Relief Map (9 page)

She was startled. “Hey, what?” His face was hot against her ear.

“What yourself,” he said. “I had a nightmare.” He squeezed her and let go. “Let's go for a walk. I have to get out of this house.”

She took a second to follow him, still feeling the hot pressure of his arm on hers. He went ahead of her into the yard, toward the woods. Downhill two children were playing in the drainage ditch at the side of the road—a pretty little brook, pebbled and bright, despite the corrugated pipes that swallowed it here and there. They were shy, curly-haired children whom Livy had often seen, and now as always they straightened up at the sight of teenagers and hid their sticks and bunches of weeds behind their backs. They were too young to know that their rituals were easy to guess, being common among children who live near water. Livy had played like that once, naming and building, day after day. She had tried, once or twice, to explain to Nelson how she had felt when she first started visiting the Inskys' pastures at the other end of the valley. She was nine, alone, and had picked her way across the creek on a whim, committing herself to a long and arduous navigation of the apron of nettles and thistles that edged the bottom pasture. As soon as she had gotten
through this marshy patch and into the broad lap of the farm, where she could walk without looking down at her feet, she had felt a stunning freedom. A clear spring ran before her, crowded with cattails; past an electric fence, a hill rose gently to the horizon, interrupted halfway up by a palisade of bedrock. On the close-cropped, grassy slope, three tall old pear trees leaned close together. The ground around their roots was littered with hard, speckled fruit. So: there was water and food, and cleared land bordered by a wilderness (the bedrock, covered with brambles and poison ivy), which meant that to a nine-year-old's mind, conditioned by dollhouses and dioramas, this farm was a scale model of a whole country. It was a miniature new continent, and Livy was gloriously alone in it, with mud leaking into her shoes and ecstatic greed in her heart. She gave everything names, declared herself empress, and built a ritual around her daily entry, making up violent rhymes to block the path of anyone trying to follow her.
If you pass the reeds so high / You'll fall in a hole and die. / Try to cross the little spring / Burn to death with nettle stings
. She had stopped going in the winter, and when she came back in the spring it was not the same. It must have been some change in herself, but the sod was just sod now.

Nelson snapped a branch off a little dead tree as they entered the path and swung it in the air in front of him, pushing back a rope of brambles. A few yards into the
woods they headed right, up the slope. “I like this spot,” Nelson said. Livy recognized it. She couldn't remember when she'd been there, but she recognized the tree, an old silvery beech leaning back and throwing up its limbs, charred by a lightning strike many years previous that had emptied it out at the bottom but left it alive. She remembered sitting inside it some afternoon when she was small.

“They were talking about us on the radio,” she said.

“They were?” He settled down beside the tree and leaned back, his face relaxing slightly.

“They didn't really say anything new. Just that they're looking for somebody and the roads are closed. Somebody foreign.” She looked up into the leaves of the tree. “I mean, they didn't say that. They said something about extradition.”

“That was it?”

She nodded and sat down beside him, glancing at the side of his face. His eyes were wide and dark, looking off into the trees.

“You know, I had something compressing when the power went out,” he said. “I think I lost it.”

“What was it?”

“The video with the ants.” He had a cheap video camera and he'd been recording an anthill at the side of his driveway, an impressive structure, the ground humped and delicate beneath, the ants glinting red. There was a song he'd
put with it, several songs; he kept trying them and discarding them, and there was something endearing about this, his focus on a project whose parameters were clear only to him, his emphatic rejection of one song, the hopeful way he took up another. Crouching for an hour at a time next to a mound of dirt, ducking around the side of the house when his parents or sister came outside.

“Did you have it backed up?” Livy said.

“I can't remember. I keep trying to remember, and I can't.”

“I bet you did. You're always careful about that,” she said. He looked like he was reviewing it in his mind, the video that might or might not exist now in the silent lump of his hard drive. She thought of elaborating a bit more on this reassuring idea, but decided not to. Sometimes she blundered too loudly into these private spaces in his life, his projects, his machinations, and she could feel him cringe.

There was a platform in a tree about ten yards away, between the edge of the Telas' yard and where they sat, that some kids had nailed up many years before. It was a pallet braced across two low branches and covered with a rotting carpet. When she was a kid she and her friends had sometimes used this tree for a game called Desert Island: the platform was the island, and the ground was a shark-infested sea, and they had nothing to eat and
were alone in the world. Livy could just see the dark shape of it through the leaves. “Do you think that story about Jeremiah is true?” she said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Nelson said. During the previous winter three men had robbed a bar at gunpoint in Maronne and some people said that Jeremiah, Jocelyn's son, was one of them.

“Do you think he has anything to do with this?” she said.

“I doubt it. He hasn't been around here in months. And I don't think he's really at the international criminal level.”

Livy laughed. “You're probably right.” He seemed gloomy still, distracted. “Hey, I bet Carine misses you,” she said, grinning. Carine was a freshman whose sister knew Nelson's sister. For several months she had been remote in person and very warm online. Livy and Nelson would sit together in his room drinking flat orange soda, playing a tedious game of Risk, and the computer would plink, plink, plink with her messages.

“Oh, desperately,” he said. He almost smiled.

“She's cute,” Livy said.

He sat back, let go of his knees. “Yeah, she's cute.” He sounded indifferent.

“What, you're too good for Carine Bronson?”

“She's fourteen. You want me to go out with her?”

“No, I don't know.” She
was talking just to talk, she realized. A bad habit. And a flirtatious gloss had crept into her voice, which happened sometimes when she was trying to cheer him up. “Do you think everybody's talking about us?” she said. As she said it, she realized that she hoped they were. “Do you think Elena is wondering what's happening—here?” She waved her hand, taking in the valley.

“Yeah, probably,” he said. Elena was a girl at school who seemed to find Livy and Nelson amusing. Her other friends were a group of Honor Society girls who met at diners to discuss the shifting hierarchies of their grade, and she invited Livy and Nelson along sometimes to be educated. She could be quick and funny, and she could be mean. She had asked Nelson once if he could get her ecstasy, which he could not, and later she had denied ever having the conversation so vehemently that it had almost ended their friendship. She and her friends operated according to a complicated system of badness and goodness. “This is all probably super exciting to her,” he muttered.

“Oh, come on. I bet she's worried.”

“She can be both.”

They sat quietly against the tree for a while. Livy grew restless. “Let's walk,” she said. She got to her feet and tugged on Nelson's hands.

They picked their way down the hill and walked back and forth, up and down Prospect, from the store to the overpass just before Somersburg Road, Livy carrying her shoes. They decided to find some pot. Their nerves were jangled, although neither of them said so. Livy was beginning to feel odd pains in her body, in her shoulders and thighs, as if she had been holding an unnatural position for a long time. They went down to Brian Carroll's house, where the motorbike was still disassembled in the yard, and persuaded him to sell them a joint from his personal supply. He haggled with them over it, holding it between two fingers and peering at it as if appraising a piece of jewelry. He named a price and Livy and Nelson exploded with incredulity.

“
Maybe
half that,” Livy said.

“I've smoked your weed before,” Nelson said. “It's not that good.”

“I got the market cornered right now,” Brian said. “Where are you going to go?”

Livy rolled her eyes and dug some money out of her pocket.

“Profiteer,” Nelson said.

From the Carroll backyard, Livy and Nelson picked their way along the creek bank to the bridge and smoked the joint in the deep shade of the high arch, looking out
at the shallow water and the hill rising above it. “This tastes weird,” Livy said.

“His stuff is terrible.” Nelson stretched his legs out and leaned back against the stones of the bridge. They sat for a few minutes without talking. A siren started up, an ordinary ambulance in the distance, and just then Livy began to feel an invisible shift. It was all around her, like a vapor, in the shadowed space under the bridge and the sunny space over the water beyond it. She held very still. The air seemed to have darkened subtly.

“I'm feeling anxious,” she said. She had always been good at identifying her emotions by their names, even when in the grip of them. She thought this was probably a talent, though not a great one. She looked up at the stone arch above their heads. “This bridge must weigh hundreds of tons. Thousands of tons.”

“Hundreds, I think,” Nelson said.

“I don't want to sit under it.”

They crossed the creek and sat in a stand of sycamores on the opposite side. Nelson patted her arm and her hair. “You're all right,” he said.

“I'm all right.” She ran her fingers across the underside of his upper arm where the skin was soft and cool over the muscle. “You don't mind if I do this, do you?”

“It's nice,” he said. He was looking up at the bright clouds as he said it, and keeping his arm very still;
keeping all of himself very still. It was nice. There was a cool buzz in the tips of her fingers.

She stared across the creek at the backyards of the houses between the bridge and the Lomath Sportsmen's Club which were separated from each other with chain-link fences but open to the water. “I love that gazing ball,” she said. There was a violet glass sphere the size of a bowling ball on a white pedestal in Lena Spellar's backyard. “I hate it when I get like this,” she added, her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth coming down.

“It happens to everybody.”

“Not you,” she said. He squinted at her sideways. She tipped her head back so the sun shone full on her face, which seemed to help. “You're like a stone,” she said. He looked away. “A stoned stone. You are.”

He laughed. She let her head drop back, felt its weight.

“Let's go up on the road,” she said. “It's sunnier.”

This was a mistake. When they came up over the embankment there was an argument going on at the end of the bridge. Lena and Dominic were talking to two policemen. Lena looked smaller to Livy than she ever had. Her blonde hair shone greenish in the sun, and she seemed to come no higher than the policemen's shoulders. Her hands waved in the air; she held something white in one small fist.

“It's empty,” Lena said. The white object was an inhaler.

“We see it,”
said one of the policemen. “This area has still not been cleared.”

“It's empty and I am out of refills.”

Noreen was sitting up in her folding chair at the top of the steps, watching.

“There is a federal investigation going on here and nobody is passing through this perimeter at this time.”

“I'll show you my prescription. I'll show you my inhalers.” Lena's face was red and her eyes were wide with frustration.

Ron Cash was pacing at the edge of the conversation. “People need things,” he said.

“I would suggest you all be a little more cooperative,” the other officer said suddenly. “Maybe this would go quicker. Have you thought about that?”

“Who's not being cooperative?” Ron shouted.

“Be
quiet
, Ron, why do you have to be in this?” said Lena.

“You've been going through everything we have,” Ron said. “We let you walk into our homes. Who's not being cooperative?”

“I can get my doctor on the phone for you,” Lena said. “I have asthma attacks from allergies, from stress. I could have one any time. These are empty.”

“I have medications myself,” Noreen called. “Quite a few.”

“
You all have a choice about how long this takes,” the second cop said.

“Are you trying to
kill
us?” Lena said.

“Put your hands down,” said the first cop. “Get your hands under control. And your tone.”

Lena took a step back, tears running down her face, and murmured something to Dominic, who was standing very still just behind her. Livy had once seen Dominic in a fight at school that had achieved iconic status afterward, with students who hadn't been there claiming that they had. It was just after the last bell, when people were milling in the front hallways and pushing for their buses, and Livy had stepped out onto the sidewalk and seen Dominic standing coatless under a cold January sky, with a friend attempting to hold him back, a shrimpish lackey of the type that seemed to swarm symbiotically around his large body. The other half of the fight was a tall, thin boy with a painfully acne-scarred face and long hair, the kind of kid who seemed to belong to no grade and no class, a phantasmic entity who might turn up anywhere at any time and who constantly projected a desire to be provoked into violence. He was screaming curses and threats, and they were collapsing the longer he went on and the more excited he got, so that “I'm going to fuck you up, motherfucker,” finally became only “I'm going to fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” until Dominic stepped forward and hit him
once in the jaw, knocking him down. Dominic didn't look angry, or even annoyed, at any moment during the incident. While the kid sat on the sidewalk, holding his face, Dominic turned and picked up his coat from where he'd dropped it and walked away to find his bus. Livy scanned Dominic now, knowing that his lack of expression did not mean that he wasn't about to do something violent. She wondered if the police could sense this also; she glanced at them and saw that they could.