Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 1

Jill




The signs for Baltimore-Washington International Airport began to appear above the highway ten miles out. “Keep right.” Cade shot a glance at my side mirror, then shifted two lanes over in one graceful, if reckless, maneuver. I braced the dowels of the two miniature American flags against my lap, but they barely shivered. Cade and his little white Saturn coupe were like a boy and his dog. He spent half his life in the thing, and there was no reason to doubt his skill at handling it.

“I bet he’s dying to get off that plane,” said Cade. “It’s a fifteen-hour flight from Kabul to Baltimore. That’s a crapload of Nicorette.”

I grinned. “So if he seems really cranky, I shouldn’t assume that’s his normal personality.”

“Nah. He’s a cool guy. Getting shot at for three years probably makes a person a little edgy, but he’ll mellow out fast enough.” He felt around in the console and, finding it empty, said, “Pass me the mints, will you, Jill?”

“You’ve got one in your mouth already.”

“Yeah, but it’s almost gone.”

I reached into the neatly arranged “auto office” box at my feet and retrieved the Altoids tin from a side pocket. “Cade, you’re a mint addict.”

“Usually you’re not complaining.”

“The first step is admitting you have a problem.”

His brow creased above his sunglasses. “I thought it was believing in a higher power.”

“No, that’s the second step. That a higher power can restore you to sanity.”

A white sign appeared above our heads, marked with a rainbow of coded indicators. Cade turned down his Dave Matthews Band CD, as if quieter music would help him see the signs better. “‘Arriving Flights,’” he read aloud. “We’re coming to get you, bro.”

We navigated the labyrinth of the parking garage and emerged into the airport. Once through security, our gate passes in hand, we joined the crowd gathered around the walkway cordoned off for the soldiers. The air was electric with anticipation. We could see, through the window, the plane pulling up to the gangway, setting off a noisy cheer and the waving of handmade signs drawn in red and blue marker. Young mothers strained to see through the glass, leaning heavily on the handles of their strollers, as if exhausted by the journey. Senior citizens stood patiently alongside, the men wearing trucker caps embroidered with the names of units and platoons, the women in sweatshirts hand painted with cheerful flag themes. Cade passed his American flag off to a little girl, then unclipped his sunglasses from his T-shirt collar and shifted them to the back pocket of his jeans. When I gave him a funny look he explained, “I don’t want to stab Elias with them when I hug him.”

Then the door opened, and a great wave of a cheer rose up as the first soldiers started down the walkway. Among the colorful crowd, their tidy uniforms—buttoned and tucked, the digital camouflage in subtle shades of sage and moss—gave them gravitas and dignity. So many hands to shake, I thought, so many people to work through, when surely each one must want nothing more than to collapse in a recliner with a beer. One soldier after another worked his jaw around a piece of gum, and I thought about what Cade had said on the highway.

At last Cade’s searching gaze snapped into recognition, and he uncoiled his arms from their crossed position against his chest. “Hey, dude,” he said, clasping Elias’s extended hand, then pulling him into a hug unimpeded by the flat ribbon of the walkway marker wedged between them. “I missed you, man.”

For a year now—ever since Cade and I began seeing each other—I’d been looking at the same photo of his brother, a glowering soldier bulked out by body armor and carrying an M-16, standing on a patch of sand with an American flag pinned to the tent behind him. The image was tacked to the corkboard above Cade’s bed in his dorm room, among the various bumper stickers from campaigns he had volunteered on—local representatives, congressmen, state senate—and a postcard of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders portrait with the quote “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” Elias almost never wrote letters home, so on one rare trip back to their farm in New Hampshire, Cade had commandeered the photo sent to their sister, Candy, as a thank-you for her church fundraising the money to buy him the body armor. “Thanks” and “Elias” were scrawled on the bottom in a sloppy cursive that looked as if it belonged to a twelve-year-old schoolboy, not a twenty-four-year-old army infantry specialist, but it looked as if Elias had bigger things on his mind than good penmanship. Sometimes when Cade and I were making love, I caught sight of that scowling image and felt a wave of guilt. Here Cade and I were in the ivory tower of academia, casting aside our textbooks to spend an afternoon at play in his bed, while seven thousand miles away his brother was making a diligent effort not to die. But the fact was, we had each chosen our own path. And now here we all were, together.

As Elias extracted himself from the hug and made his way out of the line, I watched him. He was shorter than Cade by a couple of inches, and stockier; his face offered none of the animation that lit Cade’s, but his blue eyes, like his brother’s, were piercing. His expression was more or less the same as the one he wore in the photo. When he looked at me I felt as if he had been watching me all this time, all these months I’d been with Cade, a witness to my secrets. I felt embarrassed when he shook my hand.

“This is Jill Wagner,” Cade told him. “My fiancée. She’s the one who’s been sending you all the care packages.”

His hand was warmer than my own. Holding my gaze, he indicated Cade with a cock of his head and said, in a tone that was barely jesting, “You’re actually going to marry this a*shole?”

“Not for a while yet. We both need to finish school first.” Amusement lit Cade’s face, and so I joked back, “I still have plenty of time to reevaluate.”

“Smart thinking. Thanks for all the packages. You make a mean chocolate chip cookie.” He turned to Cade. “I need a smoke so bad I’m ready to go on a shooting spree.”

“I don’t think you can say that in an airport.”

“If they throw me out I can get to my smokes faster.”

We separated while the soldiers all regrouped to turn in their government property. Cade and I retrieved the Saturn and pulled it around to the pickup lanes, idling as we watched Elias make his way through baggage claim. As soon as he was outside, he stopped in front of the open automatic doors and lit a cigarette. Other travelers moved around him, casting shy reproachful glances in his direction.

“Eli,” Cade shouted. “Over here.”

Elias nodded and meandered over. In spite of the cool November breeze he unbuttoned his uniform jacket and folded it into his duffel bag, revealing just a thin sandy-brown T-shirt. He turned his face toward the sun, closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath of air. “No dust,” he said. “Nice and cool. F*ck, yeah, it’s good to be home.”

“Still got five hundred miles to go, bro.”

“Yeah, but not until tomorrow. This is close enough. No question.”

He dropped his bag into the trunk and climbed into the back passenger seat. As we turned out onto the highway he gazed out at the landscape, squinting, blowing thin cyclones of smoke out the window. After his initial friendliness, he’d gone quiet.

“Did they debrief you?” asked Cade.

“Yep.”

“How’d it go?”

“Fine.”

Cade glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Elias set his boot against the center console and flicked ash out the window. After a minute he said, “It’s good to see green again.”

“Well, you’ll see all the green you can stand back home.”

“Have you talked to Mom and Dad?”

“Not in a while. I avoid it whenever possible.” Elias chuckled, and Cade added, “Anyway, I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on this damn campaign for five months that only just ended. We won the election, at least.”

“What do you do, Jill?” he asked, and in surprise I glanced back over my shoulder at him. “You run around doing all this election stuff, too?”

I shook my head. “No way. I couldn’t care less about politics.”

“Well, that sounds like a match made in heaven.”

I smiled, and Cade said, “She hangs out with farm animals all day. So we both deal with a lot of bullshit. It works out.”

“We both run, too,” I told him. “I ran track in high school, and Cade’s always training for some half marathon or another. So we go running together a lot.”

“I bet Cade tries to outrun you,” Elias said, “competitive son of a bitch that he is.”

“And you wonder why I don’t bring you home to meet my family,” Cade said to me. “You hear the stuff they say about me?”

Elias laughed low. “Just speaking the truth, bro. She’s got to learn it sometime.”

It wasn’t long before we made the turn back into College Park. Cade and I lived in the dormitories on campus—he in a single room, me with a snooty roommate—but on the weekends he often crashed at the apartment of his friend Stan. Up until the previous year he and Stan had been roommates, but now Stan had his own place, at which he held frequent parties. He was generous in offering his futon—or a patch of carpet—to whoever couldn’t drive home. Cade, whose ambition for an elected office made him ultraparanoid about getting a DUI, spent so much time on that futon that he actually kept a toothbrush in Stan’s medicine cabinet. It hadn’t seemed like much of a stretch, then, to ask to borrow the place for the night when Cade got the call that his brother was coming home and wanted to spend a day hanging out before making the trek back to New Hampshire.

Cade unlocked the door, and Elias stepped inside. He set his pack down on the floor beside the futon and looked around: at the mannequin head with the dart stuck in it, the poster of a trio of blonde girls in bikinis posing on a beach, the dry-erase board above the old metal desk that was the central piece of furniture in the living room. He caught sight of the photo clipped to Stan’s computer monitor—of Stan in a black suit and tails, popping out his lapels with his thumbs and flanked by two transvestites in full regalia.

“What in the hell is that?” asked Elias.

“That’s Stan,” Cade explained. “The guy you’ve heard me talk about a million times. This is his place. He’s dressed up like Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

“That’s Stan?” He walked over and peered closely at the photo. Then he looked over his shoulder at Cade, his upper lip curled in the first grin I’d seen out of him. “Does Dad know you’ve been living with a black guy?”

“What do you think?”

Elias laughed and straightened up again, still looking at the picture. “That’s Stan,” he repeated.

“He’ll be in and out this weekend. You can take the futon and I’ll sleep on the floor. Stan’s got enough blankets in the closet for an army.”

“Nah, I’ll take the floor.”

“No way. You just got back.”

“All the more reason. Floor’s still better than what I’m used to.” He looked at the girlie posters on the walls. “Some black guy, huh?”

“He only dates white women.”

Elias chuckled again. “Dad would shit a brick.”

Cade shrugged. “Back in his glory days. Since the stroke, not much pisses him off.”

“If you say so. Bet that’d still get a rise out of him on a good day.”

I looked quizzically at Cade, but nothing in his expression acknowledged the glance. Elias quit looking around and sat on the edge of the futon, opening up his pack and pulling out a clean T-shirt, socks and boxers. “Don’t bother me none,” he said. Then, almost as if pulled down by sheer fatigue and the comfort of the mattress, he lay back and rubbed his hands against his face, letting out a long, tired groan. “Motherf*ck,” he added. “God, it’s good to be back.”

That was the last I saw of him for a long time. For all those months, that was the image I held of him: supine against the futon, his body all muscular and stocky and hard as a nail. The smallest details stuck in my mind. How neatly the waistband of his BDU trousers lay against his stomach and circled his hips. How the bulk of his shoulders seemed barely contained by his shirt’s thin fabric. It was not attraction I felt, exactly, so much as awe. Here was a soldier, honed like the edge of a blade, yet stretched out before me like a cat on a windowsill. His beauty was not like Cade’s, but it was still beauty.

I still try to remember him that way, sometimes. I think he would want me to.

* * *

It had been only a couple of months before that Cade and I had had a similar reunion. On that day—the last Saturday in August, just a few days before the dorms reopened—I had run down the hill in front of the lodgelike main building of the camp where I’d spent the entire summer, racing to meet Cade as his Saturn churned slow clouds of dust along the dirt road. He’d stopped and gotten out of the car, opening his arms to me, and I had thunked against his chest with a force that made him stagger back against the car. “Missed you, too, babe,” he murmured against my hair. We had meant to see each other every other weekend, but he’d gotten so busy working on Bylina’s campaign for Congress, and time had plodded along until it was two months since he had visited me. I understood. With my jeans and stubby, plain fingernails, my total disinterest in ever again living in a city and my sketchy family history, I had little to offer as a partner to someone who wanted to be a congressman one day. But I did possess patience and devotion, and the very reason I loved Cade was that he could find his passion and follow the prize of it like a polestar. I couldn’t very well fault him for being himself.

All summer I had lived at Southridge, the camp I’d attended every year since I was thirteen—although now I was a counselor and teacher, no longer a little camper kicking around in the woods. My mother had first signed me up for the annual retreat for Alateen, the support group for teenagers with alcoholic family members. She was the alcoholic in question, although she had twelve-stepped when I was young enough not to remember it. Still, she thought it would be good for me to spend a couple of weeks in the woods with other kids whose families spoke the peculiar language of recovery, making friends, trying out rustic crafts and learning how not to turn out like any of my close relatives.

Once I outgrew the retreat, I signed on to become a counselor, and for three summers now I had lived at Southridge full-time. I loved being outdoors in the piney air at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains, teaching people much older than me how to survive in the uncharted wilderness. All kinds of people passed through—packs of Boy Scouts and troubled foster kids, hipster folk intent on learning to garden organically and brew their own beer, paranoid survivalists seeking the skills to live off the grid when the people finally rose up against the government. I’d learned to cheerfully tolerate all kinds, and did my work so well that Dave—the head guy at the camp and, next to Cade, my favorite person in the world—had tried to persuade me to stay on through the fall and do my semester online. I’d had to patiently explain to him, again, that online classes aren’t an option for agriculture majors.

Later that very day—the one on which I had run down the road to greet Cade, loaded my stuff into the trunk of his Saturn and sped back toward College Park—he had taken me down into D.C. and proposed to me in the nighttime glow of the Jefferson Memorial. The bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson loomed overhead, his knee bent as if to take a step forward; the lettered quotes from the Declaration of Independence curved all around and above us, giving me a sense of vertigo, but beyond it the Tidal Basin lay blue and softly rippling. I knew what it meant that he had chosen this place: that he was drawing me into the pantheon of the things he loved most, showing me that nobody less than his personal hero would be called upon to witness it. Of course I accepted, even though I knew an actual wedding would be a long time coming. We were only twenty-one. We had all the time in the world.

On the day Elias came back, after Cade had dropped me off at my dorm and driven off with his brother for a night of revelry, I flicked on the TV and settled onto my bed with a bag of Starbursts to watch Lockup: Raleigh. My mother had been a huge fan of the show, a lurid reality program that followed six women held in a North Carolina prison for various violent offenses. Our favorite was a woman named Kendra, a former pill addict who had attacked her boyfriend with both ends of a rake. Kendra wore one side of her hair in cornrows most of the time and used expressions like “be breezy” and “tell me what’s poppin’” and “life ain’t all peaches and cream.” I think my mother liked the show so much because the women were a caricature of what she might have become had she not joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and like most successful twelve-steppers she took a dim view of people who wanted to hold their old lifestyle close to their hearts. Kendra was an easy target. As a gentle reminder of how good I had it, when I complained about the pressures of school and SATs, my mother would sometimes pat my hand and say, deadpan, “Just remember, Jill. Life ain’t all peaches and cream.”

Midway through the program, the door swung open and my roommate waltzed in. I chewed a candy and braced myself for the inevitable comments. Erica and I had been living together only since September, and already she had a finely honed skill for needling me at any tender spot she could identify. As she stuffed her makeup into its little quilted bag, she looked over at me with one arched eyebrow. “How can you eat that stuff?”

“They’re Starbursts. Who doesn’t like Starbursts?”

“They’re pure sugar.”

“Yes. I know.”

She squeezed the makeup bag into her purse and turned toward the TV. “What is this, White Trash Wonderland again?”

“Lockup: Raleigh.”

“Is your boyfriend still at the office?”

“Nope. He went out with his brother.”

She smiled tightly. Her face was a mask of makeup. “Well, have a great Saturday night.”

I sighed through my nose as she left the room, failing to let the door close all the way. As I got up to shut it myself, I scanned the room and tried not to see it through her eyes: the small, chattering TV; the crumpled bag of candy on the bed; my phone, plugged in to its charger because I had no use for it tonight. Before self-pity could creep in, I picked up the landline phone and called Dave.

“It’s Blackbird,” I said as soon as he answered with a hearty “Dave Robinson here.” I had been using my camp name for so many years, and had developed such a good reputation around the place, that normally it was a point of pride. I was the semi-legendary Blackbird, the ragtag little city kid who had blossomed into a trail-guiding, scat-identifying swan. But alone in my dorm room it sounded a little goofy, like a kid playing spy.

“Hey, kiddo! Good to hear from you. I just found a sweatshirt you left here. Pretty nice hoodie. Want me to mail it to you?”

His face appeared in my mind’s eye with an expression to match his voice: warm brown eyes and easygoing, energetic smile, shaggy dark hair brushing his shoulders. He shaved maybe every couple of weeks, and then with haste and indifference. I smiled and tugged the phone closer to my wooden desk chair. “Sure. I was wondering where it went. Thought maybe I left it behind at Cade’s friend’s place.”

“I’ll send it out on Monday. How’s the semester treating you?” His dog began to bark, and he made a noise to shush her. “How was October?”

“I made it through okay. Kept busy.”

“You think about your mom a lot?”

“Yeah, but I tried not to dwell on it. It’s been three years now. I need to keep moving forward. One day at a time, and all that.” I shut off the TV. “I finally got to meet a member of Cade’s family today. His brother. He just got back from Afghanistan.”

“All this time and you still haven’t met any of them?”

“Nope. They live pretty far away, you know. I think he finds them embarrassing. He says they’re nothing like him.”

Dave laughed ruefully. “We all think that about ourselves. Never as true as we want to believe.”

“His brother seemed fine. I’d been sending him all these care packages with snack food and Little Debbie cakes and stuff like that, and he thanked me for them. It has to be overwhelming when you first get home after three years, so I thought that was sweet that he remembered.”

“Gonna be a hell of an adjustment, I’m sure. I remember those days.”

I frowned and slouched lower in my chair. “I thought you got kicked out of Ranger school.”

“I did, but then 9/11 happened and they sent me to Afghanistan anyway. Coming back wasn’t much of a party. Why do you think I ended up living in the woods?”

“I never heard you talk about that.”

“Nope. One day at a time, right? Keep moving forward.”

I twisted the cord around my fingers, a strange cat’s cradle. “No fair using AA lingo against me.”

“Go easy on the guy, that’s all I’m saying. Around the holidays is the worst time to come back, with everybody wanting you to be all cheery when you’re not feeling it at all. What was he, a grunt?”

“Yeah. Infantry. He did roadside patrols and things like that. He got a Purple Heart for a leg wound a couple years ago—something exploded in a car that was driving up to them, or something like that.”

Dave gave a low whistle. “Get that guy into therapy, stat. I’m not joking.”

“Oh, he’s just a normal soldier. There must have been a hundred other soldiers who got off that plane with him. I’m sure they don’t all need therapy.” I let my voice slide back into a less serious register. “Be breezy, Dave.”

At the razzing sound he made, I broke into a grin. “The wisdom of Kendra,” he said. “Words to live by. So, hey—are you coming down here again for Christmas this year? Easier if you tell me in advance instead of just showing up.”

“Not this time. I’m going to New Hampshire. Embarrassing or no, Cade can’t escape it this year.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

I laughed, but there was an edge to it. “You know what, Dave—I need to get through to him that even if his family is a little crazy, at least he’s got one. When I was a kid, I envied the kids who had aunts and uncles and big noisy households. And these people live in a big old farmhouse in the country with three generations in it. It sounds great to me. I think he just doesn’t appreciate it.”

“Or maybe they really are nuts. Maybe he’s the only sane one of the bunch.”

“I doubt that. This is Cade we’re talking about. To him, everything’s got to be on a grand scale. I hate to say it, but he’s a drama queen.”

“Well, you’ll find out.”

I smiled. “Yes. I will. Finally.”

He offered a short laugh. “Love ya, kiddo. You know it. And if they all turn out to be a pack of lunatics, I’ll still be here with the dog.”