Page 39 of When the Night Comes Knocking

Jane looks around the rest of the office—no windows, four walls, fraying furniture. On the table against the far wall, Officer Sheila lies with her eyes closed, chest rising and falling gently like a macabre Sleeping Beauty. The utility belt is still strapped above her wound, and below, the right pant leg has been cut open entirely, revealing bloody bandages wrapped up the length of her muscular thigh.

Jane slides down against the back wall, sinking to the floor. She tries to listen for noises coming from the store, though Winnie’s incessant whining and pawing at the door drowns out any other sounds.

We’ll come back when it’s over, Ashley said.

“No.” Jane pulls at her hair, yanking at the choppy ends until her scalp stings. The fear in Jackson’s eyes flashes in her mind, the fear she so willingly walked away from. “Please, please, no,” she cries into her hands, picturing the way his body dropped to the ground in a slump while Jim loomed over him like a god exacting revenge. She wails out, beating a fist against the ground until it throbs.

The tightness in her chest expands, reaching inside her gut and down her limbs until her body feels no longer her own—and really, was it ever?

“It’s all my fault,” she whispers, thudding her head back against the wall. She squeezes her eyes shut, willing it all to disappear, to go up in flames and take her with it. “It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault!”

The words come out like a muddled prayer as she drags her hands down her face, crying out loudly. She presses her fingers to the scar on her forehead, tracing up the raised skin to where it disappears into her hairline, always there to remind her of that night two months ago—that useless, dreadful night that caused all of this.

A cough sounds in the room.

Jane opens her blurry eyes, rubbing at them to see where Sheila’s have cracked open. The officer coughs again, low and dry. “What’s wrong?” she asks weakly.

It occurs to Jane that Jackson was the only other person from their sad little group willing to risk his life to try to save this woman, and the only thanks he got was a gun cracking against his skull.

Jane’s lip trembles as she stares at the puddle of blood on the floor, then rakes her eyes up to Sheila’s injured leg—yet another casualty.

The tally adds up in her mind as she cries harder. Tommy, Billy, Evan, Whitmore, Jackson. “It’s all because of me,” she says as the pain floods upward in a drowning rush. “Everyone that’s been hurt—everything that’s happening to us now—it’s all because of me.”

At the door Winnie whines louder, a woeful harmony to Jane’s weeping. She buries her face in her arms, crying harder than she’s allowed herself to in weeks.

Then the table creaks, shifting beneath weight.

Sheila sits up easily. She flashes a nurturing smile.

Fourteen

But this girl had faced…

Thomas hangs his head beneath the bathroom sink faucet, letting the icy water drip down over his head and neck. He shuts his eyes and grips the sink for a moment longer, wondering if he wishes hard enough that he might open his eyes and find himself standing in the shower back at his apartment in Athens.

But when he opens his eyes, all he sees is some mildew growing in the drain.

The single bulb flickers lightly overhead while the mirror shows him the dark, sunken circles beneath his eyes that tonight have only worsened. He lets the faucet water run over his head for a few more seconds before swiping a hand over his face and his hair. These days, he sleeps in fits and turns, always pulled awake by variations of the same nightmare. In it, he is being held down by some invisible weight while he screams and screams, though no sound comes out of his mouth. Nearby, Jane’s unmoving body dangles in the air with a bright shine of blood covering her face like a winning cosplay of Carrie.

“Stop,” he mutters to himself. The campus therapist that his doctor and his baseball coach tried to stick him with said that stressful situations can trigger past traumas and, thus, the emotions and pain experienced from them. Of course, Thomas had stopped going after the first session; he didn’t need a stranger to explain his pain.

Instead, he has grown to recognize the early workings of a panic attack and learned to snuff out the spark of anxiety before it can grow into an uncontrollable forest fire. Only now, trapped on this mountain, he cannot disappear outside to take a long, distracting walk with music blasting through headphones as he usually would. He is as stuck as he is in his nightmares, weighed down and forced to stare at all the blood.

He rakes a hand back through his wet, messy hair before pulling his phone from his back pocket. Like when he first answered Cassie’s call earlier in the evening, his home screen shows two small bars in the top corner. He pulls up the text thread with his older sister, where a string of new messages wait in response to his update that he and Jane encountered engine trouble and wouldn’t make it to the cabin tonight.

The most recent one is several lines of all caps that he doesn’t need to read to guess the gist of. By now, his family probably thinks he has simply decided to bail out of Thanksgiving—that he would rather spend it alone back in Athens, far away from their collective pity and Jane.

He starts typing a vague reply: Don’t worry, everything’s fi

The numbness reaches his fingertips, and they tremble against the letters on the screen. Fine, he finishes typing, gritting his teeth as he clicks Send before accidentally dropping the phone into the sink.

The rage bubbles up swiftly inside of him, always lurking just beneath the surface as he waits for the pins and needles in his arms to cease their warfare. He catches his sorry reflection again and wants to break the mirror, to smash the glass with his bad arm—the arm that used to be the most remarkable thing about him.

“Stop,” Thomas repeats through gritted teeth.

His phone starts vibrating within the basin of the sink, and while he expects to see Cassie’s name light up the screen, a sharp pang of panic shoots through his gut when he realizes it’s his dad calling. Thomas hangs his head again, forcing more shaky breaths in and out as the phone rings, rattling in his head alongside the sound of blind hope in his father’s voice, darkening and thickening like a noxious fog.

“This is just a setback, Tom. All the greats in the game have experienced them,” his father had told him after his last doctor’s appointment. “You’ll follow the recovery plan and be great again, Son. You can still be great—”