Page 63 of When the Night Comes Knocking

Most importantly, it was only ever meant to be a legend.

“Kimi? Hello?” says Thomas. He’s a few feet behind her shoulder but tall enough to see her every movement. “What, do you want a countdown or something?”

She bites her tongue, throwing a hard glare back at him. “What if this is a mistake?” she asks. “What if doing this just gets us all killed?”

Thomas’s dark brows furrow. “Then we die a brutal death, I guess,” he says. At the tears building in Kimi’s eyes, he sighs deeply. “Look, I get that you’re scared. Hell, I’m freaking terrified,” he tells her, clutching tighter to the baseball bat in his hand. “But this was your grandmother’s store, right? Don’t you think she’d defend it if she were here?”

Kimi feels a sharp chill at the top of her neck as though someone is whispering secrets against her skin. “Ama’s gone,” she says, picturing the gentle, strong woman who raised her and the cold, dead eyes on the night she slipped away from their world completely.

Whenever Kimi feels the memory surfacing, she forces her thoughts to turn left at a make-believe fork in the road. It’s been her best means of survival these past years on her own, trying to honor Ama’s loss by keeping her mouth shut and Blackwell’s afloat. But now, in the low light of the stairwell, beneath the disdainful eye of a stranger, it is all bubbling up to the surface too swiftly to try to contain, pressing against the seams of all of her licked wounds.

She knows she cannot keep silent any longer.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” she says, lowering her fingers from the switchboard. “Earlier tonight, when you were defending Jane, you said we were all guilty of something—that the Mimic could be drawn to any one of us. Well, I think you were right and wrong.” She pauses, turning to face Thomas. “Sure, we’re all guilty. But I think it only wants the heart of someone strong enough to admit it. Someone who’s willing to face it.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, though the image is there with perfect clarity, like a film reel frozen in place. She opens them, wishing more than anything she could change the face looking back at her.

“I did something,” she whispers. “Seven years ago, I did something horrible.”

Thomas’s body stiffens as a gust of wind whistles by loudly outside. The stairwell is cold around them, echoey like a mausoleum. “What did you do?” he asks.

—

For as long as Kimi could remember, she had loved the night—the changing phases of the moon, the serenity that befell some and the revelry that filled others. She recalled a time when she was five or six years old, dirty kneed and braiding grass in Ama’s garden, when she looked up at the dark sky and desperately wished for the stars to still be there when she woke up.

But as Kimi got older and her grandmother grew sicker, the nighttime steadily morphed into a new kind of sanctuary. It meant that all of Ama’s pills had been administered for the day and that the meals she was increasingly losing an appetite for were either packaged up in Tupperware or tossed in the trash. It meant that Kimi’s grandmother—who religiously believed in getting a full nine hours of rest—finally lay down in bed and slept without any further need.

For Kimi, stepping out into the night felt like taking the first painless breath of the day. It felt like she could simply be an eighteen-year-old girl, untethered and disgustingly in love.

The summer she graduated from high school, on a night much like any, she slipped out through the screen door as quietly as a wraith. The grass in the front yard was ankle high, with rough weeds knocking against her calves as her phone began to vibrate in her back pocket. She paused only long enough to check the cracked screen and see Grace’s name and picture—a photo Kimi had taken of her friend sprawled in a patch of dandelions, Grace’s long strawberry blond hair peppered with the white weeds as she laughed.

Another fight with lovely ole Judy, Kimi guessed before sending the call to voicemail; she’d check in later, when the toxic dust between the two Meadows women would have had time to settle.

She jogged down the winding driveway, exhilarated by only the light of the moon overhead. That particular evening the moon was nearly full, tracing the dirt road before her like a guiding spotlight. It was one of those August nights when the air remained perpetually thick and sticky, pressing into the pores of her tan skin. The crickets in the surrounding trees had hit a crescendo by the time she reached the road.

He was parked by the dented blue mailbox. There he waited for her, as reliable as the night.

They ended up in the back seat of his ancient Nissan, ripping the clothes off one another in record time. Kimi knew those fervent, hungry moments with him didn’t equate to any sort of grand eternity; after all, he was moving at the end of the week to begin the next chapter of his life, one that had pointedly never included any mention of her. But she’d decided that it didn’t matter—her body was undeniably alive when everything else in her life seemed to be dying.

After, when they lay pressed against each other, sweaty and temporarily spent, he asked, “Wanna go for a drive?” even though he knew by then that her answer would always be yes.

At the top of Blood Mountain, the sky stretched out in an endless sprawl of constellations. Kimi wished she could scoop up some of the stars with the empty Coca-Cola bottle in the cup holder; it had been sitting there since one of the first nights they had experienced together, now a permanent fixture of his car. Her lipstick stain lingered there on the glass, back from when she still thought teenage boys cared about things like makeup or matching bra and underwear.

“Left or right?” he asked once they reached the fork in the road that greeted them each evening. One way led down a dark, narrow road that passed along a strip of houses and opened up to a glistening, rocky lake where they sometimes liked to strip their clothes off and wade in. The other one looped around the rolling green land of a horse farm, stretching out farther than their eyes could ever see in the dark, but the clear view of the stars overhead was otherworldly.

A smile began to tug on her lips as he rested his hand atop her thigh, just below the hem of her jean cutoffs. Heat spread through her instantly, flushing from her cheeks and settling down low in her stomach.

She guided his hand up farther. “Surprise me,” she said.

The order of how things happened next is still an uncertainty for her. Her eyes had drifted shut when his fingers pressed against her, firm and ever attentive. Then there was a heavy thump, followed by the squeal of the car’s brakes.

The only thing she remembers with unwavering clarity is when she first stepped around to the front of the car. A piece of fabric was caught in the headlight: pale blue with daisies and flecked with blood. In the dirt below, a white sneaker rested on its side, revealing an array of shooting star doodles.

It had been ripped off from the broken, contorted body lying on the ground several feet away, where long, strawberry blond hair fanned out angelically around a bleeding head.

—

“You—you killed Grace?” Thomas asks as more tears spill down Kimi’s cheeks.