Relief Map (19 page)

They stared at each other as if each were equally surprised. There was a rush and hum in the walls as someone turned the water on in the kitchen. A scratch sounded at the door, and Livy jumped, feeling the muscles tighten all down her back.

Nelson recovered his power of speech. “It's just the cat,” he said. He glanced at the door, moved to open it, decided not to. “You're sure it's him?”

She nodded.

“Fuck,” he said. “What are we going to do?”

She absorbed the word
we
. He took his glasses off. He did that when people argued near him, she had seen him do it many times. The tension would rise in the room and he would reach up casually and blind himself.

“I have to get him out of there,” Livy said, her voice quavering a little. “Ron wants to search all the houses again.”

“He does? What are we going to do about Mark?”

“Christ, I don't know.”

He put his glasses back on. “What is he like? Beni or Deni or whatever his name is?”

She made a vague arc in the air with her hand. “He's like the picture. He looks like a businessman. Or a teacher. He doesn't speak English.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“He doesn't speak English, I said.”

“Yeah, but—” He flung his hand out, splayed his fingers.

“He didn't. He was begging me, basically.”

“You can't tell where he's from?”

“No.” She went over to the window, where she had dropped her shoes on the carpet. “I have to get him out. I don't want to give him to the police, I just—I just don't. But they can't find him here either. I already let him stay overnight in the garage. That's bad. He wants to go to Pittsburgh.”

“Do you think he did something serious?”

“I don't know. I don't know.” She stared at the dark computer monitor on the other side of the room. She closed her eyes. “I'm just going to get him out. I'm going to put him on a bicycle.” She had been turning this single idea over in her mind for an hour, waiting for a better one to come to her.

“A bicycle?” Nelson said, looking up. “He'll . . . pedal away?”

“Well, it's better than walking, and it's not like I can drive him out. My mom never rides her bike. I can pump up the tires and take him over the hill with it and put
him on the trail, and then from there he can get onto 72 and he won't be our problem anymore. I've done it myself a couple of times.”

“So you're going to go over the hill with him? In the dark?”

“Yeah.”

“They'll catch you with him,” Nelson said, alarm in his face. “You know how much trouble you'd be in? That's jail, that's
real
jail.”

“There might not be any cops over that way,” she said. It seemed important now that her plan be deemed solid and reasonable. “There's no road there, just the trail.”

“I'll take him,” Nelson said. His eyes were very wide, dense and dark.

“What? That doesn't make any sense. Why should you do it instead of me?” They were dressed alike now, both in T-shirts and gym shorts. She saw herself for a second as a squeaking, presuming child, arms crossed, advancing a dubious strategy.

“So we're both going, then,” he said.

Something in her shoulders relaxed when he said it. She realized now that this was why she had come. She was hoping for the company, even though she couldn't have asked, because it was an outrageous thing to ask for. “What if your mom catches you leaving?” she said, hedging, looking just to the right of his face.

“Don't worry about it.”

She hugged him abruptly. She smelled sweat and an edge of lemony deodorant. “I need a flashlight,” she said into his T-shirt. “Do you have an extra one?”

He went to his desk and produced a key chain flashlight. “I'll come meet you when it gets dark,” he said, palming it into her hand.

“Okay,” she said. She shrugged as she said it, but tears were stinging her eyes. She pretended to examine the light. “Thanks.”

She saw them as she came down Collier: her parents on the front steps of the store, talking to Jocelyn and Noreen. Her mother was biting her lip. Livy backed behind a boxwood hedge and sank down into the grass. Jocelyn was pointing up Collier and Noreen was rubbing Livy's mother's back. Livy's guilt rose up again; she hated to make her parents worry. They were so reasonable most of the time. She backed away from the hedge and ducked around the side of a small yellow house and into the woods.

There was no cleared path there and she got herself tangled in a multiflora rosebush only a few feet into the trees. It took several minutes to get herself unstuck from it, tearing her shirt, leaving powdery white scratches on
her arms. This close and meticulous work, unhooking the thorns, calmed her down, and once she was free of the rosebush she sat down on a stone to wait. Twenty minutes, half an hour, and her parents would have knocked on the Telas' door, found she wasn't there, and gone off someplace else to look for her. She would only have to wait. She wished she had a watch.

The rosebush protected her. No one would come through this way. She sat for a while with her head on her knees, breathing as slowly as she could.

What if he'd done something seriou
s
? she thought. Nelson's question. What if he had?

Get him out of here
, she thought.
Out of here, out of here, out of here
.

Revaz had thought she would come back right away with something to eat. She had asked if he wanted food, unless he had somehow grossly misunderstood her. But hours passed, and she didn't come back.

He needed something to do with his hands. He opened the cedar-scented drawers of the dresser one by one. In the bottom one, there were forty-five cents and a child's sock with a ruffle at the ankle. Under the windows there were boxes full of books, and he passed the
time for a while by lifting them out and looking at the covers and then putting them back very carefully where they belonged. They were mostly paperbacks, including ten that obviously belonged to a series and all had dreamy paintings of young women on them, clutching books to their chests, wearing Edwardian dresses.

She hadn't come back with food but she also hadn't come back with the police. She might be planning to help him. It was possible.

These were probably her books, put away now because she was too old for them. He had a goddaughter who was fifteen, a nice girl. He felt sad at the thought of her. He guessed that this girl was sixteen or seventeen, although he'd never been good at guessing the ages of children. She was pretty (all girls that age were pretty). She was freckled and had long, loose hair.

If she hadn't brought the police by now, she would not bring them.

Were women naturally empathetic? He was old-fashioned in believing they were. He straightened his stiff knee, painfully, until he was sitting with his legs sticking out in front of him like a child. He'd always believed women would come and save him, and usually one did. Girlfriends here and there. His sister, until she was gone.

After a while—
half an hour or forty-five minutes, she couldn't tell—Livy slipped down through the woods to White Horse Road. She would have to wait until dark to retrieve the bike, she realized now. Queen Anne's lace was blooming along the road, half strangled in nets of crown vetch. In June she had walked here with Nelson, picking wineberries, ducking out of the way of passing cars. She walked on the yellow stripe in the middle now. A gust of wind had knocked a few bright leaves loose from the trees and they lay here and there in bunches on the road, undisturbed.

Where the road turned, just before the roadblock came into sight, she sat down in the dirt by the guardrail. A pair of white butterflies looped in the still air over the asphalt. She had hours of daylight to wait through.

The Markos sometimes went back to camp at the farm where Livy's parents had once lived. The old fields were wild now, the house had been annexed by hornets and mice, and the yard was a thicket with stray poppies staggering through it. Once Livy had gotten up in the middle of the night to pee and the silence outside the tent had astonished her. There was no wind and no highway, no water running by, and after using the outhouse she'd stood outside for a long time listening, arms crossed, barefoot.

The silence had been so complete it felt like deafness. There was a strange pressure in her ears, as if they had
been switched off or blocked. She stood on packed earth; the grass grew knee-high beside the bare patch, and each blade of it, each angled stem and puff of seed, was perfectly still. She began to hear her own blood hissing in her ears. She looked at the edge of the woods, the field going over the hill, the stand of walnut trees around the bedrock at the top, and none of it scratched out any sound to match the seething in her veins. Her aliveness was monumental, and the world was faint and distant and dark.

She had been like that for most of her adolescence, vivid to herself with the world muted and blurred around her. Now the world was thunderous. She pulled up a blade of grass and chewed on the end of it. The world was loud and close, and her heart and lungs and brain were a tinny afterthought.

It was seven thirty before the sky began to dim. Livy was waiting it out behind the Sportsmen's Club, on the patch of grass where the last manager had been thinking, shortly before he quit, about setting up some tables and patio umbrellas. He had used the words
alfresco
. The patch of grass was pleasant, but it was small and it faced the back of the building, a carelessly stuccoed wall with a heavy metal door in it, painted brown. It had seemed to
Livy, when he suggested it, like an indication of the gap between the kind of restaurant he thought he deserved and the one he was in.

There was never much of a sunset in Lomath. The hills were in the way and all they got were side effects, an orangeness in the air. Livy had been moving around all day and her fear of encountering her parents was so intense that it was funny: it made her feel like a small child again, a kid on TV who had broken a lamp. Birds animated a tree across the parking lot, an invisible mob in the upper branches. She waited and waited.