Relief Map (25 page)

At some point Jocelyn said, “They have to let me make a phone call.”

Lena said, “Stop.”

“They have to.”

“They don't have to do shit, Jocelyn.”

There was a pause. Livy turned her head slightly to watch them. She was sitting on the bench with her feet drawn up, her back to the corner.

“I didn't do anything,” Jocelyn said, “and they can't just leave me here all day. They need to come in here and tell me what they think I did.”

“You didn't do anything?” Lena sat up suddenly, straightened her back. “You didn't
do
anything?”

“You want to blame somebody? Look at her.” Jocelyn pointed at Livy. “Her and your son, hiding with that guy in your house.”

“Stop it,” Lena said. “No more talking.”

“Who
did
this?” Jocelyn said.

“Your son is safe and I don't know where mine is now,” Lena said, “so shut your mouth.”

Both women subsided. Livy closed her eyes again. She fell into a light, nauseous sleep on the narrow bench. When she opened her eyes again her parents were standing in the narrow hallway outside the holding cell and a policeman was rolling back the door. She started to cry. Her mother crossed the room and embraced her. The fabric of her dress was rough against Livy's face, seeded with small buttons. Livy held on.

“Why would you get mixed up in something like that?” her mother said. “You see a crowd like that, you run the other way, you understand?”

“I'm sorry,” Livy said. She allowed herself to be shaken and rocked. No one knew about the pharmacy, still. She wondered how long it could be.

At the desk they were given release papers; Livy gathered them in numb fingers, held them against her chest. The policeman at the desk was carefully uninterested in them. Each of her parents kept a hand on her as they walked out. It was still daylight outside, a thick, late, honeyed light, and the parking lot was fringed with reporters. A row of irritated policemen patrolled the perimeter, and the camera crews stood just out of their reach, all along the sidewalks and into the street, on the patchy soccer field in the little park across the way, on the front steps of the old YWCA building on the corner. Her parents pulled her toward the car. Neither of them
looked her in the face, even while they held on to her. Her mother had been crying.

“Is Ron okay?” Livy said. She knew he was not.

“I don't know,” her father said.

She started to cry. She sat in the back seat. She put her seat belt on.

“Where's Nelson?” she said. No one answered her.

They eased out of the parking lot. The police made way. The camera crews pressed closer, then retreated. There was the Laundromat, the red-doored church, the tax preparer, the two Mexican groceries, the Quick Drug. And then they were back on Prospect, approaching the barricade.

“They opened it,” Livy said.

The sawhorses and chains were gone, but now there was yellow crime scene tape zigzagging through the deep shadows. A half-dozen squad cars, some of them with their lights silently flashing, were lined up just around the turn. The police stood in small groups, talking, or wandered back and forth among the vehicles. Two uniformed men were leaning against an FBI truck, paper from deli sandwiches spread out on the hood.

“Shit,” her father said. “We should have gone back the way we came.”

“It's open,” Livy said again. “It's over?”

A policeman knocked on her father's window. “Detour. Where are you trying to go?”

“Over the bridge. We live here.”

Livy was craning her neck from the back seat, trying to see what the policemen were clustered over in the middle of the road. She thought she could see a bloodstain on the pavement. She closed her eyes, feeling sick again.

“You're going to want to go around by White Horse Road,” said the officer.

They drove down White Horse Road and were waved through. As they passed the store they saw the Telas on the steps, Mr. and Mrs. Tela and Janine sitting there with the sun in their eyes. There was no one else in sight: no Nelson, no Noreen sitting on the shaded porch of the house next door, no children with dripping Popsicles along the railing. They looked like the only people left in the world. Livy's father slowed down and Mrs. Tela stood.

“Did you see Nelson?” she called. “Livy? Is that you?” She crossed the intersection and, incredibly, put the palms of her hands flat onto Livy's window. Livy was so disoriented by this weird assault on her parents' car that it took her a moment to roll down the window.

“He's at the station and they won't let me talk to him,” Mrs. Tela said.

“I haven't seen him,” Livy said. She was relieved at least to know where he was.

Janine padded up behind her mother on bare feet. “They found the guy's hiding spot up in the woods,” she said. “They think he left a couple of days ago. They're leaving.”

“They screwed this up so bad,” Mrs. Tela said.

Livy blinked very slowly. She kept her face still. In the woods? Her mother leaned toward the driver's-side window, her forehead wrinkling. “You're shitting me,” she said. “He
was
here? Where?”

Janine nodded. “In a deer blind up at the top of the hill, behind Paula's house.”

No one was looking at Livy. She tried to control her face. He must have been hiding in the deer blind before he came to her yard that night. Had he left anything behind in the garage, any sign he'd been there? She would go and check when she got home, if her parents ever let her leave her bedroom.

“Unbelievable,” her mother said. “I never really thought it could be true.”

“They're going to get sued so bad,” Janine said, hugging herself. “The FBI, the CIA, the Maronne PD, whoever the fuck.” Mrs. Tela did not react to this word, and neither did the Markos. “They let Ron's wife out an hour ago and she just walked home. She was wandering around here, back and forth over the bridge. They're gonna get sued for
ev-ry-thing
. Lost wages and pain and
suffering for everybody.” She swung her arm out. “Pain and suffering times a hundred and fifty people.”

Livy's mother followed the arc of her arm. “Where is everybody? It's so quiet.”

“In jail,” Mrs. Tela said. “Or staying inside.”

First, Livy slept. She slept for seventeen hours. The next morning her alarm shrieked and she jerked awake, sweaty, panicking, her lungs not drawing right, and shut it off. It was her work alarm. The electricity was back on. She lay in her too-small bed, trying to catch her breath. Did she have a job now? She could not think. They would find out about the pharmacy soon and come for her, she was sure.

She woke again hours later, the day already peaked and receding. Her mother was standing in the doorway.

“You don't leave the house until we say you can,” she said. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Livy said. Her mouth was dry. She wanted to ask her mother for water but she saw that she should not.

The phone rang all day. Livy's mother called her own mother and in-laws and boss, explained what had happened, asserted over and over that they were fine, and then unplugged the phone.

Livy lay in bed and wondered if Nelson was still in jail, if he was all right, if they were questioning him or charging him. She felt sure he would say nothing that wasn't true, no matter how hard they pushed, but she didn't know if that would be enough. Later, when the house felt empty, she crept downstairs and turned on the TV. The news anchor said: “A search for a wanted person goes tragically wrong. Anger in this small town over the death of a local man.” Livy watched with the volume turned down low, sitting on the floor an arm's length from the screen, fighting back the vertigo of seeing it on television. All these people watching, all of a sudden—newscasters and police and an old woman from Maronne who was stopped on the sidewalk outside the SuperFresh and asked for her opinion.

Livy felt like a ghost in the old house, drifting, disordering objects quietly in the kitchen. She kept returning to the TV. There were news vans right there, in Lomath; reporters from the Philadelphia stations stood in front of the Church of God in Christ, in front of the range building in the Sportsmen's Club complex, in front of the store. Livy saw the same slow panning shot of the
intersection four times, the dense green of the hill, the dust and broken-glass glitter of the road. Jocelyn was not at work, the OPEN flag was down. The intersection was empty. There were a few front-porch interviews, all among the neighbors on the other side of the bridge, pallid people Livy didn't know well. A reporter Livy remembered from several natural disasters called the place a “ghost town.” The camera followed Paula Carden getting out of her blue Taurus, turning her body away from the cameras, walking deliberately up her own front steps like she was deaf.

Around five the natural disaster woman said, “A possible kidnapping,” and Livy knew the police were coming back for her. Her mind was like a brick. Less than an hour later she heard them coming up the walk, and she got up off the living room floor and slipped her feet into her shoes and waited. Her mother came up the stairs.

“They're back?” she said.

“I'm sorry,” Livy said. Knuckles sounded on the tin frame of the screen door.

This was the beginning of the worst time, when everything receded from Livy. The police kept her up all night in an interrogation room, telling her lies and making her
go through the story of the pharmacy again and again, until she was confusing her own name with Nelson's and Mark's. No one mentioned Revaz. On the second day a young attorney named Beth arrived from Legal Aid, and the interrogations stopped. Livy's parents had sent her. On the third day there was a hearing and charges were announced. They were what Beth had told Livy to expect: one count of conspiracy to commit armed robbery, one count of conspiracy kidnapping, one count of accessory kidnapping after the fact, and one count of evading a roadblock. Livy had to sign papers with cuffed hands and stand with the arresting officer while Beth talked to the district attorney and conferred briefly with the judge. It was over in less than ten minutes. Livy was taken back to the police station, where her clothes were returned to her and she was released into the custody of her parents.

“Livy?” they said. “Why didn't you tell anybody about that boy?”

For a day or so Livy didn't talk; she could explain nothing, she understood nothing. She watched television and slept, and her parents circled around her, wide-eyed and anxious, occasionally angry; sometimes prodding at her silence, sometimes letting it be. She came downstairs when her parents had finished their meals and heated up the leftovers for herself in a pan. If her father found her doing this he would stand by the counter and wait
for her to turn and look at him, but she wouldn't. After a while he would say, “Fine.”

There had been a funeral for Ron Cash while Livy was in jail. There had been police in unmarked cars parked across the street from the funeral home, as if a riot might break out. All the folding chairs were filled and a line of overheated people in black had stretched out into the vestibule and down the front steps.