Relief Map (23 page)

Jocelyn saw her too. “Your parents are looking for you,” she said.

“I know,” Livy said. She backed away.

“My parents are sleeping,” Nelson said in Ron's direction.

The small living room was suddenly full. Jocelyn walked into the kitchen and Livy heard the pantry door open and shut. Ron and a couple of men from the sprawling
Christmas household on White Horse Road went single file down the narrow hallway, toward the back of the house. They all seemed too big for the place. Ron stopped at the end of the hall and knocked on the door of the master bedroom with the back of his hand.

“Tom,” he called. “Tom, Sarah. Sorry to disturb you.”

“Your parents are going to know I'm here,” Livy whispered. Nelson looked alarmed. The bedroom door opened and they heard a suggestion of Mrs. Tela's voice.

“Let's wait in the garage,” Nelson said.

They found Lena Spellar out there. She was standing under the high, shallow arch of the automatic garage door, drawing from an electronic cigarette, her free arm braced across her stomach. She smiled. There was a diffuse kind of regret in the smile, something less personal than an apology.

“Hi, kids,” she said.

“You're here with them?” Livy said.

Lena shrugged. “I haven't been sleeping well.”

Livy looked down at the ransacked blizzard box. “Where's Dominic?” she said. She had to clear her throat.

“At home.”

Livy glanced at Nelson. He was looking out at the yard, not reacting, and she was grateful again for his coolness.

“Has Ron already been to your place?” Livy said. She tried to make the question sound neutral, although she
was starting to think it didn't matter, that no one paid any attention to her anyway.

“Not yet,” Lena said. “We started at the top of the hill.”

Livy thought,
I want to go up on somebody's roof and just let the wind blow over me and not have to come down
. “I'm going to go home,” she said. She turned to Nelson. “Come with me.”

Nelson looked surprised. “Okay.”

Livy walked out onto the driveway and kept going, up the little curve to the road. She was barefoot. Nelson caught up with her by the mailbox.

“Are we going to Dominic's?” he said. “We should have put shoes on.” He looked down at his feet, hurrying along after her on the fine gravel.

“Yeah,” Livy said. “We can at least warn him.” So that he could do what? Turn Mark loose? As if the pharmaceutical assistant were a cornered mouse they could shoo out into the yard. Would the police recognize him, if they saw him? It was possible that he was already a famous victim on the other side of the roadblocks, his picture circulating on the news, all that. Although they had not heard anything on the radio. She fought the urge to break into a run. Anyone looking out an east-facing window, anywhere on Collier, could see her and Nelson hurrying toward the low road.

“
Where do you think he is now?” Nelson said.

“Mark?” she said.

“Your guy.”

“He's not mine. He's in Cooverton, I hope to God. How long does it take to bike twelve miles?”

“An hour, more if he's slow.”

There was plywood over the inside of Jocelyn's door. They hurried down the final slope to the little row of houses beside the Sportsmen's Club. Livy was holding Nelson's hand. They ran up the Spellar steps and banged on the door and then pushed through it without waiting. No one was in the living room.

“Dominic!” she yelled. “It's Livy!”

“What!” Dominic called from upstairs.

They ran up. Dominic opened his bedroom door. Mark was asleep on the sleeping bag, his head on the floor beside the pillow. Brian was sitting in a desk chair, spinning slowly in place.

“People are coming,” Livy said.

Nelson dropped to his knees beside Mark. “Hey, wake up,” he said.

“Who's coming?” said Dominic.

“Your mom and Ron Cash and a bunch of other people. They're searching all the houses.” She was out of breath. Nelson was shaking Mark gently, and it was making his head bobble back and forth.

“
Dom, is he still on pills?” Livy said.

“Muscle relaxers.”

“What are you
doing
to him?” she said.

“I keep
asking
him and he keeps saying yes!”

Mark's eyes were fluttering open. He fixed them on Nelson. His eyebrows went up very slowly.

“Hi, Mark,” Nelson said. “Are you okay?”

“Dom?” Mark said.

“I'm right here, man,” Dominic said. He took a glass pipe out of his top drawer.

“This is not a good time to smoke, Dom,” Livy said. He ignored her.

“Where can we hide him?” Nelson said.

“Basement?” Dominic said. He shrugged. “Backyard?”

“I think they're going to look in those places, Dom,” Nelson said.

“There's no super-secret place?” Livy said. “No place not obvious?”

Dominic shook his head. He was crumbling a bud between his fingers. “Not really.”

“You don't seem worried,” she said.

“Well, you do.” He looked at her. “Is it helping?”

Nelson had one arm around Mark's back and was trying to get him to sit up. Mark wore an expression of confusion that made Livy's chest ache like it was packed in ice. He seemed to be having trouble focusing his eyes,
holding his head up; he was like a baby. He cleared his throat. “This room,” he said.

“I'm so sorry this happened,” Livy said.

He squinted at her. There were bits of sleeping bag lint on his buzzed hair. “I don't know who you are,” he said.

“We can leave or we can stay here,” Dominic said. “It doesn't make a difference.”

Mark was rubbing his face with one hand, absentmindedly pushing down a morning hard-on with the other. Nelson pretended to study the leaves at the window.

“What do we say when they get here?” Livy said.

“I'll tell them what happened,” Dominic said. His lighter wasn't working. He frowned at it.

“What'll that be?” she said. “Tell me what you'll say.”

“It's okay, Livy,” Nelson said.

“I'm checking,” she said.

“I'll say we went to the pharmacy,” Dominic said. “And I took Mark.”

“And you were the one with the gun,” Livy said.

“Yeah, obviously,” Dominic said. “That's what happened.”

She hadn't known him well before the blockade. They said hello in school, she saw him sometimes when she was coming and going from work. She watched him take a long hit from the glass piece. She was angry at him for the way things had gone, this whole mess he
had made, his dickish bravado, his stupid gun. Sunk under the anger was a deep and terrible pity. “You're still seventeen, aren't you?” she said. “If the police find out, it won't be so bad, maybe.”

“I'm sixteen.”

“You are? We're the same age?” He was so tall. His hands were so big, the pipe and lighter lost in them.

He didn't look up. “Yeah.”

Mark was sitting up under his own power now, slumped over folded legs, looking perturbed. His lower lip stuck out. “I'm thirsty,” he said.

“I'll get water,” Nelson said. He left the room.

“You want some of this?” Dominic said. He held the piece out to Livy.

“No, thanks.” She went out and sat at the top of the carpeted stairs. Nelson came up, one hand on the banister, holding a big plastic cup of water with a football helmet on the side.

“This feels like hide-and-seek,” she said. “When you're really bad at it.” He laughed. “I'm serious,” she said. The staircase was dim and her own eyes felt enormously wide. “I was always terrible at it and I remember what it felt like. It felt like this.”

“It'll probably be twenty minutes before they get here,” Nelson said, putting his hand over hers. “Half an hour.” It was always hard to tell when he was afraid. His
face was more opaque than hers, less mobile, his eyes deep-set and dark behind his glasses.

Mark pushed open the door from Dominic's room suddenly and stopped in the doorway, backlit, in a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

“People are coming for me?” he said.

Nelson offered him the water. He drank half of it without stopping to breathe and then wiped his chin on his arm. “I should probably go home,” he said to Nelson, his eyebrows creeping up. “My sister is going to be
pissed
.”

Nelson tried an encouraging expression. “Okay,” he said.

“Let's wait downstairs,” Livy said. “I'm sick of sitting in the dark.”

They sat in the living room, all four of them, lined up on a green sofa in front of the dead television. The window behind the TV was curtained with white pointelle; a spider plant climbed a couple of bamboo sticks in a pot. Lena Spellar had nice things, Livy thought. She hadn't noticed it before. The room was all white and green.

Brian lit a cigarette, got up and retrieved a ceramic ashtray from the kitchen, and sat back down on the sofa. For a long time no one spoke.

“What's on TV at seven in the morning?” Livy said finally.

“Cartoons,” said Dominic.

“Oh, right,” Livy said. “Of course.” When she was a child she'd
woken at seven every morning, without the aid of an alarm clock, and watched cartoons in the shadowed living room with the volume turned so low she had to sit within arm's reach of the screen. She thought of little children doing that all over Harbor County that morning, at that very hour. The thought of their concentrating faces quieted her mind. She lived in an emergency that covered only a handful of addresses. She stroked the inside of Nelson's wrist with the tips of her fingers.

They heard voices outside, and then saw moving shadows on the curtains. The group of searchers didn't knock; Lena was with them, and she just pushed the front door open and stood aside. Ron was behind her, looking in all directions. Lena stared at the sofa.

“What are you all doing here?” she said.

There was a beat of perhaps two seconds after that, a suspended interval. Then Lena said, “Who are you?”

Mark didn't seem to realize she was talking to him. He looked at Livy and Nelson, then Dominic.

“Who's he?” Ron said, jutting through the doorway. Jocelyn crowded in behind them, along with Maurice Carden.

“Him? Is that him?” Jocelyn said. She pointed at Mark from the doorway, her eyes alight. “We found him?”

“He's too young,” Lena said.

“No he's
not, he looks like him,” Jocelyn said. Her face was strange, the eyes round, an expression of delight half forming, then fading, then forming again around her mouth. “His hair is all buzzed off, that's why he looks different from the picture.”

“No, we took him from the Quick Drug,” Dominic said.

“That's him,” Jocelyn said. “That's his face.”

“He shouldn't be here,” Ron said.

Lena said, “That's not him. Dom, where did he come from?”

“My room.”

“He shouldn't
be
here,” Jocelyn said.

“Who the hell are you?” Ron said, coming close. The four on the sofa all seemed to be frozen, staring up at him.

“Open your mouth,” Jocelyn said to Mark. “Say something. You speak English?”

“He speaks English, he's from Riverview!” Dominic said. He stood up. The ashtray fell off the arm of the sofa, a soft thump on the carpet.

“Why'd they say he was foreign, then?” Ron said. He looked pained. His teeth were gritted. “Why have they been
lying
to us?”

“No, no, no, no,” Livy said. She was half out of her seat.

“What's your
name, sweetheart?” said Lena.

“Mark,” said Mark.

Ron took hold of his arm and pulled him up off the sofa. “We're getting him out of here,” he said.

“Take him to the cops,” Jocelyn said.

“Riverview?” Lena said. Then: “He's just a kid.”

Ron pulled Mark out the door. Livy was buffeted by the sudden space on the sofa, like a plastic bag caught in the backdraft of a car. She got up too and followed them onto the porch. “It's not him!” she shouted, but Ron wasn't listening, pulling Mark ahead and into the street.

“Where's Ron taking him?” Lena said.

“To the cops,” Dominic said, his hands pressed to his head.

Livy ran after them. Jerry Olds was standing barefoot in his yard across the road, the cuffs of his pants rolled up, a pale shirt unbuttoned to his chest. The rest of Ron's search party, a few dozen people from the houses that had already been searched, were arrayed around the intersection, looking down toward them with interest. Ron and Mark pushed through the little crowd with Jocelyn right behind them.

“Ron, wait!” Dominic yelled. “Wait, wait, wait!” The people at the intersection seemed to sense that something exciting had happened, and they moved uncertainly toward the bridge. Clarence and Aurelia Green
stood on the front steps of the store. Livy saw them as she ran past, her feet raw against the ground, her breath suddenly burning in her throat.

“Livy, you have to go home,” Clarence called to her. “You're killing your mom and dad, they've been all over looking for you.”

Livy had lost sight of Mark. She tried to weave through the crowd, her hands balled up into fists. Nelson was a few paces behind, Dominic up ahead. She passed the straggle of houses on Prospect, rounded the curve in the road where the earth dropped off steeply to the water, and came out into the open. Ron was holding Mark by the elbow and Jocelyn was waving her arms beside them, her hair falling loose around her thin face. Dominic limped after them, trying to catch up: there was real pain in his face now, his foot must have been getting worse for days. Two policemen in powder-blue Maronne PD uniforms flanked the van on the other side of the barricade.