Page 2 of When the Night Comes Knocking

“Who do you think first guessed it?” replies Thomas, readjusting in his seat again. “Mom told her ‘it would be best if Wyatt sat this one out’ or some cryptic shit like that. I wouldn’t want my kid’s boyfriend in the audience for my breakup either.”

Jane’s eyes begin to blur, but she quickly forces the tears away. She will not cry in front of her brother, not now while they’re stuck in a car with nowhere to go but down.

The space fills up with silence again, but Jane’s mind is too preoccupied to be bothered by it. Instead, she forces her eyes to stay trained on the winding road ahead. The hardest part of this trip was meant to be coexisting with Thomas, or enduring the occasional slip in their father’s Mr. Optimist mask to reveal nothing but simmering disappointment hidden underneath.

But a divorce?

It is a dull ache sinking roots inside her, ready to grow and intertwine with the rest of her flowering pain that the past few months have planted. But as Thomas so rightly reminded her, worse things can happen.

She exhales shakily, trying to ignore how high up the mountain they are now, how close the looping road is to the earth’s edge. “I wonder if they’ll wait till after they cut the turkey,” she says, attempting Thomas’s light, unbothered tone.

“I’m thinking during the toast,” he replies. Beneath his words, there’s a hint of a smile as he mimics their father’s heavy South Georgia accent. “I’m thankful for my family, but I’m also thankful that I can break it apart. Cheers, y’all.”

A bubble of sad laughter erupts from Jane, and Thomas joins in, momentarily brightening the frozen space between them. She can’t remember when they last laughed about anything together; there is only a sharp before and after in her mind, where their relationship was and then wasn’t.

Thomas quiets quickly, schooling his face back into the cool indifference that shatters her. The words are there on the tip of her tongue.

Don’t say it, she pleads, straightening her posture. Don’t say it, Jane.

But the idea of their parents’ divorce and the sound of his laugh has stripped something from her, leaving her carefully placed armor for this trip askew. The drop-off in the trees to their left is too prominent, too eager, and that hungry dip in gravity claws away at her exposed flesh.

Nowhere to go but down.

“Are you ever going to forgive me?” she whispers.

In the passenger seat, Thomas’s slouched-over form goes stiff. His brown eyes are firmly fixated on the cast and sling on his right arm, and she can barely watch as his jaw tightens around what he really wants to say.

“Leave it alone, Jane,” he tells her, like stones being cast.

By now, she knows how this pitiful moment goes, how she will offer another useless apology—words that will fix nothing but poke and prod at wounds that have barely begun to scab—before Thomas ensures they go without seeing each other until the next familial obligation.

Will we even see each other at all if Mom and Dad divorce? Is this it, then?

He opens his mouth to say something. Then his eyes go wide as she drives around another bend in the mountain.

“Jane!”

She’s barely able to stop the car before it collides with the carcass. The screech of the tires against the road ricochets through her body, and she anticipates the breathless feeling of falling, of sailing off the road down and down through the endless red trees until it all goes black again, their joint screams echoing through the mountain valley.

Tremors tear through her limbs as they remain perfectly grounded with the glittering fall trees swaying gently to their sides. “I’m sorry,” she gasps, swallowing down bile. Her voice is a trembling wire as she faces Thomas. “It just came out of nowhere. Are you okay?”

Her brother barely nods. There is a bright terror in his eyes that she is certain matches her own, and he clutches his right arm tightly to his chest, squeezing it every few seconds as if to make sure it is still attached to him.

“Pull off here,” he mutters.

She eases the car around the roadkill and into a patch of dirt alongside the road. Thomas hops out before the car has even stopped moving, and he leans against the rocky mountainside with his eyes squeezed shut.

She presses her forehead against the steering wheel. “Shit.”

Talking was a bad idea.

After a few more deep breaths, she gets out of the car, not entirely certain her legs will hold. “Oh God.” Her hand flies up over her mouth, just as Thomas comes to stand at her side.

The animal in the road used to be a deer. Now it is a smear of blood and crushed bones with its chest cavity split open down the center in a precise, clean cut.

Jane shrinks against the car as Thomas shifts closer to the carnage. His eyes trail the spill of guts onto the pavement followed by the wide radius of sticky red that surrounds it.

“How could a car do this?” he says. “The cut looks nearly perfect,” he adds, beginning to circle it in the same pattern as the large vultures flying overhead in the dark orange sky.