“Whose house?” said Clarence.
“All of them. They’re at the Christmases’ place already, I just saw them go in.”
“They need a warrant,” Ron said, shaking his head. He was rubbing his stiff knee with one hand, wincing.
“Maybe they have one,” Clarence said.
A woman in sweatpants detached from the crowd and hurried toward the bridge. A few others who lived on White Horse Road followed her.
“Are they coming over here?” Noreen said.
“Probably,” Maurice said.
The talk continued, but it was quieter now, and people’s eyes kept drifting toward the bridge. Nelson dropped handfuls of fine gravel down the neck of his empty soda bottle. Livy perceived that he was leaning a little closer to her mother now, perhaps unconsciously, as if he were borrowing her in the absence of his own. The faint crackle of a walkie-talkie drifted down to them from White Horse Road.
When the police emerged from the trees at the far end of the bridge, the conversations in front of the store ceased entirely. There were five or six police officers there, in short-sleeved Maronne uniforms, on foot. They chatted with each other as they approached, talked into radios, peered over the sides of the bridge. Livy glanced at the neighbors standing in the intersection and was startled to see how they looked with their attention so united, so powerfully focused in one direction. For a moment they looked fierce, despite the men wearing bifocals and the women holding their hair off the backs of their sweaty necks.
“We’re looking for this man,” said the policeman in front as he reached the intersection. He held the large photo up in front of him. “Anybody seen him?”
“We don’t know who that is,” Noreen said.
“We have good reason to believe he’s in the immediate area,” said the policeman, holding the photo a little higher. The people leaning against the guardrail shouted questions.
“Who is he?”
“Is he dangerous?”
“Name is Ree-vaz Den-nee,” said the policeman, reading from the back of the photo.
“Where’s he from?”
“Europe, they said.”
“He could be from lots of places. Lebanese people are white-looking sometimes,” Jocelyn said, leaning toward Livy confidentially. “I used to live in Beckford.”
Livy’s mother snorted quietly. Jocelyn and Ron were launching into a taxonomy of whiteness, listing groups that were and groups that were not as if this would have to lead them eventually to the suspect’s specific nationality, like a game of Guess Who? with all the tiles flipped down. Black neighbors nearby, Paula and Noreen in particular, rolled their eyes. The policeman lowered the photo slightly, unsure that he had their attention. “We’re acting under direction from the federal level,” he said.
“We’re asking is he dangerous or not,” Clarence said again.
“I have a doctor’s appointment,” Noreen called out, getting up from her chair.
“We can’t open up the area until we’ve resolved it,” said the policeman.
“She has an appointment!” Ron said. “This is an older woman, sir!”
“We’re talking about an international issue, sir. We can’t let anybody through. We don’t have that kind of latitude.”
A young-looking policeman came closer and tried to pass around another copy of the photo; there was a long pause before anyone would take it from his hand. Revaz Deni was printed at the bottom. When it was passed to Livy, she looked at the name, trying to summon any association at all—a country, a language—but nothing came to her.
“Maybe it’s a joke,” Nelson muttered. “An incredibly elaborate joke.”
“We’re going to have to ask you to return to your homes,” said the policeman in front.
“How long is this going to be?” said Jocelyn. “What about the power? And the phones?”
“We really can’t answer that at this time. The best thing for everybody right now is to go home. In all seriousness, folks.”
Talk started up again, but the crowd began to disperse. Nelson’s mother came around the corner, tremulous in a heavy beaded necklace and slacks, and picked her way through the crowd, obviously looking for her son. Livy watched her approach, not stirring herself to alert Nelson. Mrs. Tela never came down to the store, even if she was out of coffee or eggs. She would send Nelson or his sister Janine instead, and it was always with a dubious sigh and a fistful of crumpled singles, as if she weren’t really confident that money could be exchanged for goods there in the conventional manner. The fact that she was here now showed how alarmed she must be over the police, enough to come down from her little house on the hillside to fetch her younger child. Mrs. Tela was the only snob Livy knew, which made her interesting. Livy knew that the store was grimy and low-rent; it was impossible not to notice the strips of flypaper, the missing acoustic tiles in the ceiling, the way the inventory never covered the shelf space. But Mrs. Tela was the only person she knew who seemed annoyed about it, as if it undermined the tenor of her life. She didn’t like Nelson hanging around the intersection or the steps in front, believing (and here Livy had to admit that she wasn’t entirely wrong) that it was a magnet for reprobates, a place where trouble was spontaneously generated. Livy watched her nod a few hellos and then catch sight of Nelson. “There you are,” she said.
Nelson looked startled, and then stood up with a sigh, brushing the dust off the back of his pants. “See you later,” he said to Livy.
The searches took up the whole afternoon. Livy’s parents told her to stay in the house, and her nervous energy propelled her up to her room and then through the hinged skylight onto the roof. It was too steep to be comfortable but she stayed there for a long time with her feet braced against the shingles, twisting apart maple seeds that had landed there, picking at the scabs on her legs. When she had destroyed all the loose vegetation within reach she went down into her bedroom for a bottle of nail polish and climbed up to sit on the chimney. Painting her nails was a default activity, something she did when her mind was disorderly and she had time to kill, which was a common condition for her in the summer. She had taught herself to do it, since she had no sisters and her mother owned no cosmetics. Cosmetics were among the many ordinary things her parents had no patience for. Greg and Mariel Marko belonged to no clubs, leagues, teams, or religious groups, and there was a long and diverse list of books they would not read, foods they would not eat, clothing they would not wear, TV shows they would not watch, and music they would not listen to. Livy had absorbed the logic of this list at such a young age that she could apply it at will, but it would have been very difficult, at sixteen, to explain it to someone else. In broad terms, the items on this list of prohibitions were all either violent, extravagant, very popular, or filled with chemicals, and sometimes some combination of the four.
Her parents had a collection of old-world skills between them: they could frame out a house, raise chickens and goats, make butter and cheese and yogurt. Her mother could knit, sew, bake bread, repair fences, overpower the morbidity of a broody hen. They knew how to do these things because they had gone back to the land before Livy was born. They’d lived in a cabin they built together, forgoing running water and electricity, basking in a total lack of other people to bother them. They’d owned a cow named Angeline; there were pictures of her in the family photo album. They had lived more or less without jobs, and this was a point that caught Livy’s attention now that she was old enough to have a job herself. Jobs were awful; bosses were awful. They talked to you like you were stupid. She came home from her shifts at the restaurant sometimes and complained over dinner about these facts, and her parents were completely in agreement. Other people were awful: they did talk to you like you were stupid, and a lot of the time they were actually the ones who were stupid, and there was no way around this situation that Livy’s parents could suggest except a total withdrawal from the world. They’d had to come back from the land, of course, after a few years. Her father said, fra
nkly, that it had gotten too hard and they were tired. They’d had a winter of record-breaking cold, and they couldn’t keep enough dry wood in the cabin to stay warm, and they’d decided to move back to the eastern side of the state and have a baby. That was when they moved to Lomath, and a year later Livy was born.
They had transmitted to her, in addition to a dislike of jobs, a kind of bodily discomfort in the presence of the police, which Livy had never fully considered the strangeness of until now. She remembered that once, years ago when she was eight or nine years old, a black-and-white police cruiser came down the long driveway that the Markos shared with the neighbors, creeping along with gravel popping under the tires, and made a slow three-point turn in the little muddy lot in front of the mill. Livy had stood with her mother just where their own private driveway joined the shared one, watching the cruiser go by, waiting until it was finally gone. Why were they out there? What were they expecting would happen? She couldn’t remember. A sense of anxiety adhered to the memory. It seemed odd now, inexplicable, looking back. Her parents were cranks, but they were also middle-aged people with jobs. They liked to imagine that they were a threat to the social order; maybe that was all.
Around three o’clock she saw the police come around the bend of the low road on foot and knock on the Greens’ door. The Greens came out and stood in the yard while the police filed in. Livy watched while two officers circled the house and disappeared into the backyard. The Greens stood in the driveway for a while, under the eye of the policeman at the door, and then sat down one by one in the grass under the windbreak of lindens they had planted along the road. Livy watched nervously. Clarence and Aurelia Green were also middle-aged people with jobs, just like the Markos, but they were black, and she was old enough to grasp that it made a difference. In Maronne, where most of the police department was white and most of the people were not, she had seen beat cops walk up to groups of men and women chatting on the sidewalk and tell them to “disperse,” the specificity of the word carrying an air of statute. This was called “clearing the sidewalk,” and it came up sometimes in city council meetings when people complained. Livy finished painting her toenails while she watched the Greens sitting in their yard, and then she painted her fingernails, and then colored the stone between her feet sparkly blue. She had painted a good deal of the masonry within reach of her left hand by the time the police came out of the Green house again and picked their way up the hill to the Cardens’. The Greens went back inside, Clarence and Aurelia ushering their twin girls ahead of them, and Livy heard the faint, abbreviated bang of their front door closing from across the creek.
She heard the porch door open below her, and her father stepped down onto the grass beside the ash tree and paused, looking in every direction. It was funny to see people foreshortened this way, all crown with little wobbling bodies underneath, like toddlers. “Hey,” she called down.
He started and looked up, peering through his glasses. She waved.
“What are you doing up there?” he said. He sounded angry.
“I won’t fall off,” she offered. “I’ve got three points of contact.” With one hand she indicated her feet, firmly planted on the copper flashing, and her other hand, resting on the stones.
“You fall off and hit the porch roof, you’ll break your leg,” he said.
He was glaring as if she were doing something outrageous, absurd. She was confused, which made her annoyed in turn. “You never fussed about me going on the roof before,” she said.
“Christ, just get off the chimney,” he said. “Stay over on the side. At least if you fall off you’ll hit the grass.”
“Okay, all right,” she said, climbing down onto the shingles. She heard the door shut as he went back inside. She guessed he was on edge about the police, and taking it out on her. He did not normally object to heights, and he was the one who had chosen a fully opening skylight to install in her room instead of the hobbled kind that stopped at a few inches, admitting nothing but bugs. Incidents like this one made her notice how lax her parents were with her the rest of the time: the driving around late at night and talking back and sleeping over wherever she wanted. Her classmates in college-bound classes at school, all of them nonthreatening, polite kids whom teachers and administrators happily ignored, were not allowed to do these things.
Some time later Livy came down off the roof to make herself a piece of toast, and the house was filled with scorching bleach fumes. She found her mother in the kitchen levering dirt out of the cracks between the floorboards with a butter knife. Her father was scrubbing the walls in the living room, and small showers of flakes were coming loose from a patch of water-damaged plaster near the chimney, clinging to his hair and beard, whitening the Harbor County Auto Fair T-shirt he’d put on for the chore.
“I’ve been meaning to do this,” Livy’s mother said as she came in. She was wiping the black material lifted from the cracks onto a piece of paper towel. Her hair was coming loose from a bun, and there was a sheen over her that Livy guessed was some combination of anxiety and heat.
“You’re all red,” Livy said.
“That’s a nice thing to say to your old mother,” she said. “You are also all red, for the record.”
“Are you worried?” Livy said. “Is that why you’re doing this?” The fumes made her throat constrict. She wanted them to admit to some anxiety; she felt a little abandoned by their fierce activity.
“Why don’t you get a broom and clear the spiders out of your room?” her father called from the other room. “I was up there yesterday and it was ridiculous. You like living with spiders?”
“They eat the millipedes,” Livy said. She cut two slices of bread and put them in the toaster, and then stared at it before remembering the power was out. She took a frying pan from a nail on the wall instead.
“Are you saying you’re not going to do it?” her father said. He was looking into the kitchen now from the living room. Livy’s mother’s back was to her, but she thought she saw a look pass between her parents. They seemed to have decided she was a problem, all of a sudden. It was one of those days.
“No, I’ll do it,” Livy said, placing the bread in the pan.
“You’d rather stay on the roof all afternoon?” her mother said.
When had the roof become a fight? Her mother and father were both watching her now. This always seemed to happen lately, contested territory cropping up in normal conversations. Livy was aware that she was to blame for some of this at times, that she defended her little patches of righteousness with the same vigor they did. But this one had caught her off guard.
“You’re not a guest, you know,” her mother said, pointing in the direction of the stairs with the dirt-laden butter knife. “You live here. You never clean.”
“What? I clean—”
“You act so put-upon when I tell you to take your things up to your room or sweep out the basement. I ask you for nothing. And right now what we’re asking is for you to clean your room this afternoon and stay the hell off the roof.”
Livy was speechless. Her mother was giving her a wide-eyed stare now, waiting for a response. Her father had a similar look. Livy turned off the flame under the pan.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“In your room with the skylight shut,” her mother said. “Until we say otherwise. All right?”
“All right,” Livy said. She was staring at her hands now, holding the two barely warmed slices of bread. She had to push past her father to get through the kitchen door, and he stepped aside and looked the other way, as if he had just noticed a crack in the plaster beside the south-facing window.
She sat on the floor in her room. A new grasp of the situation was dawning on her. It was an emergency, the kind that seeped into people’s homes like radon poisoning and made them act peculiar: large, illogical animal-parents, eyes rolling in panic.
She heard murmuring in the kitchen, and then the house was quiet. She cleaned. She swept the corners, cleared
the loose objects off her desk and dresser, took her books out of the shelves and wiped the dust off their tops with a paper towel. She filled a trash bag with plastic odds and ends whose provenance she could no longer remember and Christmas-gift knickknacks she didn’t want, and spent an hour leafing through the old magazines stacked in the closet, feeding them one by one into a recycling bag. They were evidence of a cheerfully standard femininity she had passed through at fourteen, when she had decided there might not be any good reason she shouldn’t know techniques for flat-ironing her hair or “creating a waist” or giving herself a “smoky eye.” The magazines had gradually infuriated her with their chummy, innocent tone and constant faultfinding, and now she was firmly against them, but she could still be drawn in by the sticky perfume samples and the photographs of beautiful girls in oversized sweaters, walking in grassy fields at sunset, with dabs of lens flare above their backlit hair. Nelson had found the magazines once while searching for an extra sweatshirt in her closet, and then read an article on “taming flyaways” out loud to her with great seriousness. The illustrating pictures were not clear enough for him to grasp what a flyaway was, and he was apparently struck by the lyricism of the phrase, because he tried to deduce it through a series of questions.
“It’s not a knot,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“It’s not a cowlick.”
“No.”
“So it’s little hairs just sticking straight up,” he said. “Like they’re trying to fly away from the rest of your hair.”
“Yes.”
“Like if you have static electricity?”
“No. Yes. Sometimes.”
She leafed through the magazines in the quiet house. When they were tied up inside the bag she lay down and slept, trying to will the time away.
It was evening by the time the police knocked on the Markos’ door, explaining that the search was voluntary pending a warrant but that it would make everything go much faster if they consented to it. The Markos went out to stand in the yard, leaving the gleaming, bleach-scented house to be searched by several tired-looking men in button-front shirts and dark pants. A young female police officer stood with them in the yard, smiling apologetically. Livy’s father chatted with her the way he chatted with grocery clerks, perhaps to soothe his anxiety.
Relief Map Page 4
