Disclaimer: Jericho is not mine.
Heather was trying not to think about the fact that she had just willingly allowed herself to be trapped in a mine by an intentional explosion, but it was a little bit hard to ignore. All she had to do was look up or around to have that fact hit home to her all over again. This was not a regular sort of an occurrence for her, so she was willing to cut herself some slack for the way that it kept catching at her attention. She could not decide whether it was more surreal that she was actually fully awake and living this moment or that the whole trapped like an adventure novel plan had legitimately seemed to be the best option available to them at the time. It had all moved rather quickly, but she wasn't really coming up with much in the way of other options even now with time on her hands and a brain that was stuck in processing mode. Granted, this was not something within her area of expertise, so there might have been something that should have been obvious that she was missing.
She hoped that Jake had made it back to town alright before the rain started. She still wasn't sure how he had gotten volunteered to be the one doing the actual detonation part of this endeavor when there were people who actually worked at the mine around, but she hadn't been in on the executive planning session (wasn't sure that there had actually been a planning session). He had probably wanted to be with his family back in town anyway, and he had seemed to know what it was that he was doing.
Children from the school tended to drift in her direction any time that they were left unoccupied. She figured it was grasping at something familiar in the midst of the chaos. Several of their parents seemed a bit shell shocked, and she was making an effort at projecting calm, so there were a couple that were becoming downright clingy. She couldn't really blame them. There was a part of her that kept expecting to wake up from what would have to be considered her most oddly detailed dream ever. The knowledge that they were, in fact, trapped no matter what was going on outside was probably not helping the general mood of the gathered crowd, and she was really hoping that an exit would be forthcoming sooner over later. Calm was a fragile thing when it came to large groups of people. It would be best not to test their ability to maintain that state for very long. The fact that the radios weren't working was something that she had caught early on, but she wasn't going to be spreading that around. They were all okay despite the spur of the momentness of this plan, but any sort of mass panic in this space would go very badly very quickly. There was no need to borrow trouble, so she kept her thoughts about the lack of radio contact to herself. She passed around bottles of water (forcing herself not to cringe as months of work in getting her third graders to understand that drink sharing was a bad, germ ridden idea evaporated in the face of necessity) and told a couple of favorite stories.
Then, she felt a sudden shift in the mood of the children gathered around her and found its source in the somewhat labored breathing and not completely understandable muttering of Mr. Rennie. Children tended to be sensitive to the underlying mood of the adults around them and had picked up on the change in the man's demeanor before the adults sitting in small groups and talking quietly amongst themselves had realized that something off was happening.
She tried small talk and sips of water, encouraged the children to give him space, but he was quickly approaching an edge from which he was not going to be able to gently back away. When Gray Anderson stepped in to move the man, a younger her might have let it go. She might have refocused on the worried children around her and trusted that a little distance would do the trick. A younger her, however, didn't have a biased dislike of Mr. Anderson. The current her did.
He was one of those types of people that liked to have "conversations" with other people about something in front of you in a tone of voice that encouraged you to overhear even though he would not speak directly to you on the subject. She hated that. He had done that to Mitch more times than she could count in the time that her friend had been back in town. Mitch always shrugged it off (as he did a lot of things). Heather (while having no desire to pick a fight or cause a public scene over such things) was a little less inclined to let things like that go. She figured it was one of those things that always hit you harder when it was happening to someone you cared about versus happening to yourself. She understood that all people had a past. She even understood that sometimes people had the sort of past that might make other people treat them with a certain amount of caution. She didn't fault someone for that. She did, however, fault them when they were so caught up in the past that they were displaying an inability to see the present. There was no call to spend your time trying to undermine someone who was sincerely trying, and there was never a need to attempt to cripple them by always shoving them back toward what they used to be.
In short, Mr. Anderson just all kinds of set her nerves to twitching. Watching him help to lead Scott away from the rest of the people in the mine didn't sit well, so she followed them as soon as she could redirect the children gathered around her. She just couldn't see his particular brand of being "helpful" actually doing anything to help. Her friend needed space and distraction - not a lecture on what he should be doing.
"We've got this," Gray told her in what was clearly a dismissal when he noticed that she was right behind them. She didn't bother with an answer. She just sidestepped the man (who was too surprised that she was still moving to get further into her way). She launched into an initially one sided conversation about the plans for the elementary school's fall concert, led a set of deep breathing exercises, recited every silly joke she had heard passed around between her kids over the past few weeks, and generally poured everything she could think of into the gap in an attempt to keep the man in front of her too distracted to have time to give in to his panic.
Less people did seem to be helpful, but the enclosed space in combination with the stress of the situation without adding claustrophobia to the mix was too much for the man to work through without assistance. There were moments when he hovered very close to the edge of losing it (not helped, she noticed, by the tension in the air every time that Gray wandered back to check up on them after he had grumbled at them to make sure they kept things quiet and wandered back to the others), but they managed to keep him calm enough that the people yards away were able to forget what was happening with him. The panic didn't spread, and Heather considered that a battle won even if she did hurt for her friend's state.
She breathed one of the largest sighs of relief in her life after she handed Scott off to the people who were helping everyone through the tunnel and back outside. She breathed another one when she pieced together enough of the conversations around her to realize that the town hadn't picked up any worrying readings after the rain was over. The bus ride back to town was filled with the relieved chatter of the people around her, but she wasn't one of them. All that time down in the mine trying to help without actually being able to fix the problem with Scott had gotten to her. She needed to get her bearings again, and she ran through a mental checklist of things that she could work on at the shop. She really hoped that she beat Mitch there so that she could get her composure back before she got what she was sure was going to be an earful over the situation.