Relief Map (12 page)

“Hi,” Livy murmured to the pharmacist. “Sorry.” Her arms hovered in the air in front of her chest, her wet shirt.

“I have a list,”
Dominic said. He stepped forward and dropped it on the counter in front of the pharmacist: a square of paper, folded many times so it was small and dense.

“Okay,” the pharmacist said. “Okay. I'll get them.”

“Watch for an alarm,” Dominic said to Livy.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“There's no alarm,” the kid said. “Don't shoot me. I'm not doing anything.” His eyes were big, his shoulders hunched. Livy reached past him, picked up the paper and unfolded it, and held it up before his eyes.

“Go get them,” Dominic said.

The pharmacist took the paper out of her hands and started opening drawers.

“Give me a lot of all of it,” Dominic said. “As much as you have.”

“What are you doing?” Livy said. “You're getting pills?”

“I needed some things too,” Dominic said.

The pharmacist dropped a bottle cap and it skittered away across the floor. He looked at Livy with anguish.

“It's okay,” she said. She picked it up.

Nelson was standing just behind Dominic. His mouth was open, he was breathing hard but silently, and his eyes were fixed on Livy and the pharmacist. When she looked at him he closed his mouth.

“Are the generics okay?” the pharmacist said.

“What?” said Dominic.

The pharmacist held up the paper. “I said, are the generics okay? They're the same as the name-brand drugs but cheaper.”

“What? I'm not paying for them.”

“I know.” The pharmacist looked at the paper and then helplessly at Dominic again. “So, the name-brand ones,” he said.

“Give me whatever you have the most of! Give me everything!” He shook the gun. “Hurry up!”

The pharmacist turned back to the cabinets. Livy could hear him whispering numbers to himself. She watched him, as she had been told to do. There was nothing within reach but shelves and bags of pills. There were no alarms. The pharmacist was counting, rolling pills off his fingers one by one, then tapping a box of inhalers down off a high shelf.

Nelson was at the front of the store. “There's a car in the parking lot,” he yelled.

“
Fuck
,” Brian said. “Fuck, fuck,
fuck
.”

“We have to take him with us,” Dominic said.

“What?” Livy said.

“We have to take him with us.” He pressed close to the counter. The pharmacist stepped back, colliding with the shelves behind him. “If they want him they can fucking come and get him. Do you hear me?” he said to the pharmacist. “Maybe
they can come pick you up and while they're there they can explain to us
what the fuck is going o
n
!”

The bells rang in front.

“Out the back,” Brian said. “Now, go,
go
.”

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
hous
e
?” 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.