Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 32

Jill




I packed while Cade was in Maryland. Into the diaper bag I sorted the simplest and most necessary elements of what I had carried with me into the Olmstead house only the year before. Nearly everything was TJ’s—his toys and clothes, the blanket that Leela had crocheted, sized to fit around him in the laundry basket. On the surface of our dresser, in a modest display, rested the small tokens of my romance with Cade: the tickets from our first football game, a Valentine card he had given me, a pressed rose from our wedding day. All these things I left behind.

I zipped the bag and set it heavily on the bed. When Cade had first told me he was going to Maryland, a red flag had snapped up in my mind, but he had said he wouldn’t miss the surgery, and I believed him. No matter how angry he was about Elias or what he was plotting, Cade loved his son. Knowing that would add to my grief and guilt, a day from now, when I would call the police from the hospital and turn him in.

I wished I could call Leela, or see her one last time. Even though I couldn’t tell her that I was leaving, I wished I could hear her voice again, asking me how the garden was doing or chuckling over TJ’s baby mischief. She was a good woman. For a long time after I figured that out, I had puzzled over why a person as clear minded as her had tolerated a life with people like Dodge and the younger Eddy. But I couldn’t judge her; I had tolerated so much from Cade in the name of keeping the peace and hoping, through my faith in him, that things would turn around. I might have kept on doing that forever had Cade not lost sight of the difference between a patriot and a traitor. It reminded me that some lines might blur but others stand surely apart, and one can’t be a good mother and also a coward.

In the laundry basket, on top of a folded wool blanket, TJ slept. For the remainder of the day I could give him no food, only breast milk, in preparation for the next day’s surgery, and I dreaded the struggle when he awoke expecting dinner. I watched him from the corner of my eye, attuned to signs of wakefulness, as I quietly packed our bag. Gray shadows from the window fluttered against his chest, which rose and fell in a rhythm so drowsy and content that it soothed me, even in my agitated state. His cheeks moved to suckle, his fists clenched and loosened. The shape of his brow was just like Cade’s. I wondered if he would hate me one day, looking into the mirror through his own eyes and seeing his father’s reflected back at him. I gave all I could, I thought. I would have to be the most perfect mother, because only the existing parent is real. The other is made all out of myths.

I stepped into the hallway and then, with a tentative turn of the knob, into Elias’s room. The bed, stripped to its white sheet, lay stark along one wall; the blue desk with its hutch empty, its chair slightly askew to face me, seemed to expect a visitor. The air felt cooler than on the rest of the floor, and the stillness and silence of it gave it the feeling of a grotto. I ran my hand along the dresser; it was clean of dust. Candy must have been in recently. I wanted a memento of some kind to take with me, but saw none. In a way that seemed fitting.

What I could really use, I thought, is his phone. Elias had owned the kind you could restock with minutes from phone cards, and on this day, with escape so imminent and the need so great, I would have gladly spent the money and run the small risk someone would discover I was carrying one. But I had no idea where it had gone. Earlier in the day, before TJ’s pre-op checkup down in Liberty Gorge, I had searched our bedroom high and low to see if I could find where Cade had stashed it, after he had been given Elias’s personal effects at the hospital. But not a thing had turned up, and his room was the only remaining place it might be.

I opened Elias’s dresser drawers and rooted around a little. His clothes were still there, folded neatly. They smelled like him, in a tidy, muted sort of way. Finding nothing else, I decided to brave a search through his old army duffel, slouched in the room’s far corner. But all it contained was a set of pressed BDUs, an old Bible with his name inscribed on the cover, an army-issue folding knife and a plastic wallet insert filled with photos of his family and a girl in a multicolored ski hat. No sign of the phone, not even a charger.

I sighed. That morning I’d called Dave from the pediatrician’s office phone under the pretense that I needed to reach my husband. Dave was already in Laconia. Ready when you are, he had said. My sense of gratitude to him was so profound that it twisted into discomfort deep in my gut. I didn’t like feeling so beholden to anyone, not for a favor so immense. But I had to get through this first so I could have choices again.

In the next room, TJ stirred, fussed. A sudden sleepy cry broke the air. I walked backward out of Elias’s room and shut the door silently, as though his spirit resided there and was owed absolute peace. Wherever he was, I hoped he had found a full measure of that.

* * *

The sound of the truck pulling into the gravel driveway woke me from a light sleep. Beside me TJ lay sprawled on his back in his diaper and undershirt, his plump cheeks moving in a faint rhythm as though dreaming of milk. The clock beside me said it was three-thirty in the morning. A car door slammed; beside me TJ shifted at the noise, but did not open his eyes. I felt relieved they had come home before morning, just as Cade had promised. I hated the thought of taking TJ away for good without seeing his father one last time.

I turned over and attempted to fall back to sleep, but within a couple of minutes the front door creaked open and I heard the heavy footfalls of Dodge’s boots, then the sound of something being dragged. Cade’s voice came in low and clipped. Dodge muttered a reply, and the dragging sound was replaced by grunts that indicated a heavy object being hoisted by both men.

I rolled over and lay still, my mind attuned to the puzzle of noise from downstairs. Perhaps they had hit a deer, like the day Cade had wrecked his car and Candy had butchered the doe in the front yard. But if that were the case, why would they have brought it inside in one piece? I lay there a while longer, listening. Then I eased myself past TJ and tiptoed down the stairs.

The front door was still open, the screen door propped with a brick, but the porch light was off. Dodge and Cade were both outside, unloading the truck. I looked around the downstairs. The only light came from the lamp next to Elias’s chair that we typically left on all night no matter what. I wandered toward the darkened kitchen. No blood or soil, no sign of whatever they had carried. A basket on the kitchen island overflowed with sweet corn. The beagles’ food bowls sat beside each other on the counter awaiting the day’s breakfast. On a slate square above the stove hung a tole painting of a house with a curl of smoke emerging from the chimney, beside a quote in country-primitive script: “He restoreth my soul, Psalms 23:3.” I could read it by the narrow band of light that blazed beneath the tightly closed door of the cellar. I looked at that door for a moment, considering. Then I threw it open and ventured down the stairs.

In the center of the room, tied with bungee cord to Eddy’s good Windsor chair, sat Drew Fielder. Above the strip of duct tape that covered his mouth he looked out at me with hollow, doomed eyes. The sleeves of his blue pin-striped oxford shirt were pushed above his elbows; his wrists were bound behind his back, and one leg of his khaki pants was slashed with a dark wet stain that appeared to be urine. Drew’s ankles were bound to the legs of the chair with tape, and his shoes were gone. Above his head the metal cord of the lightbulb swung slowly, like a pendulum marking time with great cans of milk powder and freeze-dried meats.

I screamed and, by instinct, jerked the tape from his mouth. He spit out a wadded paper towel and gasped in a deep breath of air. “Jill,” he said, “get me out of here.”

Already I could hear the rapid footsteps of the men returning to the house. “That had to be Jill,” I heard Cade saying. At the sound of his voice Drew strained his shoulders toward me, bumping his head against my arm, and I skittered back from his desperate touch. Cade’s boots and Dodge’s were quick and hollow against the stairs. Before I could turn I backed into Cade, who clapped his hand over my mouth when I startled, whispering a shushing noise like the one he used with TJ.

“Goddamn it,” Dodge muttered, coming down the stairs behind Cade. “You better not scream, boy. We don’t got neighbors anyhow.”

“Cade,” Drew said. “What the f*ck, man.”

Cade let me go, and I turned to him with a look of mute shock. “Don’t, Jill,” he said. “The guy’s had it coming for three years now. He’s alive, so chill.”

“Call the cops, Jill,” Drew said.

Dodge pointed at him. “You, shut up.”

“You better pick your loyalties wisely right now,” Drew told me. “They’ll be here by tonight, busting down his door.”

“In your dreams,” said Cade.

Drew looked him in the eye. “Watch and wait. You’re already on the shit list, man. You made a bad, bad move.”

Dodge grabbed the chair by its sides and dragged it backward toward the wall, tipping Drew back. The legs scraped the concrete with a broken and dissonant squeal before Dodge roughly righted it again and set to work securing it to the wall with a length of chain. I turned to Cade, who was moving his baseball cap up and down with a nervousness that belied his glowering expression. This wasn’t his idea, I knew all at once, knowing from that gesture that he was on the edge of a panic he couldn’t reveal. “Will one of you tell me what’s going on?” I demanded.

“We’re on plan C,” he informed me in a curt voice. Dodge tossed him a pack of zip ties pulled from his back pocket, and as Cade caught it I saw Elias suddenly clear in my mind’s eye, the way he was in the woods that day—the bulk of his curled shoulders, the sweat on his temples, the dreadful distance in his gaze. Cade pocketed the bag as if it meant nothing to him, and said to Drew, “I’m not on any shit list anywhere. So sit tight.”

“The hell you aren’t. Why do you think you didn’t get my job?” Cade looked at him sharply, his hand stilled for a moment on the brim of his cap. To Dodge, Drew said, “Are you the Powell guy? Richard or something? Yeah, he’s the guy on the watch list. The antigovernment nut job. No chance Bylina’s guys were ever going to clear you for my job when your family runs with this guy.”

“Shut up,” he said, but Dodge fixed the chain against a second hook and rose grinning. I stopped at the base of the stairs and looked at Drew, momentarily halting my effort to leave. If Drew already knew about Cade’s family, we were all in more trouble than I could have imagined. For all these months I had written off Dodge’s claims as paranoia, but if they were true, then I was already an accessory. I had known so much and said so little, and whatever agency knew Dodge’s name might also know about me and my silence. The fact that I had reasons for it wouldn’t matter. People always did.

“They got me on a watch list, huh?” he said, ignoring Cade’s scowl.

“Gag that a*shole back up,” said Cade.

“Why? Let him talk. I’m interested.”

Cade gave a shake of his head and moved toward Drew, but the sharpness of my voice stopped him. “This matters, Cade. Let him say what he knows.”

The way Drew’s arms were fixed behind his back made it impossible to fully raise his head, but he looked up as best he could and trained his glance on me. “Call them, Jill. They’re coming anyway, and you’ve got a lot to lose.”

“She’s not on your side, little buddy,” said Dodge.

“Is that true, Jill?” asked Drew. His voice was plaintive. “You really on the side of this yuck-a-puck and your jackass baby daddy? I always thought you were better than that.”

“I’m on my son’s side. Tell me what watch list you’re talking about.”

“Will you help me if I do?”

“She can’t do a damn thing for you,” said Cade. He looked to Dodge and asked, “What do you want to do about the truck?”

“I’ll go clean it out once we’ve got him situated. You can hold down the fort.”

“We can get Scooter to do it. He should be over any minute now. I texted him from the road.”

Drew’s piercing eye contact kept drawing me back in. “C’mon, Jill, don’t be a bitch right now,” he said, and what sympathy I had built for him turned sour. “Who kept you company on Christmas? When this guy abandoned you for his real family. Who bought you dinner when he left you behind?”

That evening flashed into my mind. “I paid for my own dinner. And then you tried to get me to go to bed with you.”

Cade looked at him sharply. His face turned pink. Dodge made a noise that sounded like the yowl of a cat, all the while tightening the bungee cords that Cade had secured too loosely for his taste.

“Sorry,” said Drew. “My bad. I got mixed signals. I thought we had a bond. Sorta like the one you had with Stan when you were f*cking him all that time you lived in his apartment.”

My heart went cold. “What?”

Dodge and Cade exchanged a glance. “Where’s the duct tape?” Cade asked Dodge, but his voice had a nervous waver.

“In the truck. I’ll grab it.”

“Yeah, you know what I’m talking about,” Drew said to me. Looking at Cade, he said, “Slept in his bed every damn night. I saw it myself.”

“Bullshit,” said Cade.

“No bullshit. Tell him, Jill. No surprise you didn’t tell this white-supremacist SOB you were taking it from the big black dude. How’d the baby turn out?”

Cade grabbed the broom beside the gun safe and whacked him across the face with the handle. His mouth started to bleed, and he rolled his lips to suck back some of the blood. Beyond that, he didn’t react. “Don’t hit me, a*shole,” he said. “Hit your nigger-loving girlfriend. Not my fault the soul brother’s too beaucoup.”

Cade thrust his palm against Drew’s forehead, making his head whip back and then forward. Streaks of blood poured down either side of Drew’s chin, vampirelike. “Shut up,” Cade shouted in his face. From the second floor came the drowsy cry of the baby. “Shut up. Shut up.”

Drew spit a mouthful of blood into Cade’s face, and Cade recoiled.

“You better let me out of here now,” Drew shouted back. “You’re gonna go to jail for the rest of your goddamn life. Best you show some mercy so they don’t hang you. Guys are gonna be bending you over in the shower till you grow a vagina. You f*cked up for real, Cade. If I were you I’d let me go and run like hell to Guatemala. They know who you are. You’ll be lucky if they’re not here by sunrise.”

By now Dodge was back, tearing a noisy strip from the roll of tape. He slapped it over Drew’s mouth and Drew ceased to even try to talk. He just glared at me, trickling blood from around the bottom of the tape and now from his nose, as well. The baby’s cry had risen to an insistent howl. I broke with Drew’s stare and hurried up the steps to TJ.

He was sitting upright on the bed, red-faced and squalling, the top of his little bare chest shiny with tears and drool. I lifted him and pulled him against me to nurse, the tension in my throat growing tighter by the second. His small fists pounded my chest with frustration when my anxiety slowed the milk letting down. Downstairs I heard the cellar door bang shut, and at that a sob burst from me, a choking, helpless sound that startled TJ and set his arms waving. I gasped back the second sob and tried to breathe normally.

Cade’s footsteps clunked against the stairs. I backed up into the corner beside the window. The door swung open and Cade stepped in, looking first at me and then to TJ. For the first time since his return I noticed his clothes were grimy and his eyes exhausted. His tattooed forearm was smeared with blood where he had wiped Drew’s spit from his face. He was overdue for a haircut, and with his baseball cap off the lank strands hung around his face in a dirty, formless mess.

“What have you done, Cade,” I cried. At the dread in my voice he threw me the uneasiest of glances, reaching into the hamper for a washcloth to wipe his forearm. “Tell me how you’re going to get out of this one. Tell me now, and then get me and TJ out of this house before they come to arrest you.”

He tossed the washcloth back into the basket. “Nobody’s coming. We’re all on our own here. And nobody’s leaving until we figure out what to do next.”

The weight of that notion was almost physical. The house, this drafty and rattling old place, seemed to snug around me as if shrunk tight by Cade’s determination. I clutched TJ tighter against my body to steady the shivers that rippled through my muscles, but it didn’t work. “How could you do this to us,” I stammered, my voice at a whisper, without any hope that he would offer an answer. “If you were going to do something this awful you never should have come home.”

“I didn’t intend to,” he snapped. “I’m not that stupid. The idea was to lure him into the truck and hold him while I went into the building with his ID. And then I walked over and the entire office building went on lockdown out of ‘an abundance of caution’ because of a bomb on the Metro. So I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I just told Dodge to drive and we’d figure the rest of it out once we got here. He was acting like I was supposed to have all the answers, and hell if I know how to cover our tracks.”

I waved a hand wildly toward the door. “Well, what are you going to do with him now?”

He squinted in a peevish way. “I don’t know, Jill. F*cking bury him in the backyard. I’m driving back to D.C. tomorrow. I’ll think about it on the way down.”

I started to cry again.

“Jill, knock it the hell off. It has to be this way. The tree of liberty must be refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants, and if it has to be mine and his, then so be it. I’m not just going to let Elias die for nothing. Let them stick a toe tag on him and shove him into their freezer.”

“He wouldn’t want you to do this. And it isn’t going to work. They’ll connect this to you in no time. You heard what Drew said. He knew who Dodge is.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting that. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. And you know why it all is.” He pointed savagely at TJ drowsing in my arms. When he spoke again, his voice sank to an aggressive hiss. “Why my life’s f*cked up. Why Fielder’s downstairs. Why you’re stuck in this shithole, and why Elias is dead.”

“TJ’s got nothing to do with Elias.”

“Bullshit he doesn’t. Elias killed himself because I had you and he didn’t and he couldn’t stand it. Let’s just put it out there, all right? Let’s lay it all on the table. He came home from the Sandbox and he was doing okay in spite of it all—”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Don’t cut me off! He was doing okay until I brought you home. I thought about this shit the whole way back from D.C., and there’s no point now in pretending it doesn’t exist. The VA had no business putting him on all those goddamn drugs and making it impossible for him to get up off his ass and get his life together. The fact that he couldn’t handle life anymore falls square on their shoulders. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say what it was that pushed him over the edge. It was him seeing that baby and knowing he was never, ever going to get a chance with you.”

“No,” I protested. But I knew it was probably true.

“And I love that kid with everything in me,” he continued. “I’d give him the world and it’s a damn good thing, because that’s about what he’s costing me. My freedom, my brother, my future, my loyalty to you—”

“That’s not TJ’s fault,” I snapped. “Back off the poor kid and take some responsibility.”

“That’s all I ever do anymore is take responsibility,” he shouted. “I’ve given all I goddamn can, and it’s time for the people who owe me to pay up.”

“Your son and I owe you nothing,” I yelled back raggedly. TJ, who had been almost asleep at my breast, awoke all at once and turned his head to look at his father, eyes baleful and mouth agape. “And we’re the ones who are going to be paying.”

Cade scowled at me. “‘Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.’”

Leave, the instinctive part of my mind commanded me. Leave now. It’s time. Whether or not I would be implicated with the rest of them, there would be no avoiding the consequence either way, and for TJ’s sake I needed to press forward without fear. With my son clutched against my chest with one arm, I snatched up the diaper bag from the bed and, before Cade could step into my path, hustled down the stairs. As I reached the landing Cade grabbed my shoulder, sending the bag sliding down my arm and disrupting my balance. I spun toward the wall to compensate, and then Dodge was in front of me, blocking off the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Dodge said. “Don’t you even think about going anywhere.”

“I’m taking TJ to the hospital for his surgery. Whatever it is you’re doing here has nothing to do with me. I don’t know a thing about it.”

“Get back upstairs.”

I met Dodge’s eyes. Cade’s hand gripped my shoulder again, and I shrugged hard, but he didn’t let go. “It’s easier for you if we’re gone,” I told him. “Babies need too many things. Let me out the door now and I won’t say a word to anyone.”

“It’s too late for that,” said Dodge. “They’re all around the house. Agents. FBI probably. Scooter, he was on his way over here and saw them coming up the road. Called to warn us—”

Not us, I thought. Me. All the pieces snapped into place in my mind: that when Cade texted him, he realized he had been all wrong in his prediction that they would wait until after TJ’s surgery. He had turned them in, most likely in a panic, and only realized after the fact that TJ and I were about to be caught in the net with the rest of them. He had tried to do the right thing, but it was too late and too complicated.

“F*ck my life,” Cade said. He let go of my shoulder and pushed past me into the living room. “F*ck!” he shouted toward the front wall.

“And they arrested him, or so it sounded like. Now they got people outside every door. And we’re just waiting.”

Dodge stopped speaking and looked toward the living-room window, but its dusty drapes had been drawn tightly against the night. Cade leaned back against the wall and gazed toward the ceiling with an empty expression, as though looking to God for instructions. I asked, “Waiting for what?”

“For them to make contact.”

I looked impatiently at Cade. The door was right there; everything within me pulled me toward it, and irritation was rapidly replacing my fear and disbelief. “Well, why don’t you take out your damn phone and call them yourself? It’s all over anyway, right? And your son needs to get to the hospital.”

Cade didn’t respond. He looked stricken. In the silence, Dodge spoke up again. “I told you Scooter was a plant. Like hell he just happened to walk into that one. Arranged to disappear before he got trapped in the house with us is more like it.”

“Shut up, Dodge,” Cade said peevishly. “It could have been anybody. Someone who saw your truck, someone who works with Bylina—Uncle Randy, even—”

Dodge cocked his head in rueful agreement. “Randy, yeah, it could be. Thanks to Miss Busybody over here.”

I scowled at him. “Why don’t you quit listening to yourself talk for five minutes and get the police on the phone so we can get out of this? Where’s Candy?”

“Downstairs watching our guest. She set the boys up in Grandma’s workroom. Cade’ll take you upstairs, too. Got to have someone keep them kids away from the windows.”

“No chance. I’m not babysitting so you can bicker back and forth with the police. Cade, give me your phone.”

He gave me a long, guarded look, as if he was considering it. Dodge said, “Goddamn, Cade, your little woman needs to see the back of someone’s hand.”

But right then, it rang. I took a step back from him and shifted TJ to the other hip, and Dodge took advantage of Cade’s distraction and mine to take me firmly by the upper arm and pull me out into the hallway. “Up the stairs,” he ordered.

I shook him off. “Don’t you dare.”

“Fine. Walk.” When I balked, he met my eye with a gaze widened by impatience. “You want to be down here if they bust in, huh? You think that’s such a smart idea? Best you and your boy be up at the top of the house, away from the people they want. And don’t think they’re going to give us any warning.”

As much as I hated him, there was a logic to what he said. I stepped onto the first stair and he nudged me forward. On the second floor the shades were all drawn. I held TJ firmly against me as I navigated the narrow staircase to the attic. In Leela’s workroom, the three little boys sat hunched around Dodge’s laptop from which came the tinny dialogue of a children’s show about George Washington. Despite the early hour, John’s face was a mess of red lollipop residue; Matthew, seated in the middle, wore his birthday rifle slung on his back as always. The little square of electrical tape over the webcam curled outward at its top edge.

“Tell Cade to tell them I need to leave,” I told Dodge. “That ought to be his priority.”

Dodge grunted a reply and thumped back down the stairs.

I set TJ down on the floor and shut the door. “Matthew, give me your rifle.”

He shook his head slowly, not raising his gaze from the screen. “‘This is my rifle,’” he quoted. “‘There are many like it, but this one is mine.’”

“Not right now, it isn’t. Hand it over.”

“No.” He began babbling a half-coherent version of the Rifleman’s Creed. “I will ever guard it against the ravinges of weatherman damage—”

I walked up behind him and lifted it off his back, ignoring his indignant hey, and unloaded it before securing it in the craft closet that was safely outside the door. Crouching on the floor, I peeked out through the thin gap between the bottom of the shade and the window. I squinted against the sudden swirling lights, red and blue, that pulsed in rhythm against the dark sky. Out on the main road sat two ambulances, three fire trucks, several other boxy emergency vehicles and a white van from which sprouted a satellite dish perched atop a long pole. At the end of the driveway, glinting beneath the moonlight and partially obscured by the trees, a large black truck blocked the exit. I sighed from deep in my chest. There was still the chance they would let me walk out with TJ and take us to the hospital if Cade put his son ahead of himself. He might, I told myself. None of this had been a part of his original plan. Surely he wanted his son to have this surgery as much as I did.

I sat with my back against the wall beneath the window and waited out the long minutes, watching the backs of the three little boys hunched over the laptop, the wanderings of TJ as he crawled across the rug. All of a sudden I had an idea. “Boys,” I said, and they startled at the sharpness of my voice. “Let me see that computer a minute.”

I took it from Matthew’s hands and checked the network connection. Our phones had been cut off long ago, but Dodge had kept up payments on the satellite internet to keep his eBay sales going. Relief washed over me at the sight of the little icon of expanding rays. I logged in to my email and sent off a quick message.





Dave—complication. We’re in trouble here at the house in Frasier. SWAT teams or FBI outside. Might not get to hospital but am trying. Help if poss.—Jill





I turned off the WiFi connection and handed the computer back to Matthew, who snapped the video back on. “TJ stinks,” he said as an afterthought. Sure enough, the baby needed a diaper change, and I had left the bag downstairs. I carried TJ down the narrow steps to change him in my room, where we kept extra diapers next to the laundry basket where he slept. As I laid him down on the bed, working hard to keep my touch gentle in spite of my anxiety, Cade stepped into the darkened room behind me. “Jill, Fielder’s lying about you and Stan, isn’t he?”

I looked over my shoulder and shot him a perplexed look. Of all the things he could be worrying about right now. “Of course he is.”

“I thought so.” He rested his back against the wall and looked toward the hallway, dimly lit from what little daylight was now creeping in around the shades. For the first time in all this I noticed the handgun holstered on his belt, just behind his right arm. “But he said—he said he saw you himself.”

I closed up the diaper and lifted TJ to my hip. “He saw that I slept in Stan’s bed sometimes, but never when Stan was home. It’s that simple.”

“I thought you were sleeping in the living room.”

“When he was home, yes, but his mattress was more comfortable and I was pregnant and my back hurt, so when he wasn’t there I didn’t see the harm in sleeping there. Come on, Cade. Drew’s just exaggerating to distract you, and it’s working. It’s ridiculous that’s even in your head at a time like this.”

“If everything was so up-and-up, then why didn’t I know about this before?”

“Because there wasn’t anything to say. Seriously, if it was like that between me and Stan, do you think I would have taken this as my best option in life?” My voice was rising. TJ thumped his fist against my chest and squirmed, but I lacked the restraint to lower my voice. “If I haven’t proven by now that I’m loyal to you, then God help me, Cade. Nothing would make you believe it.”

He broke eye contact grudgingly and looked toward the hallway again. Light splintered down in a broken pattern against the stairs, like kindling for a fire. “You know what, Jill—” he began, and the quaver in his voice was strange. “My old girlfriend, Piper…I almost slept with her about a week ago. I ran into her and it almost happened. Wait, no. That’s not the whole story.” He faced me, his eyes freakishly bright. I realized with astonishment that they were wet, almost overflowing with tears. “I was trying to find her. I couldn’t, though. And then I just stumbled into her, and one thing led to another, and I kissed her.”

I had no idea what to say. This was a fresh affront, this knowledge that I had stood through all of this beside a man who was chasing his ex-girlfriend in his spare time. I gave a short, sharp bark of a laugh and said, “That’s not cool.”

“I know. I stopped. I felt terrible. I’m such a piece of shit, babe. I’m going down so hard. I swear to God I thought I was going to die yesterday, once I walked into the office building with the stuff in my bag. I never planned to walk back out, no matter what Dodge thought. ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed—’”

Impatience and boredom filled my voice. “‘With the blood of patriots and tyrants.’”

“Right, yeah. And now what am I supposed to do? Go to jail? What the f*ck would I do in jail?” His voice was rising. “I’m too goddamn smart to be in jail.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’ll do,” I snapped. “I guess you should have thought about that several months ago.”

He leaned against the door frame, his head against the darkly stained trim, weary. His gaze caught the middle distance. “This is all Dodge’s baby,” he said. “He’s the one who knows. The man with the plan.”

“Dodge is a first-class moron. And you’ve always thought so. Do the right thing, Cade,” I pleaded. “If you love us, find a way to get us out of here.”

His phone rang, and he scrambled to answer it. “Yes,” he said as he hurried out of the room, skipping down the stairs toward Dodge. “This is Cade Olmstead.”

I sat down hard on the mattress and turned TJ around in my lap so his face pressed against my chest. He gnawed his fist, still so hungry, and submitted to my desperate cuddling with placid ease. I breathed shallowly, straining to hear his father’s words from far away. When I failed, I rested my cheek against his small downy head and, with dense, choking sobs, cried.

* * *

“There’s no reason for me to do that if you’re not going to let him get to the hospital anyway,” Cade was saying into his phone. I had strapped TJ against my hip in the baby sling and cautiously ventured downstairs. Despite all of Dodge’s warnings, an hour had passed and nothing had happened yet; it seemed harder to believe we were in imminent danger of a SWAT team invasion. “You’re not following what I’m saying here. He’s got surgery at eight a.m. My wife’s not involved in this. She just wants to take him down to the hospital in Laconia and get it done.”

He saw me standing at the door of the pantry and waved me away, but I only moved a single step back. The last of my loyalty to him had melted away with his confession, and even in the midst of far greater concerns I seethed from the insult of it. From the corner between the cellar door and the kitchen, Dodge stood watching the local news on the living-room television, using the remote to switch between channels. Of course our house was the central image on every station, either a straight-on shot from the road or an aerial from the helicopter I had been hearing overhead. The memory of my mother’s plane on the red desert floor unfolded itself in my mind, and a shudder flickered down my spine as I wrapped a protective arm around TJ. Our story wasn’t going to end the way hers had. It couldn’t. I was here and aware, moving about that house on the screen, and I wouldn’t let that happen.

“Well, just move your damned vans for half a second,” Cade said. “Or have somebody take her down there, even. When you say ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible,’ you know how that sounds to me? Because it’s really the only thing I want to talk to you about.”

There was a long silence, and then Cade rolled his eyes. “Fine, never mind, then,” he said, his voice taking on a sarcastic, bitchy edge. “Then how about you call me back when you actually want to negotiate instead of just try to f*ck with me? Because that’s not going to go real well.”

He clicked off the phone. “Did you really just hang up on them?” I asked. “You can’t do that. You have to talk. TJ and I need to leave.”

“They’ll let you leave. They just won’t let him get his surgery.”

“Well, fine, then. Just let us walk out and we’ll worry about that later.”

Cade laughed as if I’d made a joke. “Yeah, right. Then what incentive would they have not to break down the door and take me with them? We’re a family. Nobody’s leaving. If he can’t get the surgery there’s no point anyway.”

I looked incredulously at Cade, then at Dodge, who had eased himself down onto the sofa with one arm behind his head and his gun resting on his belly like a bag of chips, eyes still fixed on the TV. “You can’t hold us hostage, Cade.”

“I’m not holding you hostage. We’re married. We’re sticking together, that’s all. Like always.”

He raised his eyebrows in an imploring way, a puppy-dog look, but distraction shifted his gaze to the television. His phone buzzed again, but rested ignored against his hip as he watched the live helicopter shots. Its incessant vibration stirred a memory of one of our first nights together, when he kissed me with escalating passion against a shadowed stadium wall after a football game, his BlackBerry vibrating against my thigh the entire time. Once upon a time I had wished the damn thing would go silent just for a little while. Now I desperately hoped he would answer it.

“I’m getting impatient with all their back-and-forth chitter-chattering,” Dodge said in response to the sound. “Shit or get off the pot, that’s what I say. One of us ought to go out there and stir something up. Give ’em some real incentive.”

“Shut up, Dodge,” Cade said, but he sounded listless this time. From the cellar, I heard Candy’s syrupy voice speaking, smooth and level. Drew was moaning. I cast a long, measuring look on Cade, then bolted across the living room to the door.

“Stop her!” Dodge barked, but he was already up and grabbing at me, his arm folding across my chest as I scrambled with the locks. TJ howled and gripped at my shirt. As Dodge dragged me backward I felt a small cold impact at the back of my head: his gun. I braced one arm around TJ and clawed at Dodge’s arm with the other, twisting and struggling, too overwhelmed by purpose to feel afraid. The arm only tightened, and TJ squalled with fury.

“Sweet Jesus,” Cade said. Dodge’s balance swerved, and the feeling of the hard steel went away. Cade’s voice ramped up louder, tense as the springs of a trap. “Christ, let her go already.”

“Take her back upstairs.”

He released me roughly, and I pulled TJ against my chest to try to calm him. He screamed to the end of the air in his lungs, his round face inflamed with rage. “Give me the baby,” said Cade. His voice was conciliatory.

“Not on your life.”

“C’mon, Jill. Let me talk to them some more before you go running out there and get you and TJ shot up. It isn’t going to be much longer.”

I looked past him to Dodge, who met my gaze with a pointed glare. He slid his gun back into his shoulder holster, slowly. Cade prodded my waist, and I tramped back up the stairs.

Back in the attic room, Candy’s boys were still riveted on the laptop screen. The devil’s third eye, Dodge always called it. I took it back from Matthew and tried to set up the network connection again, but it wouldn’t work. “Damn it,” I muttered.

“Aunt Jilly said a bad word,” intoned Mark.

I set the laptop back in their eager hands and gnawed my nails, gazing out the window at the trucks that seemed to have doubled in number. The broken thunder of the news helicopter vibrated the glass. My hands shook, and the memory of Dodge’s gun planted behind my ear loomed so large in

my mind that all my strategic thoughts of escape seemed to have shriveled. That was the goal, I supposed—to intimidate me into obedience, to keep me quiet and scared. As I sat against the wall and pulled TJ against me to nurse, I pictured Dave standing in a hospital corridor, watching the clock, and I felt the anger inside me rise to a boil. They were destroying my plan to escape. All this time I had held out for TJ’s sake, and now they were making all those miserable weeks pointless. Now perhaps I would be charged as an accessory, because I had known things I should have reported, tried and failed to hedge my bets about Cade’s conscience and his sanity. At the very least the coming weeks would be a mess of lawyers, two-way mirrors—possibly even foster care for our son. I could lose my child. He would become motherless, just like me, but it would be so much worse for him. He would be shucked into a system whose goal was merely to keep him alive.

That’s unproductive thinking, Jill. I heard the shadow of my mother’s voice behind the thought. Calm down. Remember, don’t quit five minutes before the miracle happens.

“Aunt Jilly, I’m hungry,” said John.

“Let me see if Grandma’s got any snacks up here,” I replied, doubtful. TJ had fallen asleep at my breast, and I eased him back into the sling before rising awkwardly from the floor. There would be nothing in the craft room, but perhaps there was some food squirreled away on the shelves on the landing. I closed the craft-room door behind me to soften the laptop’s hearty chime of “Yankee Doodle” and began rifling through the clutter on the bookshelf. Three stories down there was enough food to feed all of Frasier for a year, but nobody had thought to hand up so much as a box of graham crackers before they confined us to the attic. Sixty thousand dollars, I remembered Cade saying as I looked over the basement in wonder. He had mocked his family then, so sure he was nothing like any of them.

The bookshelf search turned up nothing, and I wasn’t eager to return to tell John he would have to go hungry. My back aching from TJ’s weight, I walked with a gentle sway to my gait to keep him asleep, back and forth in front of the attic fan. Then, as I approached it once again, my eye caught a movement just beyond its slats. I stopped and peered through the mesh and past the slats. Two men in black SWAT gear were moving around behind a truck that blocked the driveway. My heart pounded, and TJ, as if sensing my surge of adrenaline, raised his eyebrows high above his closed eyes and stirred. I rushed to the craft closet and pulled out a torn length of white sheet to drape from the window. But as I unsnapped the grimy closures and braced my hands against the sash, another motion caught my gaze. The window below mine opened and the lean black silhouette of an automatic rifle appeared, then Dodge, easing his upper body out the window to sight in.

I glanced at the closed door of the craft room, then at the closet still wide open beside it. In a few efficient movements I grabbed Matthew’s rifle from the closet, reloaded it and took aim through the venting slats for the fan. The pop of the gun cut the air; I felt the flail of TJ’s arm against my back, and then Dodge slumped half out the window. The rifle fell from his hands and clattered against the porch roof. Blood bloomed on the back of his head, long streaks of it unfurling like a lily.

Someone screamed. A man. I guessed it was Cade.

I shoved the gun back into Leela’s closet and buried it beneath the bolts of cloth. “What the f*ck!” I heard him shouting from the second floor. “What the f*ck!”

I slipped back into the workroom and locked the door behind me with the old key that jutted from the lock. Matthew stared at me as I hurried in. He asked, “Did Uncle Cade go and shoot himself?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s what happens. My dad says so. That’s what happens when you don’t know your target.”

I nodded and peeked out the shade.

“Uncle Cade’s sort of stupid with guns.”

“He sure is.”

Cade’s howling had turned into a wail. After a few moments a long shrill sound from Candy rose up, as well. I heard the sound of the attic door being thrown open, and my heart thumped in my ears, a double thud that resonated like being underwater. I felt as though I could feel all four chambers pumping, each distinct. TJ, sensing my anxiety, pulled up his legs inside the sling and twisted against my side. But he did not awaken.

“The hell you didn’t!” Cade shouted, and without a reply from Candy I had to assume he was talking on the phone. “Then why the f*ck is my brother-in-law hanging dead out my window?”

Candy began to sob in a messy, noisy way, punctuated with fresh wails. “All right, all right,” Cade said. “All of them, yeah. Take ’em all.”

Relief flooded through me. I wrapped my arms around TJ and stood just inside the attic door, prepared to rush out as soon as Cade opened it. But when he did, he blocked my exit with his arm. “Not you. Candy’s boys.”

All the relief I had felt turned abruptly to dread. The boys ducked beneath his arm and raced down the stairs like water down a drain. I tried to push past, but he shifted to stand in my path. His face was pale, eyes frantic. “Stay there, Jill.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s not safe for you to go out. They shot Dodge. Candy wants her boys, fine, but you’re not going anywhere. Not as long as they’ve got a sniper on us.”

So that was what he believed. I had no problem playing along. “But they’re not going to shoot us. It’s safer for everybody if TJ and I go, too. Why would you want your son to stay here if there’s a sniper on the roof? Just let us go, Cade. If they see you’re willing to be reasonable, they’re less likely to rush in on you.”

“And there’s less to stop them from shooting me if they do.” I looked at him in dismay, and he combed both hands back through his hair. “Sorry, Jill, but that’s where it’s at right now. You know I’m out of cigarettes? Fine frickin’ time for that to happen.”

Just leave anyway, I thought. Shove past him and run. But I looked at the gun on his hip and thought better of it. I didn’t think he would hurt me or TJ, but I had never thought he would hold Drew Fielder hostage, either. “If I go, maybe I can negotiate for you better than anybody else can,” I suggested. “I’ve got more sympathy for you.”

He glanced toward me. I kept my expression neutral, but in the effort to do so I realized I wasn’t lying. More than anger, I felt pity for him. He could have been something wonderful, but here he was, whiling down the minutes that would end in him losing everything. Prison was going to be ugly for Cade. He was too good-looking and too easily cowed by another man’s will.

His phone buzzed. He looked at it, then handed it to me and sat on the floor, leaning back against the craft closet. I stared at the phone and then at him, and asked, “What am I supposed to do, answer it?”

“Yeah. I’m tired.”

I turned it on. “This is Jill.”

“Jill!”

The sound of Dave’s voice bewildered me. I hurried into the workroom and turned away from Cade. I couldn’t utter a response. Dave’s voice came on again. “Is that you, really? I thought I was going to talk to Cade. Are you doing all right?”

Glancing back at Cade, I gauged his reaction, but he only stared at the wall in a passive way. “I don’t understand,” I replied carefully.

“They’ve had me talking to him for a couple hours now,” Dave explained. “I got your email and then I saw the news, and so I called the police. They said sometimes it helps if someone with a connection to the family tries to help broker a truce, so they put me on. I’m trying to get you out of there. Is the baby all right? Are you?”

“We’re both here. We’re not hurt. Cade’s trying to process whatever just happened.”

“Yeah. They say they need him to be clear on the fact that they don’t know what the situation is with Dodge Powell, and they’re investigating it, but they don’t believe it was one of their men. They say they’re not in a position to retrieve the body. Do you know the condition of the hostage?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been up in the attic all this time.” At this Cade scowled at me. “What Cade wants…is to talk to a lawyer who will put together a good case for him.”

“Am I on speaker? Can he hear me?”

“No.”

“Good. What Cade really wants is for everybody to go home and forget this ever happened. In the end the choices are going to be that either he comes out or the SWAT team comes in. It’s a lot better for everyone, especially him, if he picks the first one. Tell me what it’s going to take to make that happen.”

I thought about the things Cade wanted. Not one of them sounded like anything that anyone could provide any longer. “I don’t know, Dave,” I replied. “If I did I’d tell you. He’s just tired.”

“Is that why he had you take the call? He’s still armed, though, right?”

“Yeah.” I looked at Cade again. “He could use some cigarettes. I think that’s what he wants.”

Cade gave me a listless thumbs-up.

Dave snorted with irritation. “Duly noted. Put him on the phone.”

I handed it to Cade, who clicked it off. Draping his arms loosely over his bent knees, he gazed up at the small round window, looking thoughtful and faraway. My stomach tightened with the fear that he was putting together how Dodge might have been shot just below that window. His back pressed against the door of the closet where the rifle still lay hidden.

He said, “Lay him down.”

“You mean TJ?”

“Yeah. He’s asleep anyway.”

I looked around the room as though seeking out a place to set him, but I was buying time, trying to discern Cade’s purpose. “I can’t,” I told him. “He’ll wake up if I take him off my back.”

Cade got up from the floor and, with gentle hands, braced TJ in the sling. I fumbled at the closure and loosened it enough that Cade could lift him. When he opened the closet door with his free hand, I caught my breath. But he pulled out a crocheted blanket from the shelf below the fabric bolts, shook it open and dropped it on the floor where he had just been sitting. Onto its folds he laid TJ, who didn’t stir. Then he stepped into the workroom, where I still stood, and closed the door so softly that the click of its latch made barely any sound.

“C’mere, Jill,” he said.

I didn’t move, but he came to me. He kissed me, working my shirt down over my shoulders as he unbuttoned it, letting his head drop to kiss my shoulder, my collarbone. I felt the warmth of his breath, the tip of his tongue, but as if from a great distance.

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he said, rasping a whisper. “I love you. And I love our son.”

His phone vibrated against the front of my thigh. He lifted me with one arm and set me on the worktable, then eased me onto my back. The worn wood pressed against the back of my skull and my tailbone, but that felt distant, too. From my neck to my thigh he ran his hands down my body, touching me as a blind man touches the face of a loved one, as if yearning to burn it into his memory. Give him whatever he wants, I thought. He doesn’t care about getting out of here alive. You do.

His voice rose in frustration. “C’mon, Jill. Don’t be cold to me. I don’t want to feel like I’m raping you or something.”

My laugh was short and sharp. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to relax. Do you?”

He shrugged. His expression was entirely benign. He slapped his phone onto the table, then his gun, before unbuckling his jeans and letting them slide down. “Clear your mind,” he suggested.

I diverted my gaze to the space above his shoulder. Leela’s barn stars, each painted in a cheerful variation of the Stars and Stripes, marched across the wall just below where the roof vaulted. Here and there yellow bows stiffened by wire and starch curled beneath them, like fossils recalling a battering wind. I remembered, all at once, Elias singing “Two Highways” in quiet harmony, watching out the window as we flew past the deep woods, the last of his cigarette smoldering between two fingers. A terrible ache for him opened in me out of the clear blue. My eyes burned inside and a sob choked into my throat, but I held both at bay. Cade tugged down my shorts by the waistband, and I closed my eyes, but it only made my mind’s image of Elias grow sharper and more true.

I thought of how warm and broad his body felt when I rubbed his shoulders. Of the dense wall of muscle deep beneath his skin, and the way his hair bristled along his neck in a line so clean, and the smell of him that changed as I touched him. I remembered how he looked in the apartment that first day, stretched out on the futon. Even though I knew that was not the real Elias, only the perfect one that the real world could not sustain, I couldn’t believe the one in the easy chair had been the real Elias, either. I wondered if any of us had ever seen the real one, or if he was all soul, never finding a body to inhabit that could feel like a home to him.

Cade slipped a hand beneath my shoulders and pulled me up to kiss him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and moved willingly to the edge of the table. All the thoughts that my loyalty to Cade had held at a distance now flooded my mind, and that image of Elias fell over Cade’s body like a projection onto a screen. I felt no shame from it because we all knew—every member of this family—that the moment Elias died we dropped our shallow and insular battles and turned all our loyalty to Elias: to love and mourn him, to avenge and remember him, to imagine the life he might have lived and to carry it forward like a glowing ember wrapped in a leaf.

Once it was over, Cade breathed hard against my neck, and pressed his temple against mine, and said, “I need to get that guy on the phone.”

* * *

Opening the door was enough to wake TJ, and I attended to changing him while Cade got back to the business of negotiating with the police. As I fastened TJ’s new diaper, the lights suddenly cut out. The sky outside was overcast, and the attic instantly fell into shadow. TJ whipped his head back and forth, regarding his surroundings with large, nervous eyes. I made a few comforting noises and carried him down the stairs.

Cade was taking a seat on the sofa as we walked in, moving things around on the coffee table with a restless energy I didn’t like. The holstered gun was back on his belt again. No longer was he attempting to stay away from the windows, and he was smoking a cigarette that looked hand-rolled. A dozen gutted cigarette butts lay scattered across the coffee table, the obvious materials he had used to come up with the one he was smoking now. Across the shaded room he shot me a glance that looked almost resentful.

“Don’t know what the hell Candy did to him,” Cade said, “but he’s not looking real good.”

“Drew?”

He grunted assent. I considered asking more questions, then decided my knowing more wouldn’t help anyone. I crossed the living room on the way toward the kitchen.

“Where you going?”

“I need food for TJ. I’m all out of the snacks I packed in the diaper bag.”

“There’s too many open windows along the porch.”

“Well, what do you want me to do? The kid needs to eat. All he’s done is nurse all day. Everything in the pantry is dried stuff in those giant cans. Same in the cellar—”

“You’re not going in the cellar. No way.”

“Of course not, but I’m just saying, I need to get to the fridge.”

Cade gave the kitchen a long look. Then he said, “I got on the phone with them again—not the guy you know, but the first one. They asked about the condition of the hostage. I went down to take a look so I could tell them correctly.”

I waited for him to continue. “And?”

He gave a slow shake of his head, then looked up at me from where he sat. “Jill…this was Dodge’s idea. It wasn’t mine.”

I didn’t really believe him, but I nodded.

“If I go upstairs and put this gun in my mouth, you know what that accomplishes?”

“Cade.”

“Absolutely nothing. It’s the same thing Eli did. It’s like I put all this work and time and effort into doing right by him, and the whole time I was just circling the block. I can’t make any kind of grand statement now, like I meant to down in D.C. Can’t even kill Fielder with any fair reason, because Candy already did most of that job, so far as I can tell. That’d be like shooting puppies in a box.”

I winced.

“If I walk out of here with my hands up, they send me to jail. And Fielder, he’ll get the last laugh on that one, because I won’t make it two days before some big guy makes me his bitch. Basically I’ve got zero options.”

He took his phone out of his pocket. It was buzzing energetically, and turned in a slow spin against the wood once he set it on the coffee table. We both looked at it, and I said, “I think you should choose what’s best for TJ.”

He nodded. I walked into the kitchen and took an orange from the bottom drawer of the dark refrigerator. I sat TJ on the kitchen island and cut a small piece off the top of the orange with a kitchen knife, then pulled it in two and handed TJ a section before beginning to peel off the skin from the rest. He worked the orange section into his mouth, nursing out the juice, watching with interest as I peeled. His legs swung in a carefree way. It occurred to me that he was as oblivious to my anger and fear and sense of betrayal as I had been to my own mother’s suffering that day, but I loved him no less for it. I was glad he didn’t know, glad he could sit and eat an orange in the calm of the eye of the storm, and if I could have held things that way for him forever, I would have. For the first time since my mother’s death I forgave myself a little for walking past that television. I understood then that if her spirit could have guided me it would have marched me away from that scene, sent me about my business to keep the peace in my soul as long as possible.

And then a gust of air blew across the kitchen, light filtered in and I looked up to see the front door open. Cade racked the gun and stepped outside. The screen banged shut, and as I gathered TJ into my arms with a sense of great caution, several loud pops ripped the air. I dropped to the floor with TJ, holding him against my side as I crawled with the other arm toward the corner beneath the table. Shouts rang out, a chaos of voices peppered with more gunfire. I curled beneath the table, enveloping my son with my body in an embrace that all but crushed him. Boot steps crashed into the house, voices, the sudden sense of exposure and broken boundary. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and breathed in the cold smell of the stone floor, the muscles of my back steeled against the world beyond me.

That this was a rescue did not enter my mind. These were only strangers, Cade’s adversaries, invading our home.

A gloved hand fell against my side, and then I was dragged back against the stone, not moving from my position around the baby. TJ, his mouth no longer stilled by my sleeve, twisted his head upward and let loose with a furious cry. So close to my ear, it filled my mind. My thoughts and his scream became one and the same.

It was that cry that shook away my fear and thrust me forward into the next of what life held for me. The cry was the punctuation that acknowledged the terribleness of what had gone before, and gave it a stopping place past which I might believe things would be better.

I got to my feet, planting them against the stone. Someone had me by the arm. I shifted TJ to my hip, and as if to declare the Olmsteads had never claimed me, said, “I’m Jill Wagner.”