Relief Map (28 page)

The fog was astonishing, a solid object heaped up over the city's shoulders, rolling down with an illusion of slowness created by its immensity, little winds pulling threads from its surface as if it were made of cotton wool. Every afternoon it loomed histrionically over the parks of San Francisco and Revaz stared at it, and no one else seemed to notice it at all. Long ago, when he'd visited the mountains in the summers in Georgia, there had been morning mist over the trees; but it was still and
transparent, burning off at the first full light. This was an oceanic phenomenon. He sometimes bought an ice cream cone at a cart just off Dolores Park and watched it come in. The teenagers lounging on the grass shrugged into windbreakers as it descended.

Koba gave Revaz some advice before dropping him off in Oakland. “Get some Mexican friends,” he said. “They know where the work is. And tell people you're Russian. They won't know the difference.”

“Russians will know the difference,” Revaz said.

“That's true,” Koba said. He rubbed his chin for a minute, as if this were a weighty intellectual puzzle. “Okay, you tell the Russians you're Georgian. With them you can be honest, because you know they don't give a shit. But never”—here he turned and grinned, giving Revaz's arm a firm squeeze—“tell them you're Chechen.”

“I'm not Chechen, you asshole.”

“You are. You're a Chechen Georgian asshole. And here I leave you.”

He gestured out at the road. Revaz nodded, looking through the windshield, gathering himself for a minute. Then he said, “Thank you,” and climbed down, heaving the door shut behind him. Koba lit a cigarette and waved. That was the last time they saw each other.

Revaz slept in a gravel lot under a piece of plastic sheeting that night, and in the morning walked four
miles to a parking lot off the Berkeley Marina where day laborers gathered. No one seemed remotely curious about his nationality. He had picked up a few English words but was beginning to learn that for most business, gestures and circumstances did the work. He did not have to achieve invisibility here; it was freely conferred on him. For a few days in a row he was picked up by a passenger van and taken to a supermarket in Lake Merritt to unload trucks. He worked ostentatiously hard, loading his dolly higher than others at the expense of his back. He even found a plastic broom with a bent handle in a corner of the loading dock, and when they were finished unloading he would sweep up the scraps of wilting lettuce and corn silk and crushed flowers. In the second week, the driver of the van indicated that he could come directly to the store in the mornings, which Revaz took to mean that he had a job.

There were orange flowers everywhere, heaps of vines in the small, square front yards of the bungalows along Piedmont Avenue. Koba had not prepared him for the peculiar dry lushness of the East Bay, the purple blooms winding around massive cactuses, the persimmon trees glowing in the shadows behind fences. It was September, but the place completely lacked the urgency he had always felt in the autumn in Georgia, the sense that light and warmth were draining away and would
soon be gone. The warmth lingered. There was no great change afoot as the days turned toward October.

He chose a fake name. He kept his ID duct-taped to the back of a ceiling tile in his room, a place he paid for by the week, accepting reduced rent in exchange for clearing dead weeds out of the yard and hauling out the trash on Tuesdays and Fridays. His landlady was Georgian, the only one he had encountered so far in California. It would have been smarter to avoid her for this reason, he supposed; and it would have been smarter to destroy the ID. But it was not so easy to do these things. Sometimes he took the easy way and hoped for luck. Most of the time, really, if he was being very honest with himself.

Had he paid yet? The thought woke him sometimes at night. Sometimes, if he'd been drinking before going to bed, he made earnest attempts to answer the question. He had known the wrong people, certainly, and he had not asked many questions. There was a row of figures to line up, the left and the right. But when he was sober, he recognized the superstitious nature of these mathematics. There could be no settling up.

Once, while Revaz was unpacking crates of tomatillos in a stockroom at five thirty in the morning, the PA system unexpectedly switched on in the main body of the store. There was a startling crackle and then Otis
Redding, already well into the chorus, sang out “Sittin' On The Dock of the Bay” over the empty aisles, the PA turned up so high that it echoed out to the parking lot. Revaz was suddenly flushed, the hair standing up on the back of his neck. He went to the loading doors to cool down. An old girlfriend—years and years ago, when he was not yet thirty—had given him a cassette with that song and a few others on it and explained the thrust of the lyrics, teasing him for his ignorance of English. It was his favorite from the cassette. He could see her apartment; he could smell it, the mold and the fresh paint she was trying to cover it with, the floor cleaner she used, the tea boiling on the stove. There were tears in his eyes. One of the other men unloading the truck was singing along in a full-throated baritone, and he stopped in front of the lump of Revaz at the edge of the loading dock and shouted happily in his face, “California! California!” and Revaz nodded and smiled, because he supposed that did have something to do with it—brushing the tears away with fingers that smelled like oranges—it was his old girlfriend who was gone forever now but it was also California, it was coming to the place in the song even though he had not meant to, crossing over.

In October, Nelson was back in school. Livy had been expecting this since she got her plea. They'd given him the same deal. Dominic and Brian, because they had brought the gun, got worse: they would each spend nearly a year in juvenile detention. Livy had heard that Nelson couldn't get into Sacred Heart this year and his mother was sending him back to Maronne Consolidated. The news unsettled her for two days before she saw him.

She spotted him through the open gymnasium door as she was walking back to her locker after lunch. She stopped immediately. He was standing by the far wall, waiting for his turn to kick a ball. He was paying attention to the game; his head moved when the ball sailed up. There was something strangely suspended about sound in big wooden spaces like the gym, Livy thought. The shouts and collisions took forever to settle, to end.

She wanted to talk to him, but he looked fine, ordinary and at peace in a clump of other boys, and she wondered if he wasn't better off away from her, like his mother said. Hadn't they caused a lot of trouble for each other? He reached up and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and for a second she saw what she was—a visitor, observing and unobserved, about to break the peace.

She often thought now about the power everybody had to ruin everybody else. You could do it by accident,
just by showing up, or you could make the wrong decisions in such small pieces that by the time you realized what you were doing, it was too late. Knowing this should have made her timid and anxious but instead she could feel it making her big, because she knew now that the worst thing could happen and you would find yourself still alive afterward, your eyes still open. In a year and a half she would be eighteen and free, headed someplace new.

Nelson turned and saw her and she waved at him. He glanced over at the teacher and assistant coach: they were absorbed in conversation by the locker room doors. He left his place in line and walked over to her, rubbing the back of his neck, trying to look casual.

“You're back,” she said. She closed her fingers briefly around his wrist and then let go, too jittery to hold on. How bizarre that they hadn't seen each other since they were both lying in the road that day.

“It's nice to see you,” he said.

Her mouth was dry; she thought of touching his wrist again but only splayed her fingers briefly in the air at her side. “Do you think you can get out of here for a minute? So we can talk?” she said.

He looked back over his shoulder at the teacher again, and then stepped around the door and into the hallway. “Yeah, let's go,” he said.

They walked quickly. Her heartbeat sped up; someone might come around a corner at any moment and ask to see a pass. The doors at the end of the hall were propped open and sweet air flowed in. They stepped outside, onto the grass. The parking lots were quiet; the building hummed.

“Where do we go?” Livy said.

Nelson scanned the quiet scene, the road where security guards cruising in Jeeps might appear at any moment, the distant highway lifted on an embankment. “There,” he said, pointing into the trees.

The woods began behind the stadium. Livy and Nelson skirted the massive aluminum structure as fast as they could, hand in hand. It was mid-October but the trees were still in full leaf and the day was warm and bright; it was lovely and faintly wrong, as if they were receiving some beneficence that had been left there by accident. Once they were inside the margin of the trees Livy was overwhelmed by the most basic kind of relief: being out of sight at last.

“You think security comes in here?” she said. She grinned and hugged him.

“I missed you,” he said. He squeezed her. She had wondered if they would behave like friends when they saw each other again, but she was alight with adrenaline from escaping the school building and the decision
seemed to be making itself, yanking her along with it. She kissed him on the mouth too hard, felt his teeth, put her arms around him. She sat down abruptly on the ground and pulled him with her.

He pushed her skirt up a little. He was shy. She pressed her legs against him. She didn't often wear a skirt and she didn't know how to manage it, how to smooth it beneath her; it had bunched up in the back when she sat down, and she could feel the damp earth through her underwear. Their eyes tracked each other, too close to focus.

“I don't know when I'll see you again,” she said, and now she felt the heat of tears under her eyelids. She would be fitted soon with an ankle monitor and so would he. They would not be allowed to see each other for some time. There would be a long solitude. At the end of it they might be different people entirely. There was nothing to say about this, no way to reach forward into the unknowable future and make promises about what would happen there. Livy felt equal and opposite impulses—first to bolt, to flee the exposure she felt, and second to burrow into him.

“I'll send you letters,” he said. “From up the hill.”

They had left their bags behind and they would be in trouble when they got home—the attendance secretary would have called. But they weren't in trouble yet. No
one knew where they were. They hardly existed here; it was quiet, and though the shade was deep beneath the trees, the air was warm.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Soumeya Roberts at Writers House for taking a chance on me, for sticking it out through round after round, and for ordering pink champagne in French. Thanks to Masie Cochran at Tin House for making my dream come true, which is the only way to say it. Thanks to Nanci McCloskey and Meg Cassidy for your energy and creativity. Thanks to Diane Chonette for a perfect cover.

Thank you to Peter and Katie Knecht, who know that if there's a will, there's a way. Thanks to Rastus Knecht for being, as ever, cooler than me.

Thanks to my most rigorous, kind, and inventive readers, who are also brilliant writers: Bonnie Altucher, Tom Cook, Jenna Leigh Evans, Roberta Newman, and Helen Terndrup. Thanks to Hannah Elnan, who did me many favors and gave me many dry goods and preserves.

Thanks to the Center for Fiction, for your generosity and support. Thanks to New Directions, Barbara Epler, and Laurie Callahan, for rewarding my bad manners. Thanks to Dan Chaon, who took me seriously when there was no reason to do so, and to Sharon Law, a beautiful teacher who is deeply missed.

Thanks to Pauline Jennings, who was larger than life, and Ted Fairbanks, who held court for twenty years.

Thanks in advance to my large and tolerant family for not reading anything too literally.

Thanks to Mark, for coming along.

BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

1. Whom do you think of as the antagonist in this novel? Is it Dominic? Revaz? The townspeople? The police? Or someone/thing else entirely?

2. What sort of ending do you imagine for Revaz?

3. What were you expecting from Livy and Nelson's relationship? How do you think Knecht balances the intense friendship and the budding romance?

4. How do you think the relationship between Livy and her parents evolves throughout the book?

5. The cover design features illustrations of thistles that are both beautiful and dangerous. How is this idea reflected in the town's isolation and remote location?

6. Which story of a citizen of Lomath would you like to know more about? Why?

“
Relief Map
is a first-rate
literary thriller in the Hitchcock tradition, where a police blockade turns a small town into a pressure cooker, secrets unravel in the heat, and the real danger comes not from the criminals, but from the police and the not-so-innocent bystanders. A quietly chilling novel about the loss of innocence against the backdrop of the modern war on terrorism.”