Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  He fixed his eyes on her and raised his eyebrows slightly. He seemed surprised by her interest. “We don’t really—” he said. “We don’t talk. I’ve been staying with my sister.”

  “So she’s looking for you, probably, right?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t really check up on me.”

  Livy was irritated. Irritation was an emotion so undersized for the occasion that she seized on it gladly. She was irritated with Mark for his passivity, for the lumpish way he sat on the asphalt, and for his evident failure to be as worried as she was, which made her look foolish.

  “I don’t want to go to jail,” she said, her face tight.

  “Why would you even fucking say that?” Dominic said. “Nobody wants to go to jail. You think other people go because they want to? Jesus.”

  Brian knocked on the window behind them. Livy jumped.

  “I brought handcuffs,” Brian said. He held up a pair and they dangled brightly against the dark interior of the house.

  “What the fuck!” Dominic said. He grabbed at them excitedly. “Where did you get these?” Brian handed him a blunt little key, and he reached in Mark’s direction. “Give me your wrists, Mark.”

  Mark looked back and forth between the two of them. The cigarette was still lit between his fingers. He held it up.

  “Finish it and give me your wrists,” Dominic said.

  “Don’t do that, that’s shitty,” Livy said. “He’s not even trying to get away.” She thought she saw fear in Mark’s still face. His mouth was slightly open. He took another drag on the cigarette, flipped it over the edge of the roof, looked at the two boys again, and then held up the pale undersides of his wrists. Dominic snapped the cuffs shut.

  They all looked at the handcuffs. Mark’s nails were short and dirty. “They’re too tight,” he said finally. He had a very low voice.

  “I can fix it,” Dominic said. He fumbled over them with the key. “Shit, they’re pinching.” He worked in silence for a minute. “What about now?”

  “That’s fine,” Mark murmured.

  “Ha-ha,” Dominic said, a triumphant exhalation. He leaned against the siding.

  There was someone on the bridge, but Livy couldn’t tell where the person was looking. “Look,” she said, pointing.

  Dominic squinted at the figure on the bridge. “They can’t see us from there.”

  “Fine. Do what you want,” Livy said. “I’m leaving.”

  She heard a dog barking as soon as she came out onto the front steps, and saw it a moment later, when she was closing the gate behind her. It was a big shepherd mix, standing in the intersection in front of the store, head and tail low, legs stiffly planted, and there were two men standing about fifteen feet in front of it, one of them holding a large cardboard box.

  Livy crossed the road to get a better look and saw that the two men were police. Oh Christ, she thought. Jocelyn stood in the doorway of the store, biting her lip.

  “Whose dog is this?” yelled one of the policemen.

  The dog moved back a little and stopped. It was growling so loudly Livy could hear it from where she stood, thirty feet down the low road. One of the men made a move to set the box down and the growl collapsed into furious barking. Jocelyn removed the prop from her door, stepped back into the shadows, and let it swing gently, silently shut.

  “Whose fucking dog is this!” yelled the policeman.

  At the sound of his voice the dog bounded sideways and stopped, squaring up to them, and Livy saw a piece of chewed-off rope as long as her arm trailing from its collar. The dog was ecstatic with rage. It crouched, jerked forward, retreated, and then settled into its stiff-legged pose, the bunched fur on its spine vibrating slightly. Ron Cash was standing on the porch of the house that shared a wall with the store.

  “Is this your dog?” yelled the cop.

  “No-o,” he said, letting the word waggle in the air mockingly.

  “These are medical supplies,” said the one holding the box. “You’d better figure out who this dog belongs to, you hear me?”

  “That dog is your problem,” Ron said, a little louder this time.

  The first cop had taken his gun out of the holster. The second cop tried a second time to set the box down, and a second time the dog lunged forward and stopped. The door of the store opened and Paula stepped out. “Don’t you shoot that dog,” she said. “Don’t you dare shoot that dog!”

  “Whose dog is it?” cried the first cop again.

  A door slammed. Livy jumped and looked over. She could see Jerry Olds come down the side steps from his house in his cautious way, as if his feet hurt, and walk across his steeply tilted yard. He stopped at the bare patch in the grass beside the doghouse and she saw him shake his head and walk on toward the dog, no faster than before. Jerry Olds rarely left his property. He was a silent, jagged presence, an unloved neighbor widely believed to be deficient—morally, perhaps mentally. Many years before he’d punched one of the neighbor boys, fourteen at the time, in the jaw, for reasons that were never clear: just came out of his house and hit him, and went back inside. No one had called the police about it.

  “It’s my dog,” Jerry said when he reached the edge of the road.

  “Get it the fuck out of here!” said the first cop. “These are medical supplies!”

  “Why won’t you just let us out so we can take care of our own business?” yelled Ron from the steps.

  Jerry stood in the grass and whistled to the dog. The dog ignored him.

  The cop waved his gun helplessly in the air. “I don’t want to, but I will,” he yelled.

  “You’re murderers!” said Ron. “He’s a pet, he’s a domestic animal!”

  “I’m going to come out there,” Jerry said. He edged into the intersection, eyes on the dog. “Come here, Chief, you piece of shit.”

  The dog heard him and turned. He appeared to be wracked with great waves of emotion. He barked again at the cops, hunched his shoulders, and began to whine softly. He looked at Jerry, and Livy saw the whites of the dog’s eyes.

  “That’s it, you little bastard,” Jerry said. He was smiling, which Livy had never seen him do before. The cops were wide-eyed. One still had his gun half-raised. The dog shivered and whined and Jerry held out his hand.

  “There’s a boy,” he said. He closed his fingers around the collar.

  There was a thump as the cardboard box hit the asphalt, and both cops turned and walked away, moving as fast as they could without running. The one with the gun looked over his shoulder several times. Livy’s stomach turned. They had been scared and people had seen it, and they knew it. The cardboard box sat abandoned at the end of the bridge.

  “I hope it’s what they say it is,” said Paula.

  Ron was shaking his head vigorously, pivoting a little on his stiff leg. “Acting like the dog is the problem,” he said. “The dog lives here. The dog is doing his job.”

  Jocelyn came out of the store. Livy stayed where she was, watching the bridge where the police had turned the corner and disappeared. Lena Spellar’s house huddled in her peripheral vision, compact and yellow, a fan in an upstairs window turning slowly in a light wind. The cardboard box in the intersection seemed to be soaking all the pigment from the scene. Paula came down from the steps to retrieve it, and Livy followed her. She needed to know what was in it. If the box was full of medicine then the trip the night before had not been necessary and she and Nelson and Brian and Dominic had caused this trouble for no reason at all. She crept into the store after them, hoping that no one would pay her any attention.

  Noreen was leaning on the counter, slightly out of breath. “It’s just getting worse and worse out there,” she said. “Shouting all the time. I don’t even want to step out to see anymore.”

  Paula sat down in a folding chair and braced one arm across the counter like she was holding it in place, her large glasses sliding down her nose. Jocelyn crouched on the floor to cut open the tape on the top of the box.

  �
��Livy, what are you doing out there?” Noreen said. “It’s not safe for kids to be out now.”

  “I was just walking by,” Livy said, her voice a whisper. To Noreen, she would always be eight years old. The scratches on her face and arms felt large and impossible to miss; she licked the scab on her lip. Noreen’s eyes were hidden by the reflection on her thick glasses, and Livy fought the feeling that she was being examined.

  “They brought insulin,” Jocelyn said, lifting out plastic-wrapped packages.

  “Oh, thank God,” Noreen said. “I’m trying to keep mine cool in the basement, but it’s hard.”

  “So they were paying attention when Lena was screaming at them,” Paula said.

  “She needed inhaler refills too,” Livy said quietly, trying to see over Jocelyn’s shoulder without moving from her place by the door.

  “Are there any in there?” Paula said.

  Jocelyn searched the bottom of the box. “No.”

  Livy let out a long breath, as quietly as she could.

  “Maybe they’ll come back with it,” Noreen said.

  Jocelyn sat down beside the box, cross-legged, like a child. “I don’t like this,” she said. Her voice was faint. “How long are they planning to leave us down here, if they’re bringing us medicine? I want to see my son.”

  “I saw Tobias for a minute this morning,” Paula said. “On White Horse Road. He says he doesn’t think it’ll be much longer. He’s about to lose his mind over it.” She tipped her head back suddenly and inhaled through her nose, and Livy saw that she was crying. She felt panicky: Paula with slick cheeks, pink eyes.

  Ron Cash shoved the door open, making the bells jingle on their string. “We have to find this guy.” He was sweating and his voice was more strained than usual, high-pitched and hoarse.

  “He’s not here,” Paula said. “They’ve already looked through everybody’s house.”

  “That’s naive,” Ron said. “That’s really naive.”

  “Livy, are you all right?” Noreen said. “You look shook up. Have a soda or something.”

  “Thanks,” Livy said. She went over to the silent refrigerator and took out a warm cream soda.

  “This won’t be over until they get him,” Ron said. “You all are fooling yourselves if you think otherwise. If they leave without him, they lose, and they’re not going to be the ones to lose. I guarantee you that.”

  “Knock it off,” Noreen said.

  “That’s not just the state police out there. That’s the FBI and the CIA, the ones in those black four-by-fours. It’s on the radio. Tobias knows. She’ll tell you.” He pointed at Paula.

  “I’m not going to help you panic people,” she said.

  Noreen ignored him. “Don’t worry about the money,” she said to Livy. “You’re all red.”

  “Thanks,” Livy said again, and excused herself to the road outside. Behind her she could hear Ron’s cracked voice wending higher and higher.

  She found Nelson in his parents’ garage. The door was open to the halfhearted parenthesis of the driveway, and he was dragging bags of potting soil from one wall to the other. She told him about the dog and the box of insulin. Nelson sat down on a child-sized decorative bench and listened to her with his spidery hand spread out across his forehead.

  “Sounds like it could have been worse,” he said when she was done. “I’m surprised Jerry came out to get the dog, like he gives a shit.” Jerry generally gave the impression that he would not care if his own house were burning down.

  “I know. I thought it was going to die.” Tears welled up in her eyes at the thought, and she brushed them away. “I don’t even like that fucking dog.” She stood there rubbing her arm for a minute. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

  “My mom wants me to clean up.”

  She stared at him and at the garage: the workbench at the back, the particleboard hung with hooks, the corners crowded with shovels and rakes. “That’s her priority?”

  He picked up the bench he’d been sitting on. “I’m just moving things from one side to the other.”

  “This is already the cleanest garage I’ve ever seen,” Livy said.

  Livy’s father came into the kitchen around six that evening, while Livy was peeling potatoes and her mother was attempting to make cornbread with powdered milk.

  “I was just talking to Clarence,” he said. He was out of breath in the doorway. He had taken his glasses off. “He told me about the Quick Drug.”

  Her mother stopped oiling a pan. “What?”

  “Well, Livy?” her father said. He was holding his glasses in front of his chest, his thumb heedlessly on the lens.

  “I’m sorry,” Livy said. It was weak, she could hear how weak it was. She stood there gripping a cold potato.

  “What are you talking about?” her mother said.

  “They went to the Quick Drug,” her father said.

  “I’m sorry,” Livy said again.

  “That kind of—” Her father waved his hand, and it collided with the doorframe. “I wouldn’t have—you startle a cop in the dark and you get shot, did you even—”

  “You went past the police?” her mother said.

  “We wanted to get prescriptions. Lena was out of inhaler refills.”

  “Why would you go along with that?” her father said. “You trying to impress some people? Dominic and Brian? You want to hang around with that kind of person? You want to look tough?”

  “No.” She looked at him: he must not have known about the robbery and Mark. He couldn’t know, he wasn’t horrified enough. Livy’s mother was staring at her, open-mouthed.

  “And Nelson too,” her father went on. “I was really surprised. I thought he was at least smarter than that.”

  “You thought we wouldn’t hear about this?” her mother said. “And you told us, what, you were riding your bike?”

  Livy avoided their eyes. Her heart was pounding.

  “That is not the way to handle things,” her mother said. “It’s not your job to fill Lena’s prescriptions. This isn’t like you.”

  That was true, Livy thought, it wasn’t like her. She usually had sense. But maybe it was just that she had had so few chances to do stupid things before. Maybe she was actually a person who would do stupid things all the time, if it seemed likely that other people might see her doing them and think she was brave.

  “Somebody could have gotten killed,” her father said. “Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.” She tried to compose her face.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not leaving this house again until this is over. Do you understand?”

  She nodded. He turned and walked out.

  He didn’t come back for dinner. Livy and her mother ate in punitive silence and then retired to separate corners of the house, Livy to her room with a candle, her mother downstairs to the porch with a kerosene lamp. The darkness of the house was oppressive, the candle making little difference. Livy oscillated between a tired fatalism and total, shattering amazement at the scope of the disaster that she was in. As a child, she once spent a morning at school idly chewing on the end of her pencil and then became convinced that she had given herself lead poisoning. She didn’t know that modern pencils were made of graphite, and she had only a vague idea of what lead poisoning would do to her. She sat on a bench in the library area and stared into her hands for an hour during the reading break in the afternoon, certain that a destructive force was irremediably nested within her guts. This was the template for every moment of dread she felt afterward. She could almost see Dominic’s house from the skylight in her room. She could see the Sportsmen’s Club, the outline of the folksy weathervane stuck absurdly on a fake cupola at one end of the quarter-acre sheet-metal roof. The Spellar house was next to it, in a row hidden from her by the trees crowding together over the Black Rock Creek. Mark’s presence practically glowed from the midst of those trees. What a ridiculous idea to think you could hide anyth
ing, ever, from anyone.

  Livy lay in bed, staring up at the sloping ceiling and the shadows the candle threw around the loose edges of the pictures she had taped there when she was fourteen—mostly landscapes cut from copies of National Geographic and photographs from a Time Life publication she’d found in the free bin at the library, teenage boys bare-knuckle boxing in a barn, young couples draped over each other with exhaustion at a Depression dance marathon, a row of masked girls grinning manically at a 1950s cotillion. She was easily taken in by the uncanniness of old photos, their vibrating stillness. She heard her father coming in, heard him make his way up the stairs from the basement to the kitchen and open a drawer in the sideboard. She didn’t approach the edge of the loft to see what he was doing, because he would have heard her, but she could tell anyway: he had dug out the notebook where he kept track of the garden and was sitting in his designated chair at the kitchen table, working over his lists and diagrams and drinking a glass of wine. He had calmed down, then.

  Livy slipped downstairs, past the kitchen, not turning to acknowledge her father from the doorway. They sometimes pretended to be less aware of each other than they were, to buttress the weak privacy of the house. From the ground floor she could see her mother through the front windows, sitting on the porch with the kerosene lamp, reading a book. Their house was full of books and her parents had read most of them so long ago that the books were new to them again. Livy stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind her.

  “Do you have any magazines?” she said. She cleared her throat.

  Her mother glanced up at her, lowering her book. It seemed to take her a moment to focus on Livy’s face and understand her question. “There are a couple on the bedside table,” she said.

  Livy nodded and looked out into the yard. This was a new strategy: she would pretend that it was up to her to decide when the argument was over. This was generally her mother’s prerogative—after a little while, a couple of hours or perhaps half a day if the offense was more serious, she would appear in Livy’s room, speaking in a light, friendly tone but not making much eye contact. The weight of the problem would just fall away, leaving nothing behind. Livy stood there interlacing her fingers behind her back. “You mind if I take a couple to read?” she said.