Relief Map (7 page)

When they were thirteen and fourteen Nelson would tell Livy at school that his mother was acting weird, and Livy would understand that she should take the cordless phone with her when she went to bed in case he called in the middle of the night to come over. Livy would bring the cushions from the living room couch up to her room and arrange them on the floor for him to sleep on. He was electrified with tension and fatigue when he appeared at those times, so much so that he would whisper jokes the whole time, sexual jokes,
which was not normal for him—filling the late-night silence with innuendoes about sharing a room, treating the whole thing as a ruse by her to get him alone, or the other way around. Livy had been surprised the first time by this bewildering edifice of just-kidding, but she had learned that he wouldn't refer to it later and everything would be back to normal the next day. So she played along, insinuating back at him. She enjoyed those times, even though they were bad times. They were bubbles of intimacy that appeared and then vanished and left everything just as it had been before. He would sleep a few hours and then get up before dawn to put the cushions back and slip away to his own house. Livy's parents never knew.

Around the time they turned fifteen, he stopped making late-night rescue calls. Livy suspected that he had learned to be embarrassed.

She finished the hot chocolate and made a cup for him too, and they went looking for the checkers set. It was missing a third of its pieces, so they found a pack of cards instead and played by candlelight in the middle of Livy's bedroom floor. Through the open windows they could hear occasional sirens over the hills. There was a fire station in Parna that had a government-grade siren, an enormous aluminum concavity under a little shingled belfry roof, and it went off frequently in the summer. It
meant there was a fire that needed extra trucks in one of the neighboring townships, and despite its hysterical pitch it frightened neither of them.

“Aces low,” Livy said.

“You didn't say that before.”

“Come on.” She made a give-me-a-break gesture, palms up.

“You didn't,” he said, laughing. “You are such a cheater. This is why I don't trust your line calls.”

“You can't see my line calls.” They sometimes played badminton on the sandy lot in front of the mill when they got tired of watching pirated movies in the dark, and he always took off his glasses to play, which led to a lot of disputes about what was out of bounds. The sand and the net were there because the carpenters who owned the mill met once a week to play volleyball and drink beer on the mosquito-livened lawn. They had even set up lights on tall rusted poles so they could play after dark. When she was little, Livy and the other carpenters' kids would play a parallel game on those evenings, a literal shadow game, in which each child picked an adult shadow and strived to stay in it while it moved up and down the court.

“Cheating a blind man at badminton,” Nelson said, shaking his head.

Livy laughed. “You could always keep your glasses on.” She put down a nine of hearts, and Nelson reconsidered his hand. “Doesn't this feel like camping?” she said, watching
him stare at the four cards he held. “That's the only time I do boring things like this. Cards, for God's sake.” She thought boredom was definitely the way to go, if they were going to be discussing their feelings. There was a certain bravado to it.

“Camping or a long car trip,” Nelson said. “Or a train ride. Or the guy in the bubble over Times Square for a week.” He scratched his chin. “Those Russian soldiers who were trapped in the submarine.”

“They all died, Nelson, it's not quite like that.”

“How long do you think it'll be?” he said. He was studying his cards.

“I don't know,” Livy said.

“Let's do bets, though.” He glanced up. His glasses were sliding down his nose, and he pushed them up. “Over-under.”

“Hmm.” She studied the ceiling. “Tomorrow morning. Before noon.”

He nodded, looking at his cards again. “That's optimistic.”

“Well, they've already searched most of the houses and they haven't found anybody. So they have to go soon, right?”

“But maybe it's the opposite,” he said. “They haven't found him, so they can't leave.”

She thought about that. “So you want to take afternoon.”

“Yeah. They leave before noon, you win. They leave after noon, I win.”

“So if things are okay, then I win, and if everything is terrible, then you win,” Livy said.

Nelson laughed. “I guess that's my system, yeah.”

“It's not going to take that long,” Livy said, trying briefly to push her voice into a tone that was serious and reassuring. She was thinking of his mother again. “It'll be all right.”

“Hm.” He laid down a jack of diamonds. It was an indifferent play. The sirens stopped, started, stopped again.

At one o'clock they exhausted the deck and he stood up to go. He patted his pockets absently, making sure he had his keys; delaying, shifting his weight. He went over to the skylight and looked out, as if he would be able to assess the circumstances at his own house from there.

“You don't have to go,” Livy said.

He turned quickly and she regretted it for an instant, as if she'd accidentally used an obscenity in a foreign language. “I don't mean it in a weird way,” she said, but that made it worse. There was a glare on his glasses from the candle, and she couldn't tell if he was staring at her or not. “You know what I mean. You used to.”

“I used to be more scared,” he said.

“You're not scared now?”

He rubbed his nose and glanced out the skylight again. “I used to be smaller,” he said.

She was appalled. “You don't have to go.”

“Thanks,” he said. He sounded sincere.

“It's fine if you do,” Livy said. “But you don't have to.”

He brushed his fingers over the top of her head, just barely disturbing her hair, and she started but did not move back. “Thanks,” he said again.

She watched him go down the stairs, and heard the kitchen door open and close; it would lock automatically behind him. She thought about the phones being down; he couldn't call. She hoped everything was quiet when he got home.

She was sitting opposite a mirror that leaned against the wall, and when she glanced at it she saw that her shirt had come down in front while she was hunched on the floor, and the edge of her bra was visible. It occurred to her that Nelson had been sitting right in front of the mirror, and it was likely that she had been chatting with him and playing cards while giving him a clear view down the front of her shirt. That was embarrassing. She pulled the shirt back up, but it was old and had been washed too many times and didn't lie flat against her skin anyway. She edged up to the mirror on her knees and stared herself in the eyes, recalling how easy it had been to give herself
vertigo that way when she was a child. She looked all right. She looked kind of nice in the candlelight.

Nelson had had a nervous, humorless girlfriend when he was fifteen, an eleventh grader with her own car who'd had sex with him in it after stopping at his house on her way home from a field hockey meet. She wasn't nice to him, and she wouldn't let him talk to Livy. They'd broken up after three months. Livy was still a virgin. She had pressed Nelson for sexual details, but he'd turned red and said nothing.

“So everything, then,” she had said.

He was pink all the way to the roots of his hair. “Not—no. Not everything.”

“But you
did
—”

“Yeah. But that's, you know. Not everything.”

She was annoyed that he wouldn't tell her more, but she could also see that he was being decent. She felt a little left out.

“You'd tell me if I was a boy,” she said.

“No, I wouldn't,” he said.

She abandoned the mirror and went to bed without brushing her teeth. She was too keyed up to fall asleep. She was listening for people moving in the dark, the police or the man they were looking for, or anything else. How did she not listen every night? How was it that a person could feel so safe, so much of the time?

Revaz was settling in for an uncomfortable night. The woods were full of mosquitoes, and they seemed even thicker in the deer blind, attracted by the heat it trapped, maybe, or the old sour smells of the wood. He had come to the conclusion that animals had lived in the blind since its last human use. That would explain the rancid, biological liveliness of it. He was a city dweller and had never had romantic ideas about nature. He had not slept in the open since he was a boy.

He had been expecting his old friend Davit's cousin that day, the one who drove a truck for a living. That was the plan: after flying into Philadelphia and taking the commuter train out to Lomath, he would meet Davit's cousin on the highway over the hill. Then they would drive west. He was not sure how far he would go with the cousin; he was simply anxious to get far away from the airport. On the highways a person could disappear. He understood that in this spectacular run of favors he had used up his friendship with Davit, burned it out like a candle.

Just after dawn that morning he had walked down out of the woods to the bleached and neglected-looking road that ran along the creek, and after going the wrong way for ten minutes he had made it to Prospect Road,
intending to climb up to the rendezvous point on the highway that Davit had marked for him on the map. He saw the police cruiser at Somersburg Road before the policeman in it saw him, and was able to climb over the guardrail and retreat undetected. This was good luck, although it had crossed his mind, for a few brief minutes while he tried to catch his breath on a rock beside the creek, that he might have been spared arrest only to die of a heart attack. He was already faint from hunger, and the shock of seeing the police car made his heart race horribly. The rush of adrenaline made him sweat, too: his shirt, creased and dirty from sleeping on benches and train platforms and finally in the deer blind, was now marked with dark circles under both arms and a damp plume down the back.

He had brought an empty plastic water bottle with him, and he had the presence of mind to fill it in the creek before he headed back. The thing was that the less you had, the harder it was to get anything. The light-headedness of hunger made this seem very profound. He had nothing. After paying off the cousin through Davit and buying his plane ticket, he had $232 in cash left in the world. He was afraid to try buying something to eat. And buy it where? He had a cell phone, a pay-as-you-go that he'd bought in Philadelphia before he got on the train so that he could call the cousin—a number
that he had committed to memory, not wanting it to be found on him in case he was arrested—but if the police were here then they might be monitoring cell phone calls coming out of the area. And sometimes phones had GPS trackers in them, didn't they? He took the phone out of his pocket and stared at it for several minutes, trying to remember how the chips worked from spy movies he'd seen on television. Finally he risked a single text message, not identifying himself by name, hoping that the cousin would deduce who he was from the language:
Delayed, try tomorrow
. Then he took the battery out of the phone and put both in his pocket.

Back in the deer blind, his heart beating at close to normal pace again, it occurred to him that the police car might have nothing to do with him. It was possible. He nodded to himself, crouched on the platform a mere six feet off the ground. Possible, but a useless possibility, too risky to act on. He drank the water, and his headache receded a little. He worried about parasites. There might be cows shitting in the stream, for all he knew. He had seen some on the hillside at the far end of the valley.

He had no idea what to do. He was able to fall asleep for a while, though the sun was high and it was hot in the blind. Hunger woke him close to noon, and he climbed down out of the tree and took a piss in a clump of bushes
a few feet away—some decorum, even if he was alone. A baby's changing table stuck out of a blackberry bush nearby, its wood panels warped and delaminated from exposure.

He chewed experimentally on some grass in an especially succulent-looking clump, and was shocked to discover that it tasted like onions. It made his mouth burn but it was comforting to have the scent on his breath—it was homey and he thought of dumplings. It tempered, also, the bitter empty-stomach taste of his saliva. He investigated the blackberry bush, but it was well past the season. The crevices in the bedrock that reared up out of the top of the ridge were filled with rotting walnuts, golfball–sized green globes that flaked to black, but he had no idea if they would make him sick if he ate them raw. From the top of the bedrock he could catch glimpses of a long view through the trees: the farm at the top of the valley, the sweep of the ridge opposite, the white house with the garden directly below him.