After the Woods by Kim Savage

increases the likelihood of accomplishing the goal. Your task is healing; your goal is to be well.” Mom swirls the straw-colored liquid. “Trying to make connections between yourself and Ana Alvarez is not healing, and it will not make you well.” The windowpane above the sink rattles in its casing.
    â€œI take it you’ll be drinking your dinner this evening?” I rise and stack her full plate on my empty one.
    Mom points with her glass. “Maybe everything’s not as complicated as you think it is.”
    â€œYou’re the one who taught me to think critically. That most stories are not black and white.”
    â€œOn the color spectrum, black and white represent the highest level of contrast to the human eye. Maybe viewing a situation in black and white is seeing critically,” she says, smiling as she turns it over in her mind, annoyingly mellow.
    â€œOkay, here’s black and white for you. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there are approximately 258,000 child abductions each year. Only 115 children are abducted by strangers. That’s four one-hundredths of one percent of total abductions, and fourteen one-thousandths of one percent of total children reported missing. The odds of Donald Jessup stumbling upon Liv, me, and Ana Alvarez in the woods by chance is infinitesimal. So what does that mean? It may mean nothing. You can look at it as a fluke, or you can consider the alternative. I’d think a MacArthur Genius would have no trouble seeing that.” I blow past her and dump the plates into the sink with a clatter. “Perhaps you can act like the mother and fill the dishwasher tonight.”
    Mom’s smile dissolves. “Donald Jessup is dead, Julia.” She sets her glass on the counter and reaches for her phone. “I need to speak with Dr. Ricker.”
    As she shuffles away, texting, I snatch the tinfoil wedge from the fish mug and tuck it into my jeans pocket. I throw my messenger bag over my shoulder, the hard spine of my notebook sticking out of the top at a jaunty angle, and head for the stairs.
    She stops texting and suddenly looks up. “Homework?”
    â€œTons,” I yell, charging up the stairs and slamming my bedroom door. I scoot down in my bed with the laptop against my bent knees and bring up the WFYT Web site. A new headline inside a banner blazes across the top: PAROLE BOARD CHIEF UNDER FIRE. I click it to see Paula, her dark hair brushed behind one ear, the other side in a vintage Hollywood wave. Square red fingernails pop from the cuffs of her cheetah trench coat and gleam on the microphone. Behind her are trees, stark in the camera’s blazing light.
    â€œOne year after the Shiverton Abduction, WFYT wants to know why parolee and convicted sex offender Donald Jessup was not properly monitored when he attempted to kidnap two teenage girls”—wave of one lacquered hand—“from this wooded enclave on the edge of the suburb of Shiverton, last fall.”
    THE SHIVERTON ABDUCTION: ONE YEAR LATER materializes in front of a graphic of silhouetted pine trees. Then the Fells entrance is gone, and it’s Paula, sitting in an office across a desk from a guy wearing a purple tie and a badge plate. He has a long, Roman face, sunken cheeks, and shadows under thick-lidded eyes. Across the bottom of the screen reads PAROLE BOARD CHIEF VALERIO PANTANO.
    Paula scissors her legs and leans forward.
    â€œDonald Jessup was on parole following his 2010 conviction of stalking a woman with intent to harm, before he brutally attacked two females in the Middlesex Fells Reservation in November 2013. Mr. Pantano, who is responsible for monitoring serial offenders on parole?” Paula asks.
    â€œThe governor is convening an outside committee to examine the monitoring of Mr. Jessup,” Pantano says.
    â€œWas it the psychiatrist who treated Donald Jessup following his conviction in 2010? Who