Relief Map (8 page)

There was a person sitting on the chimney of the white house. A woman or girl, probably, with long hair. She was crouched there like a gargoyle, absorbed.

He watched her for a little while, discerning the open hatch in the roof that she had apparently come through. He was unsettled by the sight of her in a way he couldn't name.

Then he saw the police on the road below him. One was in uniform and the rest were not, but it was clear they were police: two were talking into radios. They ambled from the road toward a house at the bottom of the same slope he perched on, a house mostly hidden from him by the trees. He ran for the safety of the deer blind. He felt his leg scrape on something as he climbed the boards nailed to the trunk of the tree. He collapsed against the front wall of the blind and checked his leg: he'd torn his cuff, and he was bleeding a little from a spot just beside his Achilles tendon. He must have gotten caught on a nail. He untucked his shirt and wiped his sweating forehead with the tail. He understood now why he'd been disturbed at the sight of the girl on the chimney: she had been keeping vigil, and it was the police she was watching for. What were these people thinking, as the police hemmed them in? It made him dizzy to imagine it. What a great distance there was between them and himself, and yet here they all were.

The next morning Livy got out of the house with the excuse of fetching bread from the store. They were down to a single curving heel-end. It was cloudy that morning, the birds hushed. The OPEN flag hung limply by the
door, half covering the Dempsey Market sign. Livy was relieved to see it. She had been thinking that Jocelyn might stay closed, given the lockdown, and retreat to her apartment upstairs.

Years ago, when Livy was small, it was Noreen who owned and operated the store. The neighborhood children lived their summer hours in an orbit between the creek and the store, and Noreen was Aunt Noreen to most of them. It was delightful to children to be able to walk to a place of business and make purchases. They fetched milk and eggs for their mothers, and spent their allowances on penny candy and ice cream bars. When Noreen felt she was too old, she sold it to Jocelyn, who kept it much the same—the same freezer cases, pinball machine, occasional yard-sale items along the windowsills—but filled it with a nervous energy that Noreen had never had. Jocelyn talked fast and smoked on the steps, and she smiled at the kids a lot in a way that suggested she was afraid they might not like her. Still, her store was the place where people went when they wanted to get out of the house for a minute. They went barefoot, sometimes, or in bathrobes.

Noreen was sitting in her honorary position in a folding chair just inside the door and keeping up a half-shouted conversation with Jocelyn, who stood ten feet away behind the counter. Shelly Cash was picking her nails in a corner.

“I
told those boys not to sit out there,” Noreen yelled hoarsely. “I used to chase them away when they tried it. But you let them sit there.”

“I tell them to go,” Jocelyn said. “They just don't listen to me.”

“Well, you have to make them listen to you.”

Jocelyn seemed tense. Livy guessed they were talking about Brian and Dominic and some of their friends, who liked to sit on the front steps and smoke. It was true that Noreen had not tolerated this kind of thing when she owned the store, but it was also true that there had been a different set of teenage boys then.

“Morning, Noreen,” Livy said.

“Livy!” Noreen said. She leaned over and patted Livy's knee. “You're a good girl. How'd you do in school this year?”

“Okay, pretty good.”

“All right. You stay focused. That's really what it's about, don't you think, Jocelyn?”

“Mm-hmm,” Jocelyn said. Her shoulders were always up lately and her head was always down, her hair in a long swinging ponytail that seemed too lighthearted for her. She was smoking, which she did not ordinarily do inside the store.

Noreen shook her head. “Just keep an eye on your friends. You are the company you keep.”

Livy smiled politely. The bells rattled on the door, and Angela Insky came in. She was wearing a man's work shirt and boots, and her gray hair was falling out of a topknot. “There are a couple of plainclothes cops watching the highway right behind my house,” she announced. “I've been watching out my window all morning.”

“What kind of cops?” Noreen said, putting her hand to her ear.

“PLAINCLOTHES COPS!” Angela thundered helpfully, pivoting toward her. Livy snorted into her hand, and then pretended to be comparing the nutrition labels on two loaves of bread.

“How do you know they're cops, then?” Jocelyn said.

“You think civilians are surveilling my house?” Angela said.

Livy edged around Angela with a loaf of bread and a newspaper from the rack. Jocelyn glanced over her items. “Paper's free. It's two days old.”

Livy paid for the bread and went out on the steps to read the comics. She didn't want to go home yet. Lena and Paula arrived, and Livy half listened to their conversation through the propped door.

“Let's think about this logically,” Lena said. “Who would hide somebody from the police? There are some people who would and some people who wouldn't.”

“You don't know anybody's
hiding him at all,” Paula said. “Even if he is here, which I have my doubts about, and Tobias has his doubts about.” Tobias was her live-in boyfriend of many years, a cop, who had been on an overnight shift when the roads were blocked off and had not been able to come home. There were a few other halves of couples stuck outside Lomath now—stranded night-shift workers, now sleeping on the couches of relatives nearby—but Paula's case warranted special attention, since her boyfriend had been coming up to the barricades now and then to give her bits of information.

“You talked to him?” Noreen said.

“A little bit. He says it's a mess.”

“Is that all?”

“He said there's a bunch of FBI guys taking over the station house. They took his fax machine. And now they're trying to send him up to Springton Manor to sit in a speed trap all day because they don't like him coming by to talk to me. He said they're trying to keep their plans a secret but he thinks there isn't any plan.”

“Was it them that shut off the power?” Lena said.

“Looks like it was. And the phones.”

Jocelyn sighed. “Who do you think would do it, though?” she said. “Hide somebody?”

“I'll tell you who wouldn't,” Lena said. “Clarence and Aurelia. Noreen. Paula.” She nodded toward her friend.

“
What makes you so sure?” Paula said.

“Oh, don't make jokes,” Lena said. “It could be one of those war criminals from Sarajevo, those snipers who were shooting little children. You remember that? Schoolkids running across a bridge.”

“That's not the Balkans. That's Bosnia,” Paula said.

“Bosnia is
in
the Balkans.”

Paula frowned. “It is? Well, I guess I don't remember. That was forever ago.”

“I don't think we need to speculate,” Noreen said. She had a slightly mournful tone that Livy thought she'd heard before, in her own grandparents' voices, when an old fight was getting started again at the dinner table. It must be so tiring to be old enough to know better than everybody. Livy gave up trying to read the paper and leaned in the doorway to listen.

“I wouldn't hide anybody the police were looking for,” Lena said. “My son,
maybe
.”

“I don't think anybody's here at all,” said Shelly Cash suddenly. She had long, freckled hands, and she was drawing M&M's out of a packet one by one, rolling them in her palm before she ate them. She barely moved her lips when she spoke, but her voice always cut clear through the air. She was both larger and smaller than life, physically reduced but unsettling to others, every face turning toward her at the slightest sound. “They're just trying to look like they'
re doing their job. Which means making us look like criminals while they're at it, and if I don't get to work by Thursday I'm going to get fired.”

“They don't care,” Jocelyn concurred. “When Jeremiah got arrested he stepped on somebody's foot by accident, and they put him down for assault on a police officer. He already had the cuffs on. They don't care.”

Livy stored this tidbit away, thinking she would tell Nelson about it later. Jeremiah's explanations for his problems always followed this pattern. Innocent act piled on innocent act, with inexplicable malice from teachers and security guards and police at every step. They'd had the same gym class when Livy was a freshman and Jeremiah was a junior, and she had heard him go on this way many times.

“Where is Jeremiah?” Lena said.

There was some interest in this question. Jocelyn looked sharply at Lena. “He's been with his dad in Panoke since June,” she said. She turned away and started tying up the bag in the trash can behind her.

“Lucky for him,” said Paula lightly.

Jocelyn walked around the counter with the trash bag, her face tight with anger. No insinuation about her son escaped her notice.

“Sweetheart,” Noreen said, “I don't think they're going to come pick that up tonight.”

Jocelyn stopped, and then walked back around the counter and pushed the full bag back into a corner by a pile of delivery boxes. There was a tight, thwarted silence. Lena Spellar noisily removed a piece of nicotine gum from a bubble pack. Livy pretended to study her newspaper again. The newsprint felt antique already between her fingers, brittle, coated with dust.

Clarence Green drove up from the low road in his big conversion van. Livy watched while he pulled up in front of the store and parked conscientiously, getting as close to the steps as possible, even though he could have left the van in the middle of the intersection if he'd wanted. He left the engine idling and stepped out.

“They're talking about it on the radio,” he called out.

“No shit?” Jocelyn said. Paula pushed past her and ran outside. Noreen took longer. The radio voice surged out of the car. It was one of the Philadelphia stations, an anchorwoman whose voice was familiar, though Livy couldn't remember her name.

“—Interpol reports,” the anchorwoman said. “Details are still sketchy. The FBI has issued no statement.”

“What did she say?” cried Noreen, blinking in the sunlight.

“Shhh, shhh,” Clarence said.

“For now, roads remain closed in this small community.” Then the station ID, a commercial break.

“What the hell!” cried Paula. “
That was no information at all!”

“She said something about extradition before I got up here,” Clarence said. He was out of breath. “I was just sitting in my driveway listening to the radio and they started saying how there's a roadblock but nobody's making any statements about it, and nobody knows anything. And that was about it.”

“Well, leave it on,” Paula said. “Maybe they'll come back to it.”

Noreen went back into the store and dragged out her folding chair. The news anchors talked about car wrecks and flooding in the Midwest and bond trading and the weather. Noreen was anxious, leaning forward in her chair, and Livy could hear her breathing, light and rasping. By the time the news had cycled back around again and the same bits of information had been repeated, Livy couldn't stand to sit there anymore. She excused herself and walked away up the hill.

Nelson's sister opened the door and squinted hard into the sunlight. “Oh, it's you,” she said. “Nelson, Livy's here.” She pulled the door open another foot and padded away into the dark.

It was hot inside. The house was in the sun all the time; there were no shade trees on the harsh slope of
the lawn. Livy tried to run her hands through the damp knots in her hair.

Nelson was asleep in his room. It was hotter than the hallway, hotter than the living room. The window was open but no air moved through the screen. The bed was stripped except for a fitted sheet and he was asleep in his underwear, on his back, with his arms and legs thrown out. She stopped in the doorway and then crossed the room quickly and shook him.

“What, what,” he said. He shaded his eyes with his hand.

“You should close the window.”

“It'll—make it hotter . . .”

“It could not possibly get any hotter in here.”

He sat up, rubbing his face. Her eyes dropped to his back and then she stepped away and pretended to look out the window. He really didn't seem to notice when he was half-dressed around her. She had been carefully covering up, stripping to a bathing suit only when she was just about to get in the water, for years.

“I was having fucked-up dreams,” he said.

She glanced at him. His hair was damp at his temples and the wrinkles of the sheet were printed into the skin of his shoulders.

“I was in all this mud.” He stood up and pulled on his shirt and then sat down and slowly worked his legs
into a pair of swim trunks. “People were chasing me.” He stood up and put his arms around her.