Relief Map (6 page)

Around three o'clock she saw the police come around the bend of the low road on foot and knock on the Greens' door. The Greens came out and stood in the yard while the police filed in. Livy watched while two officers circled the house and disappeared into the backyard. The Greens
stood in the driveway for a while, under the eye of the policeman at the door, and then sat down one by one in the grass under the windbreak of lindens they had planted along the road. Livy watched nervously. Clarence and Aurelia Green were also middle-aged people with jobs, just like the Markos, but they were black, and she was old enough to grasp that it made a difference. In Maronne, where most of the police department was white and most of the people were not, she had seen beat cops walk up to groups of men and women chatting on the sidewalk and tell them to “disperse,” the specificity of the word carrying an air of statute. This was called “clearing the sidewalk,” and it came up sometimes in city council meetings when people complained. Livy finished painting her toenails while she watched the Greens sitting in their yard, and then she painted her fingernails, and then colored the stone between her feet sparkly blue. She had painted a good deal of the masonry within reach of her left hand by the time the police came out of the Green house again and picked their way up the hill to the Cardens'. The Greens went back inside, Clarence and Aurelia ushering their twin girls ahead of them, and Livy heard the faint, abbreviated bang of their front door closing from across the creek.

She heard the porch door open below her, and her father stepped down onto the grass beside the ash tree and paused, looking in every direction. It was funny to
see people foreshortened this way, all crown with little wobbling bodies underneath, like toddlers. “Hey,” she called down.

He started and looked up, peering through his glasses. She waved.

“What are you doing up there?” he said. He sounded angry.

“I won't fall off,” she offered. “I've got three points of contact.” With one hand she indicated her feet, firmly planted on the copper flashing, and her other hand, resting on the stones.

“You fall off and hit the porch roof, you'll break your leg,” he said.

He was glaring as if she were doing something outrageous, absurd. She was confused, which made her annoyed in turn. “You never fussed about me going on the roof before,” she said.

“Christ, just get off the chimney,” he said. “Stay over on the side. At least if you fall off you'll hit the grass.”

“Okay, all right,” she said, climbing down onto the shingles. She heard the door shut as he went back inside. She guessed he was on edge about the police, and taking it out on her. He did not normally object to heights, and he was the one who had chosen a fully opening skylight to install in her room instead of the hobbled kind that stopped at a few inches, admitting nothing but
bugs. Incidents like this one made her notice how lax her parents were with her the rest of the time: the driving around late at night and talking back and sleeping over wherever she wanted. Her classmates in college-bound classes at school, all of them nonthreatening, polite kids whom teachers and administrators happily ignored, were not allowed to do these things.

Some time later Livy came down off the roof to make herself a piece of toast, and the house was filled with scorching bleach fumes. She found her mother in the kitchen levering dirt out of the cracks between the floorboards with a butter knife. Her father was scrubbing the walls in the living room, and small showers of flakes were coming loose from a patch of water-damaged plaster near the chimney, clinging to his hair and beard, whitening the Harbor County Auto Fair T-shirt he'd put on for the chore.

“I've been meaning to do this,” Livy's mother said as she came in. She was wiping the black material lifted from the cracks onto a piece of paper towel. Her hair was coming loose from a bun, and there was a sheen over her that Livy guessed was some combination of anxiety and heat.

“You're all red,” Livy said.

“That's a nice thing to say to your old mother,” she said. “You are also all red, for the record.”

“Are you worried?” Livy said. “Is that why you're doing this?” The
fumes made her throat constrict. She wanted them to admit to some anxiety; she felt a little abandoned by their fierce activity.

“Why don't you get a broom and clear the spiders out of your room?” her father called from the other room. “I was up there yesterday and it was ridiculous. You like living with spiders?”

“They eat the millipedes,” Livy said. She cut two slices of bread and put them in the toaster, and then stared at it before remembering the power was out. She took a frying pan from a nail on the wall instead.

“Are you saying you're not going to do it?” her father said. He was looking into the kitchen now from the living room. Livy's mother's back was to her, but she thought she saw a look pass between her parents. They seemed to have decided she was a problem, all of a sudden. It was one of those days.

“No, I'll do it,” Livy said, placing the bread in the pan.

“You'd rather stay on the roof all afternoon?” her mother said.

When had the roof become a fight? Her mother and father were both watching her now. This always seemed to happen lately, contested territory cropping up in normal conversations. Livy was aware that she was to blame for some of this at times, that she defended her little
patches of righteousness with the same vigor they did. But this one had caught her off guard.

“You're not a guest, you know,” her mother said, pointing in the direction of the stairs with the dirt-laden butter knife. “You live here. You never clean.”

“What? I clean—”

“You act so put-upon when I tell you to take your things up to your room or sweep out the basement. I ask you for
nothing
. And right now what we're asking is for you to clean your room this afternoon and stay the
hell off the roof
.”

Livy was speechless. Her mother was giving her a wide-eyed stare now, waiting for a response. Her father had a similar look. Livy turned off the flame under the pan.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

“In your room with the skylight shut,” her mother said. “Until we say otherwise. All right?”

“All right,” Livy said. She was staring at her hands now, holding the two barely warmed slices of bread. She had to push past her father to get through the kitchen door, and he stepped aside and looked the other way, as if he had just noticed a crack in the plaster beside the south-facing window.

She sat on the floor in her room. A new grasp of the situation was dawning on her. It was an emergency, the kind that seeped into people's homes like radon
poisoning and made them act peculiar: large, illogical animal-parents, eyes rolling in panic.

She heard murmuring in the kitchen, and then the house was quiet. She cleaned. She swept the corners, cleared the loose objects off her desk and dresser, took her books out of the shelves and wiped the dust off their tops with a paper towel. She filled a trash bag with plastic odds and ends whose provenance she could no longer remember and Christmas-gift knickknacks she didn't want, and spent an hour leafing through the old magazines stacked in the closet, feeding them one by one into a recycling bag. They were evidence of a cheerfully standard femininity she had passed through at fourteen, when she had decided there might not be any good reason she shouldn't know techniques for flat-ironing her hair or “creating a waist” or giving herself a “smoky eye.” The magazines had gradually infuriated her with their chummy, innocent tone and constant faultfinding, and now she was firmly against them, but she could still be drawn in by the sticky perfume samples and the photographs of beautiful girls in oversized sweaters, walking in grassy fields at sunset, with dabs of lens flare above their backlit hair. Nelson had found the magazines once while searching for an extra sweatshirt in her closet, and then read an article on “taming flyaways” out loud to her with great seriousness. The illustrating pictures were not
clear enough for him to grasp what a flyaway was, and he was apparently struck by the lyricism of the phrase, because he tried to deduce it through a series of questions.

“It's not a knot,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“It's not a cowlick.”

“No.”

“So it's little hairs just sticking straight up,” he said. “Like they're trying to
fly away
from the rest of your hair.”

“Yes.”

“Like if you have static electricity?”

“No. Yes. Sometimes.”

She leafed through the magazines in the quiet house. When they were tied up inside the bag she lay down and slept, trying to will the time away.

It was evening by the time the police knocked on the Markos' door, explaining that the search was voluntary pending a warrant but that it would make everything go much faster if they consented to it. The Markos went out to stand in the yard, leaving the gleaming, bleach-scented house to be searched by several tired-looking men in button-front shirts and dark pants. A young female police
officer stood with them in the yard, smiling apologetically. Livy's father chatted with her the way he chatted with grocery clerks, perhaps to soothe his anxiety.

The sound of heavy furniture scraping across the floor came to them through the screened front door. Livy's mother winced, which the policewoman noticed. “Most places, they put everything back the way they found it,” she said.

“You really can't tell us anything about this person?” her father said.

“There are just a lot of security concerns,” the young woman said, pressing her lips together.

Nelson knocked on the Markos' kitchen door softly, with two knuckles. Livy was standing at the stove, making hot chocolate. It was inappropriate for the season but the stove was the only appliance in the house that worked the same with or without electricity, and it was soothing to use it. The kitchen had been left mostly undisturbed in the search; some things had been pulled out of closets upstairs, and the beer cases and sacks of lime in the basement had been moved away from the walls, but that was all.

“Your mom let you out?” Livy said, as Nelson maneuvered around the counter and sat at the table. Livy
was wearing a pair of cotton shorts that were too small to be seen in outside the house, and she would have been self-conscious about them if not for the darkness of the candlelit kitchen. They revealed the white of her upper thighs where normal shorts covered them, the faint blue veins, the dark sideways hairs that she didn't bother to go after with a razor.

“She's been asleep since eight,” Nelson said.

Livy glanced up at the battery-operated clock on the wall. It was eleven thirty. Her own parents had gone to sleep at ten, looking run-down, hardly saying good night.

“She's been in bed since this afternoon.” He picked up the saltshaker, rolled it back and forth along its edge on the surface of the table.

“Is she acting weird?” Livy said, turning to watch him answer. Livy had once seen Nelson's mother throw a candlestick through a picture window. “Acting weird” was a code phrase they had used for years to refer to his mother's problem: the fact that she sometimes wouldn't get out of bed for days and seemed both blind and deaf to people who came into her bedroom to try to make her eat, and that when pressed, in that state, she could inflict astonishing violence on the inside of the house. She broke plates and put holes in the drywall. She had knocked Nelson down a few times.

“Yeah, she's getting weird,” Nelson said. He was picking at
the holes in the top of the saltshaker with his thumbnail.

“Okay,” Livy said. “We can play checkers.”

Livy's room was a loft, open to the kitchen below on one side. The Marko house was tall and narrow and regular as a cake, three small stories stacked on top of each other, built into the side of the hill so it had front doors on two different levels. There were few interior doors, and a quiet knock on the kitchen door was plainly audible in Livy's room, though it would not carry into the master bedroom where her parents slept. Their room was on the ground floor, half underground, and had a heavy door. Nelson had been coming and going from the Marko house at night for years without disturbing her parents.