Relief Map (16 page)

She shook the hair out of her eyes, wiped the sweat off her forehead. His shoulders were slumped, his body thick around the middle. He wasn't following her, but he wasn't retreating, either.

She recognized him. He was the man in the photo.

“
Shit
,” she said, pronouncing it so forcefully that saliva dribbled over her lip. He was wearing a white shirt; she could see the gleam of eyeglasses. She looked down at her shaking hands, remembered the cigarette, and threw it away.

He disentangled himself from the edge of the woods. The white shirt shifted and sagged against the dark undergrowth, and then he was out in the moonlight, walking carefully across the grass with both hands held out in front of him, palms forward. The moon shone down on his small round head. He stopped by the arborvitae a few yards from the porch and raised his hands higher. “Please?” he said.

Livy could see the shape of the top of his head, his shoulders, his supplicating hands, but his face was dark; only the frames of his glasses stood out. To his eyes she was probably only a shadow at the edge of the porch. She was glad for that. She held the potato fork out farther, to make sure he saw it.

“Please?” he said. He walked down the slope toward her. His expression was anxious. He looked about fifty, in a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and dark pants. There was a gleaming metal watchband on one upraised wrist. His hair stood up in tufts.

Livy's mouth was closed tightly and she was breathing very hard through her nose. He stopped a few feet away, below her on the grass.

“Please,” he said.

His accent rounded the word. He pressed his hands to his breast pocket, then the pockets of his pants, and held them out again, palms up: I have nothing. Livy
opened her mouth; her breathing was frighteningly loud. Her chest was heaving as if she'd been crying and she made a great effort to control it.

“What,” she said.

“Help,” he said.

He reached into his breast pocket, withdrew an object, and came closer, holding it out. She pointed the potato fork down at him. His obvious fatigue made him seem immovable, as if he had used all his strength to cross the yard and was therefore capable only of standing there forever. It was this that made her put out her hand and take the small flat object from him. He drew back instantly into himself, his shoulders going slack. She looked down at what she held in her hand: a plastic ID card, illegible in the dark, with a little square photo, and a bunch of folded money.

“What is this?” she said. “No, no. I don't want this. Take it back.” She pushed it into his hand.

He accepted it, slowly, and put it back in his pocket. She could see that his chest was heaving now too, as if he'd been holding his breath. He pivoted on one foot and pointed across the yard to the garage. “House,” he said.

“House?”

He pointed at his own chest, and then at the garage again. “House,” he said. “I go.” His hand flattened across his chest. The arm swung out and back. “Thank you,” he said.

He turned and hurried away. She watched as he crossed the flat part of the yard, vanished briefly in the deep shadow of the privet bush, and then reappeared by the garage door. There was a moment of stillness, indistinct in the dark, possibly a minute struggle with the old latch, and then the door opened and he went inside.

Livy's mind rang like a bell. She picked up the cigarette where she had dropped it at her feet, put it out, and threw it under the porch stairs. Then she carried the potato fork to the far end of the porch and propped it against the wall.

She noticed that her hands were shaking. Her legs, when she stepped down into the grass, buckled under her. The grass was long and wet; it was a corner of the yard that had not been mowed in weeks, and she stayed on her knees in it for a minute, her fingers laced into the roots. Finally she got to her feet and walked around to the kitchen door. It was still unlocked. She went in and locked it behind her.

In the kitchen she drank a glass of water very fast and thought,
I have to go get the police right now
.

She stood at the sink with the empty glass. She could go downstairs and wake up her parents. They would get the police.

But she felt weak, almost faint. She went up to her bed and lay down. Her shoes were still on and after a
while she sat up and pulled them off, which was more difficult than it normally was, as if her hands were numb. She sat with her hair falling in her face, trying to think. A little moonlight came in the window.

She lay down. She remembered a nightmare, which in her restive exhausted state felt like a cogent argument, a train of thought: herself on a sea choked with jostling ice, clinging to a floe that heaved and sank hideously.

She would get up and get her parents and the police.

But he looked so scared. He looked like her chemistry teachers: the glasses, the gray hair, the buttoned shirt. Many middle-aged men who worked indoors looked like this. She could think of a whole parade of them, wearing watches and windbreakers, teachers and restaurant managers and friends' fathers who worked in the city.

What would happen to him if the police found him? He looked like a man afraid for his life. She had heard things on TV about people like that disappearing. Foreign people who were taken to black sites. She had seen a documentary about it.

She wondered if he had killed someone. Many someones, maybe, to warrant all this. Her mind stalled there.

She fell
asleep, somehow, curled up on her side.

3

He didn't sleep
that night. It was pitch black inside the garage, and he sat down on a stack of lumber that he felt in the darkness and leaned against the wall and let his mind fade in and out for many hours. When light began to come through the windows he saw that there was a loft above him. He found a ladder and climbed up. The loft was full of old furniture.

He would have expected to feel anxious now, but he did not. He felt the calm of an infant—soft-brained, placid. He sat on the floor, leaning against a white-painted dresser. He'd turned everything over. He'd made his little bid. She might bring the police, but she might not. He was too tired and too hungry to care anymore.

He hoped that she might bring him something to eat. In a half-dreaming state, he developed a certainty that she would bring him an egg sandwich. It would have mayonnaise and soft cheese. He fell asleep as the sun was coming over the top of the hill, the valley floor still dark and cool. When he woke again and switched on his phone, there was a text message waiting for him in his own language:

Meet me in Pittsburgh
.

Livy woke early and glanced automatically at her alarm clock. Its face was still blank, a rectangle of black overlaid with a faint redness. She guessed it was six. She had slept the remainder of the night in the same position, on her side with her face close to the cool plaster, and it took a minute of careful thought to remember what had happened. She felt around cautiously in her mind, staring hard at a drip in the paint on the wall.

The house was quiet and she needed to be out of it before her parents got up. They might not realize for a few hours that she wasn't in her room. She pulled her clothes on and hurried out the kitchen door, into the blue shade of a trellis of morning glories. The ground was damp. It had rained overnight. She walked around the corner of the house and looked out at the garage.

It was a gray pine building with a red tin roof, a storage place for furniture and garden tools, an old motorcycle that her father was perpetually looking to sell, several neglected bicycles, and a few stacks of lumber that had been left to season. They didn't keep the car in it; there was no room. As a child she had sometimes hidden in the loft and pretended it was her own house. Her parents were neighbors with whom she shared a driveway. When she went in to eat lunch, she was visiting. She was always doing this as a child, laying claim to parts of the house and yard. She loved things that were small and self-contained: dollhouses, crawl spaces. She loved to lock doors.

The garage looked as it always did. Honeysuckle vines choked the privet beside it. She had no idea what to do, but being alone with what she knew was intolerable. She turned and began to walk the route to Nelson's house.

It was very quiet in Lomath that morning; she saw no human movement all the way down Prospect Road. The sulfurous smell of burning plastic came from the far side of the creek. Ron Cash was up early, then, burning his trash.

She knocked on the Telas' front door and waited. Dry leaves had started to blow down from the trees. They were silted along the edge of the narrow concrete
porch, which was otherwise clean; no one ever sat on it. There were no chairs. Mrs. Tela had asked Livy once about all the “things” in the Marko yard—lawn furniture, garden tools—out there for “anybody to take.” Livy hadn't been sure at the time whether this was actually a rebuke about neatness or if it was just honest concern from a person who believed thieves were everywhere, a tide of thieves that would sweep away all loose objects.

There was an indistinct thud from behind the door and Livy heard Mrs. Tela's sharp voice say, “I said
do not
.” There was another thumping noise and a quickly inhaled breath, and then the door jerked open and there was Nelson, off-balance, his glasses crooked, his mother a shadow in pajamas behind him.

“
Listen to m
e
!” she cried.

“It's just Livy,” Nelson said. He was out of breath.

“You don't
listen to m
e
!” his mother said. She was crying. She moved right, trying to get past him: one long hand flashed out, reaching for the door. Nelson took hold of Livy's wrist and pulled her over the threshold. She stumbled into the room, not expecting this, her feet going out from under her. He slammed the door.

“You don't listen!” Mrs. Tela said. “It could be anybody out there!”

Nelson's sister Janine was sitting up on the sofa, where she had clearly slept: she was covered with a pink
sheet, and a large pillow had slipped onto the floor. She stared at the three of them, her eyes half-closed.

“Stop it, Mom,” she said.

Mrs. Tela looked at her, her face pink and wet, and then turned and disappeared into the dark hallway.

“So, we won't see her until lunch,” Janine said. She lay back down.

Nelson watched his mother go down the hallway, then turned on his heel. “Hi,” he said to Livy. He was standing with his hands on his hips, his elbows sticking out, catching his breath. “She chased me,” he said.

“She was yanking on his shirt,” Janine said from the sofa, her voice muffled. She was letting herself sink into the gap between the cushions and the back of the couch, her eyes closed, the bony backs of her wrists somewhere around her face.

“What's wrong with her?” Livy said.

“She doesn't want us to open the door.”

Livy felt a sense of doom that was localized very precisely in the pit of her stomach. It was cold, concave. “I'm hungry,” she said. “Do you have cereal?”

They went into the kitchen.

“My parents know we went to the pharmacy,” Livy said. “I guess the word got out. Clarence told my dad.”

“Fuck. Do they know about Mark?”

“No.”

He rubbed his face, then took a long breath. “Well, we can't do anything. They'll find out or they won't.” He turned away, rummaging for something to feed her. There was a box of something twig-like on a high shelf and a carton of soy milk—Janine was lactose-intolerant. There was a little yellow radio on the counter, encased in rubber, and he switched it on as he went by. Faint music, crackling and warm.

“Batteries?” Livy said.

“I found it in a closet yesterday.”

“You're not listening to the news?”

“I got tired of it. They don't even know what country he's from. And the charges are secret.”

“So what are you listening to? Zip 100?”

“Power 96. It's a crappy receiver, I can't get that much.”

She listened to the music for a while. It was a song she disliked, but she recognized it without disappointment. She hadn't heard music in days—all car radios were tuned to the news, all the time. The girl singer sang about oceans of pain. It was so weird, Livy thought, that this rhyming description of vacillation over suicide had been set to a cheerful sing-along beat and was available on the radio for people in their cars. She felt that her normal life was an island retreating in the wake of a boat.

“Your cereal's getting mushy,” Nelson said. “And my mom will
completely lose her shit if she sees I gave you soy milk. You should eat it fast.”

“Thanks.”

He glanced at her from where he was standing in the doorway, keeping watch down the hall. “You're welcome.”

“Do you think he's here?” She realized she had not asked him this yet. It had seemed, in a strange way, beside the point; they had enough to handle with the things they knew for sure. Now the question was a roundabout way of saying
Guess what?
The big surprises were always hard to spring.