Page 59 of When the Night Comes Knocking

Thomas puts down the bucket of blood-filled balloons by his feet, nodding even though she can’t see him. “I’m the one who made you believe that you were to blame for everything that happened. I’m the reason you feel so guilty.”

Her shoulders hunch inward, rising shakily as she turns.

“It wasn’t fair of me,” he says. “I know it wasn’t.”

Her lip trembles as she shakes her head. “But if I hadn’t gotten so drunk—if I hadn’t called you to pick me up that night, then all of this…” She gestures flippantly at the store, casting her eyes upward against tears.

He recognizes the words as his own from those initial days in the hospital. He can see it then, every bit of the weight she’s been carrying—the student who died, his ruined baseball career, their parents’ endless disappointment and impending divorce. She has forced herself to feel all of it, while he has fought against feeling any of it.

He unclenches his fists, suddenly exhausted. “It’s because Dad couldn’t look at me,” he says.

At this, Jane finally peers up.

The first thing Thomas saw upon waking in the hospital after surgery was his father sitting quietly at his bedside and staring blankly at all the silver pins keeping his arm together—staring like his son might as well have been dead.

Now, Thomas traces the surgical scar down his bare skin, past the gnarled, uneven surface of mutilated tissue and muscle where so much of him was taken. “All my life I’ve worked toward this one thing,” he says, while flexing his fingers outward. “And in one shit moment, it all just got ripped right from my hands.”

He swipes beneath his nose, willing the familiar panic in his chest to remain at bay. “In the hospital, Dad couldn’t look at me, because he knew I wasn’t special anymore.” A sad laugh escapes him then, hardly recognizable. “It’s why he still can’t look at me,” he adds.

Jane’s eyes blur further, fighting to spill over, and he shakes his head as he peers up at the bright lights. “God, it sounds so fucking stupid saying it out loud now, but it felt like I lost him in the accident too. And that—well, that just killed me, Jane.”

The burning spreads up from his chest to his face, though this time he knows it is only shame. He forces himself to meet his sister’s eyes. “It was easier to blame you,” he continues, even when his voice breaks. “It was easier to blame you, even though I’m the one who drove us over that ledge.”

He stops her hand midair so she can’t brush away the few tears that have escaped. “I need you to know that I’m sorry,” he tells her, exhaling a shaky breath. “I’m sorry for everything that happened that night.”

They have never discussed it, the state she was in when he picked her up at the fraternity house—never discussed what caused her to flee the party in the first place, or the ghostly way she has lived inside herself ever since. It is the heaviest guilt he carries: suspecting what happened to her and hoping he could continue to avoid the truth.

“So please. Stop asking me if I’ll ever forgive you,” he continues, then squeezes her hand. “Because you didn’t do anything wrong, okay?”

The silence of the store yawns around them as Jane hangs her head and closes her eyes. Thomas tracks the tears as they glide down her cheeks, moving in time with the rise and fall of her small frame, and he wishes more than anything that all this would be over—that they could just go home.

He’s not sure how much time has passed when she finally looks up again.

“Earlier, when I mentioned that we need to consider a backup plan—”

“Jane, I swear to God—”

“Jesus, would you shut up and let me finish?” she says, crossing her arms. “I’m not trying to get myself killed, alright? I don’t want to die, but I also don’t want to see my brother get hurt again. Not if I can help it this time.”

The words meet his chest swiftly, and for a moment he is breathless, suspended in that terrible, endless darkness inside the car while the smoke catches and the pain seems too infinite to bear.

“You were going to give yourself up earlier if it meant I could get away,” Jane says, glancing down at Thomas’s bloody leg. “Why is it so hard for you to believe that I would do the same for you?”

Thomas shifts his gaze, focusing on where his feet are planted firmly to the ground, then on his sister standing in front of him, her eyes patient and unafraid despite everything. He exhales, loosening the grip on his arm until he lets go of it completely.

“You remember when you found me at the practice field on the day of the accident?” he asks.

The scar on Jane’s forehead stretches as her eyebrows furrow. “It was miserably hot,” she says, nodding. “And you smelled god-awful.”

A grin twitches on his face. “Yeah, I did. But I keep thinking about how that was the last time life felt normal.”

Jane almost laughs. “Normal. Imagine that,” she says, then leans down and picks up the bucket of filled gloves. Again, she stares at him with that calm, quiet strength of someone far older.

“What you said earlier? About blaming me because you were worried that you lost Dad?”

Thomas tenses slightly, feeling that hot shame creep up the back of his neck. “I told you, I know how stupid it sounds,” he says.

A ghost of a smile crosses her face, and it hits him like a lightning strike, the fear that this might be it—that they’ve run out of time.