Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 8

Jill




My mother’s cesarean scar was a jagged little ridge that ran from her navel to the top of her underpants, a slim vertical line that divided her abdomen in two. When I was very young she explained to me that usually the surgeon cuts the other way, in a crescent slung low beneath the belly, but when I was born the doctors needed to work quickly. They didn’t have time to be neat or to work with the contours of her body. I nearly lost you, she said. Now, as I stood on the children’s step stool before the Olmsteads’ bathroom mirror and regarded my rounding belly through the fading steam from the shower, I wished I had known to ask her more questions. What had caused the emergency? Had her life been in peril as well as mine? How had she felt, waking up after the chaos and trauma of an emergency birth, to find herself without a partner to worry over her and rejoice with her, without a mother to help her recover?

I yearned to hear her voice reminding me how lucky I was that Cade was with me. To counsel me on how to get through this without her. But then, if she were here, I wouldn’t need to know.

Be a girl, I thought, an order directed at my unborn child. Please be a girl. I ran both hands across my belly, strangely solid and newly convex beneath my taut skin, and imagined a daughter who would link the chain between me and my mother, helping me to understand who she had been, to repeat the wonders she had done for me and honor her for them. I wouldn’t know how to raise a boy; I would have to defer to Cade on everything I didn’t understand, and that encompassed so much that I wondered how the child would even feel like mine at all. Cade and I had already decided that I would choose the name for a girl and he for a boy; without any hesitation I chose Miranda, after my mother. It was a fair agreement, but secretly I wished to choose the boy’s name, too, so that no matter how much he emulated Cade, he would still turn his head at a name I loved.

I stepped down off the stool and pulled on my clothes—the jeans that still fit if I pushed the waistband down beneath my stomach, the radio station T-shirt that had once been relegated to the sleep-shirt drawer before its roominess gave it a new appeal. At least I had Leela now—not my own mother, no, but a woman who had raised sons as well as a daughter, who knew the pain I would be facing and might hold my hand through it. I had only a few months to build a relationship with her before the baby arrived, and since she was a farm woman I had a guess at how best to do that: to share her work. That would mean something to her.

I tied back my hair and tramped upstairs to Leela’s attic craft room. The large folding table was strewn with items Dodge had sold on eBay—oddly sized, often fragile knickknacks he’d collected from clean-outs of storage units the family owned. Once a year they seized the contents of any unit that was far enough behind on its rent and sold off the items one by one. In a larger community they would have held an auction for the entire lot, but here Dodge believed it more lucrative to sell things off one at a time. This year they had declared two of the twelve units abandoned, and so the craft room was cluttered with Hummel figurines, ceramic eagles, shot glasses and gaudy lamps. I’d offered to pack it all up for shipping, and I definitely had my work cut out for me.

But I didn’t mind. The craft room was a tall, vaulted space, with a ceiling fan to stir the air and open windows that looked out on the front and side yards; it felt like a refuge, and all the more so when I considered the smoky air and dark rooms downstairs. The walls were painted sky-blue, and all around the room, at the height I could reach on tiptoe, hung metal barn stars painted like American flags. These stars—large, sturdy and full of dimension—Leela painted, packaged and sent along with Dodge as he made his trips to the post office, mailing them off to customers around the country who bought them online. Most bore mottoes painted on strips of wood suspended between the stars’ two lowest rays—Glory Glory Hallelujah, or God Bless America, or Sweet Land of Liberty. If the customer requested, she attached a wired yellow ribbon, looped into a bow, no extra charge.

In the beginning Leela had seemed shy of me, giving me a wide berth and speaking to me only about what was necessary, but gradually she seemed to be warming to my company. After each morning of packing up eBay items, I began helping her with the craft orders by painting the mottoes across the stars she had otherwise completed. Candy sometimes doesn’t get them quite right, she told me in a conspiratorial tone, and I had to suppress a giggle; it was no big secret that her daughter wasn’t much of a speller. I was glad to have an easy way to make myself useful.

One warm afternoon I carried my box of stars downstairs and settled into the chair beside Elias, who didn’t acknowledge me. He was watching his usual fodder: a game show made up of contestants trying to cross a water-based obstacle course using small foam rafts, lengths of PVC pipe and giant rubber balls, narrated in crude double entendre. I had never once seen him crack a smile at it.

“You and Cade need to have a guy’s night out one day soon,” I said. “I think you both could use it.”

Elias gestured toward my chair as if it were a throne. “He could always come over here and watch Wipeout with me. Not like I’m a tough person to pin down.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing. You could both stand a little change of scenery now and then. And hey, you could do worse than to go someplace with Cade. Dodge is always saying he wants to get you to come out to the woods with them one day. Said he’d like to see you shoot.”

He chuckled. “Homeboy does not want to put a gun in my hand.”

“You load one every night.”

“That’s for security. If Dodge handed me one, I might take it as an open invitation.”

“No, you wouldn’t, Eli.”

He cut a glance in my direction, his eyes conveying a shadow of a challenge. Smoke drifted around his face like an apparition. “Try me. You know what I did over there?”

Over there was his term for Afghanistan. He referred to it often enough, but had never said much about the specifics of his role. “You were infantry, right? You went out on patrol and stuff like that?”

“Yeah, trying to keep the roads secure. Doesn’t matter whether you’re at the checkpoint or on the road—where we were, there’s IEDs all over the place. You might drive over ’em, or else a car comes up to the checkpoint with a suicide bomber in it, either way you’re f*cked. You wouldn’t believe how many of us end up in little bits the size of jelly beans blown all over Afghanistan. And people like Dodge and Scooter want me to come back from that and go out and shoot beer cans while they grill burgers. If that isn’t the stupidest shit on the planet, I don’t know what is.”

“Then you and Cade should go out somewhere. Maybe over to the quarry, right? Hang out there. Isn’t that what you always used to do?”

He cast a rueful gaze on the TV and dragged on his cigarette. “Ahh, the quarry. Good times were had by all.”

“They’re doing another clean-out tomorrow. I’m sure they’d be glad to take you along. I think it’s the last one for a while.”

He sipped from a can of beer, then shook his head slowly. Round one had begun, with an overweight young man in a life vest jogging in place and shaking his arms, getting ready to tackle a pendulum swinging high above the water.

“It’d be something to do. Break the monotony.”

“Spending time with Dodge isn’t breaking the monotony.”

“Oh, c’mon. They found some interesting stuff yesterday. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

At that, he snorted. I looked at him with surprise, and he said, “Grave robbing is more like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Profiting off others’ misfortune is dirty business. Somebody saved that stuff for a reason.” I opened my mouth to speak, and he held up his hand. “I know, I know, they’re in arrears, they ought to pay their bills. But when you go and sell somebody’s grandma’s antiques because they lost their job and put priority on feeding their kids, I think that’s dirty. Life’s hard.”

“Your family wouldn’t have been able to feed their kids if people didn’t pay their rent.”

“Sure. Some people deserve to have their shit sold off. Some people don’t care. I’m telling you what I think, is all. Just because it’s fair doesn’t mean it’s right. There’s such a thing in this world as mercy.”

Dodge thumped into the room, and Elias drained his beer. Once Dodge had left, he glanced at me and said, “You know he kicked out the renters, right?”

“The ones with the broken dishwasher?”

“Yep. Gave them forty-eight hours to pack their shit and leave, and now they’re gone. Completely illegal. All because he thinks Randy warned them that he likes ’em young. The truth hits you at the core.”

My paintbrush was sinking into the jar of blue, untouched. “You said you didn’t believe Randy said anything.”

Elias waved a dismissive hand. “Dodge’s looking for an excuse for a confrontation. He isn’t going to get it, not from Randy. What those renters ought to do is sue his ass, but they never would. People from Randy’s church aren’t too big on getting the government involved. Don’t think Dodge doesn’t know that.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yes and no. They want to live that life, then this is a part of it. Maybe they’ll turn the other cheek. Maybe they’ll stick up for themselves, and we’ll get a knock on the door one day. It’s their call.”

“Can’t go on like this forever, though.”

“You’d be surprised. Some things can go on an awful long time.”

He clicked up the volume by a notch and said nothing further. I sat beside him with my paintbrush and stars, keeping company. On the television, the chunky kid raced headlong toward the climbing wall, then was knocked from his perch by a boxing glove flying out on a mechanical arm. His arms pinwheeled in the air on his way down to the water. The announcers shouted, Ohhhhhhhh!

“You fat f*cker,” Elias muttered.


Cade

The quarry was at the end of a long road barely wide enough to hold a car. When they approached it back then—Cade and Elias, Piper and whoever else could fit into Elias’s converted bread-delivery van—broken chunks of asphalt rattled the tires. Now and then low-hanging oak branches brushed the windows, the leaves like aggressive hands. Then the land opened, the quarry lake came into view and Elias parked the van in the scrubby grass in the shade of the tree line. Ragged chunks of granite—some softball-sized, others large enough to stretch out on—littered the ground. A yellow knotted rope hung from a solid branch next to an outcropping of rock, high above the water.

They stripped down to their swimsuits in the shadow of the trees. Just past them lay the shimmering surface of the water, reflecting the treetops in a dark and lacy silhouette. Against it, the squealing teenagers in trunks and bikinis transformed into Indonesian shadow puppets. Treading water, slapping the surface in joyous half-drowning, then flipping like a dolphin and going under into the sudden thick silence. Cade moved through it like an eel. He loved the feel of his own physical symmetry, his resistant strength. Through some primitive sonar he sensed an edge, a wall, and he reached out and grabbed the narrow hip band of Piper’s bikini bottom, tugged. Her shriek penetrated the water, and he came up laughing, already ducking the swat of her hand.

On the ledge stood Elias, brown as toast from the sun, the Hawaiian flowers on his swim trunks blotched yellow and orange. Go, go. He heaved his arms back and then threw himself forward onto the rope, chest and stomach jiggling, and they loved him for it. The fat-kid smash into the water was epic. When Cade jumped in, nobody cared, but Elias drew a crowd. And then Piper scrambled up the rock, her body angular, a knife edge, her hair blunt-cut and threaded with summer blond. On the rope she was an acrobat. She flipped back and around, tucked and rolled, until she cut through the water long and lean and disappeared.

Disappearing: that was what Piper did. She lived down the road but left for months at a time on mysterious trips with her family, to summer camp, to ski. Once, when they were younger, she left for a year. She was never taken for granted. Elias loved her first. But her preferences were beyond Cade’s control, and Elias seemed to bear him no ill will when she singled out Cade for another kind of disappearing. Sometimes, together, they straddled the line between present and gone: on the shaded end of the quarry where a high subsurface ledge made the water shallow, there they could kiss and be ignored. But below the surface her hand worked down his trunks, and she plied him steadily, purposefully, until he came into the water in full view of every one of his friends, his brother, but of course they could not see a thing.

That summer they spent nearly all their free time with one another. Often they bought fireworks and, after building a campfire in the dirt-swept circle of the Olmsteads’ shooting range, set them off above the trees. On more than one occasion Elias singed his fingers and would hold them out, black tipped and smarting, for the girls to soothe with ice from the cooler. The range, deep in the woods as it was, hid everything. They drank whatever alcohol they could steal from the back of their folks’ top cabinets, then played squealing games of Duck Duck Goose, like little kids, around the fire. On one occasion, one of the other guys found a gun someone had left behind on the range. A box of ammo sat beside it, as though the owner had intended to target shoot but forgot about that particular weapon. Cade found a paper target without too many holes in it and clipped it to the pole. Then the whole group persuaded Elias, who was the best shot among them, to try to shoot out the bull’s-eye. He didn’t shoot out all the red in the center, but he hit it on the second shot.

Except Elias, they were all drunk on Jim Beam. Elias was heavier and could hold his liquor better. Cade got up and, jerking the sneaker from Piper’s kicking foot, climbed onto the stump between the two target poles. “I am William Tell,” he announced. He set the shoe on top of his head and added, “This is my apple.”

“It doesn’t smell like an apple,” someone shouted.

“Shut up,” Piper said.

“I cannot tell a lie,” he said, confusing his fruit legends due to the effects of the Jim Beam, and held out his arms for balance. “My brother Eli will shoot the apple from my head and we will all be saved.”

“From what?” Piper yelled.

“From the smell of your feet,” answered the guy who had brought the booze.

“Drum roll, please,” called Cade.

Someone thumped a rolling up-tempo against the cooler with his hands.

Cade looked at Elias, who stood, legs braced apart, at the shooter’s mark. He held the gun pointed at the sky, elbow bent, at the ready. “Aim true, brother,” said Cade.

Elias shook his head.

“Aw, c’mon,” Cade called, dropping character. “Straight through the middle. You can do it.”

“Didn’t say I couldn’t.”

“Hit the R,” suggested Cade. “Make it say, ’eebok.’”

Elias shook his head again.

Cade stumbled backward and fell off the stump, and they all laughed. Piper scampered over and collected her shoe. After a little while someone threw up in the bushes, and then they all went home.

There were more afternoons at the quarry lake, more nights that summer at the shooting range, although they never saw that gun again. One evening, driving home, Elias spoke up in the silence. The van was empty except for the two of them. The Eagles played low on the radio, and the fan’s gentle rattle thrummed from the deep interior of the dash. Cade, barefoot, watched the clouds cast moving purple shadows against the mountains. He felt thoroughly content.

“I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Elias.

Cade looked at him. “Do what?”

“You know. With her. In the water.”

Cade absorbed that thought. He exhaled through his teeth, scoffing. “I’ll do anything I want with her, anywhere I want,” he said. “You would, too, if you could.”

Elias said nothing. Kept on driving home.

Everyone knew Elias had loved her first.

But Cade felt no remorse. Not then. Not later. May the best man win. And the best man always did; that was why he was the best.

And Elias said nothing because he knew this about Cade, and loved him in spite of it.