Heaven Should Fall Page 16

  The porch light cut through the blackness, but only far enough to get me partway across the lawn. Dodge was sprinting across the grass toward me. I could hear his ring of keys clinking on his belt. When he came into view he was dressed in his jeans as if he kept them fully outfitted beside his bed like a minuteman. “What happened?”

  “Jill’s hurt. There’s blood everywhere. Open the car door.”

  Dodge pulled open the passenger door of the Saturn and put his arms behind Jill’s shoulders to help ease her in. I got her legs onto the seat, then stopped and said, “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have enough gas. I don’t get paid until tomorrow.”

  Dodge nodded toward his SUV. “Take mine.”

  “You’re blocked in. Get her in the Jeep.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  “No, you better stay here with Elias. I don’t know what the hell he did to her, but we can’t leave everybody else here with the goddamn psycho.”

  He shouted to my mother to bring me the keys while we maneuvered Jill into the back of the Jeep. As I started the car he laid a hand on the windshield to stop me. I rolled down the window, and he said, “Take her to the firehouse. They can get her to the hospital faster.”

  “Right. Yeah, okay.”

  When I spun out of the driveway onto the pitch-dark road and the car lurched between gears, I felt nothing but afraid. Jill was the one who would know what to do in this situation. She would know how to stop the bleeding, how to prevent shock, how to change gears without leaving the goddamn transmission in the middle of the road. I should have let Dodge drive after all. I had overestimated myself once again, as I always did, because I was so used to being golden that I had missed the fact that in the face of gritty reality I was less than nothing.

  The dense forest broke and the small clear lights of Liberty Gorge appeared. I made a quick left turn and followed the street to where the old hose tower rose up high above the small shops around it. At the curb I lurched the Jeep to a stop and ran in through the open bay doors. Four guys in dark blue uniforms were playing poker around a table. I barely got three words out before they rushed past me, instantly to work. The lights of the ambulance whirled on. Then the siren chirped, and I stood aside as three of the men eased Jill onto a gurney, stanching the blood and wheeling her to safety all at the same time.

  I leaned against the rear of the Jeep, let my head drop back and felt relief and shame wash over me. She would be all right. She was in the hands of men who knew what they were doing. Men who were not me.

  * * *

  The baby’s cry was a strangled, wet little sound. It punctured the air of the white waiting room like the yowl of a cat. I’d been staring at the ceiling, slumped into an ergonomically curved plastic chair, and when the sound came I looked up in surprise. It had happened so fast. One minute they were wheeling her into surgery, fending me off with waving hands shrouded in plastic gloves, and the next—almost literally the next—came the cry. But it seemed a good long time before the door swung open and a small crib clunked through it, pushed by a nurse. On the center of the white mattress, like a seashell nested in cotton, lay the baby, all wrapped up with just its head sticking out. Its skin was dusky pink. Its eyes were closed but with eyebrows raised, head turned to the side as though listening to a distant hum.

  “It’s a boy,” said the nurse, all cheerful, as though this whole thing were normal.

  So this was the price I had paid. This was the six pounds that had crushed me like it was the weight of the whole world. I had to catch myself before I laughed. All of a sudden I felt like such an embarrassing whiner. For months I’d been carrying on like nature’s original jackass, and here was this baby who was—and there’s just no other word for it—cute. I’d never held a baby in my life, not even one of Candy’s, but I reached in and scooped him up. It was like picking up a soda can you think is going to be full but turns out to be empty. They had him wrapped up so tight, he was like a very delicate football.

  “Is Jill going to be all right?” I asked.

  “She lost some blood, but she’ll be fine once she recovers. Why didn’t you tell us she had placenta previa?”

  “What’s placenta previa?”

  She explained it to me, but the words went over my head, and I shrugged. The nurse asked, “Did she get any prenatal care?”

  “We couldn’t afford it.”

  She scowled at me. “It’s a potentially fatal condition for both mother and child. A simple sonogram would have detected it.”

  “Oh.” I looked down at the baby. “Do I need to sign him out or anything?”

  She gave me a funny look. “He’s going to the nursery. What did you think, you can just walk out the door with him?”

  “Well—Jill can’t take care of him, right? She’s sick and all.”

  “That’s what the nursery is for. He hasn’t even been bathed yet.” She took the baby from my hands as if he was a prize she’d decided I hadn’t earned after all. “Sit tight. As soon as your wife gets into a room, I’ll let you know.”

  My wife. When the nurse said that I felt ashamed that she was wrong. It was yet another thing I’d dropped the ball on, like the prenatal care and getting a better job, keeping the fences in good repair and getting Elias taken care of before he turned into a raving lunatic at the sight of somebody bleeding.

  It was a relief, at least, that Elias had nothing to do with why she was bleeding. I felt kind of bad about that, the more it sank in. If he hadn’t started screaming, Jill would have bled out right there on the sofa and nobody would have realized it until it was too late. It was such a weird response for him. The guy had seen carnage on a level I could never imagine. He’d seen dead Afghan people by the score, kids even, and he’d told me about some of those, mutilated or partially eaten by animals. He’d seen his own buddy blown apart into a dozen pieces by an IED. In those situations he had acted decisively, and we knew that for a fact because he’d lived and come home, a Purple Heart veteran, honorably discharged. And then in his own house he acted as if his legs were stuck in concrete, screaming as though a truck was barreling down on him. Those anti-anxiety pills he was taking weren’t doing a damn thing. I made a mental note to talk to him about that.

  But it might not be anytime soon. I had a son to look after now, and that son had a mother I needed to watch out for, too. At least we knew now that under pressure Elias didn’t lash out—he froze. That made the whole thing a little less urgent. At least he wasn’t a danger to anybody.

  I wish it had been that simple.

  Chapter 19

  Jill

  It was seven in the evening when the painkillers wore off. My eyes slit open to the view of a faded pink wall fractured by the beige plastic bars of my bed. On the little cabinet there sat the incidental items of an ordinary birth—an opened package of blue trauma pads, a stack of tiny diapers, a kidney-shaped dish, a glass jar of Hershey’s Kisses with a single balloon tied to its neck—but I knew the birth had not been ordinary. I tried to roll over onto my back, but a slice of pain seared through my abdomen. I winced and eased over more gently. Not long after I’d awoken from the surgery, in a busy room washed in a greenish light and the beeping of many machines, I had laid a cautious hand on my belly and felt the incision, a vertical one, the same as my mother’s. The surprise of it had filled me with an odd sense of peace. Her experience is yours now, I had thought. She came through it, and so will you.

  I reached for the call button, but as I did my door swung open and a bassinet rattled through it, pushed slowly by a nurse.

  “Here he is,” she said. “Chewing on his fists. Let me give you your meds and then you can feed him.”

  I looked up to see Leela craning her neck to peek around the doorway. Strands of her gray hair, bunched up in its usual bun, had worked themselves out to form a disheveled halo around her face. “Oh, good, Jill, you’re awake now.”

  The room was dim, the stiff green drapes drawn tight ac
ross the windows, and Leela didn’t offer to turn on the lights. When the nurse left she lifted the baby with competent ease and handed him down to me. I hadn’t seen him for hours, and already he seemed older, his round little face evenly pink and the tips of his ears unfolded from their squashed state. I pulled up the sheet for modesty while I nursed him, and Leela said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Goodness. How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay.” The baby was so warm, his body soft and as radiant as a coal. I couldn’t help but think of Elias then, how dry and heated his skin always felt when I massaged his shoulders, like a clay dish lifted from the oven. My gaze caught on the little index card at the end of the clear bassinet. On it was the cheerful image of a blue teddy bear beside a name blocked in thick marker: “OLMSTEAD, Thomas Jefferson.” “I thought it would be a girl,” I told Leela.

  She settled into a chair beside my bed and patted my arm. I expected her to murmur a platitude that perhaps the next one would be or that God liked to surprise us, but instead she said nothing. The sudden quiet felt almost like a moment of silence for someone lost. I stole a glance at her and wondered if she had hoped for one, too.

  “I guess I expected a girl,” I continued, “because I’d know how to raise one. With a boy I don’t have the first clue. So I thought obviously it would be a girl, since my mom used to always tell people that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”

  Leela uttered a small but disparaging laugh. “Well, that isn’t true, is it?”

  I turned to her, feeling my eyes tighten with confusion.

  “God gives people more than they can handle all the time,” she said, her voice lilting with the obviousness of her words. “Shoot, babies in the Third World aren’t dying because they just didn’t try hard enough. You’d be a fool to try and predict how God will hand out pain. We all just love the world enough that we want to stay in it. See the day through to a better day past it.”

  “But you believe in God.”

  “Of course I do. But I believe in hunkering down till life gets better, too. And it does. You’re here, after all.” The baby’s cap had slipped, and she slid it back over his head. “Besides, your child might surprise you. Maybe he’ll love chasing the hens around the yard and helping people in little quiet ways that make them happy, and he won’t care a thing about power or influence. You just never know. He might be a mama’s boy.”

  “I’m sure Cade wouldn’t like that.”

  Her mouth went tight and, even as she touched my arm in a soft way, her voice was firm. “You let him be who he is, no matter what Cade or anybody else says or thinks. In the end he isn’t either of you. You remember that. He’s himself. If I could go back and do just one thing over again as a mother, I’d hold tight to that and never let anybody make me feel bad for it.”

  But Cade is his own person, I thought. I looked down at the baby, batting his loosened fist against my chest, and stroked his brow that was creased high by the effort of his nursing. I tried out the idea that I might one day see elements of myself in him after all, and the thought of it cheered me. But most of what Leela said was beyond me then. I filed it away for later, not even realizing that she had not been speaking of Cade at all, but of Elias.

  * * *

  I stayed in the hospital for nearly a week. Once TJ and I finally came home—walking in under a paper banner made by Candy’s boys and treated to a celebratory dinner of roast beef and buttery Potato Pearls with a messily frosted cake for dessert—we found ourselves carried in by the tide of a household that had been taken over by hunting season. Men from the gun club gathered on a nightly basis to clean their weapons, discuss strategies and trade tall tales about their past successes. Eddy sat in his recliner in the midst of all this, nodding and making approving comments, looking deeply pleased to be, for once, at the center of a social gathering. As they spread out their equipment all over the living room, I retreated to the chair beside Elias’s to nurse TJ in front of the TV. But Elias was almost never there anymore. He stayed in his room constantly, either to detox himself, get away from the crying baby or avoid the pressure to participate in the hunting expeditions. It could have been any one of those things, but I was too exhausted to give it much thought. For once I was distracted from my annual dread of the upcoming month of October. It was difficult to reflect on the events of four years ago while caring for someone whose needs kept me lodged in the present moment, and I didn’t mind at all.

  Once bear season officially started, the men mostly vanished, and even at mealtimes we saw little of Dodge. He and Scooter spent nearly every evening, deep into the night, sitting in a tree stand watching for bears. They dressed head to toe in camouflage, sprayed themselves down with scent-eliminating chemicals and wore their rifles slung on their backs like jungle commandos. Matthew copied his father, dressing in his own miniature set of fatigues and carrying his rifle around the house in a similar fashion, even during his dining-table school lessons. Candy thought this was adorable.

  “Look at him, Eli,” Candy prompted one afternoon, nudging Elias as she served him a sandwich during one of his rare awake hours. “Looks just like you at that age. Remember you used to get dressed up and chase me around with that BB gun of yours?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Always the soldier even then. What do you think, Matty? You going to be a soldier like Uncle Elias?”

  Matthew grinned. “Uh-huh.”

  “You hear that?” Candy smiled at her brother. “Remember? Those were some good times, huh? Running around like a bunch of ninnies, crawling around under the porch getting filthy dirty. Kids don’t hardly ever play like that anymore. All they want to do is watch TV and fool around on the internet.”

  “They ought to be playing with their cousins,” said Elias.

  The room went silent. Dodge, who had been sitting in a dining chair pulling on his boots, shot Elias a sharp look and let the stare linger. Candy set down the plate beside Elias with a muted thunk, and even Matthew cast a nervous gaze between his parents. Elias, for his part, didn’t shift his gaze from the television. On it, Rachael Ray sprinkled pepper flakes into a pot of chili, her wooden spoon moving energetically to match her voice.

  “They don’t have any cousins,” said Dodge.

  Elias’s expression didn’t change. When he spoke, his voice had a shrug to it. “Family’s family.”

  Dodge slung his gun over his shoulder and left. Candy had retreated to the kitchen, where she tidied up from the sandwich-making in chilly silence. From my nest in the chair nearest his, a cotton blanket thrown over my shoulder and the baby nursing beneath it, I watched him steadily. My eyes implored him to look at me, but he only shifted in his seat, flicking the ash from his cigarette without even looking to see if he’d hit the glass ashtray. I missed the sense of connection I’d once had with him—the rolled eyes when Candy misspelled a word on her lesson chalkboard, the shadowy smirks at the corner of his mouth when Dodge said something even more ignorant than usual. But now he seemed to have turned inward, not bothering to send those subtle messages. His mind was as impenetrable to me now as it had been the day I met him. And speaking his mind about Randy made me wonder all the more what was going on in there.

  Maybe he’s angry at you, I thought. The idea caused anxiety to well up inside me, but I knew I couldn’t blame him if he was. In the five weeks since the baby’s birth I had paid little attention to him, easy enough to do when he was almost never awake. The more time I spent apart from him, the more unnerving details wormed their way into my memories of the hours before TJ’s birth. I remembered the power I felt in Elias’s arms when he threw my hands off him, and the muted electric thrill it stirred in me. When he hugged me and pressed his face into my hair, I heard him inhale deeply. All along there had been so many solid walls that made our friendship safe: our filial relationship, my growing pregnancy, his heavy and hurting body, the complete lack of privacy. I had meant no harm, but I loved him in a way that wasn’t fair to him. It was so easy f
or me to share my affection generously, knowing at the close of each day I would lie down with Cade and offer him the best of it. But Elias spent each night alone, and there was no place for him to channel whatever feelings welled inside him. Without ever meaning to, I had been cruel.

  Now that TJ was here, I felt chagrined by it all. I needed to learn to live beside Elias in a way that would not hurt, or tempt, either of us. I needed to get over my judgment of Candy and look to her as a model for how to be with Elias. She knew how to care for her brother without adding complications to his already overburdened mind.

  On the afternoon after his comment to Dodge, I caught up with him sitting on the back porch, looking out over the backyard from his mother’s white wooden rocking chair. He wasn’t smoking, wasn’t drinking and wasn’t asleep, so it was immediately noteworthy.

  “Jill,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to apologize to you.”

  I laughed in surprise. “For what?”

  “For not doing anything to help when you were bleeding out on the sofa. It just got to me, and I felt frozen by it. I’m sorry for standing there screaming like a little girl.”

  “But you did help,” I pointed out. “Cade said I would have been dead by the morning if you hadn’t alerted everyone.”

  Elias’s expression changed. He seemed to be considering that. Then he shook his head. “I’m trained in field medicine. There’s a lot I could have done besides watch Cade throw you in the car. If you’d died, it would have been on me. I’m the one in the house who knows how to handle that. But I couldn’t handle it.”

  “And I’m not dead. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

  He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose in his weary way. “Just accept my apology, all right?”

  “No. I don’t accept that you have anything to apologize for in the first place, so I can’t.”