Citrus County (7 page)

“The Boy Scouts are the best searchers,” Shelby’s dad said. “When a Boy Scout searches for something, he falls in love with it.”

“That sounds true,” Shelby said. Her dad’s statements had taken on a philosophical tang.

Shelby had her back to her father. She was picking chicken pieces out of some Cracker Barrel chicken and dumplings, filling a bowl. She would heavy her dad’s stomach and give him a shot of whisky.

“This old man from the nondenominational church.” Shelby’s dad paused. She turned and saw him blinking, something in his eye. He tried to fish it out with his pinkie.

“The old man?” Shelby said.

“He’s got this grabber thing and then he brakes the snakes’ necks with his bare hands. He collects them in a sack and takes them home and burns them to the heavens.”

“You’ve slept eleven hours in six days.”

“I don’t feel that tired.”

Shelby opened the fridge and shoved aside a mess of boxes, making room to put the dumplings back. She felt a diffuse pain in her midsection. Since her sister had disappeared, all physical pain was diffuse. She placed the bowl of chicken in front of her father. He ate three hunks, then coughed and set down his fork. Shelby went into the next room and put on quiet music. She closed all the blinds. When she returned to the kitchen, her dad had eaten no more of the chicken. He had a hunk on his fork and it was dripping gravy on the table.

“My sister’s putting up fifty grand,” he said. “A reward for information leading to recovery.”

“Her idea?”

“She called yesterday. She’d been in Scotland.”

Shelby nudged her dad’s hand toward his mouth and he ate the piece of chicken from his fork.

Shelby’s aunt, her dad’s sister, lived in Iceland. She had a website, popular in certain circles, on which she reviewed books and restaurants and music and entire cities from the perspective of a space alien. The site was called
whatwouldtheythink
. Aunt Dale. She’d been with the same guy for fifteen years but hadn’t married him. There was a picture of her in the hallway that led to Shelby’s room. Aunt Dale had splotchy freckles and tight braids that stuck out stiffly from her head. She’d been friendly whenever Shelby had spoken to her on the phone, but Shelby hadn’t been in the same room with her in years. Shelby had looked at the website before, and it had made her feel lonely. The goings-on of these other people on these other continents were exciting and withering. Shelby had harbored a secret wish, after her mother passed away, that her Aunt Dale would make an effort to be closer to Shelby and Kaley, but that hadn’t happened. Aunt Dale was excused from doing a lot of things other people were expected to do. She was an artist, Shelby supposed. Shelby had no idea if she herself was an artist, if she would ever be excused from things for a reason other than that she’d been struck with misfortune.

Shelby’s dad looked stymied. He was leaning forward against the table.

“That’s good enough,” she told him. She removed his chicken and threw it in the trash, bowl and all. She poured a big shot and rubbed her father’s shoulders. He took the whisky down in subdued sips, like it was hot tea, then slid the shot glass to the middle of the table. Shelby wanted to sing her father a lullaby. She wanted to make a soothing sound. She rubbed her father’s shoulders more softly, found herself humming. It
was
a pretty sound. And it was working; her father was falling off.

Shelby went across the house and pulled the mattress off her bed. She didn’t want to have to wake her father and make him stumble to his bedroom. If he took too many steps, he’d come to and head right out the front door. She stood the mattress on its side and tugged it down the hall. It got stuck turning the corner to the living room and Shelby had to bounce it free. When she reached the kitchen she leaned in the door frame and her father was not in his chair. She checked the bathroom, the utility room. She dashed to the front windows and threw aside a curtain. Her father was at the end of the walk. A couple of the reporters spoke and he spoke back. When he was almost past them, a lady reporter wearing a bright scarf, Sandra Denton, stepped from behind a van and stood in his path. The angle at which she held her head was meant to be conspiratorial. Sandra Denton fondled her earrings. She touched Shelby’s dad’s sleeve. He walked on, into the brush, and she had to watch him go.

Shelby let the curtain drop. She explored the house, looking for something to break. She was going to crumble if she didn’t attack; those were her choices. She stomped over the mattress, which was lying on the living room floor, then stopped short in front of the TV. It would make a resounding crunch, the TV against the wall, but she’d regret it. It was good to have in the nighttime. She made a pass through the bedrooms—nothing large enough, delicate enough, nothing calling out to be smashed. She had an urge to trash Kaley’s room, to toss the toys everywhere and fling the clothes out of the dresser and flip the little bed over. She couldn’t do that.

Shelby rushed back to the window. She brushed the hair from her eyes and went out the front door. Nobody noticed her until she was to the road, then in a blink everyone was staring. She felt like she was on stage, the audience starved. She stepped underneath Sandra Denton’s team’s camera, which was propped on a tripod, and hoisted it onto her shoulder. It had plenty of weight to it. The tripod didn’t fully detach, but hung ungainly, pressing on Shelby’s back. The faces surrounding her beamed. Shelby flexed her knees, flung the camera upward with all she had, and shuffled to the side. There was the crunch. The camera, though it remained in one piece, was smashed on the front end. It made garbled noises.

Shelby went back inside and the phone was ringing. Shelby listened to the ringing and then she listened to the machine pick up and then to the crisp, disgruntled voice of the pixie-cut FBI agent. The woman told Shelby she was sorry if she hadn’t been professional when she’d interviewed Shelby. She said she usually did not behave like that. Her partner maybe, but not her. They saw cases like Kaley’s all the time, and it was hell on the nerves. The agent told Shelby she was a civil servant. She had good days and bad. She coped, like everyone. It sounded to Shelby like the agent was calling from a cafeteria, lots of clinking in the background. She stopped talking just as the machine was about to cut her off.

Mr. Hibma sat through detention, looking over his basketball binders for the sixth or seventh time. That was the thing about detention—when you gave it to a student, you gave it to yourself too. The offender was someone other than Toby this time. Shelby, her second day back, had told her latest trivia partner that he was one of the planet’s useless people, that his brain ought to be donated for research. She had done this, it seemed, because the boy was being so polite to her. His parents had likely told him to be extra nice to Shelby Register, and this turned out to be bad advice. Though Mr. Hibma agreed with the assertion that this particular boy’s brain wasn’t doing him a lot of good, and though the boy hadn’t seemed too offended, Mr. Hibma couldn’t let Shelby get away with calling someone stupid in front of the class. And he thought she might appreciate being treated like a regular student, might appreciate not being tiptoed around, might like to receive a detention just like anybody else.

Mr. Hibma knew he ought to talk to Shelby about her sister. He was likely the teacher she thought the most of, an adult whom, if she didn’t respect, she at least didn’t hold in contempt. He knew it was his moral duty to lend her his ear, his shoulder to cry on, but Mr. Hibma could not do these sorts of things. He was deficient. It was one of the many reasons he was not a real teacher. He saw the others do it, saw them take kids under their wings, saw them prod kids into spilling their guts. Some teachers did it for the drama and some because they genuinely cared, but the point was they did it. To Mr. Hibma it was unseemly, insinuating yourself into another person’s personal life. That’s what guidance counselors and therapists were for. Even the few kids Mr. Hibma enjoyed a rapport with he thought of as work acquaintances. Shelby was one of his favorites, and if he wasn’t going to help her now then he never would. He could feel that he wouldn’t. It went against his every fiber.

He turned toward the chalkboard and began erasing the vocabulary words. In the interest of burning time, Mr. Hibma gave ten vocab words a week. He had each class’s top kiss-ass write the words and the definitions on the board while the rest of the kids copied them. This took up fifteen minutes on Mondays. On Wednesdays, he allowed fifteen minutes of study time. On Fridays, fifteen minutes for the quiz. Blight. Wizened. Ransack.

Shelby had drawn a circle on the back of her hand and was darkening it in with a marker.

“That sort of thing is beneath you,” Mr. Hibma told her.

Shelby stopped filling in the circle but did not look at him.

“I’ve got books you can read, some good Jewish authors. Bellow, maybe.”

Shelby seemed intimidated by the idea. She glanced, not alertly, at a Dufy print—a bunch of horses at a racetrack.

Mr. Hibma felt like having a strong drink. If he stayed at this job much longer, he’d become one of those teachers who kept a flask in his bottom drawer. He went to the bookshelf and gathered the Bellow novels and put them on Shelby’s desk.

“We never know what’s going to screw us up,” he said. “We think it has to be glaring tragedies, but that’s not always the case.” Mr. Hibma wasn’t sure where he was going with this. He was, to his own surprise, taking a stab at being profound and helpful.

“Sometimes the tragedies strengthen us in the end. They make us more ourselves, you know—concentrate us.”

“Guess I’m pretty concentrated,” Shelby said. “I’m like that frozen orange juice.”

“Most of your classmates will live their whole lives without anything really good or really bad happening to them. They’ll see some funny movies and wait in some lines and maybe get their phones cut off or develop diabetes.”

Shelby nodded. Mr. Hibma might have been frightening her.

“I went to one of the fanciest high schools in the country my junior year. That’s the root of most of my problems. That and receiving an inheritance.”

“Was it a whole school of gifted kids?” Shelby said.

“Gifted.” Mr. Hibma shuddered. “Gifted is for chimps. They’ll probably ask you to be in that program soon and I hope you’ll turn them down. It’s a mark of mediocrity, gifted. You’ll have a hard enough time without those weirdos.”

“Why’d you only go to that school for a year?” Shelby asked.

“Why I got kicked out isn’t the important part,” Mr. Hibma said. “For seven months I enjoyed an environment of reflection, courtesy, fertilization of any intellectual whim. We had fireplaces to read near. They played Handel during the passing period.”

Shelby handled the Bellow novels, reading the spines. The breeze blew something against the window.

“Sometimes good things mess a person up,” Mr. Hibma said. He wondered if anything that happened was really
good
. He still hadn’t decided, after all these years, what he thought of the fact that he’d been a stolen baby. It had to mean something. It had to have shaped Mr. Hibma. “I’m not making sense,” he told Shelby. “I’m lousy at this.”

“You’re doing fine,” she said. “It’s not you. I don’t
want
to be comforted. I’m not receptive to wisdom or perspective.”

“But I’m supposed to be able to break down your walls.”

“A fool’s errand,” Shelby said. “You break down my walls, you’re not going to find anything you want to find.”

Mr. Hibma was stumped. He wanted to let Shelby know that she was special, that she couldn’t let herself be lost to the world because the world needed her. His voice had gone dumb. He’d given Shelby detention in part to test himself, to see if he could get her to confide in him, and he’d failed. Failed to try, really. He stood at the front of the room, lining the erasers up tight and orderly in the tray. He was angry at the world, that it gave the worthwhile people such a hard time. It was difficult for him to even look at Shelby. He dismissed her with a nod, letting himself off the hook.

He sat for a time, part and parcel of the imperfect quiet of the world, and then, when he could, he began drawing up a class rules sheet. He wrote numbers, 1 to 10, and next to each scribbled
see surrounding classrooms.
He taped the sheet to the wall.

Earlier that day, just after school had let out, Mrs. Conner had confronted him in the hall and informed him that it was her duty, as wing chairperson, to enforce the guidelines the liberal arts department had agreed upon. It was mandatory that each teacher post class rules.

“But every teacher has the same ones,” Mr. Hibma had said. “And those rules are identical to the school rules.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Conner. “A unified front.”

“I hate unified fronts.”

Mr. Hibma had never been to Mrs. Conner’s home, but he could see it. He saw a screened porch atop a wooden deck. He saw a shed, trimmed hedges. He knew now that he would not kill the husband. He would learn the couple’s routine and go visit Mrs. Conner when her husband was off playing golf or shooting woodland creatures or whatever activity he used as an excuse to get the hell away from his wife. Mr. Hibma had already scratched knives or guns, and had considered and thought better of poison. Poisoners always got caught. Mr. Hibma watched the TV shows. Whenever someone bought poison it turned out they’d been videotaped or had left the receipt in their floorboard or the clerk or another customer remembered them. Then the cops went and looked at your computer or library records and saw that you’d researched some topic that was vaguely related to poison. Then everyone said they should’ve known because you were always a little strange; you’d seemed harmless, though. As careful as you were, there was always something when you used poison. No, what Mr. Hibma saw himself doing was parking in the lot of the nearest strip mall and, in the middle of the night, sneaking onto the Conner property and hiding himself away behind the shed or under the deck, waiting for the husband to leave in the morning, then knocking on the front door and allowing a confused Mrs. Conner to present herself, barging in and throwing her down and smothering her under all his weight with one of her own couch pillows. There would be no blood, no loud noises, no purchases Mr. Hibma would have to make. Most of all, Mrs. Conner would get no last words.