John Brandon - Citrus County

Every second Shelby had spent with Toby, every moment she’d spent thinking of him, counted against her. She felt pity for him, like she ought to be helping him right now. It was absurd, but she wanted to smell him. He was another person lost to Shelby. The past was against her and the future could see her coming, easy prey.

As for Kaley, she was frighteningly skinny, listless. She wasn’t cuddly anymore. Her memory was porous. She was picky. She didn’t jump into hugs, but braced for them. At bedtime, she put up no fight. After all that time with nothing but a cot, now she wanted nothing but her bed. The same bed she’d been snatched from. Shelby and her dad had never gotten rid of it. Shelby knew it would be a long time before Kaley was back to something like normal. It was hard enough to feel you had a place in the world without that place being jerked out from under you. They’d kept Kaley in the hospital for forty-eight hours. Incredibly, she didn’t appear to have been abused, not physically or sexually, a fact that confused everyone from cops to reporters to TV psychologists. It was news no one knew what to do with, but it was the best news Shelby had ever received, the only good news in the world. After Shelby heard this, she didn’t want to hear anything else.

A minor parade was held for Kaley in Crystal River, put on by the banks. Shelby did not attend, nor did her father or sister. The media had broken into two camps, one at the Register house and one outside the gates of Mr. Hibma’s villa complex. Their attention was steady, but not passionate. Shelby grew accustomed to the idea of the media’s presence, and once her father’s fence was completed, she often forgot they were out there at all. The police, because, Shelby figured, they’d had nothing to do with cracking the case, showed waning interest. Kaley had been in Citrus County the whole time, right under their noses. And there was no sign of the pixie-cut FBI agent. A pair of new agents, men, had shown up at the hospital and halfheartedly took some notes, but everyone seemed to realize that the whole affair was now in the hands of lawyers and doctors and social workers, not people with badges and guns.

Shelby’s father took Kaley for a walk toward the school, reclaiming the sunny outside world. Shelby was alone at the house. The media wasn’t even out front today. The fence had done the trick. Shelby was determined to have a reasonable little meal, but it wasn’t going to happen. She was cold. The phone kept ringing. That writer guy had called again, now that the book could have a happy ending, and again Shelby had put him off. She thought maybe she should write the book. Maybe she could get signed up for home-schooling and next year she could stay in her nightgown and write all day.

She decided she could eat some croutons, but then she just stared at the box. She felt trapped in the kitchen, trapped in the chilled, over-air-conditioned house, so she went out into the front yard. She opened the gate of the fence her father had built and stood in the middle of the road. The clouds were too close, the trees too green and intent, the dust from the road insidious, the air full of mildew, the calls from the crickets and frogs exuberant. Shelby stood amid all that, the sun baking the top of her head with what Shelby was expected to believe was disinterest, not intending harm or help, the sun, like it would do to anyone who happened to be standing where Shelby was standing.

Mr. Hibma sat through the middle school graduation ceremonies, up in the front corner of the gym where he could be the last one in and the first one out. There was no good reason to attend, but he found he wanted to punctuate the year and be done with it, to feel he had nothing to think of but the future. He sat through the speeches and then the interminable calling of names, catching a couple curious stares from people in the crowd. People knew he was taking in that boy who was caught up in all the nastiness at his uncle’s compound, but none of them knew Toby personally and few of them knew Mr. Hibma. In the gym, Mr. Hibma felt a bracing normalcy. The gym was saturated with parental pride and volleyball banners, and there wasn’t room for anything else.

Afterward, he sat in his car in the parking lot. This might be the last time he ever saw this school. He watched the families all find their cars, the lot overrun with little brothers and little sisters, like rats on a ship, dodging and darting and impossible to corral. In the end they would be corralled, though, every single one, and forced into a car, and the cars would all pull away. During each basketball practice and each game, Mr. Hibma understood, a small girl Mr. Hibma had never met and who meant nothing to him had been held captive in a bunker. There were millions of little girls in the world, and one of them, while each and every basket of the season was scored, had been held captive in a bunker. During Mr. Hibma’s lectures and all the trivia games and presentations. When Glen Staulb died. Through all that nonsense with Dale. While Mr. Hibma had sat quietly in his storage unit, the girl had sat in the bunker. There’d been earthquakes on many continents. Songs had been written, many of them designed to be sorrowful. Elections had been rigged. Inventions had been thought up, patents sought. Countless people had been born, countless had died. Mr. Hibma couldn’t tell if all the events of the past months seemed momentous or meaningless. He thought about Toby coming and trying to talk to him during lunch period, and Mr. Hibma did not feel bad. A couple short days and he would begin redeeming himself. There would always be a multitude of awful people, but Mr. Hibma would not be one of them. Now that it was all happening as it was happening, now that he had a part in this new beginning, he felt that the worse he’d been, the better he’d be.

Toby slipped his shoes on and left the county house one morning while everyone was in a meeting. It was only a couple days before he went with Mr. Hibma, but he needed a field trip, a break. He sneaked out the back door, hoping not to be seen out any of the windows. The staff at the county house had made a point of making Toby feel like a guest rather than a prisoner, of impressing upon him that this wasn’t a jail and he wasn’t in trouble. He walked out past the last of the identical buildings, past a stagnant pond, through a field of sandspurs that had once been used for soccer, and into woods he’d never been in before. There was no telling where these woods stopped. Maybe they spread all the way to the other coast, to the space center. Somewhere in these woods, far away, a larky picnic was transpiring. Somewhere in them, a dog was being put down. Somewhere, people met to worship their gods. Toby would get in trouble for this, for escaping. He’d be put under watch, some casual form of lockdown, but it was worth it to get out in the fresh air on his own. He’d been breathing county air for more days than he cared to count.

Toby poked around until he picked up a trail that unfurled along the edge of a pasture. He would walk this trail to the end and then turn around and walk back. That was all. He would happen upon no hindrance or encouragement. There were things he was free of — not just the county house, but things he was permanently free of — and he felt the freedom in a tangible way, in his guts. He was free of the bunker. He never again had to approach it through dwindling or gathering shadows, never had to smell it, never had to wonder what it meant that he had found it and no one else. It was everyone’s now. The bunker wasn’t Toby’s to lose. It belonged to the news shows. It was powerless.

He tugged a baggie of nuts out of his pocket. These woods were quieter than his old woods. Spindly steers looked at him dryly. Toby tightened his sneakers. He guessed that what he was feeling was hope. He had a different plight now. He had no plight at all. He wasn’t a bad luck case. He’d made a hell of a mess, but it looked more and more like the clean-up would be someone else’s business. He’d performed well at the meeting or hearing or whatever they called it. There’d been a social worker and a cop and a psychiatrist and a couple other people, and none of them liked each other. They all had different agendas, and this kept Toby from ever feeling pinned down. And Toby hadn’t even felt like he’d been lying. He’d felt like he was doing right by himself. He worried a little about what the cops might get out of Kaley, but Toby knew he could always muddy the waters. He could muddy the waters to the point where nobody wanted to dive in.