Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 5

Jill




Seeing Stan’s futon folded up and pushed against the wall finally drove the point home: Cade and I were leaving. Up until then I hadn’t even realized I had developed an attachment to the thing, as if it were a large teddy bear given to me during a hospital stay. In a way, it had been. The worst of my pregnancy-related illness—hyperemesis, the medical term for puking too much—had lasted only a month before Stan got spooked one night and dragged me to the hospital. Dead white girl in my living room would not look good for me, he had joked on the way. They hooked me up to a bag of rehydrating solution, kept me overnight and sent me home with a prescription for antinausea drugs. It’s possible I would have been a dead white girl if it hadn’t been for him.

During those weeks and the few that followed, I spent most of my time curled up in a nest of pillows with a bag of Starbursts and my mother’s copy of the Big Book from AA, reading inspirational quotes and stories from people who had turned their lives around. Stan thought I was nuts. Sometimes, propped up on a stack of pillows beside me and channel surfing as I read, he would glance over and shake his head before commenting about how wrong it looked to see a pregnant woman reading an addiction-recovery book. You remind me of those people on that show you always watch, he said. But it was pure comfort, all of it. Starbursts seemed to be the one thing I wouldn’t throw up. And from the Big Book I could cobble together a pep talk for myself, something that held an echo of my mother’s voice.

But as comfortable as I had been there, now was a good time to leave. As I grew heavier, the futon had grown less comfortable; I’d taken to napping in Stan’s bed when he wasn’t home, and it was awkward when he came stumbling in the door with a pack of half-drunk and cross-dressed friends after Rocky Horror to pass them in the hallway as I made my way back to the living room. All of them knew Cade and I were together, and I lived in fear that somebody in the group would voice a suspicion about me and Stan to him that would cause drama. I wasn’t concerned about Drew, because Cade was above listening to anything that came out of his mouth, but Stan had other friends Cade respected, and their judgment worried me. I could feel only relieved when, at the end of May, Cade admitted defeat with the summer-job hunt, told Bylina’s head of staff to call him the minute any job opened up and we packed our bags for New Hampshire.

The drive up to Frasier took twelve hours. The farther north we drove, the quieter Cade grew and the more grim his expression became. When he filled up the car in Massachusetts and I went inside to use the bathroom, I came out to see him resting his head against his arms on the steering wheel, like a child at a school desk.

I didn’t force the conversation. For all that Cade treated each toll road as another coin for the ferryman into hell, I was happy to spend the summer in New Hampshire. Dave had been so disappointed when I called to tell him I wouldn’t be back this year, and that I’d be graduating late on top of that, but there was no sense in brooding over what couldn’t be helped. I’d thought about my mother a lot in those past few months, trying to coax my confused mind to produce a little of her wisdom, and I was at peace with this decision. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it, my mother would have told me. At Southridge I would have just been a burden, too ungainly to perform my usual tasks, and any help I requested would have saddled me with guilt. But among family—and Cade’s family counted—it would be natural to ask and receive, because this baby was their own.

We crossed the border at the southern end of the state and drove through the Lakes Region, where Lake Winnipesaukee glittered between the trees and tall-masted boats clustered at docks that stretched far into the water. Cade looked singularly unimpressed with the scenery and drove along the gray highway in silence. His music selections grew darker as we crept farther north. The mountains loomed closer and closer; the woods grew more dense; the towns became farther apart and abandoned 1950s-era motels cropped up by the side of the road in numbers I had not imagined possible. We saw moose-crossing signs and the sheer faces of cliffs. Cade made a left turn onto a smaller road that passed through a faded town of Victorian structures; we passed a gas station and a sandwich shop, then a boarded-up bed-and-breakfast with a charred roof, then two miles of nothing. Then a house.

It was set far back from the road and flanked by trees, a sprawling and ancient white farmhouse with two lichen-flecked boulders marking the entrance to the long driveway. At first glance it seemed ordinary enough. The wooden siding was badly in need of paint, but the large kitchen garden at its side was neatly kept, and a gray barn was dilapidated but stable. An American flag flapped from a pole attached to the front porch, with a frayed yellow bow waving beneath it. A much smaller house built of cinder block stood a slight distance away at the edge of the forest. If the Olmsteads owned thirty acres here, I guessed at least twenty of them were wooded. The driveway turned from asphalt to gravel, then hard-packed dust, and here Cade stopped and jerked the car into Park.

Inside the house, two beagles began howling. Cade tossed his sunglasses onto the dash and twisted his body sideways to face me. For a long moment he said nothing, but the muscles in his jaw looked tense enough to snap. Finally he said, “Jill, tell me you love me.”

“Of course I do.”

“Just say it. Say, ‘Cade, I love you.’”

“Cade, I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He unclasped his seat belt and got out of the car. From the porch came the sounds of a banging wooden screen and general commotion, and then a woman stepped toward us, heavyset and in her thirties, wiping her hands on a dishrag. Her hair fell to her waist, and she wore a dress of smocklike calico.

“Cadey’s home,” she cried. I looked at her with some confusion. Too young to be his mother, too old to be his sister, I could not identify who this woman was in the scheme of the Olmstead family. She hurried to Cade and threw her arms around his neck, enveloping him in a powerful hug. “Praise God,” she said. “You made it here safe.”

He extracted himself from her arms and cocked his head toward the car. “Jill, Candy,” he said. “Candy, Jill.”

So this was his sister. I extended my hand, but Candy used it to pull me into her embrace. “We need another woman around here,” she said over my shoulder. “We’re outnumbered.”

Cade watched us with long-suffering patience. A trio of small boys, all shirtless, rushed out the front door and into the side yard, circumventing their mother. Cade mounted the porch stairs and I fell in step behind him, into a living room crammed with objects and looking as if it hadn’t seen an update since 1979. A faded sofa and matching recliner, strewn with multicolored crocheted afghans, bracketed a grungy braided rug. The television rested on a discount-store corner stand with several dust-flocked ceramic figurines on top. Above the sooty fireplace hung the mounted head of a deer, elegantly alert, surveying the poor scene before him. And despite a small fan in one corner of the room, the air was dense with the smell of cigarette smoke, both fresh and stale. Right away I could see that it would be a lost cause to try to keep clear of secondhand smoke. If I wanted that, I’d have to stay in the barn.

Cade’s mother, Leela, blonde like him and, like Candy, looking older than I expected, rose to meet me as I stepped into the room. She shook my hand and greeted me warmly, then hugged Cade before quietly following Candy out to the back porch, where they seemed to be in the midst of assembling an egg incubator. The bright light of a clear bulb flashed on and off.

“I’m home, Dad,” Cade said to a man seated in a leather recliner in front of the television. The words sounded more ceremonial than anything else; his father, after all, could not have missed him coming in the door. But Cade had warned me that his dad, Eddy, had been foggy since his stroke, and he looked at his father with a gauging eye, as if to determine whether he had gotten worse since Christmas.

“So you are.” But his father looked at me, not Cade. A cigarette burned between his index and middle fingers, the long ash on the end lingering precipitously. He wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt despite the warmth of the room, and his hands bore dark red patches, the color of dried blood, that seemed to originate beneath his skin. Cade had told me Eddy was in his late fifties, but to my eye he looked much older, and his voice was thick. His gaze traveled from my feet to my eyes and back again. “That’s your girl, huh?”

“That’s my girl.”

“I’m Jill,” I offered. “Nice to meet you.”

He nodded unevenly but didn’t offer his hand. Cade asked, “Know where Elias is?”

“In the den. Same as always.”

Cade circled around the back of the recliner and led me into the room behind it. The space was larger and airier—an addition that encompassed a modern-looking kitchen-and-dining-room combination, as well as a nook that contained another TV and a couple of chairs. In one of these sat Elias, whom I recognized by his features and haircut but who was otherwise strikingly changed. Gone were the hard stomach and muscled chest that had flaunted themselves even from beneath his sandy-beige T-shirt. In their place were a significant gut and soft pectorals, and he carried the weight in his face, as well. When I had met him in the fall, his forearms were notable only because of their strength and deep golden tan. Now both were covered in tattoos. I blinked at him and tried to match the image I remembered with the one in front of me.

Cade took my hand and guided me to follow him. He stepped directly into Elias’s line of vision before he spoke. “Hey, bro,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”

Elias looked up from the television. “Hey,” he grunted. He met my eye and said, “Hi, Jill.”

I threw him a warm smile. “Hey, Elias. Great to see you again.”

“Did Mom and Dad tell you?” asked Cade.

“Yep. You knocked her up.” He half grinned and flicked a glance toward Cade. “Good job there, buddy. You ever heard of Trojans?”

“Yeah. They don’t work if you leave ’em in the box.”

“They sure don’t. Jill, hope to God it doesn’t come out looking like me or acting like Candy’s kids. If it has to be an Olmstead, at least its dad came from the deep end of the gene pool.”

“If you say so,” I said, and Cade threw me a joking scowl that made Elias snicker. “He’s got endurance, that’s for sure. I can’t believe he makes that drive all the time. It’s long.”

“Not long enough,” Cade said under his breath, and his brother chuckled again. I followed Cade up the stairs to a bedroom sandwiched between two others. He closed the door, then lay down on the full-size mattress and rubbed his eyes. “I’d like to go home now,” he said.

“You are home.”

He groaned and threw both arms over his face. I glanced around the room, taking in the white walls decorated only with a large American flag, the plain childish furniture, the windows shaded by artlessly stitched homemade curtains. I peeked out between them and saw the three little boys running around in the yard. “So those are Candy’s hellions, huh?”

“Yep. Wait till you meet their dad. Hoo boy.”

“They look pretty wound up. Bet she’ll be glad to get them off to school on Monday.”

“They don’t go to school. They’re homeschooled. By Candy, no less. The girl who spells religion with a d in it.”

“At least it’s not part of the curriculum.”

“If you’re Candy, it is the curriculum. Wait and see.”

I let the curtain drop. “Where’s your parents’ room?”

He tapped the wall beside the bed.

“Wonderful.”

“You’re telling me. Elias sleeps on the other side, but he isn’t going to care, so we can move the bed to the opposite wall. Of course, that would probably scandalize my mother. But it’s not like she can pretend otherwise, with you pregnant and all.”

“True. Hey, what’s happened to Elias?”

“What do you mean, what’s happened to him?”

“He’s gained a lot of weight. And the tattoos.”

Cade shrugged. “Yeah, he’s gotten pretty chunky. But to tell the truth, that’s what he looked like before he joined the army, more or less. The shape he was in when you saw him before—that’s not normal for him. Hey, speaking of food—follow me. You’ve got to see this.”

I followed him back down to the first floor where he pulled open a hallway door that led to the basement stairs. Candy peered over from the kitchen and called, “Hey, Cade, you going down cellar? You want to bring me up a can of black beans? I need ’em for tomorrow.”

“Sure thing.” He sounded almost gleeful. As we descended the dark steps I could tell by the smell of it that this cellar must be finished and not earthen; that much was good, because low dirt cellars gave me the creeps. Then he pulled the chain for the light, and what I saw made me pull in my breath.

The entire wall that faced me, running the length of the house, was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves stacked with giant-sized cans of food. Each bore a dusty yellow label printed with a cornucopia spilling out with produce. Only the black lettering differentiated their contents. PEAS. BLUEBERRIES. CHEESE POWDER. POTATO PEARLS. ROAST BEEF FREEZE-DRIED. Six fifty-five-gallon drums, in a cheerful shade of blue, sat along the adjacent wall beside a chemical toilet and a stack of military-green sleeping cots. An old television sat on a wooden crate, and next to it, a camp stove and a large gasoline-powered generator.

“What is this, a bomb shelter?” I asked.

“Kinda-sorta. You see the gun safe over there?” asked Cade. He waved a hand toward a wall holding the brackets for at least a dozen hunting rifles, and to the side, a tall brown metal safe that must have held the rest of their collection. “If the army ever runs short, they know who to call. Actually, they don’t. Which I think is half the point.”

I turned and looked around the room in wonder. The walls and floor were finished with clean concrete. An entire section of wall was devoted to evaporated milk. Several shelves contained varieties of vegetables and fruits, while another seemed to contain only baking mixes: BUTTERMILK BISCUIT MIX, CORN BREAD MIX, FUDGE BROWNIE MIX. There were even cans labeled GARDEN SEEDS.

“Jesus.” I exhaled. “You guys are ready for the apocalypse.”

“Sixty thousand dollars,” said Cade.

I looked at him. “That’s how much all this cost?”

“That’s my best guess. Freshman year of college, when I was short on money, I got pissed off and sat down to work out what I figured they’d spent on all this shit. That’s the number I came up with. How screwed up is that, huh? I’m working my ass into the ground to pay for school, getting nothing from these people, and here’s where it all went instead.” He pulled a giant can from a shelf and held it up like an infomercial salesman. “So when Jesus comes back, we can all eat precooked bacon.”

“I can see why that would piss you off.”

“You better believe it.” He chucked the can haphazardly back onto the shelf, then walked the length of the unit until he found one labeled BLACK BEANS. “Three goddamn months and we’re going home. And by that I mean home to D.C. Because by then I’ll be ready to strangle somebody, and when that happens their nuclear bunker won’t do them a damn bit of good.”

“It’s kind of funny, though.”

He turned to me with one eyebrow up. “What, this?”

“Yeah, all of it. Storing up food, homeschooling the kids. We had people like that at Southridge—the ones who were convinced the government was going to come after them personally. We called them the PSNs. It stands for ‘paranoid survivalist nut jobs.’” He laughed, but I cringed inwardly at my bluntness. “Not that I’m calling your family that. Sorry.”

“No—fair enough. In my mom’s defense, I’m pretty sure she thinks this is as stupid as I do. But she’s not one to make waves.”

“So whose idea is it?”

“Mostly my brother-in-law’s. We always had a lot of food stored up, but it didn’t turn into a bunker until Candy married him. My dad thought it was perfectly reasonable.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The longer you’re here, the more sense it’ll make. Which is why we’re only staying for the summer. Hang around much longer and it starts to eat your brain.”

“Well, we could set up our bedroom down here, in the meantime,” I said. “Wouldn’t have to worry about noise coming through the walls, that’s for sure.”

He laughed wickedly and slapped me on the backside, and we hurried back up the stairs, the can of beans rattling all the way like a children’s toy.

* * *

The whole family was already assembled around the dinner table when Cade and I walked in. Leela, sitting at the opposite end of the table from Cade’s father, threw me a shy smile, and the family fell silent as Cade and I took our places. Cade bowed his head for the prayer, and I followed suit. The man who was evidently Candy’s husband, a tall and sturdily built man I had immediately pegged as a PSN like the ones I trained at camp, intoned a singsong blessing. This was Dodge, the King Jackass of the Universe who had caused me to spend Christmas fending off Drew Fielder’s slimy attempts at flirtation. The mere memory gave me a shiver.

“Tell your father about what you learned today, Matthew,” said Candy, breaking the awkward silence that followed the blessing.

Dodge loaded his plate with chicken casserole and passed the dish across the table to Cade, who looked at him with thinly veiled contempt. Matthew’s reedy little voice replied, “The Declaration of Independence.”

“What about it?”

Matthew squeezed his fork between both hands as he rolled his eyes upward in thought, crushing noodles and sauce through his fingers like Play-Doh. “Um…that it was wrote by President Thomas Jefferson to tell the world that we had gotten independent from all our enemies.”

“That’s right,” said Dodge. He forked in a mouthful of chicken. “Enemies like who?”

“Tyrants. Like the British and judges and foreigners, and the merciless Indian savages, and the Muslims.”

“Very good.” He nodded to Candy. “Nice work there, Momma.”

Candy beamed.

Cade took a long drink of his iced tea. Then he said, “I don’t think the Muslims were a big threat to the colonies at that time.”

“There were Muslims back then,” Dodge said.

“There certainly were,” agreed Candy. “The Muslims have been around since the time of the Jews. Ask Elias—he was just over there fighting them.”

“You want to straighten her out on that one?” Cade prompted his brother. Elias looked up, and Cade tipped his head imploringly. “Who are we fighting over there? The Muslims, or al Qaeda, or what?”

“The Taliban,” Elias answered. He picked around in his dinner with his fork and added, “And ignorance.”

“Ignorance?”

“People not knowing any better way.”

“See,” said Cade, “now, that makes sense. Let’s hope we’re making progress on that one.”

“We aren’t,” said Elias.

“You want to talk about enemies,” Dodge said, and jabbed his fork in the direction of the front window. “Drove down to the rental property today to fix the dishwasher, and they wouldn’t even let me in. Gonna put those people out on their ass, first of the month.”

“You can’t do that,” Cade told him. “There’s a process. They’ve got a lease.”

“Lease that says I’m the landlord. I can go in whenever I feel like.”

Cade nodded toward his father. “Dad’s the landlord.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Legally, it does.”

Cade’s mother stood up and lifted the iced tea pitcher from the center of the table. “Stop your arguing. Let’s not turn a nice supper into one of those TV programs where everybody bickers at each other.”

“So as I was saying,” Dodge continued, “they wouldn’t let me in. Girl there said her father told her a man has to be home before she can let me in. Don’t think I don’t know what that’s all about.”

Leela’s brow creased. “Nothing wrong with that, really. They’re religious, remember. Don’t they belong to that church down the road apiece? The nondenominational one?”

“Uh-huh. Randy’s church.”

I looked from Cade to his father and back again. Randy was the uncle they never spoke to because of some old argument about a gun club. But Cade only said, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m betting Randy’s been saying things. They never had any issue with me coming in before, and now all of a sudden they need the father home. Sounds to me like there’s been some trash-talking and murmuring going on. I don’t take well to that at all.”

Elias mumbled something, and Dodge looked over at him sharply. “What’d you say?”

“I said that’s goofy.”

Taking on an exaggerated posture of shock, Dodge leaned back and shot Elias a squinty glare. “Beg your pardon?”

“Chill out. It isn’t all that.” Elias chopped his fork around in his casserole, looking up just enough to catch Dodge’s eye with his own placating gaze. “That’s not Randy’s style, is all I’m saying. He wouldn’t go around gossiping about people. You don’t need to worry about it.”

Dodge shook his head. “You picked a strange place to stand up and defend that individual. But it’s a free country, right, Matthew?” His son nodded adamantly. “You can defend that cockwad if you like.”

“Dodge,” Leela scolded. “For goodness’ sake, stop it. First time we ever have Cade’s wife at our table, and what’s she going to think of us, with you speaking like that at supper? I’m sorry, Jill.”

“She’s not his wife,” Dodge pointed out. He didn’t bother to look at me when he said it. I glanced at Cade and he lifted his eyebrows in a silent I told you so. I might have felt irritated by the look had it not been so obvious that he was right about the guy. I could handle him, but Cade’s embarrassment made all the sense in the world now.

“She’s his wife in the biblical sense and that’s good enough for me,” Leela said. She caught my eye and wagged her head up and down. “You hear me, Jill? It’s good enough for me.”

I smiled. “Thanks.”

“Well, far be it from me to argue with the Bible,” said Dodge. “Pass the green beans over here, will you?”

The bowl sat in front of me, but he hadn’t addressed me directly, so I made no motion to pass it to him. For several moments he sat in expectant silence; the family continued to eat, and at last he stood and reached down the table to retrieve it himself. When I glanced up to see the shadow of Cade’s smile I felt Elias watching me, but when I looked at him he turned back to his dinner and said nothing at all.