Free Relief Map by Rosalie Knecht Page B

around again and the same bits of information had been repeated, Livy couldn’t stand to sit there anymore. She excused herself and walked away up the hill.
    Nelson’s sister opened the door and squinted hard into the sunlight. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Nelson, Livy’s here.” She pulled the door open another foot and padded away into the dark.
    It was hot inside. The house was in the sun all the time; there were no shade trees on the harsh slope ofthe lawn. Livy tried to run her hands through the damp knots in her hair.
    Nelson was asleep in his room. It was hotter than the hallway, hotter than the living room. The window was open but no air moved through the screen. The bed was stripped except for a fitted sheet and he was asleep in his underwear, on his back, with his arms and legs thrown out. She stopped in the doorway and then crossed the room quickly and shook him.
    â€œWhat, what,” he said. He shaded his eyes with his hand.
    â€œYou should close the window.”
    â€œIt’ll—make it hotter . . .”
    â€œIt could not possibly get any hotter in here.”
    He sat up, rubbing his face. Her eyes dropped to his back and then she stepped away and pretended to look out the window. He really didn’t seem to notice when he was half-dressed around her. She had been carefully covering up, stripping to a bathing suit only when she was just about to get in the water, for years.
    â€œI was having fucked-up dreams,” he said.
    She glanced at him. His hair was damp at his temples and the wrinkles of the sheet were printed into the skin of his shoulders.
    â€œI was in all this mud.” He stood up and pulled on his shirt and then sat down and slowly worked his legsinto a pair of swim trunks. “People were chasing me.” He stood up and put his arms around her.
    She was startled. “Hey, what?” His face was hot against her ear.
    â€œWhat yourself,” he said. “I had a nightmare.” He squeezed her and let go. “Let’s go for a walk. I have to get out of this house.”
    She took a second to follow him, still feeling the hot pressure of his arm on hers. He went ahead of her into the yard, toward the woods. Downhill two children were playing in the drainage ditch at the side of the road—a pretty little brook, pebbled and bright, despite the corrugated pipes that swallowed it here and there. They were shy, curly-haired children whom Livy had often seen, and now as always they straightened up at the sight of teenagers and hid their sticks and bunches of weeds behind their backs. They were too young to know that their rituals were easy to guess, being common among children who live near water. Livy had played like that once, naming and building, day after day. She had tried, once or twice, to explain to Nelson how she had felt when she first started visiting the Inskys’ pastures at the other end of the valley. She was nine, alone, and had picked her way across the creek on a whim, committing herself to a long and arduous navigation of the apron of nettles and thistles that edged the bottom pasture. As soon as she had gottenthrough this marshy patch and into the broad lap of the farm, where she could walk without looking down at her feet, she had felt a stunning freedom. A clear spring ran before her, crowded with cattails; past an electric fence, a hill rose gently to the horizon, interrupted halfway up by a palisade of bedrock. On the close-cropped, grassy slope, three tall old pear trees leaned close together. The ground around their roots was littered with hard, speckled fruit. So: there was water and food, and cleared land bordered by a wilderness (the bedrock, covered with brambles and poison ivy), which meant that to a nine-year-old’s mind, conditioned by dollhouses and dioramas, this farm was a scale model of a whole country. It was a miniature new continent, and Livy was gloriously alone in it, with mud