Relief Map (26 page)

Livy would have a court date in September. At best, she would know in six weeks if she was going to jail, or to a juvenile detention center, or if she would be spared both. In the meantime she wasn't allowed to leave the house or use the phone, and she didn't try.

She was allowed to watch TV, however. The day after she came home from jail she turned on one of the twenty-four-hour news networks and found Revaz staring at her. It was the photo the police had shown people in Lomath, the rumpled gray-haired man with his look of having slept on a bus. The channel had a staccato rhythm, the photo appearing after the break every forty-five minutes with a recap, so that detail accumulated in distinct sedimentary layers. At noon his Georgian nationality was confirmed; at two thirty the Georgian consulate held a press conference and emphasized that his parents had been immigrants from Chechnya. For a while a hurricane grew peacefully at sea, and the anchors'
minds were elsewhere. At five a Russian diplomat was shown speaking at some sort of dinner, the podium badly centered in the frame, the audio too low.

By six a statement had come out from the Georgians, and opposite Revaz's photo there was grainy footage of a smoking, sinking ferry in a gray river. The video had been distributed to the networks along with an official statement of the charges against him: material support in a bombing plot five years before that had killed nine people. He had fled the country just before his arraignment, which had been scheduled for the previous week. A harried Georgian diplomat described him as a mercenary for separatist-nationalist Chechen causes, a tabloid journalist who met the wrong kind of people in his line of work and was too stupid or broke to resist their offers, the kind of man who would kill nine people for a few thousand dollars. An American diplomat alluded to the possibility that the criminal network he was involved in had ties to larger groups, transnational groups, groups that were responsible for American deaths.

The ferry crossed a river in Russia. In the clip it listed on its side, attended by rescue boats, all of them dwarfed by a vast column of smoke. There was a digital animation also, with tiny peg-like human figures moving at a restrained pace away from a column of orange fire that reached up from the car hold through the middle deck of the ferry. It
was terrible to watch the white lines of the deck tilt and sink. Three of the nine people who died were children.

“What is wrong with people over there?” Livy's father said. He had come in as he did every day for the evening news and was drinking his after-work beer on the sofa.

Livy said nothing. The pictures of the burning ferry took her breath away, and she had to look down at her hands as the footage played. She had a maximum-gravity feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if she were draining out through her own bowels. They were showing school portraits of the dead children. She wondered if her father would think it was strange if she stood up now and left the room.

“I hope they got what they wanted out of this,” her father said, though Livy couldn't tell whether he meant the police or the people who had put the bomb on the ferry. “I hope they think it was worth it.”

There was security camera footage of Revaz, or someone who looked like him, shuffling through an airport line in Poland en route to the United States. A security envoy held a press conference confirming the charges, alluding only indirectly to roadblocks and the death of Ron Cash. Video of Shelly Cash outside the police station was shown again, her face all pulled out of shape from crying.

Livy was horrified, but had to appear to be interested only in the normal way, and she wasn't sure what that
was. As the news coverage rolled on and on she tried to take her cues from her father: blunted anger when the siege was discussed, an undertow of what-do-you-expect; at each sight of the burning ferry, a brief silence. There was a clip of the director of some national security suboffice mumbling into a microphone, bland and uninformative, pausing at one point to sweep a little wave of gray hair back off of his forehead. He said several times that information on the case was limited by an ongoing investigation, by the fact that other suspects were still at large in Chechnya and Russia, by security concerns.

After her parents had gone to bed she returned to the television. Russian diplomats gave interviews, some of them smooth and quiet, some thundering. They called Revaz a sociopath, a mobster, a drunk with unpayable debts. And then Revaz's sister appeared, a middle-aged woman with short blonde hair, a neat hard face, wide eyes.

Livy was grateful that she was alone when the sister appeared, because the resemblance to Revaz was so striking that she jumped. The woman was exasperated and looked like she hadn't slept in days. She was interviewed via satellite from her home in Paris, where she sat wearing a dark suit, leaning closer to the camera as the pitch of her voice rose.
Anna Deni Fournier
said the screen. “My brother has never been to Chechnya,” she said. “We
are Georgians with a Chechen name. Our parents were from Chechnya. They are dead. We are Georgians.”

It made Livy sweat to watch her. “This is corruption, you do not understand our politics, he is a journalist,” Anna said. “He was writing stories about corruption. They want him to be quiet so they make accusations. They want him to be dead so he will stop bothering.”

Livy imagined the nervous speechless man in the garage first as a murdering terrorist (craven, subtly manipulating her with his shows of helplessness, laughing at her when he was alone) and then as a persecuted journalist (panicked, grateful, his bewildered looks sincere, his caution hiding a deep gentleness). It was like switching out a white lightbulb for a red one and watching the room change.

She turned the TV off and wandered around the house, upstairs and down. She had a sudden keen desire to get high. She was frenzied and electrified by this contact with the world—the much, much wider world—but she could tell no one. She couldn't even speak to Nelson about it, because her only avenue of contact with him was the internet, which she knew was not safe. It made her feel dizzyingly alone. She rolled a joint from the stash in the music box and lay still. Once in a great while a car would pass on Prospect
Road and white headlights would sweep across the ceiling of her room.

Revaz slept under a picnic table for two nights outside Pittsburgh, waiting for Davit's cousin, making visits to a rest stop food court across the road twice a day to pick up leftovers abandoned on the tables. It was mostly fried chicken, great expanses of hard, brown material that suggested birds the size of cattle. He had to pause each time at the door before he went in, willing himself into a state of calm, knowing that only confidence could make him invisible. He was beginning to take a little pride in his ability to keep body and soul together. Wasn't that some kind of virtue? He liked to think it showed the same wholesome energy as any other living thing, a mouse, a fish. His clothes were filthy. His money was gone.

The cousin's blue tractor-trailer eased into the rest stop parking lot at eleven thirty on the morning of the third day, massive and gleaming, with airbrushed lightning bolts along the sides of the cab. Revaz watched from across the parking lot as the cousin stepped down from the cab and lit a cigarette. He was wearing ridiculous wraparound sunglasses. Tbilisi emanated from him like a smell. Revaz approached quickly, his head down.

“Revaz?”
the cousin said.

“Yes.”

“Koba.” He offered his hand. “You look like shit.”

Revaz felt a rush of emotion at the sound of his own language. Yes, he looked like shit. It sounded exactly right. “You have an extra cigarette?” he said.

“No such thing,” Koba said, but he handed him one.

In the cab, Koba listened to a radio show that he informed Revaz was about sports, and broke into angry exclamations in English about basketball. He was twenty-four years old and had lived in the United States since he was nineteen. He loved basketball. He was driving the truck to Arizona. He might get another load there and go on to California. “You should hope we go to California,” he said to Revaz, with something like a leer, not feeling the need to elaborate. An enameled cross and a foam-rubber basketball hung over the dashboard. He settled into a stream of commentary about the gray landscape, the occasional views of deep valleys, the broad rivers opening up and closing again one after another.

“The plane crashed near here,” Koba said at one point, and Revaz didn't know what plane he meant, but didn't ask. It occurred to him that Koba was lonely too, driving the truck for weeks at a time by himself. Revaz kept quiet and let the chatter wash over him. He was
falling asleep, the broad stuffed seat like a lap to lie in, the road humming beneath, the voice going on and on.

One night Livy woke at two and knew she wouldn't go back to sleep. Her mind was going back and forth on its single anxious track,
zzt-zzt
,
zzt-zzt
, like the ink carriage in an old printer. It was only five weeks until her court date. Lately she had been thinking about the surveillance video from the pharmacy: What did it look like? An image like an ultrasound, four stuttering figures in light and dark, Dominic's upraised arm with the gun, and herself: walking around the counter and standing beside Mark. She was the closest to him, the one at his elbow while he counted out the pills, her own arms folded. Could her face be read? Where was Nelson in the frame? After she had gone behind the counter she had lost track of the rest of them, somehow. The world had gotten very small. Did she look cruel, those crossed arms, the invasion of the space behind the counter while the boys stood apart? Mark was all right. The police had gathered him up after the tear-gassing, picked apart his story, sent him home. On television they said it was an ordeal for his family, and she thought about his family often now. A sister and a mother, baffled and afraid.
Sometimes she felt sure she was going to jail, and often she thought she deserved it.

Around the side of the house she could see the surfaceless dark of the clump of trees where she had seen her parents burning their crop. There had been no mention of it since she came home; they didn't seem to know she knew about it. She wanted to see the campfire up close. She crossed the yard and picked her way into the wash. She found the remains of the fire and rubbed the ash between her fingers: that sharp smell.

The water was loud and she didn't hear her mother coming at all. She saw the beam of the flashlight first, searching across the trees.

“Livy!” her mother called.

She crouched, shrank against a rock.

“Livy, come on,” her mother said. The flashlight switched off and she stood at the edge of the yard, motionless, looking over toward the driveway. Livy cursed under her breath. She couldn't watch her mother look in the wrong direction, straining to hear. She stood up. “I'm here,” she called.

The flashlight clicked back on. Livy shaded her eyes. “I'm coming out.” She pushed her way back out into the yard.

“I checked on you and you were gone,” her mother said.

“You check on me?”

“
Sometimes. Why were you there?” She pointed at the wash.

Livy wanted the two of them to be having a moment of understanding. She wanted to be able to reassure her mother, say:
I know you did something stupid but it's all right now
. They could trade indulgences, one fuckup for another. The plants for everything Livy had done. But there was no real comparison and it was too dark to read her mother's face anyway.

“No reason,” Livy said.