Relief Map Read online

  “Is it normal? They just block everything off?”

  “If they’re looking for somebody, I guess they could.”

  They tried the other routes out of the valley. At the next one they found another roadblock, another car, and another polite cop. He asked for her father’s identification and showed him the photo, even after he said he’d seen it already. The officer walked in a circle around the truck and lifted the tarp in the back, frowning seriously at the bundles of cedar shakes underneath. Livy and her father did not speak to each other as they turned slowly around and drove away. Her father had turned the radio off, as he sometimes did when he was about to merge around construction or attempt an especially difficult highway on-ramp. Livy was flexing and relaxing her hands in turn, one after the other, like a cat. It was now only ten minutes until her appointment time, which was not long enough to get there, and if she was late she would have to spend at least an extra hour sitting in the waiting room and listening to the faint squeal of drills through the walls before another time slot opened up. She was afraid of the dentist, and her teeth already ached from clenching her jaw. There was one last route out of the valley, which was Somersburg Road, but as they came around the curve they saw that the intersection was blocked, this time with a low plastic barricade and a strip of tire-puncturing stainless steel. “Shit,” Livy said, and was not rebuked for it. Her father gamely put the truck in neutral again.

  The roadblock was manned by a lone officer chewing gum in a cruiser. He made no move to get out of his car. Livy glanced back and forth between her father and the policeman, the two men regarding each other through their windshields. After a long pause, her father opened his door and stepped down from the truck. He ambled toward the car, studiously casual. The two men began to talk in a way that looked friendly. After a moment, not wanting to miss anything, Livy got out of the truck herself.

  “He’s from the Balkans,” the cop was saying.

  “Really?” her father said.

  “That’s what they told us. These federal guys, you know.” The cop rolled his eyes. He was older, gray-haired, red-faced. He seemed generous with information, gesturing loosely with the hand that dangled over the sill of his car door.

  “Why would he be here?” her father said, waving his hand illustratively at the guardrail, the row of trash cans at the end of a driveway, the ragged pasture across the road.

  The cop rolled his eyes again. “FBI guys show up yesterday with a bunch of trucks and now they’re in charge. Who knows.”

  “Is that why the power’s out?” her father said.

  “That I don’t know. That would be the utility company. You should call.”

  “The phones are out too.”

  “Really? That’s probably the feds, then.”

  They were back at the house by nine. They sat in the truck in the yard for a little while before going in, searching for the local stations on the radio, but couldn’t find them: it was always hard to get a signal on the weaker frequencies down in the valley. After a few minutes her father turned the radio off, muttering about running down the battery. Livy trailed after him into the house. His step was quicker than normal, and he kept putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out again.

  In the kitchen he turned on the front burner but it failed to light for several seconds, and he had to stop to wave the gas away. “How about pancakes?” he said to Livy.

  “Sure,” she said. She hovered around the edges of the kitchen, waiting for a clearer response from him, but there was none. She felt lucky not to be at the dentist; beyond that the morning felt distant and abstract. Her father made pancakes and she took all the toppings she could think of out of the cabinet and lined them up on the table, first in a straight row, then in a circle with a jar of blueberry jam at the center. Her father tended to retreat into an implausible calm when anything frightening or strange happened. She remembered once, when she was seven, watching from the living room window while he walked at a stately pace from the far edge of the yard, shirtless despite the coolness of an early spring day, revealing when he arrived in the kitchen that his shirt was wrapped tightly around his mangled and bleeding right hand. He had been using a rope thrown over the branch of a sugar maple to hoist the engine out of an ancient Volvo, and his right hand had gotten pinned in the engine compartment and twisted, almost severing his index finger. When she offered to dial 911 for him as she had learned in school—white, shaking, saucer-eyed at the blood soaking through the checked fabric—he had said, “No, I’ll drive. Do you know how to heat up a cup of coffee?” Livy had successfully heated the coffee, though she was not normally allowed to use the stove. She had also operated the gearshift all the way to the hospital. Her father was left with a thick scar down the length of the finger and limited range of motion to the second knuckle. Livy had asked him years later about the coffee, and why he wasn’t worried that the delay might cost him his finger, but he claimed not to remember it.

  Her father started the pancake batter and then borrowed Livy’s cell phone, although its service was terrible in the valley—Livy usually walked to the top of their long driveway if she wanted to use it—and called the owner of the roof he was supposed to be working on in Hareford. Livy heard him explaining what was happening, apologizing for the delay in the job, and then what sounded like several rounds of mutual complaint over the way things were run in the world today. The police roadblocks were folded into an everyday rant about traffic.

  Livy’s mother, Mariel, came into the kitchen in an old bathrobe toward the end of the conversation and stood in her husband’s periphery with a questioning look until he got off the phone. She was a charge nurse on the evening shift at the hospital in Maronne, and she rarely found her husband in the house when she woke up in the morning. During the week, their days cross-stitched past each other, and Livy was not used to being in the house with both of them at once except on the weekends. She found herself absent-mindedly digging the cloth napkins out of a drawer to use with breakfast, as if it were a holiday.

  Her father explained what had happened while he made a second pot of coffee. Her mother listened and frowned. At first she looked irritated, but as he spoke her face softened into blankness. When he was done she sat for a minute, her hand on her forehead. “Oh, Greg,” she said.

  Livy looked impatiently at them. Why were they both being so quiet, so slow-moving about this? She wanted energetic theorizing to match the weirdness of the occasion. But for a few seconds the Markos merely looked at each other, wide-eyed.

  “So he’s hiding here?” Livy said, prodding.

  “I doubt it,” her mother said. “Why would anybody come here? I mean, from halfway around the world?”

  “It didn’t sound like they really knew what was going on,” her father said, turning his back now to watch the bubbles rising in the pancakes. “The FBI’s calling the shots.”

  “And the Maronne PD is screwing it up,” her mother said with sudden conviction. She bundled her robe up with one hand and pushed her hair out of her face with the other. “They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Remember when they were after that kid for armed robbery in Maronne? He hid in his mother’s basement in the west end for three weeks. It took them three weeks to get around to checking his mother’s basement.”

  Livy was running a spoon back and forth across the surface of the table, a habit that she couldn’t break and that annoyed her mother. “How long do you think we’re going to be stuck in here?” she said.

  “Who knows,” her mother said. “I guess they can do whatever they want, can’t they?”

  Her father cleared his throat. “Let’s not get panicky.”

  “I’m not getting panicky,” her mother said. “I just hope they’re out of the way before I have to go to work.”

  “What do you think he did?” Livy said. “It must be something big.”

  “Who knows,” her father said.

  “But what do you think?”

  “I don�
�t know, Livy.”

  His tone stopped her. She busied herself setting the table.

  Livy went up the hill to find Nelson, wanting to compare notes. There were a few people sitting outside the corner store, including Jocelyn, the owner, who was smoking a cigarette at the bottom of the steps and waving her arms. These emphatic gestures looked strange on her; she was normally so quiet, so slump-shouldered, a thin woman hunched in on herself. Livy went by on the other side of the road, out of earshot.

  Nelson’s house, sitting up on the hillside, always seemed to be further along in the day than her own. She was out of breath when she reached the front door: the yard was an absurd, ankle-twisting slope. Nelson opened the door with a half bottle of orange soda in one hand and a cell phone in the other. “The battery’s dying,” he said. “But my dad wants me to keep it on in case the FBI wants to call and apologize for the inconvenience.”

  His parents and sister were sitting at the kitchen table. “It’s in case your lola calls,” Nelson’s father said, using the Tagalog word for grandmother. Nelson’s Filipino grandparents lived in the suburbs on the New Jersey side of Philadelphia. “Don’t be a smartass. I left her a message, she’s going to be worried.”

  “Do you know about the roads?” Nelson’s mother said to Livy.

  “Yeah. They said he’s from the Balkans.” The geographical phrase was already starting to warp on her tongue, becoming more than it was. It didn’t mean anything to her, really.

  “He is? I didn’t hear that,” Mrs. Tela said.

  “I doubt that,” said Mr. Tela. “When the cops are here it’s always about the goddamn drug addicts down at the store, that kid Jeremiah and his drug dealer friends. You see them out on the bridge, don’t you? I drive through at ten, eleven o’clock at night and they’re standing in the middle of the road like I have no right to be there.” He expanded and slackened as he said this, like an uncoiling spring. “Ought to throw them out. And Jocelyn too. Get that whole family out of here.”

  Livy could think of nothing to say to that, since he seemed to be indulging in a private fantasy in which he lived in a neighborhood where difficult people could be forced to leave—someplace like where her friend Elena lived, where clotheslines were prohibited and flags had to be approved by a board and you could be fined for painting your garage a different color from your house. She glanced at Nelson, who had adopted the blank expression he favored with his parents.

  Mrs. Tela tapped her fingers on the table. Her eyes were red. She was a nervous woman. “How long is it going to be, anyway?” she said. She didn’t seem to expect an answer. Livy shrugged and made an apologetic face. Nelson moved off down the hall toward his bedroom and Livy turned to follow him, relieved.

  “Keep the door open,” Mrs. Tela called after them. Neither Livy nor Nelson reacted to this in any visible way. Livy hated Mrs. Tela. She particularly hated her every time she reiterated this unnecessary rule, which Livy believed was meant to humiliate her, to make it hard for her to look Nelson in the eye.

  Livy had always thought of herself as a plain girl, at best inoffensive to look at. In elementary school she’d been mocked for her clothes, mostly secondhand items she chose with a sensibility shaped by Anne of Green Gables as much as anything else—pinafores and homemade sweaters, interspersed with corduroy pants on gym days. The meanest kids were a group of boys who made it clear to her that while her clothes were bad, her face was the real problem: her teeth stuck out, and her cheeks were too round, and her nose was shaped wrong. She also said stupid things, and once made the serious mistake of trying to argue value with a boy who was chanting “Goodwill shoes! Goodwill shoes! Goodwill shoes!” at her with such excitement that he was spraying her with spit. She knew she no longer looked as awkward as she had when she was nine and ten, but she was still mostly afraid of boys, afraid of the careless and vicious way they could judge the girls around them. For most of the time they had been friends she was relieved to find that Nelson didn’t seem to think of her as a girl at all, but as a person who liked and disliked the same things he did, and with the same energy.

  Nelson’s room was small and bright, facing down the hill. The walls were white. His sister had painted her room a shade of blue-green called “Twilight Meadow” the summer before, but Nelson’s room had stayed white. He didn’t seem to understand why anyone would go to any effort to change the appearance of a wall.

  When the door was shut Livy said, “Jesus Christ.” Someone was mowing a lawn, somewhere up the hill.

  “He’s been talking about drugs this whole time,” Nelson said. “It’s like he had a speech prepared.” Livy saw his eyes go reflexively toward the desk drawer where he kept his pot in a little tin box.

  “Your computer looks so dead,” Livy said. She wasn’t used to seeing the monitor dark, hulking in the corner by the window. He made music on it, inscrutable songs that were full of crinkly explosions and bookended by minutes and minutes of peppy dance beats. Livy had listened to several songs with him recently and was reminded of electric fencing. They had been stoned at the time, so she told him this, which seemed to satisfy him. She was the only one who had heard the songs. He was a private person. “This is crazy,” she added. She was aware that she was enjoying it a little, the way she enjoyed thunderstorms.

  “My mom thought it was because of Maurice and Bev,” Nelson said. “They had another fight last night.” Maurice Carden and his girlfriend lived in one of the twin houses by the bridge. Sometimes, to punctuate their fights, Maurice would appear in the yard and fire a small-bore rifle into the air. Then he would stand there for a while, as if waiting for the bullet to come down.

  Livy did a lap of the room, looking things over. The Tela house made her restless. “Do you want to go see the roadblock?” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Okay, let me get my shoes.”

  They slipped out the front door without being questioned. It was a steep walk up to the roadblock, and by the time it was in view they were both sweating and slightly out of breath. They saw the police truck from a distance and walked toward it as confidently as they could, heads up, hands out of their pockets. The policeman stayed in the truck. When they got close they saw that he was leaning back in his seat, one arm trailing out the window. He watched them with some interest. They stopped a few feet from the yellow sawhorse and looked at him for a long moment.

  “Get back, kids,” he said.

  Livy took a half step back and ran into Nelson; she hadn’t realized he’d come up so close. “Can we get by?” she said. She smiled. In the last few years she had developed, somewhat against her own will, a lilting way of asking questions that stripped them of aggression. Nelson hovered behind her, suddenly tense and quiet, and Livy could see that the cop’s eyes drifted toward him even as he spoke to her.

  “No,” the officer said.

  “Why not?” She smiled again.

  The cop sat up, stretched his arms, and sighed. “You want to obstruct an investigation?” he said. “You want to get arrested? Get back.”

  On the other side of the sawhorse, a chain was stretched across the road. Yellow plastic ribbons hung from it, perfectly still. The policeman smiled. He waggled his fingers at them.

  They got back. They stopped to think in the shade of the store at the bottom of the hill. Livy had an unsettled feeling in her stomach, as if she had briefly been hung upside down.

  “That guy was a dick,” Nelson said. “Let’s go to the other one. The one at Somersburg Road. We could walk up the creek.” He straightened up as he said this, animated by a rush of righteousness. Livy was beginning to feel nervous. “Maybe we should give it a rest,” she said.

  Nelson frowned at his shoes, and then frowned at the horizon. “That guy was a dick,” he said again.

  “Yeah.” She watched him. He was squinting through his glasses. If she were alone, she would have dropped the project then, but she pushed things further when he was around, not wanting to disabuse him of his apparent belief t
hat she was daring and adventurous. She doubted that anyone else thought this about her; their school was strictly divided between good kids and bad kids. So she tended to go with him on his mild delinquencies—cutting class, walking into Maronne late at night to smoke a spliff by the sodium-lit scrapyard. This was a particular favorite, the two of them sitting quietly against the fence by the piles of wrecked cars and gutted appliances. It was dramatic and filthy and quiet. Livy was prone to apocalyptic, self-aggrandizing thoughts there, and she suspected that Nelson was too. A security guard had shined a flashlight in their faces once but Livy had apologized so elaborately that he waved them away. Adults reacted differently to boys and girls at that age, and they seemed to go easier on Nelson when she was with him.

  “Let me get an iced tea first,” she said.

  They stopped in the store and bought one from Jocelyn, who was staring moodily into a freezer full of melted Popsicles, and then they walked north, slapping mosquitoes. Before the road left the cover of the trees they slipped down the bank to the stream. It was shallow there, with sandbars along the far side that they could walk on easily and quietly. A margin of trees protected them from the lower pasture of an underused dairy farm that belonged to a lean artistic couple named Insky. The farmhouse stood at the top of the hill, gamely ignoring a highway that roared behind it. Livy had lived her whole life at the bottom of the valley, and the high yellow sweep of cleared land had always been her horizon. When she was about nine Livy started a game of crossing the creek in secret and running through the Inskys’ lower pastures, pulling watercress out of their spring, walking bent-legged on the cow paths through their waste of brambles, applying names to things and annexing territories to herself. The Inskys never seemed to notice. They were friends of her parents’, and they were unusual in that group for having no children. This made them seem somehow more grown-up than the other grown-ups. They sometimes invited Livy’s parents over for dinner, and Livy was not asked to come along. Her parents would pick their way across the creek in the early evening, one of them holding a wine bottle by the neck, and come home after ten in an exuberant, chatty mood. It wasn’t that the Inskys disliked children, exactly; they were never hostile to those in their path. They just projected a lack of interest in accommodating them. This added to the thrill Livy found in roaming through the fringes of their farm during the period of her childhood when she spent most of her time outdoors. She always thought she might catch them in some shocking act, the contours of which were vague in her mind.