“Why would you get mixed up in something like that?” her mother said. “You see a crowd like that, you run the other way, you understand?”
“I’m sorry,” Livy said. She allowed herself to be shaken and rocked. No one knew about the pharmacy, still. She wondered how long it could be.
At the desk they were given release papers; Livy gathered them in numb fingers, held them against her chest. The policeman at the desk was carefully uninterested in them. Each of her parents kept a hand on her as they walked out. It was still daylight outside, a thick, late, honeyed light, and the parking lot was fringed with reporters. A row of irritated policemen patrolled the perimeter, and the camera crews stood just out of their reach, all along the sidewalks and into the street, on the patchy soccer field in the little park across the way, on the front steps of the old YWCA building on the corner. Her parents pulled her toward the car. Neither of them looked her in the face, even while they held on to her. Her mother had been crying.
“Is Ron okay?” Livy said. She knew he was not.
“I don’t know,” her father said.
She started to cry. She sat in the back seat. She put her seat belt on.
“Where’s Nelson?” she said. No one answered her.
They eased out of the parking lot. The police made way. The camera crews pressed closer, then retreated. There was the Laundromat, the red-doored church, the tax preparer, the two Mexican groceries, the Quick Drug. And then they were back on Prospect, approaching the barricade.
“They opened it,” Livy said.
The sawhorses and chains were gone, but now there was yellow crime scene tape zigzagging through the deep shadows. A half-dozen squad cars, some of them with their lights silently flashing, were lined up just around the turn. The police stood in small groups, talking, or wandered back and forth among the vehicles. Two uniformed men were leaning against an FBI truck, paper from deli sandwiches spread out on the hood.
“Shit,” her father said. “We should have gone back the way we came.”
“It’s open,” Livy said again. “It’s over?”
A policeman knocked on her father’s window. “Detour. Where are you trying to go?”
“Over the bridge. We live here.”
Livy was craning her neck from the back seat, trying to see what the policemen were clustered over in the middle of the road. She thought she could see a bloodstain on the pavement. She closed her eyes, feeling sick again.
“You’re going to want to go around by White Horse Road,” said the officer.
They drove down White Horse Road and were waved through. As they passed the store they saw the Telas on the steps, Mr. and Mrs. Tela and Janine sitting there with the sun in their eyes. There was no one else in sight: no Nelson, no Noreen sitting on the shaded porch of the house next door, no children with dripping Popsicles along the railing. They looked like the only people left in the world. Livy’s father slowed down and Mrs. Tela stood.
“Did you see Nelson?” she called. “Livy? Is that you?” She crossed the intersection and, incredibly, put the palms of her hands flat onto Livy’s window. Livy was so disoriented by this weird assault on her parents’ car that it took her a moment to roll down the window.
“He’s at the station and they won’t let me talk to him,” Mrs. Tela said.
“I haven’t seen him,” Livy said. She was relieved at least to know where he was.
Janine padded up behind her mother on bare feet. “They found the guy’s hiding spot up in the woods,” she said. “They think he left a couple of days ago. They’re leaving.”
“They screwed this up so bad,” Mrs. Tela said.
Livy blinked very slowly. She kept her face still. In the woods? Her mother leaned toward the driver’s-side window, her forehead wrinkling. “You’re shitting me,” she said. “He was here? Where?”
Janine nodded. “In a deer blind up at the top of the hill, behind Paula’s house.”
No one was looking at Livy. She tried to control her face. He must have been hiding in the deer blind before he came to her yard that night. Had he left anything behind in the garage, any sign he’d been there? She would go and check when she got home, if her parents ever let her leave her bedroom.
“Unbelievable,” her mother said. “I never really thought it could be true.”
“They’re going to get sued so bad,” Janine said, hugging herself. “The FBI, the CIA, the Maronne PD, whoever the fuck.” Mrs. Tela did not react to this word, and neither did the Markos. “They let Ron’s wife out an hour ago and she just walked home. She was wandering around here, back and forth over the bridge. They’re gonna get sued for ev-ry-thing. Lost wages and pain and suffering for everybody.” She swung her arm out. “Pain and suffering times a hundred and fifty people.”
Livy’s mother followed the arc of her arm. “Where is everybody? It’s so quiet.”
“In jail,” Mrs. Tela said. “Or staying inside.”
First, Livy slept. She slept for seventeen hours. The next morning her alarm shrieked and she jerked awake, sweaty, panicking, her lungs not drawing right, and shut it off. It was her work alarm. The electricity was back on. She lay in her too-small bed, trying to catch her breath. Did she have a job now? She could not think. They would find out about the pharmacy soon and come for her, she was sure.
She woke again hours later, the day already peaked and receding. Her mother was standing in the doorway.
“You don’t leave the house until we say you can,” she said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Livy said. Her mouth was dry. She wanted to ask her mother for water but she saw that she should not.
The phone rang all day. Livy’s mother called her own mother and in-laws and boss, explained what had happened, asserted over and over that they were fine, and then unplugged the phone.
Livy lay in bed and wondered if Nelson was still in jail, if he was all right, if they were questioning him or charging him. She felt sure he would say nothing that wasn’t true, no matter how hard they pushed, but she didn’t know if that would be enough. Later, when the house felt empty, she crept downstairs and turned on the TV. The news anchor said: “A search for a wanted person goes tragically wrong. Anger in this small town over the death of a local man.” Livy watched with the volume turned down low, sitting on the floor an arm’s length from the screen, fighting back the vertigo of seeing it on television. All these people watching, all of a sudden—newscasters and police and an old woman from Maronne who was stopped on the sidewalk outside the SuperFresh and asked for her opinion.
Livy felt like a ghost in the old house, drifting, disordering objects quietly in the kitchen. She kept returning to the TV. There were news vans right there, in Lomath; reporters from the Philadelphia stations stood in front of the Church of God in Christ, in front of the range building in the Sportsmen’s Club complex, in front of the store. Livy saw the same slow panning shot of the intersection four times, the dense green of the hill, the dust and broken-glass glitter of the road. Jocelyn was not at work, the OPEN flag was down. The intersection was empty. There were a few front-porch interviews, all among the neighbors on the other side of the bridge, pallid people Livy didn’t know well. A reporter Livy remembered from several natural disasters called the place a “ghost town.” The camera followed Paula Carden getting out of her blue Taurus, turning her body away from the cameras, walking deliberately up her own front steps like she was deaf.
Around five the natural disaster woman said, “A possible kidnapping,” and Livy knew the police were coming back for her. Her mind was like a brick. Less than an hour later she heard them coming up the walk, and she got up off the living room floor and slipped her feet into her shoes and waited. Her mother came up the stairs.
“They’re back?” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Livy said. Knuckles sounded on the tin frame of the screen door.
This was the beginning of the worst time, when everything receded from Livy. The police kept her up all n
ight in an interrogation room, telling her lies and making her go through the story of the pharmacy again and again, until she was confusing her own name with Nelson’s and Mark’s. No one mentioned Revaz. On the second day a young attorney named Beth arrived from Legal Aid, and the interrogations stopped. Livy’s parents had sent her. On the third day there was a hearing and charges were announced. They were what Beth had told Livy to expect: one count of conspiracy to commit armed robbery, one count of conspiracy kidnapping, one count of accessory kidnapping after the fact, and one count of evading a roadblock. Livy had to sign papers with cuffed hands and stand with the arresting officer while Beth talked to the district attorney and conferred briefly with the judge. It was over in less than ten minutes. Livy was taken back to the police station, where her clothes were returned to her and she was released into the custody of her parents.
“Livy?” they said. “Why didn’t you tell anybody about that boy?”
For a day or so Livy didn’t talk; she could explain nothing, she understood nothing. She watched television and slept, and her parents circled around her, wide-eyed and anxious, occasionally angry; sometimes prodding at her silence, sometimes letting it be. She came downstairs when her parents had finished their meals and heated up the leftovers for herself in a pan. If her father found her doing this he would stand by the counter and wait for her to turn and look at him, but she wouldn’t. After a while he would say, “Fine.”
There had been a funeral for Ron Cash while Livy was in jail. There had been police in unmarked cars parked across the street from the funeral home, as if a riot might break out. All the folding chairs were filled and a line of overheated people in black had stretched out into the vestibule and down the front steps.
Livy would have a court date in September. At best, she would know in six weeks if she was going to jail, or to a juvenile detention center, or if she would be spared both. In the meantime she wasn’t allowed to leave the house or use the phone, and she didn’t try.
She was allowed to watch TV, however. The day after she came home from jail she turned on one of the twenty-four-hour news networks and found Revaz staring at her. It was the photo the police had shown people in Lomath, the rumpled gray-haired man with his look of having slept on a bus. The channel had a staccato rhythm, the photo appearing after the break every forty-five minutes with a recap, so that detail accumulated in distinct sedimentary layers. At noon his Georgian nationality was confirmed; at two thirty the Georgian consulate held a press conference and emphasized that his parents had been immigrants from Chechnya. For a while a hurricane grew peacefully at sea, and the anchors’ minds were elsewhere. At five a Russian diplomat was shown speaking at some sort of dinner, the podium badly centered in the frame, the audio too low.
By six a statement had come out from the Georgians, and opposite Revaz’s photo there was grainy footage of a smoking, sinking ferry in a gray river. The video had been distributed to the networks along with an official statement of the charges against him: material support in a bombing plot five years before that had killed nine people. He had fled the country just before his arraignment, which had been scheduled for the previous week. A harried Georgian diplomat described him as a mercenary for separatist-nationalist Chechen causes, a tabloid journalist who met the wrong kind of people in his line of work and was too stupid or broke to resist their offers, the kind of man who would kill nine people for a few thousand dollars. An American diplomat alluded to the possibility that the criminal network he was involved in had ties to larger groups, transnational groups, groups that were responsible for American deaths.
The ferry crossed a river in Russia. In the clip it listed on its side, attended by rescue boats, all of them dwarfed by a vast column of smoke. There was a digital animation also, with tiny peg-like human figures moving at a restrained pace away from a column of orange fire that reached up from the car hold through the middle deck of the ferry. It was terrible to watch the white lines of the deck tilt and sink. Three of the nine people who died were children.
“What is wrong with people over there?” Livy’s father said. He had come in as he did every day for the evening news and was drinking his after-work beer on the sofa.
Livy said nothing. The pictures of the burning ferry took her breath away, and she had to look down at her hands as the footage played. She had a maximum-gravity feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if she were draining out through her own bowels. They were showing school portraits of the dead children. She wondered if her father would think it was strange if she stood up now and left the room.
“I hope they got what they wanted out of this,” her father said, though Livy couldn’t tell whether he meant the police or the people who had put the bomb on the ferry. “I hope they think it was worth it.”
There was security camera footage of Revaz, or someone who looked like him, shuffling through an airport line in Poland en route to the United States. A security envoy held a press conference confirming the charges, alluding only indirectly to roadblocks and the death of Ron Cash. Video of Shelly Cash outside the police station was shown again, her face all pulled out of shape from crying.
Livy was horrified, but had to appear to be interested only in the normal way, and she wasn’t sure what that was. As the news coverage rolled on and on she tried to take her cues from her father: blunted anger when the siege was discussed, an undertow of what-do-you-expect; at each sight of the burning ferry, a brief silence. There was a clip of the director of some national security suboffice mumbling into a microphone, bland and uninformative, pausing at one point to sweep a little wave of gray hair back off of his forehead. He said several times that information on the case was limited by an ongoing investigation, by the fact that other suspects were still at large in Chechnya and Russia, by security concerns.
After her parents had gone to bed she returned to the television. Russian diplomats gave interviews, some of them smooth and quiet, some thundering. They called Revaz a sociopath, a mobster, a drunk with unpayable debts. And then Revaz’s sister appeared, a middle-aged woman with short blonde hair, a neat hard face, wide eyes.
Livy was grateful that she was alone when the sister appeared, because the resemblance to Revaz was so striking that she jumped. The woman was exasperated and looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She was interviewed via satellite from her home in Paris, where she sat wearing a dark suit, leaning closer to the camera as the pitch of her voice rose. Anna Deni Fournier said the screen. “My brother has never been to Chechnya,” she said. “We are Georgians with a Chechen name. Our parents were from Chechnya. They are dead. We are Georgians.”
It made Livy sweat to watch her. “This is corruption, you do not understand our politics, he is a journalist,” Anna said. “He was writing stories about corruption. They want him to be quiet so they make accusations. They want him to be dead so he will stop bothering.”
Livy imagined the nervous speechless man in the garage first as a murdering terrorist (craven, subtly manipulating her with his shows of helplessness, laughing at her when he was alone) and then as a persecuted journalist (panicked, grateful, his bewildered looks sincere, his caution hiding a deep gentleness). It was like switching out a white lightbulb for a red one and watching the room change.
She turned the TV off and wandered around the house, upstairs and down. She had a sudden keen desire to get high. She was frenzied and electrified by this contact with the world—the much, much wider world—but she could tell no one. She couldn’t even speak to Nelson about it, because her only avenue of contact with him was the internet, which she knew was not safe. It made her feel dizzyingly alone. She rolled a joint from the stash in the music box and lay still. Once in a great while a car would pass on Prospect Road and white headlights would sweep across the ceiling of her room.
Revaz slept under a picnic table for two nights outside Pittsburgh, waiting for Davit’s cousin, making visits to a rest stop food court across the road twice a day to pick up leftovers abando
ned on the tables. It was mostly fried chicken, great expanses of hard, brown material that suggested birds the size of cattle. He had to pause each time at the door before he went in, willing himself into a state of calm, knowing that only confidence could make him invisible. He was beginning to take a little pride in his ability to keep body and soul together. Wasn’t that some kind of virtue? He liked to think it showed the same wholesome energy as any other living thing, a mouse, a fish. His clothes were filthy. His money was gone.
The cousin’s blue tractor-trailer eased into the rest stop parking lot at eleven thirty on the morning of the third day, massive and gleaming, with airbrushed lightning bolts along the sides of the cab. Revaz watched from across the parking lot as the cousin stepped down from the cab and lit a cigarette. He was wearing ridiculous wraparound sunglasses. Tbilisi emanated from him like a smell. Revaz approached quickly, his head down.
“Revaz?” the cousin said.
“Yes.”
“Koba.” He offered his hand. “You look like shit.”
Revaz felt a rush of emotion at the sound of his own language. Yes, he looked like shit. It sounded exactly right. “You have an extra cigarette?” he said.
“No such thing,” Koba said, but he handed him one.
In the cab, Koba listened to a radio show that he informed Revaz was about sports, and broke into angry exclamations in English about basketball. He was twenty-four years old and had lived in the United States since he was nineteen. He loved basketball. He was driving the truck to Arizona. He might get another load there and go on to California. “You should hope we go to California,” he said to Revaz, with something like a leer, not feeling the need to elaborate. An enameled cross and a foam-rubber basketball hung over the dashboard. He settled into a stream of commentary about the gray landscape, the occasional views of deep valleys, the broad rivers opening up and closing again one after another.
Relief Map Page 18
