced for a minute at the edge of the porch, running her thumb back and forth over the hot part of the phone where it had been pressed against her cheek. Then she sat down on the floorboards and started to cry. It was a little trickle of tears, no sobbing, very quiet.

  The cicadas were making their cascading call all across the yard. It would start to get cool soon. School would start. She would sit in the yellow light of her room over a trigonometry book and listen to the same four albums over and over and hear the dishes being washed in the kitchen, know it was all ruined, and have no one to talk to. Then, at the end of September, her court date.

  The long open days were almost gone and they would never be allowed to be friends as they had been friends. And she loved him, maybe. She used the words surreptitiously and self-mockingly, even in her own mind. She seemed to love him. It appeared that she loved him. She tried it out, tasted it, stared out into the yard.

  When Livy stepped onto the bus on the first day of school she met a wall of eyes. She glanced sideways at the driver, expecting the bored profile she’d seen twice a day for two years, the elaborate and refreshing lack of interest; but the bus driver was also staring at her. Livy picked her way down the aisle in total silence. The narrow space required a complicated set of movements she had never noticed before, a baffling series of choices—look up or down? Drop the bag on the seat first, or sit down and drag it in after? Fold hands? She clutched the bag and studied the window, the dirt on the glass, until the bus was moving again.

  A week before, the vice principal had called, suggesting to Livy’s mother that Livy might consider short-term homeschooling until her case was resolved. Her mother had said that whatever happened with Livy had not occurred on school grounds and was therefore irrelevant to the vice principal’s interests, and to the school board, and to anyone else who might be concerned. And that was that.

  Lomath was gone in a moment. There were no other pickups; Dominic always got a ride with someone, and Nelson’s mother dropped him off when she took his sister to her private school. Lom
ath looked quiet, the hills just touched with light. It seemed clear to her already that the day would be just as bad as she’d thought.

  Maronne Consolidated was a large, low brick building moated with parking lots. In the front stairwell she passed a boy who had once washed dishes at the Lomath Sportsmen’s Club. He’d gotten fired in July and made an impressive scene about it, despite being stoned. He even pulled his apron off and hurled it into the sink at the appropriate moment.

  “Hey, the restaurant’s closed now, isn’t it?” he said.

  She stopped. “Yeah, it’s closed.” The owner had not come to reopen it and she didn’t know if he ever would. The business had been on the edge of failure even before the blockade, and every mention of it on the news was more bad press, reporters talking about the guns in the pro shop as if it were a militia stockpile and not a large beige building with a sports and recreation license.

  “Is it because of the cops shooting that guy?” he said.

  She stared at him.

  “Did they fuck you up?” he said. He was bright with interest, excited, but he put a casual drawl on the words “fuck you up” as if this were a situation he encountered often himself, getting fucked up by the police. She grasped now that he was edging around the main question, leaning closer and closer, his backpack nearly toppling him. He lowered his voice. “Did you seriously kidnap that guy?” he said.

  She stepped back with a startled expression, like an ingenue in a silent movie. “Fuck you,” she said. She did her best to disappear in the crowd at the bottom of the stairs.

  In her homeroom the staring was gradual. She was one of the first to arrive, so it took a while for the normal buzz of conversation to build up in the room, and then a few minutes more for her presence to be noted and commented on. Livy had brought a book to read, a ridiculous ploy, since it was not normal to read books in homeroom on the first day of school; it only made her more obvious, the single bowed head in the room. She read the same sentence over and over again while seats shifted around her, chair legs scraped, and people whispered.

  She had hoped she might have the same lunch period as Nelson. At twelve thirty she stood at the door to the cafeteria with her lunch tray, scanning the room, but he wasn’t there. Her chest constricted. Disappointment was hard to bear when she wanted such small things: half an hour with him. To talk to him, which would relieve her of the work of imagining what it was like to talk to him, evaluating the strength of her feelings that way, biting them like coins.

  A girl named Valeria who’d been in a play with Livy the year before waved at her, and Livy sat down quickly at her table. Valeria talked and talked, and appeared not to notice when people at neighboring tables twisted on their benches to look at Livy. Livy was at a loss to explain this generosity, but she accepted it quietly. Valeria had spent the summer working at a store in the mall that sold leather jackets and she had stories to tell about many of their classmates who worked in other stores. From the sound of it, they had formed a little kingdom rich in intrigue there among the fountains and the potted ferns. There were betrayals and drugs and secret abortions. Managers pursued young girls. Scores were settled outside, or deferred to other parking lots where there was less security. Livy listened for thirty minutes and then they were dismissed.

  In the hallway she saw Elena, she of the Honor Society and the ritualistic diner trips. She was putting her books away. She stood and turned, saw Livy, and went white in the face.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Livy said.

  “Somebody told me you were here but I thought they were lying,” Elena said. “I thought you must be in jail or something.”

  Pain bubbled up in Livy. “I haven’t even had my court date yet. You could have called and found out.”

  “My mom won’t let me talk to you. She said she would take my car keys if she found out I did.”

  “Nelson’s mom won’t let me talk to him either,” Livy said.

  “Oh, she’s keeping him home from school,” Elena said. “She’s trying to get him into Sacred Heart with his sister.”

  “He’s not coming to school?” Another beam gave way inside her.

  “Of course not. I mean, you guys—” Elena sighed, peered more closely at Livy’s face. “You guys did something really serious. I didn’t even know you hung out with Dominic.” She shook her head. “I have to go to class.”

  “Go,” Livy said. “Say hello to your mom for me.”

  She watched Elena disappear around the corner. Crowds milled and circulated. All the extra stuff falls away, she thought. Pretty soon it’ll be just me, sitting on a rock.

  In the end, there was a plea. Livy’s lawyer met with the district attorney at the end of September and the deal came back two days later. “They’re hanging on to the accessory charge,” her lawyer said on the phone, apologetic, mumbling a bit so Livy had to press the handset to her ear. “Your record’s good and the whole situation is embarrassing so they didn’t push for juvenile detention. They’re offering six months’ house arrest and probation until you’re eighteen.” She cleared her throat. “If you stay out of trouble your record will be sealed.”

  “Six months’ house arrest?” Livy was standing at the kitchen window with the cordless phone, twisting a rubber band around her wrist. “I’m not going to jail?”

  “Not if you take this.”

  “I’m taking it.”

  “I have to talk to your parents.”

  “I’ll tell them to call you. They’re at work.”

  After she hung up the phone she walked outside barefoot, warmed by relief. It was late September and the ground was cold already. The Inskys’ farm was touched with absurd gold, held up there at the end of the valley; she stood in the yard looking at it, and then walked down to the creek and sat with her arms around her knees. It would all be all right. House arrest would be humiliating and isolating but she could get through six months. A year after that she would be eighteen and it would be as if this never happened. In some ways it already felt like Revaz had never happened. He was a ghost, a story that only Nelson knew. He would be her currency of intimacy. Many people might know little things about her but there would be very few in her whole life, she thought, who would hear this secret. It would always be with her, right there at her elbow. That was what made you grown-up, she thought: having the past following you around. Having a past at all, really.

  The fog was astonishing, a solid object heaped up over the city’s shoulders, rolling down with an illusion of slowness created by its immensity, little winds pulling threads from its surface as if it were made of cotton wool. Every afternoon it loomed histrionically over the parks of San Francisco and Revaz stared at it, and no one else seemed to notice it at all. Long ago, when he’d visited the mountains in the summers in Georgia, there had been morning mist over the trees; but it was still and transparent, burning off at the first full light. This was an oceanic phenomenon. He sometimes bought an ice cream cone at a cart just off Dolores Park and watched it come in. The teenagers lounging on the grass shrugged into windbreakers as it descended.

  Koba gave Revaz some advice before dropping him off in Oakland. “Get some Mexican friends,” he said. “They know where the work is. And tell people you’re Russian. They won’t know the difference.”

  “Russians will know the difference,” Revaz said.

  “That’s true,” Koba said. He rubbed his chin for a minute, as if this were a weighty intellectual puzzle. “Okay, you tell the Russians you’re Georgian. With them you can be honest, because you know they don’t give a shit. But never”—here he turned and grinned, giving Revaz’s arm a firm squeeze—“tell them you’re Chechen.”

  “I’m not Chechen, you asshole.”

  “You are. You’re a Chechen Georgian asshole. And here I leave you.”

  He gestured out at the road. Revaz nodded, looking through the windshield, gathering himself for a minute. Then he said, “Thank you,” and climbed down, heaving the door shut behin
d him. Koba lit a cigarette and waved. That was the last time they saw each other.

  Revaz slept in a gravel lot under a piece of plastic sheeting that night, and in the morning walked four miles to a parking lot off the Berkeley Marina where day laborers gathered. No one seemed remotely curious about his nationality. He had picked up a few English words but was beginning to learn that for most business, gestures and circumstances did the work. He did not have to achieve invisibility here; it was freely conferred on him. For a few days in a row he was picked up by a passenger van and taken to a supermarket in Lake Merritt to unload trucks. He worked ostentatiously hard, loading his dolly higher than others at the expense of his back. He even found a plastic broom with a bent handle in a corner of the loading dock, and when they were finished unloading he would sweep up the scraps of wilting lettuce and corn silk and crushed flowers. In the second week, the driver of the van indicated that he could come directly to the store in the mornings, which Revaz took to mean that he had a job.

  There were orange flowers everywhere, heaps of vines in the small, square front yards of the bungalows along Piedmont Avenue. Koba had not prepared him for the peculiar dry lushness of the East Bay, the purple blooms winding around massive cactuses, the persimmon trees glowing in the shadows behind fences. It was September, but the place completely lacked the urgency he had always felt in the autumn in Georgia, the sense that light and warmth were draining away and would soon be gone. The warmth lingered. There was no great change afoot as the days turned toward October.

  He chose a fake name. He kept his ID duct-taped to the back of a ceiling tile in his room, a place he paid for by the week, accepting reduced rent in exchange for clearing dead weeds out of the yard and hauling out the trash on Tuesdays and Fridays. His landlady was Georgian, the only one he had encountered so far in California. It would have been smarter to avoid her for this reason, he supposed; and it would have been smarter to destroy the ID. But it was not so easy to do these things. Sometimes he took the easy way and hoped for luck. Most of the time, really, if he was being very honest with himself.