Relief Map

by Rosalie Knecht

  “My parents are going to be worried,” she said.

  “It’s probably not even six yet. They’re asleep.” He touched the scrape on her cheek. “This scabbed over pretty well.”

  “What am I going to tell people?” She put her fingers to her cheek. It was hard to the touch.

  “That you fell.”

  “I’ve been saying I fell a lot lately. I told my dad I flipped my bike over in some gravel and that was why I had these scratches . . .” She indicated her arms. “I wonder when they’ll notice the bike is gone. My mom hasn’t used it in years.” She bit her lip. “Maybe they’ll just think somebody stole it. They don’t lock the garage.”

  Nelson put his arm across her chest. She took a long, tired breath. “I don’t really see a way we can get out of all this with everything together,” she said.

  He lifted his head off the pillow and looked at her for a minute. She was tempted at first to look away; he was shirtless, one bare arm was across her chest, and this was a position familiar mostly from movies—male propped up thoughtfully on one elbow, female on her back. The intimacy between them was ordinary and alien at the same time. She made herself look him in the eye. He put one hand flat across her face, covering her left eye and the scrape on her cheek, and kissed her forehead. He lay back down. He wasn’t going to say anything, she thought, because he agreed with her.

  “I wonder if your mom’s awake,” she said.

  “Probably not.”

  Livy sat up. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I’m so hungry.”

  Nelson lit up. “We should open the blizzard box.”

  “There’s still a blizzard box?”

  The blizzard box was a metal locker in the garage filled with canned and freeze-dried food, in case of a major snowstorm. Nelson’s mother was prepared for all kinds of emergencies. Nelson had grown up practicing house-evacuation drills twice a year, when the clocks were set forward and back; waking up to shrieking tests of the fire, radon, and carbon monoxide detectors; memorizing rendezvous points in the neighborhood, the county, the state. The blizzard box was always stocked but never touched.

  They climbed out of bed. Livy’s hunger rolled through her, pitching and reeling. They crept down the dark carpeted hallway, their breathing light and shallow, and Nelson heaved open the door from the kitchen to the garage. Livy saw the locker half hidden under a plastic toboggan and dragged it out into the light. They sat cross-legged on the floor beside it.

  “Beans, corn, blueberries, pumpkin, condensed milk, condensed milk, condensed milk,” she said, pulling out the cans.

  “Beans and corn,” Nelson said. “If we had tortillas . . .”

  “Tomato soup, mandarin oranges, pearl onions, olives, minestrone soup,” she said.

  His brownish knee was bent beside hers. “I love mandarin oranges.”

  “Look at all this condensed milk. Let’s make pudding.”

  “Taco salad and pudding.”

  They carried armloads back into the house. His mother would be furious, but they would be full of pudding and it wouldn’t matter that much. Nelson turned the radio on the counter on.

  “Are you sure?” Livy said.

  “She’s a really heavy sleeper after an Ativan,” he said.

  Janine appeared in the doorway, trailing a sheet. “Is that Mom’s hurricane stash?”

  “Yeah,” Nelson said.

  “You’re asking to get killed,” she said, and shuffled back into the dark of the living room.

  They were too hungry to wait for the food to heat. They ate the beans and corn with spoons, cold. Livy dipped her fingers in sweetened condensed milk and licked it off, over and over. Nelson made a stack of empty mandarin orange cans. The radio swooned in the corner.

  “These are so good,” Livy said, studying a spoonful of beans. “Better than normal, for beans.” The window over the sink faced east and the sun was just coming up over the hill. The woods were a dark, cool mass. She could look straight out at the horizon from the kitchen. She stood at the sink with her spoon, eating one bean at a time, watching the sun rise. Nelson stood beside her.

  “The Harbor County standoff enters its fifth day,” said the radio.

  They both lurched toward the volume knob.

  “Federal law enforcement officers seeking the arrest of a foreign national have been at an impasse outside Maronne since Monday morning, after tracking him there on Sunday.” It was a woman’s voice, maybe from one of the Philadelphia stations, or a national one. “Revaz Deni is under an extradition order from the Republic of Georgia. At a press conference on Tuesday a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reluctant to reveal further details, citing security concerns and an ongoing investigation by international partners.”

  “Georgia?” Livy said.

  “Nearby Maronne is growing tense as the standoff drags on,” the woman said. “Some expressed anger at the way police are handling the situation.” An old man spoke against a background of tinny traffic noise. “It’s been a mess,” he said. “Everybody thinks so.”

  “We’ll bring you updates as we receive them,” the woman said.

  The traffic report started up. Nelson turned it off.

  “Georgia?” Livy said. “Where is that? It’s under Russia, isn’t it?”

  “I think so. It’s not in the Balkans, anyway,” Nelson said.

  “I don’t know anything about Georgia.”

  “I wish I still had that encyclopedia.”

  “The Kid’s World Book?” Livy laughed. The book had a cracked spine and had been kept in the bathroom, and she had leafed through it idly so many times that she had memorized the format of its brightly illustrated pages. “If only. We could look up their annual rainfall.”

  “Well, it would be something,” Nelson said.

  “Knowing doesn’t help now anyway,” Livy said.

  The kitchen was the brightest room in the house. Livy wanted it to be very early in the morning forever. It was the best, most private time of day, and the air was cool. It was easy to believe that she and Nelson were the only people awake for miles. They ate until they were full and rinsed the cans out in the sink. They were drinking instant coffee with powdered creamer at the kitchen table, sitting in two chairs pulled close together in a pool of light, when there was knocking at the door. Livy’s stomach turned over. She saw an instant of panic on Nelson’s face before he caught his breath.

  “I’ll get it,” he said.

  They could hear Janine shifting on the sofa in the dark living room. “Somebody’s knocking,” she called.

  “I know, J,” Nelson said.

  Livy got up and followed him. There was an obscure protective impulse in this. She jogged across the living room in his wake, plucking at the borrowed shirt so it billowed away from her chest. She saw him catch his breath and then jerk open the door.

  Ron Cash was standing there, the top of his bald head shiny as glass.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Oh, thank God.” Livy stopped and covered her face briefly with her hands. She had meant Thank God it’s not the cops, and had come close to saying it out loud. Janine sat up, blinking in the light from the doorway. All the shades were down and she looked annoyed at the intrusion. “You shouldn’t bang on the door like that,” she said.

  “We’re doing a search,” Ron said. His hands were folded in front of him, over his belt buckle. There were other people with him, though Livy couldn’t see yet who they were; she heard low voices, and the clear morning light through the doorway was interrupted by a jumble of shadows.

  “You’re looking for the guy?” Nelson said.

  “That’s correct,” Ron said. Livy tensed. She thought Nelson might glance at her at this mention of Revaz, and that people would notice, but he didn’t turn. He stepped aside and pushed open the door with a little shrug. Livy saw, in the clump of people now stepping up from the grass to the concrete steps, the bobbing ponytail and long anxious face of Jocelyn.

 
Jocelyn saw her too. “Your parents are looking for you,” she said.

  “I know,” Livy said. She backed away.

  “My parents are sleeping,” Nelson said in Ron’s direction.

  The small living room was suddenly full. Jocelyn walked into the kitchen and Livy heard the pantry door open and shut. Ron and a couple of men from the sprawling Christmas household on White Horse Road went single file down the narrow hallway, toward the back of the house. They all seemed too big for the place. Ron stopped at the end of the hall and knocked on the door of the master bedroom with the back of his hand.

  “Tom,” he called. “Tom, Sarah. Sorry to disturb you.”

  “Your parents are going to know I’m here,” Livy whispered. Nelson looked alarmed. The bedroom door opened and they heard a suggestion of Mrs. Tela’s voice.

  “Let’s wait in the garage,” Nelson said.

  They found Lena Spellar out there. She was standing under the high, shallow arch of the automatic garage door, drawing from an electronic cigarette, her free arm braced across her stomach. She smiled. There was a diffuse kind of regret in the smile, something less personal than an apology.

  “Hi, kids,” she said.

  “You’re here with them?” Livy said.

  Lena shrugged. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  Livy looked down at the ransacked blizzard box. “Where’s Dominic?” she said. She had to clear her throat.

  “At home.”

  Livy glanced at Nelson. He was looking out at the yard, not reacting, and she was grateful again for his coolness.

  “Has Ron already been to your place?” Livy said. She tried to make the question sound neutral, although she was starting to think it didn’t matter, that no one paid any attention to her anyway.

  “Not yet,” Lena said. “We started at the top of the hill.”

  Livy thought, I want to go up on somebody’s roof and just let the wind blow over me and not have to come down. “I’m going to go home,” she said. She turned to Nelson. “Come with me.”

  Nelson looked surprised. “Okay.”

  Livy walked out onto the driveway and kept going, up the little curve to the road. She was barefoot. Nelson caught up with her by the mailbox.

  “Are we going to Dominic’s?” he said. “We should have put shoes on.” He looked down at his feet, hurrying along after her on the fine gravel.

  “Yeah,” Livy said. “We can at least warn him.” So that he could do what? Turn Mark loose? As if the pharmaceutical assistant were a cornered mouse they could shoo out into the yard. Would the police recognize him, if they saw him? It was possible that he was already a famous victim on the other side of the roadblocks, his picture circulating on the news, all that. Although they had not heard anything on the radio. She fought the urge to break into a run. Anyone looking out an east-facing window, anywhere on Collier, could see her and Nelson hurrying toward the low road.

  “Where do you think he is now?” Nelson said.

  “Mark?” she said.

  “Your guy.”

  “He’s not mine. He’s in Cooverton, I hope to God. How long does it take to bike twelve miles?”

  “An hour, more if he’s slow.”

  There was plywood over the inside of Jocelyn’s door. They hurried down the final slope to the little row of houses beside the Sportsmen’s Club. Livy was holding Nelson’s hand. They ran up the Spellar steps and banged on the door and then pushed through it without waiting. No one was in the living room.

  “Dominic!” she yelled. “It’s Livy!”

  “What!” Dominic called from upstairs.

  They ran up. Dominic opened his bedroom door. Mark was asleep on the sleeping bag, his head on the floor beside the pillow. Brian was sitting in a desk chair, spinning slowly in place.

  “People are coming,” Livy said.

  Nelson dropped to his knees beside Mark. “Hey, wake up,” he said.

  “Who’s coming?” said Dominic.

  “Your mom and Ron Cash and a bunch of other people. They’re searching all the houses.” She was out of breath. Nelson was shaking Mark gently, and it was making his head bobble back and forth.

  “Dom, is he still on pills?” Livy said.

  “Muscle relaxers.”

  “What are you doing to him?” she said.

  “I keep asking him and he keeps saying yes!”

  Mark’s eyes were fluttering open. He fixed them on Nelson. His eyebrows went up very slowly.

  “Hi, Mark,” Nelson said. “Are you okay?”

  “Dom?” Mark said.

  “I’m right here, man,” Dominic said. He took a glass pipe out of his top drawer.

  “This is not a good time to smoke, Dom,” Livy said. He ignored her.

  “Where can we hide him?” Nelson said.

  “Basement?” Dominic said. He shrugged. “Backyard?”

  “I think they’re going to look in those places, Dom,” Nelson said.

  “There’s no super-secret place?” Livy said. “No place not obvious?”

  Dominic shook his head. He was crumbling a bud between his fingers. “Not really.”

  “You don’t seem worried,” she said.

  “Well, you do.” He looked at her. “Is it helping?”

  Nelson had one arm around Mark’s back and was trying to get him to sit up. Mark wore an expression of confusion that made Livy’s chest ache like it was packed in ice. He seemed to be having trouble focusing his eyes, holding his head up; he was like a baby. He cleared his throat. “This room,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry this happened,” Livy said.

  He squinted at her. There were bits of sleeping bag lint on his buzzed hair. “I don’t know who you are,” he said.

  “We can leave or we can stay here,” Dominic said. “It doesn’t make a difference.”

  Mark was rubbing his face with one hand, absentmindedly pushing down a morning hard-on with the other. Nelson pretended to study the leaves at the window.

  “What do we say when they get here?” Livy said.

  “I’ll tell them what happened,” Dominic said. His lighter wasn’t working. He frowned at it.

  “What’ll that be?” she said. “Tell me what you’ll say.”

  “It’s okay, Livy,” Nelson said.

  “I’m checking,” she said.

  “I’ll say we went to the pharmacy,” Dominic said. “And I took Mark.”

  “And you were the one with the gun,” Livy said.

  “Yeah, obviously,” Dominic said. “That’s what happened.”

  She hadn’t known him well before the blockade. They said hello in school, she saw him sometimes when she was coming and going from work. She watched him take a long hit from the glass piece. She was angry at him for the way things had gone, this whole mess he had made, his dickish bravado, his stupid gun. Sunk under the anger was a deep and terrible pity. “You’re still seventeen, aren’t you?” she said. “If the police find out, it won’t be so bad, maybe.”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “You are? We’re the same age?” He was so tall. His hands were so big, the pipe and lighter lost in them.

  He didn’t look up. “Yeah.”

  Mark was sitting up under his own power now, slumped over folded legs, looking perturbed. His lower lip stuck out. “I’m thirsty,” he said.

  “I’ll get water,” Nelson said. He left the room.

  “You want some of this?” Dominic said. He held the piece out to Livy.

  “No, thanks.” She went out and sat at the top of the carpeted stairs. Nelson came up, one hand on the banister, holding a big plastic cup of water with a football helmet on the side.

  “This feels like hide-and-seek,” she said. “When you’re really bad at it.” He laughed. “I’m serious,” she said. The staircase was dim and her own eyes felt enormously wide. “I was always terrible at it and I remember what it felt like. It felt like this.”

  “It’ll probably be twenty minutes before they get here,” N
elson said, putting his hand over hers. “Half an hour.” It was always hard to tell when he was afraid. His face was more opaque than hers, less mobile, his eyes deep-set and dark behind his glasses.

  Mark pushed open the door from Dominic’s room suddenly and stopped in the doorway, backlit, in a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

  “People are coming for me?” he said.

  Nelson offered him the water. He drank half of it without stopping to breathe and then wiped his chin on his arm. “I should probably go home,” he said to Nelson, his eyebrows creeping up. “My sister is going to be pissed.”

  Nelson tried an encouraging expression. “Okay,” he said.

  “Let’s wait downstairs,” Livy said. “I’m sick of sitting in the dark.”

  They sat in the living room, all four of them, lined up on a green sofa in front of the dead television. The window behind the TV was curtained with white pointelle; a spider plant climbed a couple of bamboo sticks in a pot. Lena Spellar had nice things, Livy thought. She hadn’t noticed it before. The room was all white and green.

  Brian lit a cigarette, got up and retrieved a ceramic ashtray from the kitchen, and sat back down on the sofa. For a long time no one spoke.

  “What’s on TV at seven in the morning?” Livy said finally.

  “Cartoons,” said Dominic.

  “Oh, right,” Livy said. “Of course.” When she was a child she’d woken at seven every morning, without the aid of an alarm clock, and watched cartoons in the shadowed living room with the volume turned so low she had to sit within arm’s reach of the screen. She thought of little children doing that all over Harbor County that morning, at that very hour. The thought of their concentrating faces quieted her mind. She lived in an emergency that covered only a handful of addresses. She stroked the inside of Nelson’s wrist with the tips of her fingers.

  They heard voices outside, and then saw moving shadows on the curtains. The group of searchers didn’t knock; Lena was with them, and she just pushed the front door open and stood aside. Ron was behind her, looking in all directions. Lena stared at the sofa.

  “What are you all doing here?” she said.

  There was a beat of perhaps two seconds after that, a suspended interval. Then Lena said, “Who are you?”