Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  The rosebush protected her. No one would come through this way. She sat for a while with her head on her knees, breathing as slowly as she could.

  What if he’d done something serious? she thought. Nelson’s question. What if he had?

  Get him out of here, she thought. Out of here, out of here, out of here.

  Revaz had thought she would come back right away with something to eat. She had asked if he wanted food, unless he had somehow grossly misunderstood her. But hours passed, and she didn’t come back.

  He needed something to do with his hands. He opened the cedar-scented drawers of the dresser one by one. In the bottom one, there were forty-five cents and a child’s sock with a ruffle at the ankle. Under the windows there were boxes full of books, and he passed the time for a while by lifting them out and looking at the covers and then putting them back very carefully where they belonged. They were mostly paperbacks, including ten that obviously belonged to a series and all had dreamy paintings of young women on them, clutching books to their chests, wearing Edwardian dresses.

  She hadn’t come back with food but she also hadn’t come back with the police. She might be planning to help him. It was possible.

  These were probably her books, put away now because she was too old for them. He had a goddaughter who was fifteen, a nice girl. He felt sad at the thought of her. He guessed that this girl was sixteen or seventeen, although he’d never been good at guessing the ages of children. She was pretty (all girls that age were pretty). She was freckled and had long, loose hair.

  If she hadn’t brought the police by now, she would not bring them.

  Were women naturally empathetic? He was old-fashioned in believing they were. He straightened his stiff knee, painfully, until he was sitting with his legs sticking out in front of him like a child. He’d always believed women would come and save him, and usually one did. Girlfriends here and there. His sister, until she was gone.

  After a while—half an hour or forty-five minutes, she couldn’t tell—Livy slipped down through the woods to White Horse Road. She would have to wait until dark to retrieve the bike, she realized now. Queen Anne’s lace was blooming along the road, half strangled in nets of crown vetch. In June she had walked here with Nelson, picking wineberries, ducking out of the way of passing cars. She walked on the yellow stripe in the middle now. A gust of wind had knocked a few bright leaves loose from the trees and they lay here and there in bunches on the road, undisturbed.

  Where the road turned, just before the roadblock came into sight, she sat down in the dirt by the guardrail. A pair of white butterflies looped in the still air over the asphalt. She had hours of daylight to wait through.

  The Markos sometimes went back to camp at the farm where Livy’s parents had once lived. The old fields were wild now, the house had been annexed by hornets and mice, and the yard was a thicket with stray poppies staggering through it. Once Livy had gotten up in the middle of the night to pee and the silence outside the tent had astonished her. There was no wind and no highway, no water running by, and after using the outhouse she’d stood outside for a long time listening, arms crossed, barefoot.

  The silence had been so complete it felt like deafness. There was a strange pressure in her ears, as if they had been switched off or blocked. She stood on packed earth; the grass grew knee-high beside the bare patch, and each blade of it, each angled stem and puff of seed, was perfectly still. She began to hear her own blood hissing in her ears. She looked at the edge of the woods, the field going over the hill, the stand of walnut trees around the bedrock at the top, and none of it scratched out any sound to match the seething in her veins. Her aliveness was monumental, and the world was faint and distant and dark.

  She had been like that for most of her adolescence, vivid to herself with the world muted and blurred around her. Now the world was thunderous. She pulled up a blade of grass and chewed on the end of it. The world was loud and close, and her heart and lungs and brain were a tinny afterthought.

  It was seven thirty before the sky began to dim. Livy was waiting it out behind the Sportsmen’s Club, on the patch of grass where the last manager had been thinking, shortly before he quit, about setting up some tables and patio umbrellas. He had used the words alfresco. The patch of grass was pleasant, but it was small and it faced the back of the building, a carelessly stuccoed wall with a heavy metal door in it, painted brown. It had seemed to Livy, when he suggested it, like an indication of the gap between the kind of restaurant he thought he deserved and the one he was in.

  There was never much of a sunset in Lomath. The hills were in the way and all they got were side effects, an orangeness in the air. Livy had been moving around all day and her fear of encountering her parents was so intense that it was funny: it made her feel like a small child again, a kid on TV who had broken a lamp. Birds animated a tree across the parking lot, an invisible mob in the upper branches. She waited and waited.

  She realized, crossing the creek in the new dark, that Revaz must be thirsty. He was hungry too, but she still couldn’t go into her own house to get anything to eat, and thirst was more of a problem. She pictured him unconscious, an enormous unshiftable weight. There were jars in the garage. The hose might be unspooled in the garden; if she was lucky her father might have forgotten to turn the valve off in the house.

  Her house looked dark from across the yard. Her parents might have been home or not; lit candles were invisible from outside. She hurried around the corner of the garage and pushed open the door.

  “Hello?” she said. “Sir?”

  The dark was close and it felt populated. She dug in her pocket for the key chain flashlight Nelson had given her. It was small, encased in soft plastic; she squeezed it and the little light came on. She found a carpenter pencil in an old baking soda can and pocketed it. The big canning jars were on the shelf by the door. She took one and backed out of the garage again, found the hose lying among the rhubarb, filled the jar, drank half of it down, then filled it again. The water was warm and smelled like rubber, but it was the best she could do.

  Back in the garage she repeated herself. “Hello?”

  She heard something like a shoe scraping on the boards of the loft. “Hello,” he said.

  She aimed the flashlight at the loft. There were indistinct shapes, a gleam of white paint.

  “I brought you water,” she said.

  He said nothing. Why did she keep talking to him? She crossed carefully to the ladder and climbed it. The full jar made her hand ache. “Water,” she said.

  He was sitting against the north-facing wall, one ear visible in the light from the window. She set the jar down on the boards and pushed it toward him. He heaved himself onto his knees and reached for it. “Thank you,” he said. He lifted it clumsily and water poured down his chin.

  “Sorry it’s warm,” Livy said. She could hear his throat working. She looked away. “Sorry I didn’t think of it before.”

  He set the empty jar down. “Thank you,” he said again.

  “Map,” she said. She pretended to unfold and refold a map several times, and at last he pulled the map from his pocket and handed it to her. “We’re going to get you out tonight,” she said. She had an urge to point the flashlight at him. It was strange to talk to someone whose face she couldn’t see. “I have a bicycle—bike, bike . . .” She gestured meaninglessly. He would see the one downstairs in a minute anyway. “A bike for you to ride. We’ll take it over the hill and you’ll go down a trail to a highway.” She unfolded the map on the floor and drew in the trail with a thick stroke of the carpenter pencil. They would go over the hill, and then he would ride down the trail, which followed the Lomath Creek for half a mile before crossing it on an old railroad bridge and continuing across flat bottomlands to the highway.

  “Here,” she said. “We go to the trail, and you go down the trail to the highway, and you turn left,” she said. She traced the highway with the pencil, finished in Cooverton with a triumphant flourish. “T
o Cooverton. Where there’s a train. To Pittsburgh.” She sketched a train, an arrow, the magic word: Pittsburgh.

  “I go,” he said.

  Did that mean he understood? “Okay, good,” she said. “Good good good.”

  Her face was hot with nerves, her forehead was slick. She backed down the ladder. The bike was hanging on a hook back under the loft, and it took her several minutes of sweating and cursing in the dark to get it untangled from the rakes that hemmed it in. It came free finally with a clanking of pedals, and the tires hit the gravel floor of the garage with no resistance at all. Her heart sank.

  “The tires are flat,” she called up to the man in the loft. It was reflexive to talk, and the more complete the silence of the other party was, the more she was driven to narrate. She was the same way with babies. She shined the flashlight around in the mess. She saw a pump gleaming on a nail beside the rakes.

  There was some shuffling upstairs. The man’s head appeared over the edge. “Okay?” he said.

  “Okay.” She did a thumbs-up, invisible in the dark. She had to hold the flashlight in her mouth while she pumped up the tires. They held air. This was the luckiest thing that had ever happened. She flipped the bike over so it was propped on its seat and turned the pedals a few times with her hand, and the wheels spun solidly, heavily, and made the correct noise. She was flushed with success.

  “Hey,” she said. She shined the flashlight into the loft and beckoned. “Come down.”

  She heard the boards creak, a quick exhale and shifting of weight. He climbed very slowly down the ladder.

  “Bike,” she said. “For you.” She put her hand on the wheel, which was still spinning. “You ride?” She turned the bike over, patted the seat. “Can you ride? You know how to ride? You go to Cooverton,” she said, holding up the map again, “on this,” pointing to the bike. “Okay?” she said. She patted the seat energetically.

  With one hand Revaz loosened the crank on the seat and raised it a few inches.

  “Okay!” she said. “You understand!”

  “Okay,” he said. He tightened the crank, loosened it, straightened the seat, tightened it again.

  “Yes, good!” she said. “It was too low for you!”

  She went and stood by the door, listening. She heard nothing in particular coming from outside. “My friend is coming to meet us,” she said over her shoulder.

  Revaz was squeezing the tires. He seemed satisfied with them. He lifted the bike slightly by the handlebars and dropped it on the gravel once, twice, three times, so it bounced. He ran his fingers over the chain and then wiped the grease on his pants.

  “We’ll wait a little bit,” Livy said.

  He rolled the bike forward and back on the gravel, forward and back. He was waiting for her to do something—that was why he was standing there making meaningless assessments of the bike. Demonstratively, Livy settled down on the lumber to wait, her knees jiggling with nerves. Revaz put the kickstand down with one foot and stood with his hands in his pockets. He had a heavy kind of patience, standing very still.

  There was a tension in Livy’s abdomen that pulled at the rest of her body. She sifted the night sounds for footsteps, but heard nothing. Acid was thickening in her stomach. An interval crept by that felt like twenty minutes, or ten, or an hour. Had Nelson forgotten? It was unlikely. Maybe he’d been prevented from leaving, or stopped on the way, or maybe it was just too hard to arrange a meeting with no clocks. Her cell phone battery was dead and so was his. He’d said he would come when it was dark, and it was dark now, had been dark for a little while already. The minutes felt viscous, stretching and sticking; the effect got worse the more she tried to track the time.

  “We should just go,” she said finally. She heard Revaz shift on the gravel, perhaps looking at her, but it was too dark to see him clearly. She took a couple of deep breaths, her legs tensing, and allowed for a few last-minute intercessions: Nelson could knock softly at the door now, or now, or now. But there was nothing.

  “All right,” she said, standing up. She tried to shrug off her disappointment, pack it away. “Now.” She pulled open the door. The blackness gave way to the yard in weak moonlight. She pulled the bike out of Revaz’s hands and walked out into the grass and around the side of the building. She kept her head up, her hair bouncing in a silly girlish way on the back of her neck. The grass was soaked with dew. She walked fast but did not yet permit herself to run. She heard him close the door behind him, quickly but softly.

  “Okay,” he stage-whispered, hurrying after her.

  Livy dragged the bike through the creek and clambered up the far bank. Revaz followed, breathing audibly. His white shirt was terribly visible in the moonlight.

  “Okay,” Livy muttered to herself, uncontrollably. “Okay. Okay.” She began to run, drawing in great dilating breaths. Revaz fell into a jog behind her. The woods were dark and still, but Livy could see very clearly. The bike rattled and bashed against her legs as she rounded the turn by the Inskys’ long driveway. The moon was high and through the trees that lined the road she could see the Inskys’ pastures rolling away below her, smooth as cream. There was no wind. It took less than five minutes to reach the top of the hill, and there the road ended at a fence. There was a well-worn path around the gate, and Livy slowed to a walk to guide the bike through it. Revaz stopped and coughed once or twice.

  She waited on the other side of the gate for him to catch up. He was unsteady, as if carrying another person on his shoulders. He put one hand on the top bar of the fence and took a few deep scraping breaths.

  “Are you all right?” Livy said. She didn’t know how long it had been since he’d eaten. He might have asthma, a weak heart. His chest was heaving as it had been when she first encountered him, and his mouth was open. She put the kickstand down on the bike and came back to the gate. “Are you okay?” she said. She touched his arm.

  “Okay,” he said.

  The top of the hill was bare. In normal times boys rode four-wheelers and dirt bikes across the open space and into the woods farther down. On a bright night like this it felt like a stage, held up broad and flat above the trees and distant houses and the highway that girdled the Lomath valley. It was a dangerous place to be.

  “We have to hurry,” she said. “We can’t stand here.” She grabbed the bike and jogged away from him. It veered in her hands and she banged her shin on it. “Come on, please,” she said to him. Ahead there was an open strip thirty yards wide where the trees had been cleared, years before, for easy access to the sewer lines beneath. It ran from the top of the hill to the bottom. Livy headed for it. “It’s downhill from here,” she hissed over her shoulder. “It’s easy.”

  He followed her, jogging gamely, with more movement in his arms than in his legs. She watched her feet as well as she could; the ground was difficult, strewn with gravel knocked down by the dirt bikes, marked with unexpected ditches where the water cut through when it rained too hard. The plumes of seeded grasses whipped her legs. As she stepped over a branch in the path, a light flashed at the corner of her eye. She turned her head to see where it had come from and fell.

  She had not fallen like this since she was little. She somersaulted; the bike was wrenched from her hands and she went down first on her left forearm, then her face, and then flipped over, her feet slashing through the air, and landed on her back so hard the air was knocked out of her lungs.

  She opened her eyes, struggling for breath, and Revaz was crouching over her, whispering incomprehensible words.

  Her lungs opened and pulled. “Shiiiit,” she whispered.

  He disappeared from view and then he was back, tugging on her arms. She could feel her legs now, her back, her feet, and it was all ringing and thudding. She half turned while he pulled her and tried to get up onto her knees, and both of them tipped over. The bike wheels spun nearby.

  “I’m okay,” she whispered. “My head.”

  Her head was ringing and thudding harder than anything else; it wa
s the source of the ringing and thudding. Her shaking arms gave out and she sank down. Distinct pains were beginning to emerge. Her cheek and forehead stung. A powerful throbbing issued from the lower ribs in her back, on the right side. She was grateful to be on the ground.

  She lay with her face in the dirt, resting on the unscraped side. Small insects crawled on her legs.

  “There was a light,” she said.

  Revaz was a mass to her left, sitting and waiting. She pushed herself onto her knees, very slowly, accounting for all the parts of her body. She felt a little better. The pain was focused now at a few fixed points and had withdrawn from the interstices of her head and back and belly. She got to her feet. She saw that the flashlight, which she had clipped to her waistband, was on. It had a pulse setting and it was flashing away, swinging back and forth on its short chain.

  “Oh,” she said. “It was just . . .” She looked at him. “I thought I saw a light, but it was just this.” She pointed at it. He looked confused. “No light!” she said. She started to laugh, but it made her head hurt.

  They walked the rest of the way down. Livy felt calm; her blood was a soup of numbing chemicals. The air was sweet and cool. In a few minutes they stepped down into the sand and mud at the bottom of the hill, on the often-flooded margin of the Lomath Creek. Tussocks of grass interrupted the eroding bank. Livy veered off to the right, toward the trail that Revaz would take.

  The trail was broad and flat, and it followed the creek on a shelf that had been carved out for the railroad a long time ago. That particular line, which had once connected two mills, had been out of use since before Livy was born, and when the rails were pulled out and the ties rotted away, a broad gravel pathway was left behind. These paths appeared here and there in the woods around Maronne, connecting it to other towns with straight industrial lines. Livy came to the mouth of the trail.