Recently, she learned about Google Maps and has been looking up places, like where she lived with Brent or where she lives now, and it’s eerie to see the house there, as if she or Harvey might come out the door or peep from a window. She had looked up the name of that old man who keeps coming to the door: Frank Wishart. And now she types in his address—524 Ivy Trail—and studies the house, a neat little house like a storybook cottage with a blue front door. She zooms out and can see the golf course. Why would he ever want to come back to the house where she lives? Whitepages.com lists his family members: Lillian Wishart, Rebecca Wishart. She makes a note on the dashboard, where she has penned a lot of other information, like the phone number of Harvey’s school or how many calories are in Chicken McNuggets or when her next oil change is due. Maybe she should ride over to their house and ask to come in. Maybe she should ask do they want to swap houses like on that TV show?

One day when Shelley was sitting like this at the cemetery—still in her bathrobe and bedroom shoes—she parked under a shade tree and watched a funeral procession. It was peaceful, and lately, she needs peaceful. But more than that, she needs to know she still has her job, and so parked here at the courthouse is the right place to be, even if it is hot as hell and scared-looking people are loitering all over the place. And she needs more sleep, uninterrupted sleep. And she needs to know there is not a person coming into her house when she isn’t there or up to her car window. She locks the doors and opens the newspaper; it’s a month old, but she studies it closely while the people in the car next to her get out and go up those big steps. The man stops to light a cigarette, and the woman clutches her purse close to her body. They are both painfully thin and clearly not there for something happy.

Night terrors. That’s what they call it when children wake and cry and are too terrified to sleep. Shelley isn’t crying, but that’s how she feels all the same, maybe the fallout of being a mom with a kid who can’t sleep, who often wets the bed, daily claiming he’s seen a ghost, as if she didn’t already have enough to worry and be afraid about without him giving her more. She looks up night terrors, and it says they can go on until adolescence! Harvey is only six, and the thought of seven or more years of this sounds terrible, like some of those plagues in the Bible, seven years of snakes and locusts and boils, all kinds of bad shit to mess you up.