John Brandon - Citrus County

“How long does this session have to take?” Shelby asked him. “Is there a certain amount of time?”

Cochran tipped his head at her. He looked like a stately, full-blooded dog. He had a controlled afro and wore a light-colored suit.

“Not long,” he said.

Shelby’s father looked like he was falling asleep. She touched his shoulder and he yawned.

“I’m taking diving lessons,” he said. “The police have no budget for divers, so I’m going to search all the springs myself. Is that something I should tell you?”

“You said something there.” Cochran had to push back from the table to cross his legs. “You said you’d search all the springs. That means you don’t expect to find anything.”

“I don’t,” Shelby’s father said.

Shelby had hardly slept the night before. She’d stayed up watching comedians. One of the comedians would get her laughing and the next thing she knew her face would be slick with tears. Last night it had been a nasally guy who told jokes about the state of Texas. Shelby had felt light and giddy for a moment and then she was muffling her sobs so she wouldn’t wake her father. This was her therapy, she supposed, not anything Cochran Wells could tell her. He was explaining something about emotional perseverance to Shelby’s father. She interrupted him.

“I have a question,” she said. “What’s the difference between therapy and psychotherapy?”

“Psychotherapy is the Jewish word for therapy.” Cochran allowed himself to laugh.

“Do you dislike Jews?” Shelby asked.

“I don’t like or dislike anyone. I apply my empathy one case at a time.” Cochran paused. “I evaluate circumstances, not individuals.”

“Lucky us,” Shelby said. “We got plenty of circumstances.”

“I finally had a dream,” Shelby’s father put in.

Cochran bellied up to the table and uncapped his pen.

Shelby’s father’s dream took place in the woods, at night. He couldn’t see anything but he could smell the woods, could smell tree bark and old breath. He was lost. Sometimes he smelled car exhaust or meat grilling. It was almost dawn. Suddenly, all the scents were blown away and bright artificial light flooded down. Shelby’s father had wandered into a small, shipshape warehouse. It was full of damp socks. They were Kaley’s socks, hung to dry on clotheslines.

Shelby’s father returned to the mosquito control offices on a Monday. Shelby fixed him a lunch and saw him off, then she watched a documentary about fighter pilots. The narrator was English and favored English pilots. Shelby enjoyed knowing that her father wouldn’t bust in at any moment, vine wrapped around his ankle. She had the house truly to herself. The sun was up, finding its way through the blinds. First period would begin in seven minutes. Shelby drank some orange juice and found her school bag. She sat on the couch. She pictured her father at work, doing familiar things with his hands, driving familiar roads, filling out paperwork. It would be good for him. People would walk on eggshells around him for a couple weeks, as they continued to do around Shelby at school, but in time his work-life would be monotonous and consuming and his sleep patterns would return to normal and his crazed gloom would break like a fever, would turn to a reasonable sadness. That’s what happened. Eventually your gloom listened to reason.

The next show was a history of the World Cup. They had grainy footage of Pele and they kept replaying one of his moves. First period was starting. Shelby let her school bag slide to the floor and stretched out on the couch. She wasn’t prepared to gaze at chalkboards and projector screens, to hurry from place to place so she wouldn’t be late. She especially wasn’t prepared to explain to earnest-eyed teachers why she wouldn’t be participating in their spring clubs. She’d been all set to go around with Interact, painting houses for poor people. She’d been set to join and possibly captain the debate team. The lady who ran the French group had made her silky overtures. These were possibly the three things Shelby felt least in the world like doing: painting, debating, pronouncing.

Shelby watched the soccer players. They had wonderful hair. She muted the commercials and she could hear the faint shouts of the kids who had PE first period. It was an enchanting, crushing sound. Maradona’s hand-of-God goal. Maradona was very short. Shelby knew she would skip the whole day. She would skip and tomorrow none of her teachers would say a word about it.

She went to the pantry and found nothing — healthy cereal, tuna. She knew she didn’t want to eat anything out of the fridge but she couldn’t stop herself from opening it. Shelby thought of her father again. She could not keep up this petty grudge — leaving the Cracker Barrel food in the fridge as it molded. She set the garbage can near and began dumping the foam boxes into it. She tied the bag up, put in a new one and continued, a sharp stink escaping each box as she transferred it. She fetched disinfectant and scrubbed the shelves of the fridge. She saw, sitting on the floor of the pantry, the bag of religious teen paraphernalia that girl had come to the door with, and she dropped that in the trash as well. She took the garbage bags outside, then lit a candle in the kitchen.

She went into her sister’s room, plucked a coloring book off the shelf, sat down and flipped the pages. She imagined Kaley at the kitchen table. Kaley never paid attention to the lines. Or sometimes she colored only one object, a hat or something, and deemed the page finished. One coloring book would last her months; she’d keep going over certain pictures, making alterations. She was really gone. Shelby’s sister’s absence was a physical law of the universe. Shelby tore each page out of the coloring book she was holding, building a stack of pictures, then she dropped the empty binding in Kaley’s Manny the Manatee wastebasket. She picked up each sheet, one at a time, and tore it into small, even shreds. After a few minutes, the wastebasket was full of busy confetti.

Shelby left Kaley’s room, went up the hall, and paused at the sliding-glass door. She leaned her front against it, tired of being afraid, and surveyed the backyard. She tried to feel lordly. It was time to get rid of the kiddie pool. That was a chore she could do. None of the memories of Kaley playing in it meant anything and it was time for the pool to go. All Shelby thought of was curling underneath it that day. She would wait for garbage day, after her father had left for work, and drag it out to the road.

A thin, black snake lounged on the patio, still, half in the sun. She wanted to see it move, wanted to see how it slithered. She pressed herself harder into the glass and watched. She closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them the snake would be sneaking off. Shelby didn’t want to cheat, didn’t want to slide the door open and poke the thing with a stick. She could hear a clock in another room ticking dutifully. Shelby watched the snake, the line the shade made inching over it, until it was fully in the sun.

The phone rang. Shelby went to the kitchen and plucked the receiver off the wall. It was the FBI agent, the one with the pixie-cut.

“Why aren’t you in school?” she asked Shelby.

“I come home for lunch.”

Shelby went to the living room and sat. She was in the same spot as when the agents interviewed her. “Your investigation hit a dead end?” Shelby said.

“I talked to your dad. We shook down all the sex offenders in the region.”

“How many are there?”

“Sex offenders? About eighty in Citrus County.”

Shelby didn’t know if the number sounded high or low.

“They split us up,” the agent said. “My partner and I.”