Heaven Should Fall (4 page)

He shrugged.

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a reply.” I snatched the delivery bag from the table and stuffed it into a garbage can. As I bustled around angrily he watched with a bemused detachment that unnerved me.

“You know why I admire Cade?” he asked.

My shoulders twitched. “Because unlike you, he has principles?”

“No. That’s not why.” His voice disdained me. “Because he’s so fucking ambitious.”

“Thanks,” I said icily. I saw now exactly why Cade detested the guy so much, and felt shamed by my naïveté. “I’ll pass that on to him when I tell him about this whole conversation.”

“If you want. He’ll be sorry you didn’t take me up on it. He wouldn’t admit it, of course. But he’ll wish you’d just done it and kept your mouth shut about it.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Cade’s not like that at all.”

“As if you’d know,” he said, “when it’s all been sunshine and rainbows and snuggle sex for the two of you. I’ve been on the campaign trail with him, and I know a little different. Let me tell you, Jill. You don’t know a guy until you’ve seen him under pressure. Cade’s like everybody else. He only cares about one thing.” He held up a single finger.

“That’s the stupidest cliché ever.”

“Not sex,” said Drew. “Recognition.”

I hurried back to Cade’s room, dressed quickly and headed back across campus to my own dorm. The sidewalks were deserted. I thought of Cade sitting around his living room with his parents, his brother and sister, and seethed at both him and Drew. Here I was alone on Christmas Eve, hurrying away from the leering creep to whom I had afforded benefit of the doubt, all because Cade wanted to avoid the embarrassment of me meeting his brother-in-law. My messenger bag beat against the side of my coat, and I breathed into my hands to warm them. I knew what would sneak in just behind this anger: self-pity. That was how I would spend Christmas, and the next year I would dread the holidays all the more, remembering how miserable this one had been.

It doesn’t have to be that way,
I thought. I jogged up the steps to my building, tossed a few things into my overnight bag, tugged on the hoodie Dave had just mailed back to me and headed out to my car. I thought about calling him, but it was late already and I didn’t want him to feel he needed to wait up for me. I had a full tank of gas and a key to my old cabin, and I would find him in the morning. He wouldn’t mind. Dave never did.

* * *

In the few photos I have of my mother and me together, it’s easy to see we don’t resemble each other at all. She was fairly tall, with honey-blond hair that kinked into unmanageable curls when the weather grew the least bit humid. Despite her coloring, she had an Italian face—a regal nose and long eyes, a smile that appeared to store a secret. Sometimes I wondered if she had hoped for a miniature version of herself, rather than the baby daughter she received—one destined to be fine haired and button nosed, with eyes so round as to seem perpetually surprised. Even as a teenager she had looked like a
woman,
while long into college I still had to pull out my driver’s license to be allowed into R-rated movies.

She never voiced the truth we both knew: that I looked like my father. It had to be true, because I resembled her family not at all, and yet she would never tell me who he was. Around the age of eight I entered a stage of nagging her with questions: what was his name, his job, where did he live, did he know about me. She brushed them off or changed the subject, until finally, when I was twelve and began asking again, she gave me her first sort-of answer.

“If you want to know the truth, Jill,” she said, using that wry monotone that never meant anything good, “I wasn’t in a very good place when I found out I was going to have you. And once I knew you’d be joining me, I wasn’t about to go back to that place to see if anybody wanted to tag along.”

I understood her meaning—that she had abandoned him, not the other way around. I stopped asking her after that; I knew enough about addicts by then to grasp that whoever he was, wherever he was, he was sure to disappoint me. And it had to be bad for him, because my mother was not one to assume someone was beyond hope. Padding around in her panty hose, her curly hair up in a messy bun from a long day at the office, she would pull the extra-long phone cord into the one bedroom and shut the door when one of the women she sponsored in AA called. If the call went on for a long time I would turn out the lights, make up the futon and try to sleep. Always I would overhear her calming and definite voice, and even though I knew she was handling a crisis—someone’s sobriety on the brink of failure—the sound of it would lull me easily to sleep. She was a sure guide, knowing the route through every situation. Eventually she would slip back out, hang up the phone in its cradle and lie down softly on the other side of the futon, because this bed was technically hers. Some nights I would move to my bedroom, but usually I feigned a deep sleep so I could nestle near her warmth all night, like a chick beneath her mother’s wing.

Sometimes now, when her absence became less bearable, I would imagine those moments with her until the line between reality and memory seemed almost to disappear. In a warm bed, with my eyes closed, it was so easy to imagine. But even then there was a bittersweet edge to it, because for all my belief that she and I were inextricably connected to one another, at the critical moment it proved not to be true at all.

On that day, the day it happened, I was rushing to class—I had lingered too long over my lunch in the Student Union, browsing through my notes for the midterm that was now only ten minutes away. As I hurried up the stairs, I pressed through a crowd gathered around the two televisions suspended from the ceiling in the entryway. They were riveted on some news broadcast. For only a second I glanced up at it—a stretch of red desert, the wreckage of two small planes, an excited voice-over—before squeezing between two students and pushing out the door. It would be hours before I checked my voice mail and found the message from the police in Las Vegas, requesting that I call immediately.

I had spoken to my mother only the day before. I knew she was in Las Vegas, finally taking a well-earned vacation now that her only child was away at school—a girls’ weekend with a couple of friends from AA. When I’d called her she sounded breezy and excited, telling me about the shows and the buffets, the tour of the Grand Canyon they planned to take the following day and how she should have done this years ago. I’d caught the glow of her euphoria and mirrored it back to her, enthusiastic on her behalf and envious, in a good-natured way, of the fun. She told me that the next time, she’d take me with her, and wished me luck on my midterm before dashing off to what sounded suspiciously, from her vague description, like a Chippendales show. If she had mentioned the Grand Canyon tour would be by small plane, I hadn’t paid attention. And so when I saw the flash of the television screen, heard them say
Las Vegas,
I had only the briefest moment of thinking
my mother is there
before the thought followed,
but that’s not her
.

Before it all happened I would have been certain that, in such an event, I would
know
. A sudden feeling would arrest me, a sense of disturbance or perhaps even a premonition, and I would scramble to call her to discover what was wrong. Never would I have believed that I would sense nothing, that I would look up at the very scene of my mother’s death and hurry along to my next class, utterly ignorant. The guilt that came along with it stalked me, uninterrupted, for a year. I’d pushed on through the semester believing that it was what my mother would want me to do, but even then I nursed the suspicion that I had a lot of nerve to assume I knew what my mother would think or want. The image of those two wrecked planes, having clipped each other and fallen simultaneously to the earth, lingered in my mind like the flame of a vigil candle. Even now it remained there, flickering in the background somewhere, always. It was as if I believed that by holding it in my mind, I could make amends for my indifference to it at first sight.

That year, Dave had insisted I come to Southridge for the holidays rather than spend them alone. It had turned into a tradition-by-accident, as every year circumstances dropped me there, and this year was no different. When my car emerged from the trees that pressed closely against the road I saw a single light on in the main lodge, in spite of the fact that it was two in the morning on Christmas Day. I thought I would slip past, drive up the side road to my cabin. But then the storm door swung open and Dave stepped onto the porch, looking wary at first, then smiling.

* * *

On Christmas Day, Dave and I strapped on snowshoes and hiked out into the forest. The gray clouds sent down an occasional riot of flurries, and between that dark sky and the blanketed ground the world seemed to be holding me like a firefly between two hands. In silence I followed Dave down the trail we both knew. His green jacket and dark hair collected a dusting of flakes that melted slowly, and his hiking pole made a steady
chunk
against the buried ice as we moved ever deeper into the woods.

He stopped in a clearing I knew well. Hidden under a drift was a campfire ring; the fallen tree was a place to sit, as were the two slabs of stone nearby. In the summer months the staff came out here to spend time together, away from the fire pit closer to the lodge that was used nightly by our guests. Nearby was a waterfall that created a pool to wade in on the hottest days, but in the winter it ran dry, and the silence of its absence confused my ears like a distant hum. Through a break in the trees I could see the mountains—the ski trails twisting down the north face, the march of the lifts uphill, the little buildings dotting the peak. But this place felt a world apart from the comfortable resort life. The longer I stayed in college, the more I suspected that I belonged out here instead—not just as a summer job until I earned a degree that could secure me something better, but for good. When I had agreed to marry Cade, even as I said yes to him, this was the thought at the back of my mind—
but how will I live in the place I love?
I told myself it was a petty concern, but the truth is there’s no way to talk yourself out of the concept of
home
. I loved the quiet here, the distant sight of sailboats drifting on the lake in the summertime, the way the mountains framed the sky. The little log cabins were easy on my eyes, and the framework of life felt so simple and unencumbered by a tiring menu of choices. I’d believed, in the romantic, girlish way, that it was worth giving up anything for the sake of real love. But even now I sometimes wondered,
which
real love?

Dave pulled off his gloves and flexed his fingers, then blew into his hands. He nudged me with his elbow and lifted his chin to indicate the woods beyond. Two does stared back at us, their ears alert and tails high. The smaller one eased and nudged a patch of brush for a moment, then followed the other as she bolted into the forest.

“Jill, I’m going to be honest with you,” said Dave.

The sound of my real name spoken by him jarred me to attention.

“I think you ought to think hard about Cade,” he continued. “I know—you’re giving him a pass on this one because you understand about somebody being embarrassed by their family. I remember how your mom felt about her folks, so I know where that comes from. But if Cade felt like he had to choose between them and you, I think he made a bad decision.”

“That’s not it. He doesn’t want me to have to deal with all their drama, is all. He means well.”

He turned his head toward me and squinted, as if trying and failing to see things the way I did. “He’s been with you a year now. You told him you wanted to go, and he knew you didn’t have anyplace else to go, either.” Dave shook his head. “In my opinion he failed a loyalty check, and that means something. You deserve to be with somebody who has more empathy for you. Somebody who’s always on your side.”

I shook my own head slowly, but Dave wasn’t saying anything that hadn’t already crossed my mind. I didn’t want to hear him speaking it aloud, and so I said nothing. Because for over a week now I had been waiting for my body to give a sign that everything was ordinary—that our long Thanksgiving weekend at Stan’s had left us with a romantic memory and not an immediate problem. I’d postponed taking a pregnancy test because I feared the answer, and dreaded the possibility that Cade would receive the news and leave me behind on Christmas anyway. That would be more than I could bear. My mother had taught the women she sponsored about taking a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves to figure out who they really were; it was the Fourth Step officially, and a good idea for anybody, she often said.
Know what you are capable of. Know what stands in the way of your moving forward
. I had done that, and found myself sorely lacking. I wished I had my mother’s courage, but when I looked inward all I saw was the fear of finding myself in her situation, alone.

“It’s getting darker,” I said. The temperature was dropping and the air felt sharp and clear, with the smell of new snow enlivening it. “We should go back.”

“Don’t be mad at me. I’m just trying to look out for you.”

“I’m not mad,” I told him, and it was true. After this week, once Cade was back, we could let the situation unfold in an organized way, unimpeded by his brother-in-law. I wasn’t afraid that Cade would shirk his responsibility. I only feared that I would decide he was unworthy of it, and if that was the case, I didn’t want to know.

Chapter 4

Cade

It’s not as if it was the first time this had happened to me. Senior year of high school, barely more than a month after I lost my virginity, my girlfriend Piper pulled me aside during open lunch in the courtyard and told me she was pregnant. She always wore a lot of eye shadow that made her eyes look huge, and so all the fear in them came right at me.
Do something, Cade
. There was some accusation in there too:
you promised
. But what did I know? I was seventeen. Of course I’d thought it would be fine to have sex. I would’ve sworn to her I could beat Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France right then if I’d thought it would help me close the deal, and I would have believed it, too.

I’m not sure what my excuse was at twenty-one. Overconfidence: it’s a problem. It’s probably why, when Jill came to me and told me
she
was pregnant, I took it in stride. Part of me was definitely freaked, but by then I’d spent so much time knocking on doors, talking up candidates, that my gut reaction in an uncertain situation was to project total confidence. Here Jill was caught in this fight-or-flight response between hightailing it to some camp in the woods or else to the abortion clinic, and I’m all, hey, it’s gonna be great! I’ll teach the kid to play hockey!

It definitely wasn’t like that when it happened with Piper, when for the first few days I was in denial, mulling over all the reasons it wasn’t even possible, along with these spikes of cold-sweat, hyperventilating panic. I’d envision this showdown in the living room with my folks, my dad grabbing me by the collar and shoving me up against the wall like he used to do with Elias, my mom all stoic, but radiating utter disappointment. After about a week I couldn’t take it anymore. I drove down to the U-Store-It to talk to my brother alone. I didn’t know who else to go to.

When I got there the parking lot was empty except for Elias’s green Jeep, which was a relief. If he’d been driving the van I would have suspected my brother-in-law, Dodge, would be there, too, but the Jeep was Elias’s own, and he didn’t want Dodge Powell to so much as breathe in the smell of its air freshener. I parked next to it and went around back to find him. The storage units were basically garages, three sets of four arranged in a U shape around the little office building. We had this one customer who kept a weight bench and a full set of weights in his. Lately Elias had taken to driving down there and letting himself into that unit with the master key so he could lift weights. It went against policy, and if he ever got caught either by Dad or Dodge or the customer, he would have been in trouble. But Elias was nineteen and kind of in a “fuck it” stage at that point. He’d graduated high school a year before and had been working with Dodge ever since, managing the U-Store-It, and since then he’d gotten a lot quieter—part Clint Eastwood, part serial killer.

Sure enough, I found him in the last unit on the right, lifting. He was lying on his back on the bench, with an impressive amount of weight on the crossbar. His shirt was hiked up and under it, his gut was jiggling with every pump of the bar. Elias’s body was like one big temper tantrum. If Dodge brought home doughnuts one Sunday, Elias would eat as if his own execution was the next day, and I swear he’d go up by five pounds overnight. But now that he’d taken to secret weight lifting, in no time he was bulking up like the Incredible Hulk. Unfortunately it still had all the doughnuts on top of it, so mostly he just looked fatter.

He clunked the bar back in place and sat up once he noticed me there. It’s not as if I ever dropped by just to say hello, so he knew something was up. He fanned out his shirt at the front—it had a big V of sweat down it—and asked, “You need something?”

“I got a problem, man.”

Now, Elias was a good guy. He was the guy you called in the middle of the night if you snuck out to see your girlfriend and then inadvertently locked yourself out of the house, or if you needed an emergency ride back from, say, Massachusetts, or had to borrow fifty bucks. Stuff like that didn’t shake him. He’d just go. And so it surprised me when he shot me this
glare
. The kind where a person’s eyes look to be two different sizes and one of them is twitching underneath. He got up and started yanking weights off the bar.

“I’ll bet you do,” he said. “I sure as hell bet you do.”

For the life of me I didn’t know what was up his ass. Mentally I went over anything I might have done wrong to him lately, but nothing came to mind. Whatever it was, I figured he had to be on the wrong track, so I said, “Piper’s pregnant.”

“Oh,
I
know.”

That
was unexpected. “No, you don’t. How would you know that?”

“A friend of a friend told me.”

“Who?”

“None of your business.” He clunked the weights back on the storage bars.

Asking more wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I gave up. “I don’t know what to do. I’m completely freaked.”

“Shoulda thought about that before you nailed her, shouldn’t you?” The bench was between us now, and even though he was standing normally his bigger arms made the stance look threatening. I stood there feeling all sheepish, and his face shifted to this look of total disgust. “Fuck you,
Cadey
,” he said, using Dodge’s asshole nickname for me. “Fuck you sideways.”

By then I didn’t know what to say anymore. I’d sort of figured out what his reaction was about, but I didn’t know where to go with that. I didn’t know where to go at
all
. There were a lot of boxes lying around, and I sat down on the closest one behind me and planted my elbows against my knees, dropped my head down and started to cry.

“Jesus Christ,” said Elias. No chance was I going to look up at him, but I could feel him standing there looking at me, stuck on what to do. When he was much younger, eight or nine at the most, our father used to come down
really
hard on him for crying. He’d shove Elias down into a chair and bend over him, screaming himself hoarse, one fist up all threateningly, like someone about to beat a dog with a newspaper.

Elias came around the bench and sat on the box next to me. All I could see were his shoes, beat-up sneakers stretched all wide at the bottom. I was still making little gasping, sniveling noises and wiping my nose against my shoulder. It was bad. Years later the memory still makes me cringe.

“What am
I
supposed to do about that problem?” he finally said. “I can’t unfuck her for you.”

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

“I won’t.”

“If Dad finds out—”

“He isn’t going to do shit to you. I’ll knock him out if he does. But you’re his favorite anyway. He won’t.”

“I just ruined my life.”

“Naw. Least it’s Piper. Worst thing that happens is you’re stuck with her—that doesn’t count as ruined.”

I didn’t say anything back, and kind of awkwardly he put his arm over my shoulders. He never hugged anybody, so that was a stretch for him. He didn’t have any real answers for me. There wasn’t anything he could do but sit there and assure me Mom and Dad weren’t going to kill me and bury me in the backyard. But he did that. And for a really, really long time I felt like shit about all that, because I knew—I
always
knew—that he loved her.

* * *

When I was home for Christmas, almost right away I noticed the hacked-up tree in the backyard. It was over by the barn. What had still been a giant oak when I’d last come home was now a four-foot-high pile of splintered wood, with these long raw shards sharp enough to kill a man sticking out in all directions like some kind of lethal haystack. I asked my mom, “What happened—that tree get hit by lightning?”

She shook her head. She was standing at the stove with the teapot, raising and lowering a couple of tea bags into it to steep them. “That’s Eli’s.”

“That’s Eli’s
what
?”

“His tree for when he’s mad.” She closed the lid, letting the tags and strings dangle down the side of the teapot. She nodded toward the back-porch windows and said, “Your father and Dodge cut off most of the limbs a few years back anyway, you know, because it had a disease. When Elias needs to blow off some steam he goes out there and he chops at it. Doesn’t bother me any. I wanted that tree gone years ago.”

I looked out the back window again and saw the ax wedged in a hunk that used to be a branch, off to the side, almost buried beneath the snow. We’d tried to build a tree house in that oak years ago when we were kids. “That’s a lot of steam to blow off,” I said.

She shrugged. “Olmstead men,” she said. Then she poured a cup and drank it black, without any sugar.

A little while later Elias came downstairs. He’d been locked up in his room all day, sleeping off a migraine. When he saw me he said, “I need your help with something.”

I glanced up at a motion behind him. My mother was pushing a big cellophane-wrapped plate piled high with Christmas cookies across the kitchen island. It had an oversize red bow on top.

“Need to run over to the Larsens’ real quick,” he said. “Be good if you could ride with me.”

The Larsens were Piper’s family. “Sure,” I said, and he shrugged on his coat and picked up the plate of cookies. The cellophane was bunched up so high it got in the way of his face.

“Take your car,” he said. “I don’t like driving anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Too many distractions.”

That seemed like a weird reason. In Frasier, New Hampshire, there’s really nothing but woods and fields and the occasional rotting house here and there. But whatever, I didn’t mind driving. It was only a couple of miles to Piper’s. When the house rose up along the road, a boxy white Victorian at the end of a long drive that curved uphill, Elias said, “Pull up on the shoulder a sec, all right?”

I parked on the gravel, right behind the family’s old fruit stand. The wood was gray, like driftwood, with a darker slush slopped up against the decaying boards on the bottom. You could still see the shadows of the painted watermelons, and the yellow letters, faded almost invisible but not quite, that read Fine Fresh Lemonade.

“How come you didn’t bring Jill up here for Christmas?” he asked.

“Dodge.”

He nodded. Looked out at Piper’s house, squinting. “You’re still engaged and all that?”

“Yeah. What, did you think I was going to try to move in on Piper?” He made a face but didn’t answer. “That one’s dead, junked and sold for parts, man. She’s all yours.”

“I just want to say hello.”

Sure you do
, I thought.

“You’re not going to feel awkward about seeing her, are you?” he asked. “After that stuff that happened?”

I shook my head. “’Course not. Maybe if she’d had an abortion I would. But a miscarriage isn’t anybody’s fault.”

“Maybe she was never even really pregnant in the first place.”

I shrugged. Sometimes I’d wondered that, too. One day she had a positive pregnancy test, and then another three weeks went by and all of a sudden she told me not to worry anymore, she’d had a miscarriage. I’d gotten used to living in despair over it and then ta-da, the whole problem was gone. It was as if someone had kidnapped me at gunpoint and driven me all over town with their boot against my neck and then, without warning, dropped me off in my own front yard. Except that the whole experience made things so weird between us that we broke up over the phone and never really talked much after that. It had made everything too heavy, too fraught.

“Probably not,” I said, for my brother’s sake. I knew it was what he wanted to believe.

I turned the car back on and pulled up into her driveway, and we crunched through the snow and up onto the porch. Elias rang the bell with one gloved finger, trying to hold that huge plate of cookies in both arms like a squirming calf. When Piper opened the door she saw me first, because the cellophane was blocking Elias, and smiled.

“It’s the Olmstead boys,” she said, noticing my brother under there and taking the plate out of his hands. “Aww, thank you. Come on in.”

We stepped inside and Elias unzipped his coat. The woodstove pumped out blazing heat that shimmered the air in front of it like a mirage. I stomped the snow from my boots onto the rug. Piper crossed the room to set the cookies down on the dining table. She still had a fine little ass, but not for me.

“Elias, you must have just gotten back,” she said. “How was it?”

“Not too bad,” he said. I cut a sideways glance at him. He’d had his thigh torn open down to the muscle by a piece of shrapnel, seen friends die, killed people. But around Piper it came out like an underwhelming vacation.

“Slimmed down a little, didn’t you?” she said, and he looked at the ground and chuckled even though getting her to notice that had been the sole reason he’d opened up his coat. I gave him a bemused sort of look, because this was as close as Elias got to pulling out his A-game. But then something in his face changed and when I looked over I saw a guy had come in from the back porch with his arms full of firewood. As he arranged it in the fireplace, Piper asked Elias about where he was working now (he wasn’t) and if he thought things had gotten better for women now that the Taliban was gone.
Latch onto that one
, I thought,
c’mon, dude
, because Piper was a curious person, the type who really wanted to know about international politics and women’s issues. I could see in her eyes that she was hoping for a substantial sort of answer. But Elias had shut down. He just shrugged and said, “Nothing’s ever going to get better there. They all just want to kill each other. Far be it from me to stop ’em.”

The guy got done kindling the fire and came over. Piper introduced us. His name was Michael. I was going to ask where he went to school, but then he wrapped his arm around Piper’s waist and said to my brother, “Army vet, huh? Thanks for your service.”

Maybe all siblings have this problem, but sometimes with my brother I might as well consult a Magic 8 Ball to figure out what’s going on in his head and other times it’s like I know everything. These tiny cues of his, they become like a code. As soon as that guy touched Piper I glanced at Elias, saw him looking at the guy’s hand for a split second before he zipped up his coat. “It wasn’t for you personally,” he said, and Piper laughed uneasily while Michael shot Elias an offended glare.