Relief Map (13 page)

“You were riding your bike? In the dark?”

“I couldn't sleep.”

“I hope you stayed away from the roadblocks.”

“I did. I was just in the parking lot of the restaurant.”

“Why would you do that? Ride your bike in the dark, with cops everywhere? I don't know what's wrong with you lately.”

Livy was neither allowed nor forbidden to go out alone in the middle of the night. Her parents did not generally make rules. They just became annoyed when she did certain things.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She couldn't meet his eyes and she guessed that she looked only sullen, not sorry at all. “I won't do it again,” she offered. “The bike thing.”

“This is a hard time,” her father said. “Don't make it harder.”

She went back to her room and lay in bed, wide awake, too tense to read or sleep. She imagined Dominic and Mark asleep in Dominic's room with Lena Spellar oblivious in the kitchen below them.
We are in so much trouble
, she thought,
so so so much trouble
, although the word seemed inadequate for what had happened. Her heart was racing. She pressed her hand across her breastbone.

When Livy was in ninth grade her health teacher had gotten frustrated with the class's lack of attention and had made them all sit on the floor beside their desks with their eyes closed for a meditation exercise, hectoring them to focus on calming their energy. Livy had found to her surprise that it worked, at least partially. If she closed her eyes her mind wandered irretrievably, so she'd kept them open and fixed on a cracked tile near her feet. Several minutes of focus had revealed profundities in the tile, in her shoelaces, in the underside of her desk—dirt and light, an alert calm. She'd practiced later in her room. She was fourteen then, unhappy at school, and the lonely summer that followed (Nelson was away with his grandparents in New Jersey) inclined her to a foggy mysticism. During solitary evenings in her room, the plaster walls seemed to bulge with unexpressed truths. She checked some books on meditation out of the library and put some candles on her dresser. She felt she was on the verge of a great discovery. But in the fall Nelson came back and school improved, and in the face of these banal comforts the spiritual urgency she had felt began to fade. She still lit her candles before bed and meditated briefly, but she was doing it in a perfunctory, corrective way, and she no longer felt she was on a path from one place to another. She never told Nelson or anyone else about meditating. But she still found that it could work, from time to time.
She stared at the lamp that hung from her bedroom ceiling and began to feel a pleasant heaviness in her face; she even slept for a little while.

At ten she roused herself and found the house empty. She went out to the yard to see what her parents were doing. They were working on a cold frame in the garden and her mother was standing beside it, resting her back.

“Come here, Livy,” she said. They were a pale family and they were all sunburned, which gave them the sad, doomed look of people outflanked by their climate. Her mother pulled at her sticky dress and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “So you were out last night,” she said.

They stood looking at each other. Livy's father cursed softly inside the cold frame and knocked a jammed staple gun against a plank.

“Yeah,” Livy said.

“Your dad thinks we haven't taught you any common sense.”

“Does he?” Livy was unsure of the role she was supposed to play in this conversation. The truth of what had happened so dwarfed the offense they were scolding her for that it was hard to keep the right expression on her face—shame, a touch of defiance.

Her mother nodded. She kept nodding for a minute, looking at her feet, and then she sniffed and Livy
saw that she was crying. Livy started as if someone had struck a match in her face. “I'm really sorry. Don't—”

“Don't do stupid things right now, all right?” her mother said. She wiped her eyes with dirty fingers and shook her head. Livy backed away, dismissed. Halfway to the house she turned and looked back at the garden: her father and mother were both in the cold frame now, pacing with a measuring tape, as if on an ordinary day.

Livy knocked on Dominic's door at eleven, when it was reasonable to visit, and caught her breath when Lena answered. “Livy?” she said.

“Is Dominic here?” Livy said.

Lena looked surprised. Livy was a bookish girl, an honor student. She had never visited Dominic before. “In his room.”

“Upstairs?”

“Yeah. Top of the stairs, in the back.”

Livy grinned nervously and stepped through the doorway, past the scent of Lena's jasmine perfume. “Thanks,” she said.

The bedroom door was closed, and Livy knocked several times before Dominic came and opened it. He
looked a little surprised to see her. “I thought you were pissed at me,” he said.

“I am. You're an asshole.”

He laughed. There was something genteel about it, his lack of concern. “What are you here for, then?”

“To keep an eye on things, I guess.”

He stepped out of the way. The window opened onto the porch roof at the back of the house, and Mark was out there, peering around the curtain at her.

“He's outside?” she said.

“It's all right,” Dominic said. “Nobody'll see him.”

Mark said, “I'd come in, but—” He held up a lit cigarette. His expression was blank, or simply earnest; she couldn't tell. In daylight he was solid and pale, like a piece of carved soap. She thought she recognized his type: boys who were punished often in school but didn't seem to notice, as if life were naturally a string of humiliations.

“I'll come out,” she said. She crawled out the window, scraping her scabbed elbow on the window frame. The asphalt shingles were hot. She crouched on her heels. Dominic climbed through the window with a practiced, graceful movement, frowning in concentration, and then sat back to pick the bits of shingle off his palms. He favored his hurt foot.

“Does your mom know?” she said.

“
She knows we went to the drugstore,” Dominic said. “I gave her her refills.”

“Does she know about him?” She pointed at Mark.

“She doesn't come in my room.”

“I've been here before,” Mark said suddenly. He was looking thoughtfully down at the creek, the trees on the far bank. “I didn't even know this place had a name. I drove through a couple of times when there was a detour on the highway after the flood.”

Livy's split lip was starting to throb. “I'm sorry about this,” she said. He didn't react. She looked at Dominic. “You should let him go, Dom.”

Mark looked up as if she had said something impolite.

“The cops wouldn't let him through even if he got up there,” Dominic said, pointing up at the bridge, meaning the barricade beyond it. “You know that, right, Mark? You're stuck down here as long as we are.”

“The longer you keep him here, the more trouble we're in,” Livy said.

“We're already basically in jail,” Dominic said.

She looked down over the edge of the porch roof at the hydrangea bush in the yard, the patio umbrella tipped over in the grass. “What about your parents, Mark?” she said.

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 i
t
?” 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 anima
l
!”