Heaven Should Fall Page 11

  At first supper went fine, but then I got to noticing a strange feeling around my legs, like there was a mouse beneath the table or something. I felt my heart flutter a little—embarrassment was why—and real quietly I slid my foot forward to see if I could stir it up, to confirm whether we had some kind of rodent running around. And what do you know but my calf knocked right into Cade’s. At first I thought, now why in the world is his leg all sticking out under the table like that, and then I looked from him to Piper and I figured it out. He was stroking on her leg with his own, right across from his own brother. I didn’t have any idea right then if she was offended by that and just too polite to say anything, but the way things worked out later, I suppose she must not have minded.

  After supper, as soon as Elias went to drive Piper home, I came up to Cade in his bedroom and asked him, “Now, what was the meaning of all that nonsense?”

  He knew what I was talking about. Cade was never one to play dumb. “She’s not his girlfriend or anything. We’re both friends with her.”

  “Let him be, Cade.” He was sitting cross-legged on his bed with a schoolbook open on his lap, that big old American flag pinned to the wall behind him, and looking at me with his defiant eyes. I remember thinking, Son, Eli’s never going to have all that you do. Leave this town for him and you can have the rest of the world. Do him that one kindness.

  “It’s a free country,” Cade said. “Women have equal rights here. It isn’t like he won her at a farm auction.”

  “Just give him a chance. That’s all I’m saying to you. Things aren’t as easy to him as they are to you.”

  He laughed. “Piper isn’t easy,” he said, which wasn’t what I meant and he knew it. Then he said, “Whatever,” which was the thing he always said to put his foot down on a conversation. It could make me so mad when he said that, because you knew nothing was ever a whatever to Cade, no matter what he said. It just meant he didn’t want to listen to your part anymore.

  It wasn’t too long after that when Piper started coming around with Cade instead. Elias didn’t react one way or another when he saw them, but I knew that way of being, too. On Eve’s birthday every year, nobody had ever looked at me and furrowed their brow and sensed something was wrong, or asked if I was feeling poorly. So I knew Eli might be dying inside and never show a soul. Or he might be all right and here I was just pushing my own feelings onto one of my children, like the kind of mother who can’t see the break between herself and her young ones, or admit that they might be better and stronger than she is. I just couldn’t tell which it was.

  If I had it to do over again, I would have flat-out told Cade he wasn’t welcome to bring that girl home. For Eli’s sake I would turn on her the way Eddy turned on Randy, cast her out with all that prejudice, and take my punishment from God for my cruelty when it was time. I would never have made Eli look at all that, if I’d known for certain. But I didn’t, and the fact was, I didn’t want to lose my chance to have her as a daughter-in-law someday. I think that was in the back of my mind, that I just couldn’t quite let that girl go. Whatever Cade’s guilt is in everything that happened, it’s my guilt, too. It’s a sadness and a shame, the things loneliness can do to you.

  Chapter 11

  Jill

  That night, after my morning with Leela in the craft room, I lay awake feeling the baby tumble and kick inside me, jabbing its little feet against my diaphragm muscle in a slow jog. From downstairs I heard the clicks of a magazine being pushed into a gun, then the slide pulling back. Elias was up and settling into his routine. Sometimes when I heard him downstairs I’d think about how lonely I’d felt in the dark living room of Stan’s apartment, long after Cade had come and gone from his daily visit to me, lying there listening to the gentle clatter of the vertical blinds above the air vent, their movement letting in shards of harsh light from the courtyard lamps. If Stan was asleep in the bedroom alone, somehow the loneliness seemed to echo. I felt right only when he’d come out and sit beside me, channel surfing with the volume down low as I drifted off to sleep, resting his big heavy hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t Stan that I wanted, not especially; it was just the presence of another human being. The touch of one.

  Go down and say hello, I thought. Make an excuse. You promised Scooter. I slipped out of bed and crept down the stairs, letting the boards creak once I reached the bottom two. I was 98 percent sure Elias wouldn’t do anything hasty with that gun, but that 2 percent gave me pause. He glanced over and nodded as I reached the landing.

  I murmured a hello and got to work searching through the cupboards. I’d decided to make us a batch of Fudgies—a camp treat made up mostly of rolled oats, which we’d kept around in Olmstead-sized quantities, along with peanut butter and the scraps of chocolate from s’mores-making. In the kitchen I found no chocolate chips, but stuffed in the back of a cabinet was a stash of miniature Hershey bars; they might be Candy’s private hoard, but if so, I could claim ignorance later. As I moved ingredients to the kitchen island I caught the sound of a familiar voice from the television: Just be breezy, y’know? Abruptly I laughed, and Elias whipped his head around to look at me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I like Kendra. She’s funny.”

  “You about startled the piss out of me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” I abandoned the ingredients and came around his chair to watch the segment. “This is the one where she gets into the fight with the girl in the chow hall. I’ve seen it, like, twelve times.”

  “I was just channel surfing. I hate this show.”

  “Oh, really? That’s too bad. I love it. My mom and I used to watch it together all the time.”

  “Your mom?” He shot a quick glance at me. “Never even heard you mention your mom before. I figured you didn’t get along.”

  I shook my head. “She died four years ago this October. I try not to bring her up too much. People get uncomfortable hearing stories about people who are gone.”

  “That they do.” He set down the remote, as if changing his mind about switching to a better channel. “How’d she die?”

  “In a plane crash.”

  “A plane crash? Shit.” He was quiet for a minute as I watched the show, leaning on one arm against his chair. “That’s why you moved in with us instead of your own people, then, huh?”

  “Yeah. I don’t have ‘people.’ Her parents were alcoholics. I’m sure they died years ago, but anyway, I haven’t seen them since I was four.”

  “Shit,” he said again.

  I shuffled back into the kitchen and began peeling the waxed paper from a stick of butter. “We all have our traumas.”

  “That we do. But most people’s don’t involve plane crashes. You get some kind of extra credit for that one. How old were you, then?”

  “Eighteen. Too old to be an orphan, so no extra credit for me.” I set down my work for a moment and leaned toward him in a conspiratorial way, my hands resting on the edge of the kitchen island. “You want to hear the weird thing? I saw the clip on the TV at school while I was on my way to class—the wreckage of these two planes, they’d flown into each other—and I didn’t give it a second thought. I looked right at it. You’d think you’d get some kind of gut feeling when you see something like that, right? Or you’d have some sense of dread or that uneasy feeling that something isn’t right. But I got none of that. I just went about my business, clueless the entire day. That really screwed me up for a while.”

  “Wasn’t your fault. So you’re not a psychic, so what.”

  “I know, but since then I overcompensate a little. I see things like that on the news and I can’t shake the feeling that it must be personal until I can prove otherwise. One time, there was this avalanche near Deep Creek Lake, which is near the camp where I worked, and these two hikers died. I couldn’t get in touch with my friend Dave, the camp leader, so I drove all the way out there to check on him. Three and a half hours each way.”

  He replied with a low, sympathetic laugh. “Are yo
u serious?”

  I nodded. “He thought I was nuts. But I was in college, and it was a Friday, so I had the time to spare. It turned out to be a good excuse to see him.”

  Elias fell silent again, but there was an expectant feeling within the quiet, as if he wanted to keep the conversation going yet didn’t know what to say. I measured oats and peanut butter into a bowl, added in the butter softened in the microwave. After a minute or two he said, “You know it’s midnight?”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m hungry. I’ve been eating like it’s going out of style.”

  “You don’t show it. It’s all baby.”

  “I hope so.” I watched as he cracked open another can of beer with one hand and took a sip from it. “What’s the shield tattoo for?”

  “It’s my unit patch.”

  “Were you pretty close with those guys?”

  “Of course. You can’t not be.”

  “You ever talk to them these days?”

  He didn’t reply. The TV flickered with the scene in the chow hall. I said, “You know, you could probably meet people like that at the VFW, if you miss spending time with them.”

  His voice was scornful. “I know that, Jill.”

  “Sorry.” I dropped Fudgie mix by the spoonful onto a piece of waxed paper and slid the tray into the fridge. “My mom was a big advocate of group support like that. She was an AA sponsor.”

  “That means she was an alcoholic, right?”

  “One who didn’t drink anymore. She’d done her step work.” I nodded toward the beer can on the side table. “She would tell you not to mix that with Prozac.”

  His laugh came out as a single note—a bark of surprise. “Guess you were the one who hung the bag on my door, then.”

  “It’s no big deal. I was on it for a while myself.”

  “I just started it a couple months ago. Scooter picks it up, since I don’t drive anymore, and he won’t say anything to Dodge. If Dodge found out he’d start razzing me about it, and that’d work my nerves, and it wouldn’t end so well.”

  “I get that. But mixing alcohol with antidepressants won’t end so well, either.”

  “Eh, who cares. I’m okay so far. And I’m already a shitbag, so just put it on my tab.”

  “Why do you say you’re a shitbag? Nobody thinks that about you.”

  He took another drink of his beer. “That’s the term. It’s an army thing. People who can’t hack it, can’t pull their weight. I wasn’t feeling so hot by the halfway point of my last tour, but no way in hell I was going to come out of there labeled a shitbag. It’s funny, though—over there, I could make it work. I could push through it. Back here, not so much.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I’m supposed to relax. There, it’s normal to be on edge 24/7. You hear a sudden noise, you can aim a rifle at it. You’re supposed to be suspicious of everyone you don’t know. Try any of that over here. You just can’t get used to it.” He broke his focus on the TV and met my eyes, his gaze frank and clear. “You know why I had to stop driving? Fucking bicyclists. They come pedaling up alongside my Jeep out of nowhere and I’m ready to kill somebody. And other stuff, too. Motorcycles, road work. The noise. It’s like chaos-noise. It doesn’t match up with what my brain tells me it is.”

  I nodded.

  He exhaled smoke away from me. “So I stopped driving. Fine. I put my ass in this seat and stay here. And then Candy’s kids come up behind me and try to scare me, or they jump up and down and say the same thing over and over again, or they shriek—you know, the stuff kids do. And I feel like I’m going to beat the living shit out of them.”

  “Me, too.”

  He laughed a little. “No, but I really am going to beat the living shit out of them. I can feel my muscles pumping up for it. One time, John—the littlest one—came by and knocked over my beer. And I grabbed him by the shoulder and smacked him across the side of the head with my hand. He went running back to Candy crying, ‘Uncle Elias hit me, he hit me.’ She spanked him and told him to leave me alone.” He picked up the beer can again. “That’s when I got my ass to a doctor.”

  “Did they tell you it was post-traumatic stress disorder?”

  “Nope. Combat stress.”

  I frowned. “That’s not what it sounds like to me. My mom knew some Vietnam vets who—”

  “Well, I don’t know about Vietnam. But here, now, you pretty much have to point your weapon at your commanding officer for them to decide it’s PTSD. The Prozac helps, though. I don’t feel like hitting the kids anymore. The downside is, I don’t feel anything.” He shrugged and dropped his cigarette into his beer can. “No panic, no excitement. I’m like a ghost. But at least I’m not killing anyone.”

  “Maybe they can change your medication. Or your dosage.”

  “Maybe. That would require going back to the doctor.” He stretched his leg out and brought it back, gingerly, as though testing it for pain. “I just want everyone to leave me alone. You’re okay, though. If you think I’m a shitbag, it’s no skin off my nose, because I know what you went and did.” He nodded at my belly.

  I laughed. “Hey, now. Your mom has declared me Cade’s true wife.”

  “Yeah. You’re his biblical wife because he knows you in the biblical sense. Sorry to break it to you, but if that’s true, then your boyfriend’s a polygamist.”

  “At college they just called him a man-whore.”

  He shot me half a grin. “Fair enough. Say, can you pass me that heating pad over there?”

  “Sure.” I handed it to him. “What hurts?”

  “My leg and my shoulders. They always hurt.”

  I moved behind the chair and let my hands rest on his shoulders. His muscles tightened, but he didn’t flinch, and so I began rubbing them slowly, rhythmically, working my way across his neck and upper back. He let his head drop forward, and so I worked my thumbs along his spine and down to massage his shoulder blades. He groaned, and I smiled.

  “Is that better?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. Damn, that’s way better.”

  He sat upright again and sighed. Softly I rubbed his temples, the sides of his jaw, his scalp. I scratched his forehead along his hairline, and stroked my fingers back through his buzz-cut hair. He tipped his head upward, eyes closed, smiling.

  “Fudgies are probably ready,” I told him. “You want some?”

  Without opening his eyes, he asked, “What the hell’s a Fudgie?”

  “Chocolate and peanut butter comfort food.”

  “Fuck, yeah.”

  I laughed and patted him on the shoulders. “I hope you like them. I’m not the most awesome in the kitchen.”

  “I have faith,” he said.

  * * *

  The next morning I awoke, groggy and exhausted from interrupted sleep, to the sound of bacon sizzling in the skillet downstairs. The smell of it wafted into the room, and I was out of bed and dressed in no time. Pregnancy had made me a serious carnivore. In my ordinary life my staples were bread and fruit, but lately I found myself snacking on strips of leftover flank steak, cold from the fridge. I hoped it was helping build the baby’s brain.

  Scooter was already in the kitchen, dressed in a white crew-neck undershirt, a Patriots ball cap and a pair of Levi’s thirty-inch-waist extra-longs. He was chugging chocolate milk from a Coca-Cola glass. The beagles licked bacon grease from the floor around Candy’s feet. I could hear Cade washing up in the bathroom, and Dodge sat at the table with his arms folded in front of him, looking more alert than anyone ought to be at 6:00 a.m. He met my eye but offered no greeting. I wondered if Scooter could sense the tension.

  “Mornin’, Jill,” said Scooter. He had a milk mustache.

  “You guys doing a clean-out today?”

  “Nope. The AC’s not cooling the place down like it ought to. Got to try to fix it.”

  “It’s at eighty-five in there right now,” said Dodge.

  Candy raised the skillet high and carried it to the kitchen island, sending the b
eagles scrambling. Dodge asked, “You think Elias knows anything about HVAC work?”

  Cade walked in from the hallway. “He doesn’t.”

  “That sucks. Would make the sumbitch good for something this morning.”

  “Easy,” said Cade.

  “I am being easy.” Dodge moved his hands to the sides to make room for the plate Candy was setting in front of him, casting a meaningful glance at me before finishing his thoughts. “Boy needs a drill sergeant. Get him to come out and work. Or one of those trainers like on TV, make him run on the treadmill till his ass falls off.”

  “He could have run circles around you a year ago,” Cade told him.

  “A year ago. Now all he runs circles around is that island right there. Relay races with a box of Ho-Hos.” He dug into his eggs, and I glanced at Scooter, who looked away. “We’re gonna get him straight.”

  Cade kissed me goodbye at the door, but I followed him out to the car anyway. The Saturn wasn’t looking its best these days. The white paint above its wheel wells showed splatters of mud, and the backseat was a mess of crumpled sandwich wrappers and soda cups, unwashed laundry and boxes from the copy center filled with résumés. As Cade climbed in I said, “You’ve got to get Dodge to stop saying that crap about Elias. He’s a bully, your brother-in-law.”

  “Don’t make a melodrama out of it. It’s just Dodge being Dodge. He’s trying to get Elias working to keep his mind busy, so he means well. I’ll give him that much credit.”