Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  Dominic limped around the counter and grabbed the pharmacist by the arm. He pushed him toward the door in the back wall. There was blood on the floor from his foot, long streaks of it on the tile. Far off at the front of the store a man called out, “Hello?”

  They crashed through the bright air-conditioned cold of the storeroom, knocked the back door open, and ran as fast as they could through the parking lot, Dominic staggering on his bad foot with one hand gripping the pharmacist’s arm. Livy had the bag of pills and inhalers knotted up in her fist to keep them from rattling. Nelson was next to her, looking back.

  There was nobody watching. They dove across the intersection. Livy had never run like this. Her body burned. She followed the bobbing white of the pharmacist’s lab coat, down the bank, across the tracks, dropping off the edge of the retaining wall into the creek and remembering just in time to hold the bag of medications up out of the water.

  There was no thought of noise this time. They were all running as fast as they could and that imperative obliterated everything else. They splashed and fell, jumped up, battered their feet. Dominic must have been numb with adrenaline: he led them all, dragging the pharmacist by the arm. They passed the point where the roadblock stood on Prospect. They cut through the islands, through whipping brambles, and Livy’s lip bled, her arms and legs stung with tiny scratches. They ran past the backyards, crossed the floodplain with what felt like marvelous ease after the rocky creek bed, and looped up under the bridge, into the intersection by the corner store.

  They stopped there. Dominic took his hand off the pharmacist’s arm. They straggled together; none of them could speak. They looked back over the bridge, into the dark. They had run a mile through the water, over the stones.

  There were no lights. There was nobody coming.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Livy said. She sat down on the asphalt and held her head. The pharmacist sat down heavily beside her. “What the fuck did you do that for, Dominic?”

  “What are we going to do?” Brian said. He was hunched over his heaving stomach, his freckled elbows sticking out like rafters. “What are we going to do? Dom?”

  Dominic was walking in a little circle, long arms hanging, long fingers curled.

  “They could be coming,” Brian said. “Dom?”

  Dominic fished in his pockets, looking up at the sky.

  “You have to take him back,” Livy said.

  “I’ll take him to my house,” Dominic said. He turned around to look at them, the four of them sitting on the pavement.

  “To your house?” Livy said, incredulous. “What are you going to tell your mom?”

  “I’m going to tell her I got her refills and here’s a pharmacist, and I’m sorry.”

  Livy stared at him. For a minute the only noise was their breathing. Then Brian straightened up. “What did they say?” he said.

  Livy looked up at him. He was staring at the kid in the lab coat.

  “What’d who say?” the kid said.

  “The cops,” Brian said. “When they blocked the road, what did they say?”

  The pharmacist glanced back and forth between them. Dominic was still standing apart, looking up at the dark hill, as if this had all suddenly ceased to interest him.

  “That they were looking for somebody, I don’t know,” the pharmacist said.

  “You don’t know? What, you weren’t paying attention? Where do you live?”

  The pharmacist blinked. “Riverview.”

  “Where the fuck is that?” Brian said.

  “Stop yelling at him,” Livy said.

  Dominic turned toward them again, squinting, as if observing from a comfortable distance. “That trailer park on 72.”

  The pharmacist laid his head on his knees and stared in the direction of Sportsmen’s Club. “Leave him alone,” Livy said again.

  “What’s your name?” Nelson said.

  The pharmacist didn’t respond. Nelson leaned down toward him. It occurred to Livy for the first time that Nelson’s buzzed head made him look slightly dangerous, even when he was speaking softly. “What’s your name?” Nelson said again, and Livy had an ugly thought: Had he known about the gun? She watched him, still breathing hard, wondering. Everything was so opaque to her.

  “Mark,” said the pharmacist.

  “Okay. Mark.” Nelson patted the boy’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go to my house,” Dominic said.

  Nelson offered Mark a hand, which he accepted. Brian kept spinning in place, shifting his weight from foot to foot, tapping his closed fist against his mouth. Mark was unsteady on his feet and Livy saw a slash of mud across his white coat.

  “You messed up your coat,” she said, but no one heard her. She paused in the road, arms crossed, refusing to follow them. She hated Dominic just then, and wanted to make a point of it. But no one noticed except Nelson, who looked back at her anxiously. She relented and caught up with them at Dominic’s gate.

  Dominic took great pains with the hinges on the screen door, and no one moved inside. Lena Spellar appeared to be a sound sleeper. Dominic led them into the kitchen, dropped into the closest chair, and retrieved a joint from a bag in his pocket. He pushed his shoe off with his good foot, wincing, and held a penlight close to the injury.

  “Fuck,” Brian said.

  The sole was red, black, crusted. It had cracked open again when Dominic had taken off the sock and it was bleeding on the cushion. Brian picked a newspaper up off the floor and slid it underneath Dominic’s foot and blood soaked the dirty pages.

  “Mark, do you know what to do with this?” Dominic said.

  Mark blinked at him. “I’m not a doctor,” he said.

  “You’re not a doctor? I got confused and thought you were a doctor, Mark, what with the fucking coat and all.”

  “I’m a trainee tech. I’m only eighteen. I’m not even supposed to be there by myself, but the night guy called out, he has kidney stones . . .”

  “Do you have any iodine?” Nelson said, but now all Dominic would say was “Shit,” over and over.

  Nelson found a bottle of Betadine in the bathroom upstairs and cleaned the cut. Blood had made a scrimshaw of the babyish wrinkles on the sole of Dominic’s foot. The cut was three inches long, clean, slightly curved. Dawn was breaking and a kind of gray static filled the room. The sharp smell of marijuana hung over them; Dominic had lit the joint and was passing it back and forth with Brian and Mark, who looked grateful.

  “What are you going to do with him, Dom?” Livy said. She pointed at Mark.

  “Are you tired, Mark?” Dominic said. “You can have the couch.”

  Mark took a long drag on the joint.

  “What are you talking about, he can have the couch?” Livy said. “What about your mom?”

  Dominic looked at her, and then at Mark. “I guess he has to stay in my room,” he conceded.

  “Jesus Christ!” Livy said. She threw her hands in the air, appealing to him and to Nelson, who was standing there with the bottle of Betadine and an unreadable expression. “How are you going to keep people from finding out? Your mom for instance, who lives in this house?”

  “Mark, you have to stay in Dominic’s room and not make a fucking sound,” Brian said. “Seriously, Dom, can you make him do that?”

  Mark glanced back and forth between them, waiting for the resolution of this question as if it were not about him. There was something trusting about him, like a child in the back seat of a car.

  “What if you say he’s a friend of yours?” Nelson said. “Like, he’s visiting?”

  “How could he be visiting with the roads cut off?” Brian snapped.

  “You know what? It’s your problem,” Livy said. “You were the one with the gun. I have to be home before my parents wake up.” She glanced at Nelson, but he was not looking at her. His perpetual calm suddenly seemed suspicious. She made her way out through the living room, clumsy in her agitation. She tripped twice in the maze of furniture between the kitchen and the front door
, and stopped on the front steps to pull herself together. The spring door squealed and Nelson was there, stumbling and blinking, as if the house had spat him out into the morning with her.

  “Did you know he had that gun?” Livy said. “Were you all planning that before you came over to my house?”

  “No!” He seemed shocked that she would think it.

  She crossed her arms. Every muscle in her body felt like a closed fist.

  “You don’t believe me?” he said. “This is a nightmare. I shouldn’t have done this, we should never have gone with them. I would never have gone with them if I had known—you don’t really think I would do something like this on purpose?” He looked helpless, out of breath.

  She hugged him quickly, squeezing his shoulder. “I believe you, I’m sorry,” she said. “They’ll let him go today, probably, when they get bored.”

  He took a deep breath and let go of her. How quickly he could regain control of himself, leaving only a puff of embarrassment in the air. “I have to get home before my mom wakes up,” he said, his gaze leapfrogging away over her head. “Come up when you can, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  After he was gone she stood for another minute at the Spellar gate, taking slow, deep breaths. It would be a hot, bright day. She could tell already by the blueness of the air, the way the noise of the insects carried. They were coming to the time of year when the crickets, desperate and close to the end, kept calling all day long from the ragged grass at the edges of mowed yards.

  In the new light she could see what had happened to her arms when she ran through the brush on the silt islands in the creek. Her anger at Dominic was wavering, crackling like one radio station interfering with another: self-pity was coming through now, and dread. She was speckled and slashed with dried blood. Her jeans were clotted with burrs and she could feel her lip swelling. She hoped her parents might still be asleep. She was so tired she could hardly feel her feet.

  The house was quiet. She crept up the stairs to her room and was asleep in minutes.

  In less than an hour, there was rattling in the kitchen. She woke up slowly. Her muscles ached; she was lying on her stomach, her hands knotted together beneath her chest. A bird twittered insanely in the scrubby tree outside her window.

  She took a shower, thankful that their water heater ran on gas, and found some clean clothes in the mess on the floor. She went downstairs, where her father was frying potatoes and making coffee. He had been digging the potatoes up out of the garden for weeks and the basement was filling with them. Normally he would be playing the radio at low volume, listening to the news. The silence felt strange, the room tight with omission. He looked up when she came into the kitchen.

  “You’re up early,” he said. He peered at her. “What’s wrong with your face?”

  She remembered her cut lip. “I fell off my bike last night,” she said. “Flipped over in the gravel.” She showed him the scratches on her arms.

  “You were riding your bike? In the dark?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I hope you stayed away from the roadblocks.”

  “I did. I was just in the parking lot of the restaurant.”

  “Why would you do that? Ride your bike in the dark, with cops everywhere? I don’t know what’s wrong with you lately.”

  Livy was neither allowed nor forbidden to go out alone in the middle of the night. Her parents did not generally make rules. They just became annoyed when she did certain things.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She couldn’t meet his eyes and she guessed that she looked only sullen, not sorry at all. “I won’t do it again,” she offered. “The bike thing.”

  “This is a hard time,” her father said. “Don’t make it harder.”

  She went back to her room and lay in bed, wide awake, too tense to read or sleep. She imagined Dominic and Mark asleep in Dominic’s room with Lena Spellar oblivious in the kitchen below them. We are in so much trouble, she thought, so so so much trouble, although the word seemed inadequate for what had happened. Her heart was racing. She pressed her hand across her breastbone.

  When Livy was in ninth grade her health teacher had gotten frustrated with the class’s lack of attention and had made them all sit on the floor beside their desks with their eyes closed for a meditation exercise, hectoring them to focus on calming their energy. Livy had found to her surprise that it worked, at least partially. If she closed her eyes her mind wandered irretrievably, so she’d kept them open and fixed on a cracked tile near her feet. Several minutes of focus had revealed profundities in the tile, in her shoelaces, in the underside of her desk—dirt and light, an alert calm. She’d practiced later in her room. She was fourteen then, unhappy at school, and the lonely summer that followed (Nelson was away with his grandparents in New Jersey) inclined her to a foggy mysticism. During solitary evenings in her room, the plaster walls seemed to bulge with unexpressed truths. She checked some books on meditation out of the library and put some candles on her dresser. She felt she was on the verge of a great discovery. But in the fall Nelson came back and school improved, and in the face of these banal comforts the spiritual urgency she had felt began to fade. She still lit her candles before bed and meditated briefly, but she was doing it in a perfunctory, corrective way, and she no longer felt she was on a path from one place to another. She never told Nelson or anyone else about meditating. But she still found that it could work, from time to time. She stared at the lamp that hung from her bedroom ceiling and began to feel a pleasant heaviness in her face; she even slept for a little while.

  At ten she roused herself and found the house empty. She went out to the yard to see what her parents were doing. They were working on a cold frame in the garden and her mother was standing beside it, resting her back.

  “Come here, Livy,” she said. They were a pale family and they were all sunburned, which gave them the sad, doomed look of people outflanked by their climate. Her mother pulled at her sticky dress and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “So you were out last night,” she said.

  They stood looking at each other. Livy’s father cursed softly inside the cold frame and knocked a jammed staple gun against a plank.

  “Yeah,” Livy said.

  “Your dad thinks we haven’t taught you any common sense.”

  “Does he?” Livy was unsure of the role she was supposed to play in this conversation. The truth of what had happened so dwarfed the offense they were scolding her for that it was hard to keep the right expression on her face—shame, a touch of defiance.

  Her mother nodded. She kept nodding for a minute, looking at her feet, and then she sniffed and Livy saw that she was crying. Livy started as if someone had struck a match in her face. “I’m really sorry. Don’t—”

  “Don’t do stupid things right now, all right?” her mother said. She wiped her eyes with dirty fingers and shook her head. Livy backed away, dismissed. Halfway to the house she turned and looked back at the garden: her father and mother were both in the cold frame now, pacing with a measuring tape, as if on an ordinary day.

  Livy knocked on Dominic’s door at eleven, when it was reasonable to visit, and caught her breath when Lena answered. “Livy?” she said.

  “Is Dominic here?” Livy said.

  Lena looked surprised. Livy was a bookish girl, an honor student. She had never visited Dominic before. “In his room.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “Yeah. Top of the stairs, in the back.”

  Livy grinned nervously and stepped through the doorway, past the scent of Lena’s jasmine perfume. “Thanks,” she said.

  The bedroom door was closed, and Livy knocked several times before Dominic came and opened it. He looked a little surprised to see her. “I thought you were pissed at me,” he said.

  “I am. You’re an asshole.”

  He laughed. There was something genteel about it, his lack of concern. “What are you here for, then?”

  “To keep an eye on things, I guess.”r />
  He stepped out of the way. The window opened onto the porch roof at the back of the house, and Mark was out there, peering around the curtain at her.

  “He’s outside?” she said.

  “It’s all right,” Dominic said. “Nobody’ll see him.”

  Mark said, “I’d come in, but—” He held up a lit cigarette. His expression was blank, or simply earnest; she couldn’t tell. In daylight he was solid and pale, like a piece of carved soap. She thought she recognized his type: boys who were punished often in school but didn’t seem to notice, as if life were naturally a string of humiliations.

  “I’ll come out,” she said. She crawled out the window, scraping her scabbed elbow on the window frame. The asphalt shingles were hot. She crouched on her heels. Dominic climbed through the window with a practiced, graceful movement, frowning in concentration, and then sat back to pick the bits of shingle off his palms. He favored his hurt foot.

  “Does your mom know?” she said.

  “She knows we went to the drugstore,” Dominic said. “I gave her her refills.”

  “Does she know about him?” She pointed at Mark.

  “She doesn’t come in my room.”

  “I’ve been here before,” Mark said suddenly. He was looking thoughtfully down at the creek, the trees on the far bank. “I didn’t even know this place had a name. I drove through a couple of times when there was a detour on the highway after the flood.”

  Livy’s split lip was starting to throb. “I’m sorry about this,” she said. He didn’t react. She looked at Dominic. “You should let him go, Dom.”

  Mark looked up as if she had said something impolite.

  “The cops wouldn’t let him through even if he got up there,” Dominic said, pointing up at the bridge, meaning the barricade beyond it. “You know that, right, Mark? You’re stuck down here as long as we are.”

  “The longer you keep him here, the more trouble we’re in,” Livy said.

  “We’re already basically in jail,” Dominic said.

  She looked down over the edge of the porch roof at the hydrangea bush in the yard, the patio umbrella tipped over in the grass. “What about your parents, Mark?” she said.