Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 19

Jill




It was seven in the evening when the painkillers wore off. My eyes slit open to the view of a faded pink wall fractured by the beige plastic bars of my bed. On the little cabinet there sat the incidental items of an ordinary birth—an opened package of blue trauma pads, a stack of tiny diapers, a kidney-shaped dish, a glass jar of Hershey’s Kisses with a single balloon tied to its neck—but I knew the birth had not been ordinary. I tried to roll over onto my back, but a slice of pain seared through my abdomen. I winced and eased over more gently. Not long after I’d awoken from the surgery, in a busy room washed in a greenish light and the beeping of many machines, I had laid a cautious hand on my belly and felt the incision, a vertical one, the same as my mother’s. The surprise of it had filled me with an odd sense of peace. Her experience is yours now, I had thought. She came through it, and so will you.

I reached for the call button, but as I did my door swung open and a bassinet rattled through it, pushed slowly by a nurse.

“Here he is,” she said. “Chewing on his fists. Let me give you your meds and then you can feed him.”

I looked up to see Leela craning her neck to peek around the doorway. Strands of her gray hair, bunched up in its usual bun, had worked themselves out to form a disheveled halo around her face. “Oh, good, Jill, you’re awake now.”

The room was dim, the stiff green drapes drawn tight across the windows, and Leela didn’t offer to turn on the lights. When the nurse left she lifted the baby with competent ease and handed him down to me. I hadn’t seen him for hours, and already he seemed older, his round little face evenly pink and the tips of his ears unfolded from their squashed state. I pulled up the sheet for modesty while I nursed him, and Leela said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Goodness. How do you feel?”

“I’m okay.” The baby was so warm, his body soft and as radiant as a coal. I couldn’t help but think of Elias then, how dry and heated his skin always felt when I massaged his shoulders, like a clay dish lifted from the oven. My gaze caught on the little index card at the end of the clear bassinet. On it was the cheerful image of a blue teddy bear beside a name blocked in thick marker: “OLMSTEAD, Thomas Jefferson.” “I thought it would be a girl,” I told Leela.

She settled into a chair beside my bed and patted my arm. I expected her to murmur a platitude that perhaps the next one would be or that God liked to surprise us, but instead she said nothing. The sudden quiet felt almost like a moment of silence for someone lost. I stole a glance at her and wondered if she had hoped for one, too.

“I guess I expected a girl,” I continued, “because I’d know how to raise one. With a boy I don’t have the first clue. So I thought obviously it would be a girl, since my mom used to always tell people that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”

Leela uttered a small but disparaging laugh. “Well, that isn’t true, is it?”

I turned to her, feeling my eyes tighten with confusion.

“God gives people more than they can handle all the time,” she said, her voice lilting with the obviousness of her words. “Shoot, babies in the Third World aren’t dying because they just didn’t try hard enough. You’d be a fool to try and predict how God will hand out pain. We all just love the world enough that we want to stay in it. See the day through to a better day past it.”

“But you believe in God.”

“Of course I do. But I believe in hunkering down till life gets better, too. And it does. You’re here, after all.” The baby’s cap had slipped, and she slid it back over his head. “Besides, your child might surprise you. Maybe he’ll love chasing the hens around the yard and helping people in little quiet ways that make them happy, and he won’t care a thing about power or influence. You just never know. He might be a mama’s boy.”

“I’m sure Cade wouldn’t like that.”

Her mouth went tight and, even as she touched my arm in a soft way, her voice was firm. “You let him be who he is, no matter what Cade or anybody else says or thinks. In the end he isn’t either of you. You remember that. He’s himself. If I could go back and do just one thing over again as a mother, I’d hold tight to that and never let anybody make me feel bad for it.”

But Cade is his own person, I thought. I looked down at the baby, batting his loosened fist against my chest, and stroked his brow that was creased high by the effort of his nursing. I tried out the idea that I might one day see elements of myself in him after all, and the thought of it cheered me. But most of what Leela said was beyond me then. I filed it away for later, not even realizing that she had not been speaking of Cade at all, but of Elias.

* * *

I stayed in the hospital for nearly a week. Once TJ and I finally came home—walking in under a paper banner made by Candy’s boys and treated to a celebratory dinner of roast beef and buttery Potato Pearls with a messily frosted cake for dessert—we found ourselves carried in by the tide of a household that had been taken over by hunting season. Men from the gun club gathered on a nightly basis to clean their weapons, discuss strategies and trade tall tales about their past successes. Eddy sat in his recliner in the midst of all this, nodding and making approving comments, looking deeply pleased to be, for once, at the center of a social gathering. As they spread out their equipment all over the living room, I retreated to the chair beside Elias’s to nurse TJ in front of the TV. But Elias was almost never there anymore. He stayed in his room constantly, either to detox himself, get away from the crying baby or avoid the pressure to participate in the hunting expeditions. It could have been any one of those things, but I was too exhausted to give it much thought. For once I was distracted from my annual dread of the upcoming month of October. It was difficult to reflect on the events of four years ago while caring for someone whose needs kept me lodged in the present moment, and I didn’t mind at all.

Once bear season officially started, the men mostly vanished, and even at mealtimes we saw little of Dodge. He and Scooter spent nearly every evening, deep into the night, sitting in a tree stand watching for bears. They dressed head to toe in camouflage, sprayed themselves down with scent-eliminating chemicals and wore their rifles slung on their backs like jungle commandos. Matthew copied his father, dressing in his own miniature set of fatigues and carrying his rifle around the house in a similar fashion, even during his dining-table school lessons. Candy thought this was adorable.

“Look at him, Eli,” Candy prompted one afternoon, nudging Elias as she served him a sandwich during one of his rare awake hours. “Looks just like you at that age. Remember you used to get dressed up and chase me around with that BB gun of yours?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Always the soldier even then. What do you think, Matty? You going to be a soldier like Uncle Elias?”

Matthew grinned. “Uh-huh.”

“You hear that?” Candy smiled at her brother. “Remember? Those were some good times, huh? Running around like a bunch of ninnies, crawling around under the porch getting filthy dirty. Kids don’t hardly ever play like that anymore. All they want to do is watch TV and fool around on the internet.”

“They ought to be playing with their cousins,” said Elias.

The room went silent. Dodge, who had been sitting in a dining chair pulling on his boots, shot Elias a sharp look and let the stare linger. Candy set down the plate beside Elias with a muted thunk, and even Matthew cast a nervous gaze between his parents. Elias, for his part, didn’t shift his gaze from the television. On it, Rachael Ray sprinkled pepper flakes into a pot of chili, her wooden spoon moving energetically to match her voice.

“They don’t have any cousins,” said Dodge.

Elias’s expression didn’t change. When he spoke, his voice had a shrug to it. “Family’s family.”

Dodge slung his gun over his shoulder and left. Candy had retreated to the kitchen, where she tidied up from the sandwich-making in chilly silence. From my nest in the chair nearest his, a cotton blanket thrown over my shoulder and the baby nursing beneath it, I watched him steadily. My eyes implored him to look at me, but he only shifted in his seat, flicking the ash from his cigarette without even looking to see if he’d hit the glass ashtray. I missed the sense of connection I’d once had with him—the rolled eyes when Candy misspelled a word on her lesson chalkboard, the shadowy smirks at the corner of his mouth when Dodge said something even more ignorant than usual. But now he seemed to have turned inward, not bothering to send those subtle messages. His mind was as impenetrable to me now as it had been the day I met him. And speaking his mind about Randy made me wonder all the more what was going on in there.

Maybe he’s angry at you, I thought. The idea caused anxiety to well up inside me, but I knew I couldn’t blame him if he was. In the five weeks since the baby’s birth I had paid little attention to him, easy enough to do when he was almost never awake. The more time I spent apart from him, the more unnerving details wormed their way into my memories of the hours before TJ’s birth. I remembered the power I felt in Elias’s arms when he threw my hands off him, and the muted electric thrill it stirred in me. When he hugged me and pressed his face into my hair, I heard him inhale deeply. All along there had been so many solid walls that made our friendship safe: our filial relationship, my growing pregnancy, his heavy and hurting body, the complete lack of privacy. I had meant no harm, but I loved him in a way that wasn’t fair to him. It was so easy for me to share my affection generously, knowing at the close of each day I would lie down with Cade and offer him the best of it. But Elias spent each night alone, and there was no place for him to channel whatever feelings welled inside him. Without ever meaning to, I had been cruel.

Now that TJ was here, I felt chagrined by it all. I needed to learn to live beside Elias in a way that would not hurt, or tempt, either of us. I needed to get over my judgment of Candy and look to her as a model for how to be with Elias. She knew how to care for her brother without adding complications to his already overburdened mind.

On the afternoon after his comment to Dodge, I caught up with him sitting on the back porch, looking out over the backyard from his mother’s white wooden rocking chair. He wasn’t smoking, wasn’t drinking and wasn’t asleep, so it was immediately noteworthy.

“Jill,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to apologize to you.”

I laughed in surprise. “For what?”

“For not doing anything to help when you were bleeding out on the sofa. It just got to me, and I felt frozen by it. I’m sorry for standing there screaming like a little girl.”

“But you did help,” I pointed out. “Cade said I would have been dead by the morning if you hadn’t alerted everyone.”

Elias’s expression changed. He seemed to be considering that. Then he shook his head. “I’m trained in field medicine. There’s a lot I could have done besides watch Cade throw you in the car. If you’d died, it would have been on me. I’m the one in the house who knows how to handle that. But I couldn’t handle it.”

“And I’m not dead. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose in his weary way. “Just accept my apology, all right?”

“No. I don’t accept that you have anything to apologize for in the first place, so I can’t.”

He frowned. “I really wish you would.”

“You were trying to wean yourself off the medicine,” I said. “Nobody would have expected you to do anything differently. I’m sorry I’ve been preoccupied these last few weeks. I’ll get Cade to make you another appointment, okay? And you and I can drive down together, like last time.”

He shook his head. The chair’s wooden rockers creaked in rhythm, and he gazed out over the yard. “I already know what they’ll tell me. They’ll lower my dosage and I’ll just take twice as many. I can see it coming. Every time I try, I just binge on it the next day. They can’t stop me from doing that, and neither can I.”

I touched his shoulder, but he shrugged my hand off. “Maybe they have an inpatient program,” I said.

“Detox, you mean?”

“Maybe.”

He chuckled. “Put it on my tombstone,” he said, and drew a hand slowly in front of him as if envisioning the sign. “‘This man was a shitbag. May he rest in peace.’”

“Elias, come on. You’d hardly be the first veteran to deal with that. They can’t all be shitbags.”

He shook his head again, and I sighed. “Eli,” I said, “would you like to hold the baby?”

“Sure.”

I handed TJ to him. He took him easily, nestling him into his arm, and looked down at his face. At first it surprised me how easily he handled the baby, but then I remembered he had been here through the births of all three of Candy’s sons.

“He looks just like Cade,” he said.

“Yeah, I think so, too.”

“Got that arrogant li’l mouth.” He leaned back against the chair, looked out at the yard again, and rocked.

“You want me to take him back?”

“No, he’s fine.”

I walked off to get some lunch, pleased for the opportunity to eat without having to keep an eye or a hand on the baby. And when I came out to the porch to take TJ again, he was still asleep in the crook of Elias’s arm, and Elias, for all that his face was ever unreadable, looked almost content.

* * *

That night Dodge and Scooter joined the rest of the family for supper before hiking out into the woods to sit in their hunting spot. Elias happened to be awake, so he joined everyone, too, then returned to his room. The house was quiet and cool, and when Cade came in to undress for bed, he glanced at TJ asleep in the laundry basket and threw me a pleading look. We made love for the first time since the birth, very carefully. Cade seemed almost apologetic, and grateful; only afterward did I realize how much we had needed it to take away the feeling that as a couple we were fragmenting, becoming two employees of the same baby rather than a man and a woman irresistibly attracted to each other.

TJ slept well that night. Not until two o’clock in the morning did I awake to the muted report of a gunshot from outside that I realized must be Dodge and Scooter having finally crossed paths with a bear. The noise woke TJ, and regretfully I pulled myself away from Cade’s warm bare chest and lifted the baby from his basket.

I pulled him to my breast and eased back into bed, arranging the covers over myself and the lower half of TJ’s body. Cade had left the door ajar, and the night-light from the bathroom was the only illumination in the darkness. The baby’s nursing was slow and rhythmic, and I closed my eyes in deep fatigue. When I opened them, Elias was standing in the doorway, looking at me with his plain, unreadable eyes.

I pulled up the edge of the quilt immediately, self-conscious to be caught nursing the baby bare chested in front of him. When he didn’t react, I held up a finger to let him know I would be with him in a minute. I looked down at the baby, and when I glanced up again, Elias was gone.

After a while TJ fell back asleep at my breast, and I laid him softly in the basket. I pulled on one of Cade’s T-shirts and a pair of pajama pants and tiptoed down the stairs. The entire house was dark; both televisions were off, and the lamp that always burned beside Elias’s chair when he was awake had been snapped off, as well. I checked the porch rocker and found it empty, then headed back up to my room. Only then did I notice Elias’s door was closed, and I knew he must have grown tired of waiting for me to finish nursing the baby and had gone off to bed. For that, I felt a little sorry. Elias and I needed to talk. He had put his arms out to me. That was progress. If he would do that much, maybe he would open up to me about how the rest of us could help him, too. And we could all move forward.

I slipped back under the covers and slept until four-thirty, when TJ woke to nurse again and Cade got out of bed to attend to the day’s chores. And then I drifted back to sleep for a while, until I heard Cade yelling from the barn, and then Candy’s scream, and I realized it had not been Dodge’s gun that went off that night, but Elias’s.

* * *

It was Dodge who stopped me at the door of the barn with both hands held up and out, his face a warning that he meant business, that there was no chance I would find a way to push past him. I screamed for Cade, but Cade didn’t even turn in the direction of my voice. I could see him crouched on the floor of the barn, with Elias’s legs jutting out to the side, sneakers on as always, but both he and Cade were in shadow. Candy came and went, her long hair flying behind her as she ran between the main house and the barn, then down the driveway to meet the ambulance. From the upper window came the sound of TJ squalling with increasing vehemence, but my own newborn’s crying had become a distraction from the primary event. After a while Leela appeared with TJ on her shoulder and her face bone-white, and then red and blue flashing lights twirled in the driveway, accompanied by the staticky clatter of radios. Only then did Cade reappear from the barn, both of his hands and the front of his T-shirt covered with thick red blood. His expression was stoic, and he met my eyes before pointing to the house and saying in a voice that was not to be argued with, “Get inside.”

I took the wailing baby from Leela and trailed into the house, sitting in a dining chair near the window and setting him to nurse. Instantly he went quiet. The window offered no good angle on the barn and driveway. After the sirens chirped to life, I caught sight of Cade stalking over to the shed. He pulled off his shirt and stuffed it into the trash, then squatted by the garden spigot and rinsed off his hands. I let out a shaky sigh and switched TJ to the other breast. There was nothing to do but wait for Cade.

He came back into the house and jerked open the bifold door of the laundry closet, then opened the dryer, spilling out clean clothes onto the floor as he searched for a fresh T-shirt. I asked, “Are you going with him?”

“I’m driving down there now. They wouldn’t let anyone come in the ambulance. Said we needed to follow in a car. Dodge is already on the way, with Dad.”

“What happened? Is he going to be all right?”

He pulled a shirt over his head and looked at me as though I had asked the stupidest possible question. “He shot himself in the head, Jill.”

“Okay, but do you think they can save him?”

“Of course they can’t save him. He’s dead. You think a guy like Elias doesn’t know how to pull off something like that? Did you see my hands?” He felt in the pockets of his jeans. “Damn it, where are my keys?”

“But I saw him. I just saw him first thing this morning. I know I did.”

“Well, I just saw him, too. Jesus Christ.” He pulled off his watch and dropped it onto the counter. Smears of blood marked both the countertop and his skin. “Get rid of all that, will you? My mom’s going to have a nervous breakdown if she sees it, and I gotta go.”

I tore off a paper towel. “Do you want me to come with you? I can leave TJ with Candy. Maybe they can save him. You won’t know until they get him there.”

“He’s dead, Jill. And no, you can’t come. It’ll be hours and hours. I’ll have to help Dad figure out where to send him and how to fill out all the paperwork. And when the hospital files their report, I want them to know every last detail. I want them to know who’s accountable.”

I set TJ on my shoulder to burp him. “What do you mean, who’s accountable? Nobody’s going to think it was you or Dodge.”

“I mean so they know it’s the army that did it. So it’s on the record that they broke this poor bastard and then ignored him and blew him off, and when he tried to get help they threw some pills at him, and then he shot himself because they’d turned him into a drug addict.” The volume of his voice ramped up gradually with each sentence, until he was nearly shouting. “I want it to be on that last line on his death certificate. ‘Cause of death: homicide.’”

“Cade…they’re not going to do that.”

“They’d better. It’s criminal. You don’t agree with me? You don’t think they royally screwed him over?”

“I never said I didn’t agree. I just said there’s no recourse.”

“It’s my opinion,” Cade began, leaning toward me with his hands against the kitchen island, “that people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, namely life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Nobody’s arguing with you.”

“And whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it’s the right of the people to alter or abolish it. That’s my right and my duty.”

I stood up and joggled TJ on my shoulder. “Cade, don’t go in there with your sleeves rolled up quoting the Declaration of Independence. They’ll think you’re a nut job. The important thing is to get Elias taken care of.”

Cade threw his arms in the air. “He’s dead!”

“I just saw him!” I shouted back again, and in the moment I felt so passionately correct that nothing would ever have convinced me otherwise. “I bled a lot, too, and here I am! So don’t you write him off until someone with a degree who knows what they’re talking about tells you different!”

He swore at me, grabbed his keys from the hook and slammed the front door.

It would be many hours before I saw him again. And by the time he walked back in the door, dry-eyed and grim and smelling of cigarette smoke, I’d had much more time to consider all that had been said.

I felt sorry for what I’d said about hearing it from a person with a degree. I knew that must have been salt in the wound for Cade, that only a person who had finished college was qualified to judge what he himself had seen.

I believed, finally, that Elias was dead.

And I thought, where the army was concerned, Cade might be right. Maybe it was the army’s fault for throwing him back into the world when he returned from war, woefully ill equipped to make his way through the battlefield of normalcy. Maybe it was their fault for nurturing a culture in which he couldn’t admit need without acknowledging failure.

But also came the terrible thought that it was my fault, too. For not listening to my mother’s voice that had whispered to me so insistently over these past months, warning me that what we were doing for Elias was not enough—never enough. For not recognizing, the previous afternoon, that Elias was trying to make his peace with me and Cade. And worst of all was not what I had failed to do, but what I had done: how I, with the best of intentions, had led him to love me. Deep in my heart I had known for months that his fondness for me was not sisterly, but in spite of that I laid my hands on his shoulders and my son in his arms and expected him to find it a comfort and not a burden.

For a long time after the funeral it seemed always to be on my mind—the constant question of whether my friendship with Elias played a role in his death. He left no note, no letters, no explanation. In the infinite stretch of time that followed, some days I told myself it was egotistical to assume I had a part in it at all. He was addicted, in pain, mentally ill. None of those things had anything to do with me. But I couldn’t get away from the belief, down in the core of me, that it was true. Elias’s mind was a crowded room of people he could never get his arms around: not to hold, not to carry, not to save. And so he put a bullet in it, and in doing so joined most of them, and left only one behind.