I never used to be bothered by the weather, but I lost most of the summer and fall to recovery. Day after day of gray, sunless days leaves me struggling with what feels like a constantly encroaching depression.
“Sasha?”
I jump at my boss’s voice. I startle much easier now, ever since the incident.
“Sorry,” Gary says, smiling gently. “You okay?”
I was zoning out. Ironically, the man who put me in the hospital for nearly a month was correct in one way: being a young woman in labor organizing isn’t easy. Respect is hard to come by. But after what happened to me, I have it in spades now.
I expected pity when I returned to work. Instead, my colleagues treat me with a deference I find unsettling. No one wanted to continue my work on the Trinity Casino case, unsurprisingly, but I made a promise to help those workers.
When I finally got released from the hospital and recovered enough to go back to work, I picked up where I left off. I always keep my promises. And I promised myself I’d make James Carney pay.
Otherwise, all that pain would’ve been for nothing.
“I’m fine,” I reply. “Just a little cold.”
“Better fix those working conditions,” he says, nodding. His dark hair flops into his eyes and he gives me what he thinks is a roguish smile. “Don’t want an uprising.”
He brings over a space heater and plugs it into an outlet near my feet. The warm air eases the ache in my shin.
“Thanks.”
He pats me on the shoulder and sees the stack of petition cards on my desk.
“Are those…?”
“We reached majority today. I was afraid folks would be too scared after, well, you know.”
“You’re the one who took the beating,” Gary says. “I’d feel like a piece of shit if I gave up after what you’ve been through.”
Didn’t feel shitty enough to take this case on, though.
While I still respect the work Gary does, the starry-eyed esteem I had for him is long gone. He always looks guilty when he talks to me, and I find it kind of pathetic. It’s hard to believe that I used to have a crush on him
“Well, we have a leak somewhere. Someone’s informing on the staff, so we’ve had to be really careful. Switch up where we meet. Only discuss matters in person. But I sent the application to the National Labor Relations Board today. James Carney will be served with the legal notice on Monday.”
He won’t like that. A tremor of fear passes through me.
The police haven’t found the men who assaulted me. They checked in with James Carney after I told them that his goon had warned me off organizing his staff. Nothing stuck to him, of course.
He’s got half the city in his pocket anyway.
It’s another reason why I want to finish what I started. If I can’t get justice in one way, I’ll get it in another.
“That’s incredible, Sasha!”
I offer a wan smile to Gary. It’s more than he deserves. “It’s another beginning. We’ll still have to get the staff through the election process, and if Carney doesn’t crush that, through the negotiations. Still, it feels like a victory.”
“It absolutely is. You should be proud. No one would’ve faulted you for running the other way.” Gary pauses, that shadow of guilt crossing his face again. His gaze drifts to the window. “Shit, it’s really coming down now. Looks like this storm’s going to dump about a foot of snow. Won’t be long before the busses won’t be able to make it across the Mystic Bridge.”
It’s time for me to get going, then. I need to get to the grocery store. By the time I’m ready to leave work, it’s close to white-out conditions—impossible to see more than a few feet in front of you. I need to get the bus back home to Everett. I don’t have a car, but I wouldn’t drive in this snow anyway.
My office, like the casino, is in Charlestown, just across the river from home. Only a few miles, but a world of difference. Charlestown has gentrified in a way Everett hasn’t. Everett is still a very blue-collar city, overly packed with people, and home to all of the industrial blights no one else wants in their backyard, like the liquified natural gas terminals.
If those ever blow, they’ll take Carney’s casino with them.
That’s a satisfying thought.
I turn off my space heater, bundle up, and trudge out into the snow. It’s a quick walk to the bus stop. My shin starts its familiar ache. It’s annoying, but I’m lucky that’s the worst physical souvenir I retained.
I woke in Mass General Hospital two days after the assault. I hadn’t been found until early the next morning, and I’d been lucky to survive that long given all the internal bleeding and the swelling in my brain. My doctors were stunned I not only survived, but with time and physical therapy, made a full recovery.
There’s a scar on the back of my wrist from where the nylon cord shredded my skin to the bone, but it feels like a friend to me. It knows what we went through.
My shivering intensifies, and it’s not from the cold. There’s no one lingering around the bus stop, but something’s set off my fear response.
Is it real this time? It’s only six o’clock in the evening, but the dark of winter and blustery snow makes it hard to see clearly. I hate not being able to differentiate if my gut is telling me something important, or if it’s something completely innocuous triggering my PTSD. I thought only soldiers got that, but my doctors tell me it’s a very real thing for people who went through what I did. I can’t remember any of the coping mechanisms they taught me right now, though.
Bile rises in my throat. My senses heighten as the world around me slows. I can’t stay here. I need to move.
That’s fine. I can climb up the hill toward home and walk until the bus catches up with me. Being on the move usually calms some of the panic.
But then I hear footsteps behind me and I’m too terrified to look back. No matter how fast I walk, I can’t seem to outpace whoever follows me. Fear claws at my throat but I fight to keep my thoughts clear. Not getting distracted: that’s what got me into trouble last time.
Finally, I decide to ditch this road lined with vacant industrial parks and slip into one of the fancier neighborhoods.
There at least someone might hear me scream and think it’s out of the ordinary. Not like in Doherty Park.
My leg protests as I hustle through the side streets, hoping that the dense clusters of brownstone buildings and the possibility of witnesses convince whoever’s following me to give up.
That’s when I hear the laughing. Christ. That nasally cackle has been the soundtrack of my nightmares for months.
Does Carney know about the application already?
I didn’t tell the casino staff I was going to file to protect us. Does Carney have a contact at the NLRB? Or did Gary sell me out? Either seems impossible to believe. The NLRB is federal, not local, so hopefully beyond Carney’s grasp. And Gary is too vanilla to be a double agent.
It’s probably just more fallout from the petition card process. Not every staff person wants the union, and we suspect it’s the ones who don’t who dropped dimes to Carney in the first place.
But it doesn’t matter as I sprint through the snow, running wildly toward any hint of another person. I was scared running from my attackers back in July, but this is a new level of fear.