Heaven Should Fall (29 page)

“What? Why?”

“It’s not safe for you to go out. They shot Dodge. Candy wants her boys, fine, but you’re not going anywhere. Not as long as they’ve got a sniper on us.”

So that was what he believed. I had no problem playing along. “But they’re not going to shoot us. It’s safer for everybody if TJ and I go, too. Why would you want your son to stay here if there’s a sniper on the roof? Just let us go, Cade. If they see you’re willing to be reasonable, they’re less likely to rush in on you.”

“And there’s less to stop them from shooting me if they do.” I looked at him in dismay, and he combed both hands back through his hair. “Sorry, Jill, but that’s where it’s at right now. You know I’m out of cigarettes? Fine frickin’ time for
that
to happen.”

Just leave anyway,
I thought.
Shove past him and run.
But I looked at the gun on his hip and thought better of it. I didn’t think he would hurt me or TJ, but I had never thought he would hold Drew Fielder hostage, either. “If I go, maybe I can negotiate for you better than anybody else can,” I suggested. “I’ve got more sympathy for you.”

He glanced toward me. I kept my expression neutral, but in the effort to do so I realized I wasn’t lying. More than anger, I felt pity for him. He could have been something wonderful, but here he was, whiling down the minutes that would end in him losing everything. Prison was going to be ugly for Cade. He was too good-looking and too easily cowed by another man’s will.

His phone buzzed. He looked at it, then handed it to me and sat on the floor, leaning back against the craft closet. I stared at the phone and then at him, and asked, “What am I supposed to do, answer it?”

“Yeah. I’m tired.”

I turned it on. “This is Jill.”

“Jill!”

The sound of Dave’s voice bewildered me. I hurried into the workroom and turned away from Cade. I couldn’t utter a response. Dave’s voice came on again. “Is that you, really? I thought I was going to talk to Cade. Are you doing all right?”

Glancing back at Cade, I gauged his reaction, but he only stared at the wall in a passive way. “I don’t understand,” I replied carefully.

“They’ve had me talking to him for a couple hours now,” Dave explained. “I got your email and then I saw the news, and so I called the police. They said sometimes it helps if someone with a connection to the family tries to help broker a truce, so they put me on. I’m trying to get you out of there. Is the baby all right? Are you?”

“We’re both here. We’re not hurt. Cade’s trying to process whatever just happened.”

“Yeah. They say they need him to be clear on the fact that they don’t know what the situation is with Dodge Powell, and they’re investigating it, but they don’t believe it was one of their men. They say they’re not in a position to retrieve the body. Do you know the condition of the hostage?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been up in the attic all this time.” At this Cade scowled at me. “What Cade wants…is to talk to a lawyer who will put together a good case for him.”

“Am I on speaker? Can he hear me?”

“No.”

“Good. What Cade
really
wants is for everybody to go home and forget this ever happened. In the end the choices are going to be that either he comes out or the SWAT team comes in. It’s a lot better for everyone, especially him, if he picks the first one. Tell me what it’s going to take to make that happen.”

I thought about the things Cade wanted. Not one of them sounded like anything that anyone could provide any longer. “I don’t know, Dave,” I replied. “If I did I’d tell you. He’s just tired.”

“Is that why he had you take the call? He’s still armed, though, right?”

“Yeah.” I looked at Cade again. “He could use some cigarettes. I think that’s what he wants.”

Cade gave me a listless thumbs-up.

Dave snorted with irritation. “Duly noted. Put him on the phone.”

I handed it to Cade, who clicked it off. Draping his arms loosely over his bent knees, he gazed up at the small round window, looking thoughtful and faraway. My stomach tightened with the fear that he was putting together how Dodge might have been shot just below that window. His back pressed against the door of the closet where the rifle still lay hidden.

He said, “Lay him down.”

“You mean TJ?”

“Yeah. He’s asleep anyway.”

I looked around the room as though seeking out a place to set him, but I was buying time, trying to discern Cade’s purpose. “I can’t,” I told him. “He’ll wake up if I take him off my back.”

Cade got up from the floor and, with gentle hands, braced TJ in the sling. I fumbled at the closure and loosened it enough that Cade could lift him. When he opened the closet door with his free hand, I caught my breath. But he pulled out a crocheted blanket from the shelf below the fabric bolts, shook it open and dropped it on the floor where he had just been sitting. Onto its folds he laid TJ, who didn’t stir. Then he stepped into the workroom, where I still stood, and closed the door so softly that the click of its latch made barely any sound.

“C’mere, Jill,” he said.

I didn’t move, but he came to me. He kissed me, working my shirt down over my shoulders as he unbuttoned it, letting his head drop to kiss my shoulder, my collarbone. I felt the warmth of his breath, the tip of his tongue, but as if from a great distance.

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he said, rasping a whisper. “I love you. And I love our son.”

His phone vibrated against the front of my thigh. He lifted me with one arm and set me on the worktable, then eased me onto my back. The worn wood pressed against the back of my skull and my tailbone, but that felt distant, too. From my neck to my thigh he ran his hands down my body, touching me as a blind man touches the face of a loved one, as if yearning to burn it into his memory.
Give him whatever he wants,
I thought.
He doesn’t care about getting out of here alive. You do.

His voice rose in frustration. “C’mon, Jill. Don’t be cold to me. I don’t want to feel like I’m raping you or something.”

My laugh was short and sharp. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to relax. Do you?”

He shrugged. His expression was entirely benign. He slapped his phone onto the table, then his gun, before unbuckling his jeans and letting them slide down. “Clear your mind,” he suggested.

I diverted my gaze to the space above his shoulder. Leela’s barn stars, each painted in a cheerful variation of the Stars and Stripes, marched across the wall just below where the roof vaulted. Here and there yellow bows stiffened by wire and starch curled beneath them, like fossils recalling a battering wind. I remembered, all at once, Elias singing “
Two Highways”
in quiet harmony, watching out the window as we flew past the deep woods, the last of his cigarette smoldering between two fingers. A terrible ache for him opened in me out of the clear blue. My eyes burned inside and a sob choked into my throat, but I held both at bay. Cade tugged down my shorts by the waistband, and I closed my eyes, but it only made my mind’s image of Elias grow sharper and more true.

I thought of how warm and broad his body felt when I rubbed his shoulders. Of the dense wall of muscle deep beneath his skin, and the way his hair bristled along his neck in a line so clean, and the smell of him that changed as I touched him. I remembered how he looked in the apartment that first day, stretched out on the futon. Even though I knew that was not the real Elias, only the perfect one that the real world could not sustain, I couldn’t believe the one in the easy chair had been the real Elias, either. I wondered if any of us had ever seen the real one, or if he was all soul, never finding a body to inhabit that could feel like a home to him.

Cade slipped a hand beneath my shoulders and pulled me up to kiss him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and moved willingly to the edge of the table. All the thoughts that my loyalty to Cade had held at a distance now flooded my mind, and that image of Elias fell over Cade’s body like a projection onto a screen. I felt no shame from it because we all knew—every member of this family—that the moment Elias died we dropped our shallow and insular battles and turned all our loyalty to Elias: to love and mourn him, to avenge and remember him, to imagine the life he might have lived and to carry it forward like a glowing ember wrapped in a leaf.

Once it was over, Cade breathed hard against my neck, and pressed his temple against mine, and said, “I need to get that guy on the phone.”

* * *

Opening the door was enough to wake TJ, and I attended to changing him while Cade got back to the business of negotiating with the police. As I fastened TJ’s new diaper, the lights suddenly cut out. The sky outside was overcast, and the attic instantly fell into shadow. TJ whipped his head back and forth, regarding his surroundings with large, nervous eyes. I made a few comforting noises and carried him down the stairs.

Cade was taking a seat on the sofa as we walked in, moving things around on the coffee table with a restless energy I didn’t like. The holstered gun was back on his belt again. No longer was he attempting to stay away from the windows, and he was smoking a cigarette that looked hand-rolled. A dozen gutted cigarette butts lay scattered across the coffee table, the obvious materials he had used to come up with the one he was smoking now. Across the shaded room he shot me a glance that looked almost resentful.

“Don’t know what the hell Candy did to him,” Cade said, “but he’s not looking real good.”

“Drew?”

He grunted assent. I considered asking more questions, then decided my knowing more wouldn’t help anyone. I crossed the living room on the way toward the kitchen.

“Where you going?”

“I need food for TJ. I’m all out of the snacks I packed in the diaper bag.”

“There’s too many open windows along the porch.”

“Well, what do you want me to do? The kid needs to eat. All he’s done is nurse all day. Everything in the pantry is dried stuff in those giant cans. Same in the cellar—”

“You’re not going in the cellar. No way.”

“Of course not, but I’m just saying, I need to get to the fridge.”

Cade gave the kitchen a long look. Then he said, “I got on the phone with them again—not the guy you know, but the first one. They asked about the condition of the hostage. I went down to take a look so I could tell them correctly.”

I waited for him to continue. “And?”

He gave a slow shake of his head, then looked up at me from where he sat. “Jill…this was Dodge’s idea. It wasn’t mine.”

I didn’t really believe him, but I nodded.

“If I go upstairs and put this gun in my mouth, you know what that accomplishes?”

“Cade
.
”

“Absolutely nothing. It’s the same thing Eli did. It’s like I put all this work and time and effort into doing right by him, and the whole time I was just circling the block. I can’t make any kind of grand statement now, like I meant to down in D.C. Can’t even kill Fielder with any fair reason, because Candy already did most of that job, so far as I can tell. That’d be like shooting puppies in a box.”

I winced.

“If I walk out of here with my hands up, they send me to jail. And Fielder, he’ll get the last laugh on that one, because I won’t make it two days before some big guy makes me his bitch. Basically I’ve got zero options.”

He took his phone out of his pocket. It was buzzing energetically, and turned in a slow spin against the wood once he set it on the coffee table. We both looked at it, and I said, “I think you should choose what’s best for TJ.”

He nodded. I walked into the kitchen and took an orange from the bottom drawer of the dark refrigerator. I sat TJ on the kitchen island and cut a small piece off the top of the orange with a kitchen knife, then pulled it in two and handed TJ a section before beginning to peel off the skin from the rest. He worked the orange section into his mouth, nursing out the juice, watching with interest as I peeled. His legs swung in a carefree way. It occurred to me that he was as oblivious to my anger and fear and sense of betrayal as I had been to my own mother’s suffering that day, but I loved him no less for it. I was glad he didn’t know, glad he could sit and eat an orange in the calm of the eye of the storm, and if I could have held things that way for him forever, I would have. For the first time since my mother’s death I forgave myself a little for walking past that television. I understood then that if her spirit could have guided me it would have marched me away from that scene, sent me about my business to keep the peace in my soul as long as possible.

And then a gust of air blew across the kitchen, light filtered in and I looked up to see the front door open. Cade racked the gun and stepped outside. The screen banged shut, and as I gathered TJ into my arms with a sense of great caution, several loud pops ripped the air. I dropped to the floor with TJ, holding him against my side as I crawled with the other arm toward the corner beneath the table. Shouts rang out, a chaos of voices peppered with more gunfire. I curled beneath the table, enveloping my son with my body in an embrace that all but crushed him. Boot steps crashed into the house, voices, the sudden sense of exposure and broken boundary. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and breathed in the cold smell of the stone floor, the muscles of my back steeled against the world beyond me.

That this was a rescue did not enter my mind. These were only strangers, Cade’s adversaries, invading our home.

A gloved hand fell against my side, and then I was dragged back against the stone, not moving from my position around the baby. TJ, his mouth no longer stilled by my sleeve, twisted his head upward and let loose with a furious cry. So close to my ear, it filled my mind. My thoughts and his scream became one and the same.

It was that cry that shook away my fear and thrust me forward into the next of what life held for me. The cry was the punctuation that acknowledged the terribleness of what had gone before, and gave it a stopping place past which I might believe things would be better.

I got to my feet, planting them against the stone. Someone had me by the arm. I shifted TJ to my hip, and as if to declare the Olmsteads had never claimed me, said, “I’m Jill Wagner.”