Heaven Should Fall Page 22

  It all made me nostalgic for college, and not in a good, glory-days way. It ached. I thought about the street hockey games in front of the White House, how good it felt to sail over the pavement on my skates, fighting for the ball, everybody yelling and cheering. Police and security people, uniformed and armed, were everywhere, and none of them stopped us, because we were permitted. The white marble buildings and monuments gleamed in the sunlight. In my pocket I had an ID card that allowed me into the halls where the legislators met. I had a good haircut and I was in shape. That card felt like a golden ticket, an infinite VIP pass. It wasn’t, but it sure felt like it then.

  I kept thinking about all that—the person I’d been back then, the person I was now. I kept telling myself I needed to reapply for work-study, hit the deadline this time, but I couldn’t find the heart to do it. Every time I sat down to work on it I pictured a thin letter declining my application, something with “Dear Applicant” at the top, and I’d push the whole thing away like a plate of food I couldn’t eat. If my school rejected me now, I knew I’d lose it. I wasn’t even sure that I hadn’t lost it already.

  One weekend—it was a Saturday, the day we played Memphis—I gathered up all the stuff from the box in the shed and drove it out to the quarry, just as I’d promised Jill. I hadn’t been exactly honest with her when I told her it was all leftovers from high school. It was true we used to set off fireworks there a lot, but that wasn’t what she’d asked. I didn’t want to tell her I’d been experimenting with a few ideas, in the beginning as a challenge to Dodge. He had all these screwy, amateurish concepts of how to blow things up, notions he’d come up with from listening to those gun-club idiots tell thirdhand stories to each other. I’d look them up on Google to affirm they were misinformation, and they always were, but along the way I’d come across things that might work and get curious to try them. And then, as I worked, I’d find myself thinking about people who had it coming—people who had wronged us, like that stupid doctor who’d written Elias the Xanax scrip, or Fielder taking credit for the work I’d done. When the work in the shed went well I felt like some kind of mad scientist in there, competent at something again, finally, and I’d start to imagine that Fielder was sitting there in the corner all tied up and whimpering, watching me ace a project he wouldn’t have the chance to claim as his own. It wasn’t serious, just an idle sort of going through the motions, a way to make me feel I could do something if I wanted to. Visualization: it was something they always talked to us about in public speaking classes and how-to-succeed seminars. You envision yourself being articulate and powerful and wowing the crowd, and then it’s way easier to walk out there as if you own the place and make it all happen. It always worked pretty well for me when I was knocking on doors for candidates. But fantasies aside, I’d made a promise to Jill. What mattered was that I was dumping it all now, and I meant well.

  I parked in the same place Elias always used to, beneath the trees, and opened the pipes up one at a time with the bolt cutters. I shook out the nails and powder into the grass and watered it all down with two gallon jugs I’d stashed in my trunk, to neutralize all the powder. There, I thought as the water drained down into the earth. Clean slate. There was more than one way to vindicate Elias’s death. I’d get a haircut on my way back to the house, work on my résumé while I watched the game and Sunday drive down to D.C. to put out some feelers. Watching all that basketball had filled me up with that miserable feeling of being estranged from the place where I belonged, and wanting to get back there felt like the most important thing in the whole world right then. More important even than what I’d sworn to do.

  Jill was super-enthusiastic about me driving down to D.C., even volunteering to call me in sick at work so I didn’t need to be bothered. The Terps had lost the second-round game by then, but once I got down there I was so happy to see College Park that I didn’t even care. That first night, rolling into town at 9:00 p.m., I got a room at a motel up the road from campus—a place called the Mustang Inn. An orange horseshoe-shaped sign marked it from the road, and it had a reputation, which is how I knew it would be the one place I could afford to stay. I kicked off my sneakers and stretched out on the bed, had a cigarette and mulled some things over. I was back, finally, but I was an outsider now. In my absence this place had kept moving, and if I wanted my membership back I was going to have to fight my way back in.

  Next morning, I cleaned up as best as I could under the lukewarm shower and took the Metro down to Capitol Hill, carrying my messenger bag full of résumés. All morning I talked to front-desk people and managers, and all morning I fought frustration that my game seemed off somehow. Before, it had been easy to talk my way into meeting with people much higher up the food chain than these. Lunchtime rolled around, and I ducked into a fast-food place to take a leak. While I washed my hands I stole glances at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out the problem. I was all ready to blame the usual things—lack of a tan, small-town haircut—when I realized what it was: I looked desperate. They could see it in my body language and in my eyes, hear it in my voice. Realizing that, I felt disgusted. How many times had I snickered at people like that myself—men talking to the candidate, trying to sound cocksure but coming off hopeful and needy; women who sidled up acting flirtatious but showing the wrong kind of hunger in their eyes. I couldn’t stand thinking that had been me all morning.

  I bought a cup of coffee and was about to walk back out when I saw a group of people heading into the deli across the street. There were five of them: a guy from my old street hockey group, a campaign volunteer named Kelly I’d hooked up with after I drove her home from the office one night, a guy and girl I didn’t know, and Drew Fielder. It was the deli where we normally got lunch most days, all of us on Bylina’s staff. I watched them all walk in and gradually sit down at a big table by the window, leaving two of the guys up front to order. Fielder sat down with the girls, who were laughing and chatting together about who knows what. The hollow feeling I’d fended off the night before came back full-bore. The old-Cade part of me itched to walk across the street and say hello—schmooze and network, ask about job openings, establish connections. But I couldn’t do it. I’d just seen what I looked like right then, and I didn’t want them to see it, too, Fielder especially. He’d give me shit about where’d my tan go, was that cow barn he smelled, how was the little woman these days and had I heard how Stan was doing lately.

  My stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten since the drive down and knew I had to be hungry, but I didn’t feel like eating, and anyway I barely had enough cash to get a cheeseburger. So I just watched them through the window for a couple minutes, then slid out the door and hurried back up the street to the offices I hadn’t hit yet. I tried to psych myself up to project confidence, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. And after another hour of that I got back in my car and headed back toward 295 North. God knows I didn’t want to go back to New Hampshire, but it was obvious enough I didn’t have a life in D.C. anymore. Everyone I knew had moved on, and here I’d vanished from their minds without a trace, as if I’d never even mattered to begin with.

  * * *

  It wasn’t any mystery how I’d gotten to this point, and it didn’t all have to do with Elias. Even after Jill and I moved in with my folks, even after TJ was born, I was completely bound and determined to come back to school the next year. And then TJ got the first ear infection. And the second. And the third. Every time it happened we had to throw another wheelbarrow full of money onto it, as if it wasn’t bad enough already that we had the bills from his birth. I’d gotten some money out of my folks to pay for that, but I couldn’t keep asking them, and then they dropped the bomb on us about the surgery. Driving away from D.C., I thought about it nonstop, and the whole thing made me feel gloomy as all holy hell. Between the debt I was carrying and how shitty I’d felt since my brother died, it seemed impossible that I would ever pull it together enough that I could come back to where I belonged. I’d try to distract mysel
f thinking about something different, but every time I drifted back, my brain wanted to crawl off to the corner and curl up in a ball. So I turned my mind to the subject I’d tried to keep it off lately, ever since I’d cleaned out the shed and tried to make good on my promises to Jill. I started thinking about Piper.

  At the funeral she’d told me she was at the University of Vermont. A little bit of internet searching had informed me she was the president of a service group that did Christmas in April and Harvest for the Hungry and those types of things. It gave me a pang to see that, knowing that she might be impressed with the career of service I had ahead of me, if I’d still had it. At first I told myself I was just curious what she’d been up to, but in no time at all she had taken over my brain. At work, when I wasn’t watching basketball, I daydreamed conversations with her. Driving through Frasier, past all the familiar spots, I mused over the high school memories. And more and more, my thoughts had been drifting to her when I was with Jill. It wasn’t personal and it wasn’t even deliberate. I’d be making love to Jill, letting my mind wander to buy some time, and then Piper would get in there like smoke drifting in around a door.

  As I came off the New Jersey Turnpike onto 95, I batted around which way to go, then took the exit toward Vermont. I didn’t think too hard or too deeply about it, just merged right. And then I kicked the radio volume up and didn’t think about much at all for the next few hours. It was as if I was finally able to turn my brain off, maybe because it had gone into total shutdown mode, like nuclear power plants do when a catastrophe is looming.

  * * *

  It was late evening when I pulled up in front of Piper’s dorm building. I knew it was hers because I’d stopped in the Student Union and looked her up in the student directory at the front desk. That’s where I was that day: desperate in the job search, a stalker in my downtime. You’re really hitting rock bottom today, Cade, I’d told myself as I flipped through the directory, but of course I still had a long way to go.

  Sitting there outside that old stone building, I knew she might not even be in there at all. But I didn’t care that much. Didn’t get out of the car and try to hunt her down. All I wanted to do was sit there and look at the things that were familiar to her. The giant oak. The light pole with the Ramones bumper sticker plastered to it. The fat guy in a trench coat with a head of wild, curly hair, walking out of her building and then, later, back in with a plastic grocery bag. I wedged my knee against the dash and smoked my last few cigarettes one after the other, watching for her, drinking in her world. Men walked by, and I wondered if any of them knew her. I kept picturing her face the way she’d looked at the funeral, her eyes all big and somber and seeming to hold a complete knowledge of what I’d lost. But watching the students come and go from the dorms made me think about Jill and me, too. I looked up at the lights in those windows and thought about the people who must be up there together, careless and whiling away the time as if it was nothing. Jill and I had been that way once, and not all that long ago, either. Almost as soon as I met her, I fell so hard for her. I knew I still loved her the same way now, but I felt as though I’d set my feelings for her down somewhere and forgotten where I’d left them.

  Sometime after midnight I put the Saturn back in gear and drove the rest of the way home. When I finally crawled into my own bed, thanking God that TJ was in the laundry basket and not all sprawled out on my side, Jill wiggled backward and nestled herself against me. I kissed her on her shoulder and she made a contented purr.

  “How’d it go?” she whispered.

  “Fine.”

  “I’m sure it did,” she said. “You’re still the most handsome bastard in the world.”

  I managed to smile, and she slid her bare foot down my leg. As I made love to her, very quietly and with the last little bits of energy I had left after that bitch of a drive, I thought about the extra hours I’d spent away from her and TJ and all the extra money I’d burned up on gas. I felt lousy about it, but I was glad I still had enough of a human soul to recognize when I was being a selfish asshole. Little rags of it seemed to be getting sucked away into the black hole that had opened up in me after Elias died. I didn’t know how much longer what I had left would last me.

  The next night, after TJ and Jill had gone to bed, I got back to work in the shed. Now that I could forget going back to Maryland anytime soon—forget ever doing anything but scrape along enough to maybe stay just ahead of all the bills—there was no reason to hold on to the fantasy that I could lobby for change like a real person. I was never going to raise my hockey stick over my head while everybody cheered, coasting along on my skates under that blue sky, not ever again. That alone was a sore, open wound, and I was one shallow bastard that I felt that way.

  But where Elias had been screwed over—that was something that mattered. It was a mission I had—to state unequivocally that what had been done to him was unconscionable and corrupt and morally wrong. The fact that the fire of it still burned in me was a sign that I still had a human soul, too. And I wasn’t cheating on anybody in my heart when I kept that flame alive. On the contrary, I was keeping the faith.

  Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

  Chapter 26

  Jill

  A couple of weeks before the craft fair, Leela asked me to take her down to Henderson, south of where Cade worked, to buy supplies. Scooter, who had just come in the door from helping Dodge repair the rental house’s faulty dishwasher once again, asked if he could hitch a ride. Before I’d arrived in Frasier he’d had free use of Elias’s Jeep, and now he was reduced to bumming rides from all of us. I tried to be a good sport about it. He never complained about his circumstances, but I knew it was a tough life for him—reluctant to move too far from his grandparents’ nursing home, but unable to scrape together much of a living alone in this small town. He was lonely, and sometimes, watching him work with Dodge, I suspected he maintained the tenuous friendship more out of desperation than actual fellow feeling.

  He was quiet for the whole ride down, tipping little puffed apple crackers into his palm for TJ to pick up one at a time. Glancing at him in the rearview mirror—at his impassive face, at the light that glinted off his glasses and obscured his eyes—I mused over whether I dared to ask him if he knew what, exactly, my husband was up to these days. Ever since his last trip to Maryland, Cade had begun hiding in the shed again, night after night. Just a day earlier, as I cleaned out his jeans pockets before doing the wash, I closed my hand around a dozen aluminum nails. I had stood there in front of the washing machine, staring at them in my palm, and wondered if I even wanted to know. My mother had always said that denial was the most powerful force after God, and I felt the undertow of it then, trying to drag the unnerving suspicions from my consciousness and tuck them away in a nice dark spot where they belonged. It was like the pull of sleep.

  I dropped Leela off at the craft store, then rounded the corner and pulled up at the storefront for the mom-and-pop hardware store housed on the first floor of a crumbling Victorian building. Before he could get out, I said, “Come sit by me a second. I need to ask you something.”

  Cooperatively—in his easy Scooter way—he climbed out and then back into the Jeep, settling into the passenger seat Leela had just vacated. I cut the engine and turned to face him, and he eyed me back warily.

  “You remember when we painted the porch that day?” I began. “How you told me you were worried about Elias?”

  He nodded.

  “And it turned out you were right. And you came to me because you didn’t think the rest of the family was picking up on it.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, now I’m coming to you. I’m worried about what’s going on with Cade. He promised me he wasn’t building bombs, and now he’s back in the shed again all the time. Just like after Elias died.”

  He hesitated. “Did you look in the shed yourself?”

  “He’s started using the padlock. I don’t know the code.”

  Scooter sh
ifted in the seat. He glanced back at TJ hammering against the seat back with the soles of his tiny sneakers. “He and Dodge have been talking a lot,” he said. “I think they’ve got something planned.”

  His words should have come as no surprise, but I felt the squeeze in my chest even so. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. They talk about all kinds of things. Cade’s so pissed about Elias, and Dodge just feeds it and feeds it. I don’t even think Dodge feels that bad about what happened, truth be told. I think he just likes that he can puppet Cade by talking about it. But he still talks real big about how it was an injustice done to him and they need to settle the debt.”

  “But what are they doing? What does that even mean?” I made a helpless sound, a humorless half laugh. “Should I grab my kid and run? Or what?”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. Olmsteads are never real clear on what they’re actually up to. Trust me, I hear stories from the Vogels.”

  “Well, will you tell me if you do hear anything? Promise me you will.” He looked uneasy, and so I leaned in closer, dropped my voice. “I promise not to lay blame on you. And if you trusted me back then, I ought to be able to trust you now.”

  He replied with a slow nod. Then he said, “If you need to get away from the house, go to the other Olmsteads. Randy and Lucia. You can trust them. They’re good people.”

  I squinted at him in surprise. “How would you know?”