Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 11

Jill




That night, after my morning with Leela in the craft room, I lay awake feeling the baby tumble and kick inside me, jabbing its little feet against my diaphragm muscle in a slow jog. From downstairs I heard the clicks of a magazine being pushed into a gun, then the slide pulling back. Elias was up and settling into his routine. Sometimes when I heard him downstairs I’d think about how lonely I’d felt in the dark living room of Stan’s apartment, long after Cade had come and gone from his daily visit to me, lying there listening to the gentle clatter of the vertical blinds above the air vent, their movement letting in shards of harsh light from the courtyard lamps. If Stan was asleep in the bedroom alone, somehow the loneliness seemed to echo. I felt right only when he’d come out and sit beside me, channel surfing with the volume down low as I drifted off to sleep, resting his big heavy hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t Stan that I wanted, not especially; it was just the presence of another human being. The touch of one.

Go down and say hello, I thought. Make an excuse. You promised Scooter. I slipped out of bed and crept down the stairs, letting the boards creak once I reached the bottom two. I was 98 percent sure Elias wouldn’t do anything hasty with that gun, but that 2 percent gave me pause. He glanced over and nodded as I reached the landing.

I murmured a hello and got to work searching through the cupboards. I’d decided to make us a batch of Fudgies—a camp treat made up mostly of rolled oats, which we’d kept around in Olmstead-sized quantities, along with peanut butter and the scraps of chocolate from s’mores-making. In the kitchen I found no chocolate chips, but stuffed in the back of a cabinet was a stash of miniature Hershey bars; they might be Candy’s private hoard, but if so, I could claim ignorance later. As I moved ingredients to the kitchen island I caught the sound of a familiar voice from the television: Just be breezy, y’know? Abruptly I laughed, and Elias whipped his head around to look at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I like Kendra. She’s funny.”

“You about startled the piss out of me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” I abandoned the ingredients and came around his chair to watch the segment. “This is the one where she gets into the fight with the girl in the chow hall. I’ve seen it, like, twelve times.”

“I was just channel surfing. I hate this show.”

“Oh, really? That’s too bad. I love it. My mom and I used to watch it together all the time.”

“Your mom?” He shot a quick glance at me. “Never even heard you mention your mom before. I figured you didn’t get along.”

I shook my head. “She died four years ago this October. I try not to bring her up too much. People get uncomfortable hearing stories about people who are gone.”

“That they do.” He set down the remote, as if changing his mind about switching to a better channel. “How’d she die?”

“In a plane crash.”

“A plane crash? Shit.” He was quiet for a minute as I watched the show, leaning on one arm against his chair. “That’s why you moved in with us instead of your own people, then, huh?”

“Yeah. I don’t have ‘people.’ Her parents were alcoholics. I’m sure they died years ago, but anyway, I haven’t seen them since I was four.”

“Shit,” he said again.

I shuffled back into the kitchen and began peeling the waxed paper from a stick of butter. “We all have our traumas.”

“That we do. But most people’s don’t involve plane crashes. You get some kind of extra credit for that one. How old were you, then?”

“Eighteen. Too old to be an orphan, so no extra credit for me.” I set down my work for a moment and leaned toward him in a conspiratorial way, my hands resting on the edge of the kitchen island. “You want to hear the weird thing? I saw the clip on the TV at school while I was on my way to class—the wreckage of these two planes, they’d flown into each other—and I didn’t give it a second thought. I looked right at it. You’d think you’d get some kind of gut feeling when you see something like that, right? Or you’d have some sense of dread or that uneasy feeling that something isn’t right. But I got none of that. I just went about my business, clueless the entire day. That really screwed me up for a while.”

“Wasn’t your fault. So you’re not a psychic, so what.”

“I know, but since then I overcompensate a little. I see things like that on the news and I can’t shake the feeling that it must be personal until I can prove otherwise. One time, there was this avalanche near Deep Creek Lake, which is near the camp where I worked, and these two hikers died. I couldn’t get in touch with my friend Dave, the camp leader, so I drove all the way out there to check on him. Three and a half hours each way.”

He replied with a low, sympathetic laugh. “Are you serious?”

I nodded. “He thought I was nuts. But I was in college, and it was a Friday, so I had the time to spare. It turned out to be a good excuse to see him.”

Elias fell silent again, but there was an expectant feeling within the quiet, as if he wanted to keep the conversation going yet didn’t know what to say. I measured oats and peanut butter into a bowl, added in the butter softened in the microwave. After a minute or two he said, “You know it’s midnight?”

“Yeah, I know. I’m hungry. I’ve been eating like it’s going out of style.”

“You don’t show it. It’s all baby.”

“I hope so.” I watched as he cracked open another can of beer with one hand and took a sip from it. “What’s the shield tattoo for?”

“It’s my unit patch.”

“Were you pretty close with those guys?”

“Of course. You can’t not be.”

“You ever talk to them these days?”

He didn’t reply. The TV flickered with the scene in the chow hall. I said, “You know, you could probably meet people like that at the VFW, if you miss spending time with them.”

His voice was scornful. “I know that, Jill.”

“Sorry.” I dropped Fudgie mix by the spoonful onto a piece of waxed paper and slid the tray into the fridge. “My mom was a big advocate of group support like that. She was an AA sponsor.”

“That means she was an alcoholic, right?”

“One who didn’t drink anymore. She’d done her step work.” I nodded toward the beer can on the side table. “She would tell you not to mix that with Prozac.”

His laugh came out as a single note—a bark of surprise. “Guess you were the one who hung the bag on my door, then.”

“It’s no big deal. I was on it for a while myself.”

“I just started it a couple months ago. Scooter picks it up, since I don’t drive anymore, and he won’t say anything to Dodge. If Dodge found out he’d start razzing me about it, and that’d work my nerves, and it wouldn’t end so well.”

“I get that. But mixing alcohol with antidepressants won’t end so well, either.”

“Eh, who cares. I’m okay so far. And I’m already a shitbag, so just put it on my tab.”

“Why do you say you’re a shitbag? Nobody thinks that about you.”

He took another drink of his beer. “That’s the term. It’s an army thing. People who can’t hack it, can’t pull their weight. I wasn’t feeling so hot by the halfway point of my last tour, but no way in hell I was going to come out of there labeled a shitbag. It’s funny, though—over there, I could make it work. I could push through it. Back here, not so much.”

“How come?”

“Because I’m supposed to relax. There, it’s normal to be on edge 24/7. You hear a sudden noise, you can aim a rifle at it. You’re supposed to be suspicious of everyone you don’t know. Try any of that over here. You just can’t get used to it.” He broke his focus on the TV and met my eyes, his gaze frank and clear. “You know why I had to stop driving? F*cking bicyclists. They come pedaling up alongside my Jeep out of nowhere and I’m ready to kill somebody. And other stuff, too. Motorcycles, road work. The noise. It’s like chaos-noise. It doesn’t match up with what my brain tells me it is.”

I nodded.

He exhaled smoke away from me. “So I stopped driving. Fine. I put my ass in this seat and stay here. And then Candy’s kids come up behind me and try to scare me, or they jump up and down and say the same thing over and over again, or they shriek—you know, the stuff kids do. And I feel like I’m going to beat the living shit out of them.”

“Me, too.”

He laughed a little. “No, but I really am going to beat the living shit out of them. I can feel my muscles pumping up for it. One time, John—the littlest one—came by and knocked over my beer. And I grabbed him by the shoulder and smacked him across the side of the head with my hand. He went running back to Candy crying, ‘Uncle Elias hit me, he hit me.’ She spanked him and told him to leave me alone.” He picked up the beer can again. “That’s when I got my ass to a doctor.”

“Did they tell you it was post-traumatic stress disorder?”

“Nope. Combat stress.”

I frowned. “That’s not what it sounds like to me. My mom knew some Vietnam vets who—”

“Well, I don’t know about Vietnam. But here, now, you pretty much have to point your weapon at your commanding officer for them to decide it’s PTSD. The Prozac helps, though. I don’t feel like hitting the kids anymore. The downside is, I don’t feel anything.” He shrugged and dropped his cigarette into his beer can. “No panic, no excitement. I’m like a ghost. But at least I’m not killing anyone.”

“Maybe they can change your medication. Or your dosage.”

“Maybe. That would require going back to the doctor.” He stretched his leg out and brought it back, gingerly, as though testing it for pain. “I just want everyone to leave me alone. You’re okay, though. If you think I’m a shitbag, it’s no skin off my nose, because I know what you went and did.” He nodded at my belly.

I laughed. “Hey, now. Your mom has declared me Cade’s true wife.”

“Yeah. You’re his biblical wife because he knows you in the biblical sense. Sorry to break it to you, but if that’s true, then your boyfriend’s a polygamist.”

“At college they just called him a man-whore.”

He shot me half a grin. “Fair enough. Say, can you pass me that heating pad over there?”

“Sure.” I handed it to him. “What hurts?”

“My leg and my shoulders. They always hurt.”

I moved behind the chair and let my hands rest on his shoulders. His muscles tightened, but he didn’t flinch, and so I began rubbing them slowly, rhythmically, working my way across his neck and upper back. He let his head drop forward, and so I worked my thumbs along his spine and down to massage his shoulder blades. He groaned, and I smiled.

“Is that better?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Damn, that’s way better.”

He sat upright again and sighed. Softly I rubbed his temples, the sides of his jaw, his scalp. I scratched his forehead along his hairline, and stroked my fingers back through his buzz-cut hair. He tipped his head upward, eyes closed, smiling.

“Fudgies are probably ready,” I told him. “You want some?”

Without opening his eyes, he asked, “What the hell’s a Fudgie?”

“Chocolate and peanut butter comfort food.”

“F*ck, yeah.”

I laughed and patted him on the shoulders. “I hope you like them. I’m not the most awesome in the kitchen.”

“I have faith,” he said.

* * *

The next morning I awoke, groggy and exhausted from interrupted sleep, to the sound of bacon sizzling in the skillet downstairs. The smell of it wafted into the room, and I was out of bed and dressed in no time. Pregnancy had made me a serious carnivore. In my ordinary life my staples were bread and fruit, but lately I found myself snacking on strips of leftover flank steak, cold from the fridge. I hoped it was helping build the baby’s brain.

Scooter was already in the kitchen, dressed in a white crew-neck undershirt, a Patriots ball cap and a pair of Levi’s thirty-inch-waist extra-longs. He was chugging chocolate milk from a Coca-Cola glass. The beagles licked bacon grease from the floor around Candy’s feet. I could hear Cade washing up in the bathroom, and Dodge sat at the table with his arms folded in front of him, looking more alert than anyone ought to be at 6:00 a.m. He met my eye but offered no greeting. I wondered if Scooter could sense the tension.

“Mornin’, Jill,” said Scooter. He had a milk mustache.

“You guys doing a clean-out today?”

“Nope. The AC’s not cooling the place down like it ought to. Got to try to fix it.”

“It’s at eighty-five in there right now,” said Dodge.

Candy raised the skillet high and carried it to the kitchen island, sending the beagles scrambling. Dodge asked, “You think Elias knows anything about HVAC work?”

Cade walked in from the hallway. “He doesn’t.”

“That sucks. Would make the sumbitch good for something this morning.”

“Easy,” said Cade.

“I am being easy.” Dodge moved his hands to the sides to make room for the plate Candy was setting in front of him, casting a meaningful glance at me before finishing his thoughts. “Boy needs a drill sergeant. Get him to come out and work. Or one of those trainers like on TV, make him run on the treadmill till his ass falls off.”

“He could have run circles around you a year ago,” Cade told him.

“A year ago. Now all he runs circles around is that island right there. Relay races with a box of Ho-Hos.” He dug into his eggs, and I glanced at Scooter, who looked away. “We’re gonna get him straight.”

Cade kissed me goodbye at the door, but I followed him out to the car anyway. The Saturn wasn’t looking its best these days. The white paint above its wheel wells showed splatters of mud, and the backseat was a mess of crumpled sandwich wrappers and soda cups, unwashed laundry and boxes from the copy center filled with résumés. As Cade climbed in I said, “You’ve got to get Dodge to stop saying that crap about Elias. He’s a bully, your brother-in-law.”

“Don’t make a melodrama out of it. It’s just Dodge being Dodge. He’s trying to get Elias working to keep his mind busy, so he means well. I’ll give him that much credit.”

I scowled. Glancing quickly at the house, I said in a low voice, “I think you ought to talk Elias into going back in to get his meds adjusted and to get some counseling. I can’t believe they’d just hand him a prescription and let him go home without any other treatment. He’s twenty-four years old and all he does is sit there all day. I don’t like Dodge trash-talking him, but he needs to get up, at least.”

Cade’s expression had grown peevish. He was in a hurry to leave, and I knew it. “Give the guy a break. He spent three years fighting the Taliban. It’s okay for him to sit down and watch TV for a while. You and Dodge both need to realize that.”

“If you think he’s acting like that because he just wants to relax, you’re off in la-la land.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “What I think,” he began, and his voice was cold, “is that people ought to back off and let the guy be. Elias has always been a couch potato. Just give him some space, and stop playing into it by lavishing attention all over him for being lazy. Don’t think he doesn’t love that shit. He knows how to play it. Girls love it when he whips out his Eeyore impression.” He turned the key in the ignition and slammed the door. The window scrolled down, and he added, “I’ll try to talk him into coming with us when we do the gun-club thing with Dodge, okay? Get him to come out and socialize a little. Even with those idiots, it would be an improvement.”

“Sure, you can try, but he won’t go.”

“You forget where my skill set lies. If I can get college students out to the polls, you’d better be damn sure I can get my brother to walk into the backyard.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so.” He leaned a little out the window, and I kissed him on the mouth. Then he reversed out of the driveway and spun out onto the road, disappearing past the trees in a blue-gray haze of burning oil.

* * *

Another week passed before the gun club met again, and Dodge managed to hassle Cade into coming along. Cade was already in a bad mood. The ten résumés he had sent to various offices in D.C. two weeks before had resulted in no phone calls at all, and what was worse, the news had gotten back to him that Drew Fielder had taken a permanent position on Mark Bylina’s staff. The previous night Cade had been downright morose. He had drunk an entire six-pack of beer in front of the TV, slept for two hours and then was up half the night cursing at the clothes dryer he had suddenly decided to repair. He had looked like death when he woke up at four-thirty in the morning, but that afternoon he returned from work in the chipper mood I recognized from his days of campaign volunteering. It was one-dimensional and deceptively shallow, but he could muscle through a bad day with a smile on his face as long as he kept moving.

As Dodge packed his cooler and ammo into the truck, Cade approached Elias and nudged his shoulder. “Hey,” he said good-naturedly. “C’mon. Don’t make me do this on my own.”

Elias looked at his brother over his shoulder, barely raising an eyebrow. “I don’t think so.”

“Just this once. I don’t want it to just be me and those dipshits.”

“Jill’s going.”

“Yeah, but they’ll leave her alone. I’m the one they’ll be giving all the shit to.” He barraged the back of Elias’s shoulder with pokes of his index fingers. “C’mon. Back me up.”

Elias sighed heavily and stood up, and Cade clapped him on the back. As he headed out the door behind Cade, I felt impressed with Cade’s work. Maybe he was right about his brother after all; maybe Elias just needed more encouragement.

Dodge drove his truck up the slim dirt road that snaked into the woods, but the rest of us walked. As I followed Cade and Elias up the trail I saw the trees clear into an opening that revealed the closest thing to a party I had seen since my arrival. An ancient boom box blasted an ’80s heavy-metal sound track; the fresh piney air carried the smoke from the grill, filling the clearing with the scent of hamburgers. On a series of tree stumps surrounding an ashy fire pit, the men of the club sat drinking beer from bottles shiny with condensation. As they drank they chatted and cleaned their guns with loving care.

“Your old hangout,” Dodge announced to Cade and Elias, climbing out of the cab of his truck. “You know you missed it.”

Elias looked over the scene before him. “Not really.”

Dodge chucked the package of paper targets onto a fallen log. Cade reached into a cooler and retrieved two beers, offering one to Elias, who held up his hand to decline it. Even Candy had come along; she stood at a card table removing sheets of plastic wrap from bowls of pasta and potato salad, scooping a spoon down into each one. Scooter looked expectant, standing on the sidelines squinting at us through his little glasses, arms crossed over his chest, displaying the oversize tattoo winding around his biceps. Beside him squatted Matthew, balancing his small weight against the butt of his rifle pressed against the ground. He had received the gun for his eighth birthday, Candy had told me, and he often shot birds and squirrels with it in the woods behind the house. According to Candy he did this only with Dodge’s supervision, but that seemed to be a flexible rule. He wore it slung on his back at every opportunity, regardless of whether his father was home.

The other men moved easily around the space, but Elias stood more or less where Cade had left him, holding the uncomfortable posture of a new kid approaching the high school cafeteria. I got him a cheeseburger from the grill and carried it over, offering it to him on a paper plate with a flourish and a friendly smile.

“Keep it for now,” he said. He looked around the perimeter of the clearing, eyes steady. “Know what, I don’t think this was a great idea. Why don’t you walk me back to the house.”

“No, you don’t,” called Dodge. “It’s a beautiful day and we’re about to get started. Leave now and you’ll miss all the fun.”

Somebody pulled back the slide on a handgun, and at the click of it Elias shook his head. “No. I don’t like this.”

“I’ll walk him back,” I called over to Dodge. “It’s not a problem.”

Cade planted a foot against the fallen log beside him. “Come over here and sit down, Eli. I’ll hang out with you until my turn comes up.”

Elias looked at Cade’s earnest face, then at the log, and brushed past me to where his brother stood. He eased himself down beside Cade, but at the metallic clunk of a magazine being locked into a rifle his arms twitched, and I watched as he pushed a hand back across his hair to make the sudden jerk of his muscles look natural.

Dodge was standing at one of the wooden posts wedged into the dirt, unwrapping the pack of targets. I sidled up to him, turning my back to Elias and Cade. “Hey, I think Elias ought to go home,” I said. “I think he’s too nervous for this.”

He picked up his staple gun and glanced at me as he fastened a target against a post. “I think he can be the judge of his own self. How about you stick to cutting the balls off the poultry and let Elias keep his for the time being.”

I breathed in deeply through my nose, not eager to create a scene that would make it obvious to Elias that I had been talking about him. As I retreated toward the grill, Dodge barked, “Jill. Cade. You two get to go first.”

He handed a .22 to me and another to Cade, then rattled off a list of rules that appeared to be for Matthew’s benefit. When I racked my rifle, Cade snickered and shook his head. “I’m so screwed,” he said. “You’re probably a hundred times better than me at this.”

“Probably.”

He grinned, and I focused on the target and sighted in. Candy laughed and said, “A pregnant lady shooting a rifle. If that isn’t the doggone funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Dodge gave the signal, and we both fired. When I glanced over at Elias his shoulders had relaxed, and he watched us with more engagement in his eyes than I had ever seen when he sat in front of the television. This turned out to be a good idea after all, I thought, lining up my second shot. Even Cade looked happy, and with only a few shots left to go, he said in a cheerful voice, “You are indeed kicking my ass.”

“I try.”

“I had no idea they’d trained you so well at militia camp.”

“It’s not militia camp, it’s homesteading camp.”

“Or so Dave claims. Looks to me like—”

A loud cry from Matthew snapped my attention to the sidelines. As I lowered the rifle I saw the boy hurrying toward his father with his arms extended, a black plastic zip tie tight around his wrists. “Now, what in the hell did you do to yourself?” demanded Dodge.

“I was just playing. I pulled it with my mouth.”

“Well, that’s not a good way to play, is it?”

He whipped out his buck knife from its case on his belt and set to work trying to convince his son that he wouldn’t cut off his hand at the wrist in the process of removing the tie. I rolled my eyes and unloaded my rifle. Beside me, Cade grinned and did the same. “Game over,” he said, and only then did I focus past the tussle between Matthew and Dodge to see Elias doubled over behind them. Candy was rubbing his back, her long hair falling forward as she leaned down to talk to him.

“Hey, I think Elias is sick,” I said.

I hung back while Cade rushed over. Even from a distance I could hear Elias’s gasping, stilted breathing, see him nodding rapidly at the soft things his siblings said to him. Sweat trickled down his temples in slow, broad droplets. “Matthew’s fine,” Cade was assuring him. “It wasn’t even all that tight.”

“I know. I know.”

“So don’t worry about it. Just breathe.”

Candy fluttered around him for a few more minutes, and finally Elias rose to stand, taking unsteady steps toward the path as Cade draped his arm around his brother’s shoulders. I watched them until they vanished beyond the trees.

“All right, enough of that drama,” shouted Dodge. He snapped the buck knife closed and patted his son on the back, sending him running back to the food table. “Who’s up next?”

* * *

“Apparently he just doesn’t like the sight of zip ties,” said Cade. We were speeding down the road toward Liberty Gorge, a spontaneous excursion Cade had announced as soon as I walked in the door from the gun-club get-together. I understood exactly why: tonight he couldn’t abide another family dinner, sitting across the table from Dodge as he offered a postgame analysis of the gathering. I’d offered to go with him, gladly.

“That’s a little strange,” I said.

“Sounded like he had to use them on people before, so it really bugged him to see his nephew bound up like that. I only ever saw him like that once before, over Christmas. We drove into town to see a movie, and once we got there he saw a piece of trash in the parking lot and freaked out. We ended up going back to the car and driving home.”

“Over a piece of trash?”

He flipped his visor down against the lowering sun. “Yeah, well, apparently over there people hide IEDs under pieces of trash along the roadways. And he’d just gotten back, so I understood he was still in soldier mode and all that.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think freaking out at trash is ‘soldier mode.’”

“Maybe not. I dunno. Makes more sense now why he never wants to leave the house, though. I figured he was over all that.” We approached a turnoff marked by a mailbox—a simple dirt path that led through a field. “You know what, let’s go to the quarry. I’ve been wanting to show it to you anyway.”

I braced myself for the sharp turn. “So are you going to talk to him about going back to the doctor now?”

“Yeah, I suppose so. That’s got to be embarrassing, what happened to him today. If it was me, I wouldn’t want to be going around like that.” He parked on the scrubby grass beneath a tree. “This is it. Our old parking spot and everything. Hasn’t changed a bit, except there’s no water. Which was kind of the whole point.”

I looked out over the jagged expanse of rock. It was a long way down. Cade left his sunglasses in the car, and as we approached the gaping, empty space, he stopped and peered up at the sky, squinting. High cirrus clouds marked the clear and solid blue, and the sunlight shone down through the trees as sharply as if thrown. He said, “I haven’t been back here since they drained it. It’s disorienting.”

“Sounds kind of like it was an old swimming hole, like in Tom Sawyer.”

“Yeah, and in the winter you could skate on it. We used to come out here all the time—winter, summer, anytime except when it was raining. Every year at Christmastime all the kids who’d gone away to school would have a reunion up here. Me and Elias and a lot of the other guys, we’d play hockey here once it was good and frozen. You see that spot?” He gestured toward the center of the empty space. “That was the no-go zone. It didn’t freeze hard enough over there, so if your puck went that way you were just screwed. One winter we lost so many pucks, we took to making them out of firewood dipped in beeswax just so they wouldn’t be worth anything. It didn’t work very well. We thought the beeswax would make them slicker, but it knocked off real fast once we started banging on them with the sticks.”

“So why’d they drain it?”

“Somebody drowned. One of the Vogels’ daughters from the next farm over. It was during the winter.”

I looked out over the canyon the rock formed, at all its precipitous ledges and sharp, loose boulders. Filled with water it must have been idyllic, but beneath the surface, dangerous as hell. “That’s awful.”

He kicked a few rocks over the edge. “Yeah. She was a friend of Candy’s. She’d been at one of the reunion games but nobody else knew her real well, so we were all just…talking to each other and not much to her, I guess. She must have been skating like everybody else, and at some point she went through the ice and nobody noticed. I didn’t hear anything about all that until later. Me and Elias had already left, so we missed the whole thing.”

“Candy must have been devastated.”

“She was in shock about it, I guess. Candy’s funny about stuff like that. It’s hard to say her faith comforts her. It’s more like she uses it to work out the logic of why everything happens. If something good happens she goes on about how it’s a reward for obedience or an answer to a prayer, and if things go wrong she says it’s a test of faith or a punishment. It’s almost like karma with her. I think it drives my mom nuts.” He sat down on a smooth stretch of rock. “This is the old sunbathing stone. In August, anytime you came here, there’d be a bunch of girls in their swimsuits stretched out here trying to get a tan.”

I moved to sit down beside him, and he reached for my arm to ease my way down. “I can’t stand it when people try to explain random tragedies. You wouldn’t believe how many people have said to me that small planes are dangerous and my mom never should have been in one in the first place. As if I’m going to say, ‘Oh, I feel much better about losing her now that you’ve explained why it was her own fault.’”

“Yeah, you and Candy are going to be the best of friends.”

I laughed and turned onto my back, resting my head in Cade’s lap. The sky was a more appealing sight than the jagged gap of the quarry; the high clouds moved through it slowly, their trailing edges thin as contrails. Cade stroked my hair back from my forehead in an idle way, and said, “I wish you could see this place the way it was before. I feel like there’s this part of me I can’t even show you because it doesn’t exist anymore.”

“It’s pretty much the same, though, right? It’s just the water that’s missing.”

“It’s just the people that’re missing,” he said.

I turned sideways so I could look out at what he was seeing: the ledges where his friends had once stood, the knotted yellow rope hanging from a tree, the scrubby and pebble-strewn grass that must have been the site of a hundred tailgate parties. I wondered if Elias missed it the same way. The Olmstead home seemed riddled with broken connections—to their extended family, to their way to gather as a community and even to each other, for the atmosphere of the house felt heavy with brooding thoughts that nobody talked about. It was no wonder Cade hated coming home. I had never imagined, in all my time growing up with just my mother, how hard it might be to live in a family. From the outside it had looked like the easiest and most natural thing.

Maybe it’ll be different after the baby gets here, I thought. The common work of caring for a newborn might bind the family together once again; a christening might even be an opportunity to reach out to Randy’s family and put a stop to the enmity from Dodge’s side. It might even give Elias a sense of renewal and purpose, and a distraction from all he had going on in his head. These are the thoughts I had, heady and optimistic, as Cade tried to make sense of the lost quarry lake. After all, my mother had never hesitated to share her burning testimony that it’s never too late to start over. My mother, however, was not an Olmstead. It was a lesson I would learn, again and again, in the months ahead.