Noreen was sitting in her honorary position in a folding chair just inside the door and keeping up a half-shouted conversation with Jocelyn, who stood ten feet away behind the counter. Shelly Cash was picking her nails in a corner.
“I told those boys not to sit out there,” Noreen yelled hoarsely. “I used to chase them away when they tried it. But you let them sit there.”
“I tell them to go,” Jocelyn said. “They just don’t listen to me.”
“Well, you have to make them listen to you.”
Jocelyn seemed tense. Livy guessed they were talking about Brian and Dominic and some of their friends, who liked to sit on the front steps and smoke. It was true that Noreen had not tolerated this kind of thing when she owned the store, but it was also true that there had been a different set of teenage boys then.
“Morning, Noreen,” Livy said.
“Livy!” Noreen said. She leaned over and patted Livy’s knee. “You’re a good girl. How’d you do in school this year?”
“Okay, pretty good.”
“All right. You stay focused. That’s really what it’s about, don’t you think, Jocelyn?”
“Mm-hmm,” Jocelyn said. Her shoulders were always up lately and her head was always down, her hair in a long swinging ponytail that seemed too lighthearted for her. She was smoking, which she did not ordinarily do inside the store.
Noreen shook her head. “Just keep an eye on your friends. You are the company you keep.”
Livy smiled politely. The bells rattled on the door, and Angela Insky came in. She was wearing a man’s work shirt and boots, and her gray hair was falling out of a topknot. “There are a couple of plainclothes cops watching the highway right behind my house,” she announced. “I’ve been watching out my window all morning.”
“What kind of cops?” Noreen said, putting her hand to her ear.
“PLAINCLOTHES COPS!” Angela thundered helpfully, pivoting toward her. Livy snorted into her hand, and then pretended to be comparing the nutrition labels on two loaves of bread.
“How do you know they’re cops, then?” Jocelyn said.
“You think civilians are surveilling my house?” Angela said.
Livy edged around Angela with a loaf of bread and a newspaper from the rack. Jocelyn glanced over her items. “Paper’s free. It’s two days old.”
Livy paid for the bread and went out on the steps to read the comics. She didn’t want to go home yet. Lena and Paula arrived, and Livy half listened to their conversation through the propped door.
“Let’s think about this logically,” Lena said. “Who would hide somebody from the police? There are some people who would and some people who wouldn’t.”
“You don’t know anybody’s hiding him at all,” Paula said. “Even if he is here, which I have my doubts about, and Tobias has his doubts about.” Tobias was her live-in boyfriend of many years, a cop, who had been on an overnight shift when the roads were blocked off and had not been able to come home. There were a few other halves of couples stuck outside Lomath now—stranded night-shift workers, now sleeping on the couches of relatives nearby—but Paula’s case warranted special attention, since her boyfriend had been coming up to the barricades now and then to give her bits of information.
“You talked to him?” Noreen said.
“A little bit. He says it’s a mess.”
“Is that all?”
“He said there’s a bunch of FBI guys taking over the station house. They took his fax machine. And now they’re trying to send him up to Springton Manor to sit in a speed trap all day because they don’t like him coming by to talk to me. He said they’re trying to keep their plans a secret but he thinks there isn’t any plan.”
“Was it them that shut off the power?” Lena said.
“Looks like it was. And the phones.”
Jocelyn sighed. “Who do you think would do it, though?” she said. “Hide somebody?”
“I’ll tell you who wouldn’t,” Lena said. “Clarence and Aurelia. Noreen. Paula.” She nodded toward her friend.
“What makes you so sure?” Paula said.
“Oh, don’t make jokes,” Lena said. “It could be one of those war criminals from Sarajevo, those snipers who were shooting little children. You remember that? Schoolkids running across a bridge.”
“That’s not the Balkans. That’s Bosnia,” Paula said.
“Bosnia is in the Balkans.”
Paula frowned. “It is? Well, I guess I don’t remember. That was forever ago.”
“I don’t think we need to speculate,” Noreen said. She had a slightly mournful tone that Livy thought she’d heard before, in her own grandparents’ voices, when an old fight was getting started again at the dinner table. It must be so tiring to be old enough to know better than everybody. Livy gave up trying to read the paper and leaned in the doorway to listen.
“I wouldn’t hide anybody the police were looking for,” Lena said. “My son, maybe.”
“I don’t think anybody’s here at all,” said Shelly Cash suddenly. She had long, freckled hands, and she was drawing M&M’s out of a packet one by one, rolling them in her palm before she ate them. She barely moved her lips when she spoke, but her voice always cut clear through the air. She was both larger and smaller than life, physically reduced but unsettling to others, every face turning toward her at the slightest sound. “They’re just trying to look like they’re doing their job. Which means making us look like criminals while they’re at it, and if I don’t get to work by Thursday I’m going to get fired.”
“They don’t care,” Jocelyn concurred. “When Jeremiah got arrested he stepped on somebody’s foot by accident, and they put him down for assault on a police officer. He already had the cuffs on. They don’t care.”
Livy stored this tidbit away, thinking she would tell Nelson about it later. Jeremiah’s explanations for his problems always followed this pattern. Innocent act piled on innocent act, with inexplicable malice from teachers and security guards and police at every step. They’d had the same gym class when Livy was a freshman and Jeremiah was a junior, and she had heard him go on this way many times.
“Where is Jeremiah?” Lena said.
There was some interest in this question. Jocelyn looked sharply at Lena. “He’s been with his dad in Panoke since June,” she said. She turned away and started tying up the bag in the trash can behind her.
“Lucky for him,” said Paula lightly.
Jocelyn walked around the counter with the trash bag, her face tight with anger. No insinuation about her son escaped her notice.
“Sweetheart,” Noreen said, “I don’t think they’re going to come pick that up tonight.”
Jocelyn stopped, and then walked back around the counter and pushed the full bag back into a corner by a pile of delivery boxes. There was a tight, thwarted silence. Lena Spellar noisily removed a piece of nicotine gum from a bubble pack. Livy pretended to study her newspaper again. The newsprint felt antique already between her fingers, brittle, coated with dust.
Clarence Green drove up from the low road in his big conversion van. Livy watched while he pulled up in front of the store and parked conscientiously, getting as close to the steps as possible, even though he could have left the van in the middle of the intersection if he’d wanted. He left the engine idling and stepped out.
“They’re talking about it on the radio,” he called out.
“No shit?” Jocelyn said. Paula pushed past her and ran outside. Noreen took longer. The radio voice surged out of the car. It was one of the Philadelphia stations, an anchorwoman whose voice was familiar, though Livy couldn’t remember her name.
“—Interpol reports,” the anchorwoman said. “Details are still sketchy. The FBI has issued no statement.”
“What did she say?” cried Noreen, blinking in the sunlight.
“Shhh, shhh,” Clarence said.
“For now, roads remain closed in this small community.” Then the station ID, a commercial break.
“What the hell!” cried Paula. “That was no information at all!”
“She said something about extradition before I got up here,” Clarence said. He was out of breath. “I was just sitting in my driveway listening to the radio and they started saying how there’s a roadblock but nobody’s making any statements about it, and nobody knows anything. And that was about it.”
“Well, leave it on,” Paula said. “Maybe they’ll come back to it.”
Noreen went back into the store and dragged out her folding chair. The news anchors talked about car wrecks and flooding in the Midwest and bond trading and the weather. Noreen was anxious, leaning forward in her chair, and Livy could hear her breathing, light and rasping. By the time the news had cycled back around again and the same bits of information had been repeated, Livy couldn’t stand to sit there anymore. She excused herself and walked away up the hill.
Nelson’s sister opened the door and squinted hard into the sunlight. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Nelson, Livy’s here.” She pulled the door open another foot and padded away into the dark.
It was hot inside. The house was in the sun all the time; there were no shade trees on the harsh slope of the lawn. Livy tried to run her hands through the damp knots in her hair.
Nelson was asleep in his room. It was hotter than the hallway, hotter than the living room. The window was open but no air moved through the screen. The bed was stripped except for a fitted sheet and he was asleep in his underwear, on his back, with his arms and legs thrown out. She stopped in the doorway and then crossed the room quickly and shook him.
“What, what,” he said. He shaded his eyes with his hand.
“You should close the window.”
“It’ll—make it hotter . . .”
“It could not possibly get any hotter in here.”
He sat up, rubbing his face. Her eyes dropped to his back and then she stepped away and pretended to look out the window. He really didn’t seem to notice when he was half-dressed around her. She had been carefully covering up, stripping to a bathing suit only when she was just about to get in the water, for years.
“I was having fucked-up dreams,” he said.
She glanced at him. His hair was damp at his temples and the wrinkles of the sheet were printed into the skin of his shoulders.
“I was in all this mud.” He stood up and pulled on his shirt and then sat down and slowly worked his legs into a pair of swim trunks. “People were chasing me.” He stood up and put his arms around her.
She was startled. “Hey, what?” His face was hot against her ear.
“What yourself,” he said. “I had a nightmare.” He squeezed her and let go. “Let’s go for a walk. I have to get out of this house.”
She took a second to follow him, still feeling the hot pressure of his arm on hers. He went ahead of her into the yard, toward the woods. Downhill two children were playing in the drainage ditch at the side of the road—a pretty little brook, pebbled and bright, despite the corrugated pipes that swallowed it here and there. They were shy, curly-haired children whom Livy had often seen, and now as always they straightened up at the sight of teenagers and hid their sticks and bunches of weeds behind their backs. They were too young to know that their rituals were easy to guess, being common among children who live near water. Livy had played like that once, naming and building, day after day. She had tried, once or twice, to explain to Nelson how she had felt when she first started visiting the Inskys’ pastures at the other end of the valley. She was nine, alone, and had picked her way across the creek on a whim, committing herself to a long and arduous navigation of the apron of nettles and thistles that edged the bottom pasture. As soon as she had gotten through this marshy patch and into the broad lap of the farm, where she could walk without looking down at her feet, she had felt a stunning freedom. A clear spring ran before her, crowded with cattails; past an electric fence, a hill rose gently to the horizon, interrupted halfway up by a palisade of bedrock. On the close-cropped, grassy slope, three tall old pear trees leaned close together. The ground around their roots was littered with hard, speckled fruit. So: there was water and food, and cleared land bordered by a wilderness (the bedrock, covered with brambles and poison ivy), which meant that to a nine-year-old’s mind, conditioned by dollhouses and dioramas, this farm was a scale model of a whole country. It was a miniature new continent, and Livy was gloriously alone in it, with mud leaking into her shoes and ecstatic greed in her heart. She gave everything names, declared herself empress, and built a ritual around her daily entry, making up violent rhymes to block the path of anyone trying to follow her. If you pass the reeds so high / You’ll fall in a hole and die. / Try to cross the little spring / Burn to death with nettle stings. She had stopped going in the winter, and when she came back in the spring it was not the same. It must have been some change in herself, but the sod was just sod now.
Nelson snapped a branch off a little dead tree as they entered the path and swung it in the air in front of him, pushing back a rope of brambles. A few yards into the woods they headed right, up the slope. “I like this spot,” Nelson said. Livy recognized it. She couldn’t remember when she’d been there, but she recognized the tree, an old silvery beech leaning back and throwing up its limbs, charred by a lightning strike many years previous that had emptied it out at the bottom but left it alive. She remembered sitting inside it some afternoon when she was small.
“They were talking about us on the radio,” she said.
“They were?” He settled down beside the tree and leaned back, his face relaxing slightly.
“They didn’t really say anything new. Just that they’re looking for somebody and the roads are closed. Somebody foreign.” She looked up into the leaves of the tree. “I mean, they didn’t say that. They said something about extradition.”
“That was it?”
She nodded and sat down beside him, glancing at the side of his face. His eyes were wide and dark, looking off into the trees.
“You know, I had something compressing when the power went out,” he said. “I think I lost it.”
“What was it?”
“The video with the ants.” He had a cheap video camera and he’d been recording an anthill at the side of his driveway, an impressive structure, the ground humped and delicate beneath, the ants glinting red. There was a song he’d put with it, several songs; he kept trying them and discarding them, and there was something endearing about this, his focus on a project whose parameters were clear only to him, his emphatic rejection of one song, the hopeful way he took up another. Crouching for an hour at a time next to a mound of dirt, ducking around the side of the house when his parents or sister came outside.
“Did you have it backed up?” Livy said.
“I can’t remember. I keep trying to remember, and I can’t.”
“I bet you did. You’re always careful about that,” she said. He looked like he was reviewing it in his mind, the video that might or might not exist now in the silent lump of his hard drive. She thought of elaborating a bit more on this reassuring idea, but decided not to. Sometimes she blundered too loudly into these private spaces in his life, his projects, his machinations, and she could feel him cringe.
There was a platform in a tree about ten yards away, between the edge of the Telas’ yard and where they sat, that some kids had nailed up many years before. It was a pallet braced across two low branches and covered with a rotting carpet. When she was a kid she and her friends had sometimes used this tree for a game called Desert Island: the platform was the island, and the ground was a shark-infested sea, and they had nothing to eat and were alone in the world. Livy could just see the dark shape of it through the leaves. “Do you think that story about Jeremiah is true?” she said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Nelson said. During the previous winter three men had robbed a bar at gunpoint in Maronne and some people said that Jeremiah, Jocelyn’s son, was one of them.
“Do you think he has anything to do wi
th this?” she said.
“I doubt it. He hasn’t been around here in months. And I don’t think he’s really at the international criminal level.”
Livy laughed. “You’re probably right.” He seemed gloomy still, distracted. “Hey, I bet Carine misses you,” she said, grinning. Carine was a freshman whose sister knew Nelson’s sister. For several months she had been remote in person and very warm online. Livy and Nelson would sit together in his room drinking flat orange soda, playing a tedious game of Risk, and the computer would plink, plink, plink with her messages.
“Oh, desperately,” he said. He almost smiled.
“She’s cute,” Livy said.
He sat back, let go of his knees. “Yeah, she’s cute.” He sounded indifferent.
“What, you’re too good for Carine Bronson?”
“She’s fourteen. You want me to go out with her?”
“No, I don’t know.” She was talking just to talk, she realized. A bad habit. And a flirtatious gloss had crept into her voice, which happened sometimes when she was trying to cheer him up. “Do you think everybody’s talking about us?” she said. As she said it, she realized that she hoped they were. “Do you think Elena is wondering what’s happening—here?” She waved her hand, taking in the valley.
“Yeah, probably,” he said. Elena was a girl at school who seemed to find Livy and Nelson amusing. Her other friends were a group of Honor Society girls who met at diners to discuss the shifting hierarchies of their grade, and she invited Livy and Nelson along sometimes to be educated. She could be quick and funny, and she could be mean. She had asked Nelson once if he could get her ecstasy, which he could not, and later she had denied ever having the conversation so vehemently that it had almost ended their friendship. She and her friends operated according to a complicated system of badness and goodness. “This is all probably super exciting to her,” he muttered.
Relief Map Page 6
