For all those who have trouble at home.
You are not alone.
JUNE 2006
24/7/365
It’s like she can’t breathe anymore, no matter what she does.
Like everything is closing in on her, crowding her. Threatening her.
The hearing. The truth coming out. Reliving Durbin’s party in front of a judge and the three bastards themselves, staring her down. Cameras following her around the second she steps outside the courtroom. Exposed as a narc, all of Fieldridge talking about it.
Talking about her.
For weeks, it’s on the local news. Gossip in the grocery store. Downtown. People point, murmur with heads close together, those looks on their faces. Randomly coming up to her and asking invasive questions. Strangers, former classmates, leaning into her space, whispering, like they’re her closest confidantes: So, what did they really do to you?
Janie’s not cut out for this—she’s a loner. She is underground. It’s like she hasn’t even had time to let all the other stuff sink in—the real, the important. The Janie life-changing stuff. The stuff from the green notebook.
Going blind. Losing the use of her hands.
The pressure is breathtaking.
She’s suffocating.
Just wants to run.
Hide.
So she can just be.
JULY 2006
Five minutes that matter.
Across the desk. The spot beside her, empty.
“I don’t know anymore,” she says. “I just don’t know.” Presses her palms into her temples, hoping her head doesn’t explode.
“Whatever you decide,” the woman says.
It is their secret.
AND THEN
Tuesday, August 1, 2006, 7:25 a.m.
“I can’t breathe,” she whispers.
His hot fingers lace her ribs, sear through her skin to her frozen lungs. He holds her. Kisses her.
Breathes for her. Through her.
Makes her forget.
Afterward, he says, “We’re going. Right now. Come.”
She does it.
On the three-hour drive, she looks through eyelashes at her blurred fingers, curled in her lap.
Pretends to be asleep. Not sure why. Just soaking in the quiet. And knowing, deep down.
Knowing that he, and this, are not answers to her problems.
She’s beginning to realize what is.
THE FIRST THURSDAY
August 3, 2006, 1:15 a.m.
The inquisitors are nowhere to be found on this side of the state. Here, at Charlie and Megan’s rental cabin on Fremont Lake, no one knows her. The days are peaceful but the nights . . . in a tiny cabin, the nights are bad. Dreams don’t take vacations when people do.
It’s always something, isn’t it? Always something and never nothing for Janie. Never, ever nothing.
Like the car a doctor once told her never to drive, she craves it. Craves the rebellious never, the elusive nothing. And when the next nightmare begins, she thinks about it for real.
1:23 a.m.
Janie shakes on a lumpy sofa. Beside her, stretched out in a reclining lawn chair, is Cabe.
Asleep.
He’s dreaming about her.
Janie watches, as she sometimes does when his dreams are sweet. Storing up memories. For later. But this . . .
They’re playing paintball in an outdoor field with a dozen faceless people. It looks like a video game. Cabe and Janie move through the obstacles and shoot at each other, laughing, ducking, hiding. Cabel sneaks up and takes two shots at Janie, two red paintballs.
They nail her right in the eyeballs.
Red paint drips down her cheeks, her eye sockets hollow.
He keeps shooting and takes out one limb at a time, until Janie is just a body and a paint-striped face.
He sobs, remorseful, kneels next to her on the ground, and then picks her up and carries her, puts her in a wheelchair. Rolls her away to an empty part of the field and dumps her out onto the yellow grass.