Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 18

Cade




The screaming woke me from a dead sleep. By reflex I clutched for Jill, but her side of the bed was empty. I scrambled over the bed to the stairs, barefoot and shirtless. The voice was my brother’s. From the landing I could see Elias’s silhouette: broad back, thuglike neck, arms out just slightly at his sides as if he had tried to react but got frozen in place. Over his shoulder I could make out Jill’s face as she rested on the sofa, sleeping peacefully through his raw, haggard screams.

I rushed down the steps and started toward Elias. Only then did I see that the lower half of Jill’s body—my boxer shorts that she’d slept in, her legs entangled in the afghan—was soaked in blood. It streaked her legs to the knee and seeped into the bottom edge of her T-shirt.

“Jesus Christ,” I shouted. I shoved Elias aside and tried to shake Jill awake, calling her name, but she wouldn’t wake up. Faintly, she breathed. I yelled for Dodge, but of course he was in his own house, too far away to hear me. Elias’s screaming kept on in a gravel monotone, an alarm that wouldn’t goddamn quit. I looked at him and shouted, “What did you do to her?”

Elias just kept on yelling.

My mom had appeared at the top of the stairs, clutching at the neck of her nightgown. “Get Dodge,” I ordered her.

I tried to loop my arm beneath Jill’s knees, but her legs were too slippery from blood to let me get a solid grip. The blanket beneath her was too bloody to use. To Elias I yelled, “Get me a different blanket, quick.”

Elias didn’t budge. That never-ending Tarzan yell was more than I could take. I crossed the room to where he was standing and shoved him in the chest. “Stop it. Stop it. Tell me what you did to her. What did you f*cking do to her?”

The screaming stopped, and Elias panted but said nothing. I shoved him again, but he was too heavy for it to move him or even register. I was losing time. I wrapped the bloody afghan around Jill’s legs and hoisted her up. My mother scuttled past Elias and opened the door, and I rushed outside into the warm night air.

The porch light cut through the blackness, but only far enough to get me partway across the lawn. Dodge was sprinting across the grass toward me. I could hear his ring of keys clinking on his belt. When he came into view he was dressed in his jeans as if he kept them fully outfitted beside his bed like a minuteman. “What happened?”

“Jill’s hurt. There’s blood everywhere. Open the car door.”

Dodge pulled open the passenger door of the Saturn and put his arms behind Jill’s shoulders to help ease her in. I got her legs onto the seat, then stopped and said, “F*ck.”

“What?”

“I don’t have enough gas. I don’t get paid until tomorrow.”

Dodge nodded toward his SUV. “Take mine.”

“You’re blocked in. Get her in the Jeep.”

“I’ll drive.”

“No, you better stay here with Elias. I don’t know what the hell he did to her, but we can’t leave everybody else here with the goddamn psycho.”

He shouted to my mother to bring me the keys while we maneuvered Jill into the back of the Jeep. As I started the car he laid a hand on the windshield to stop me. I rolled down the window, and he said, “Take her to the firehouse. They can get her to the hospital faster.”

“Right. Yeah, okay.”

When I spun out of the driveway onto the pitch-dark road and the car lurched between gears, I felt nothing but afraid. Jill was the one who would know what to do in this situation. She would know how to stop the bleeding, how to prevent shock, how to change gears without leaving the goddamn transmission in the middle of the road. I should have let Dodge drive after all. I had overestimated myself once again, as I always did, because I was so used to being golden that I had missed the fact that in the face of gritty reality I was less than nothing.

The dense forest broke and the small clear lights of Liberty Gorge appeared. I made a quick left turn and followed the street to where the old hose tower rose up high above the small shops around it. At the curb I lurched the Jeep to a stop and ran in through the open bay doors. Four guys in dark blue uniforms were playing poker around a table. I barely got three words out before they rushed past me, instantly to work. The lights of the ambulance whirled on. Then the siren chirped, and I stood aside as three of the men eased Jill onto a gurney, stanching the blood and wheeling her to safety all at the same time.

I leaned against the rear of the Jeep, let my head drop back and felt relief and shame wash over me. She would be all right. She was in the hands of men who knew what they were doing. Men who were not me.

* * *

The baby’s cry was a strangled, wet little sound. It punctured the air of the white waiting room like the yowl of a cat. I’d been staring at the ceiling, slumped into an ergonomically curved plastic chair, and when the sound came I looked up in surprise. It had happened so fast. One minute they were wheeling her into surgery, fending me off with waving hands shrouded in plastic gloves, and the next—almost literally the next—came the cry. But it seemed a good long time before the door swung open and a small crib clunked through it, pushed by a nurse. On the center of the white mattress, like a seashell nested in cotton, lay the baby, all wrapped up with just its head sticking out. Its skin was dusky pink. Its eyes were closed but with eyebrows raised, head turned to the side as though listening to a distant hum.

“It’s a boy,” said the nurse, all cheerful, as though this whole thing were normal.

So this was the price I had paid. This was the six pounds that had crushed me like it was the weight of the whole world. I had to catch myself before I laughed. All of a sudden I felt like such an embarrassing whiner. For months I’d been carrying on like nature’s original jackass, and here was this baby who was—and there’s just no other word for it—cute. I’d never held a baby in my life, not even one of Candy’s, but I reached in and scooped him up. It was like picking up a soda can you think is going to be full but turns out to be empty. They had him wrapped up so tight, he was like a very delicate football.

“Is Jill going to be all right?” I asked.

“She lost some blood, but she’ll be fine once she recovers. Why didn’t you tell us she had placenta previa?”

“What’s placenta previa?”

She explained it to me, but the words went over my head, and I shrugged. The nurse asked, “Did she get any prenatal care?”

“We couldn’t afford it.”

She scowled at me. “It’s a potentially fatal condition for both mother and child. A simple sonogram would have detected it.”

“Oh.” I looked down at the baby. “Do I need to sign him out or anything?”

She gave me a funny look. “He’s going to the nursery. What did you think, you can just walk out the door with him?”

“Well—Jill can’t take care of him, right? She’s sick and all.”

“That’s what the nursery is for. He hasn’t even been bathed yet.” She took the baby from my hands as if he was a prize she’d decided I hadn’t earned after all. “Sit tight. As soon as your wife gets into a room, I’ll let you know.”

My wife. When the nurse said that I felt ashamed that she was wrong. It was yet another thing I’d dropped the ball on, like the prenatal care and getting a better job, keeping the fences in good repair and getting Elias taken care of before he turned into a raving lunatic at the sight of somebody bleeding.

It was a relief, at least, that Elias had nothing to do with why she was bleeding. I felt kind of bad about that, the more it sank in. If he hadn’t started screaming, Jill would have bled out right there on the sofa and nobody would have realized it until it was too late. It was such a weird response for him. The guy had seen carnage on a level I could never imagine. He’d seen dead Afghan people by the score, kids even, and he’d told me about some of those, mutilated or partially eaten by animals. He’d seen his own buddy blown apart into a dozen pieces by an IED. In those situations he had acted decisively, and we knew that for a fact because he’d lived and come home, a Purple Heart veteran, honorably discharged. And then in his own house he acted as if his legs were stuck in concrete, screaming as though a truck was barreling down on him. Those anti-anxiety pills he was taking weren’t doing a damn thing. I made a mental note to talk to him about that.

But it might not be anytime soon. I had a son to look after now, and that son had a mother I needed to watch out for, too. At least we knew now that under pressure Elias didn’t lash out—he froze. That made the whole thing a little less urgent. At least he wasn’t a danger to anybody.

I wish it had been that simple.