Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 3

Jill




My mother believed in signs. Not in a superstitious way, really, but from the belief that sometimes an event catches your attention and brings to the surface of your mind, all of a sudden, a truth about yourself that you ought to pay attention to. When I was twelve she told me about the moment she knew she needed to get sober. She was driving north of Fresno, California, with me in the back of the car, and I asked her about the trees growing in the orchards alongside the road. I was four years old, she told me—she knew the date exactly—and I wanted to know what sort of fruit they were growing that was round and fuzzy and green. So she pulled the car over onto the shoulder, and we got out to take a look, because she wasn’t sure. We were in town to visit her parents for what would prove to be the last time. It was a lovely day, but she was feeling sad and angry, because her parents’ health was poor and they were mean. A couple of old, sick drunks, she said. The most pathetic type of creature in the world. All she could think about doing was getting back to our hotel and opening up a bottle of wine, to make the day go away.

We got out of the car and pulled one of those fuzzy things off a tree. She thought perhaps it was a kiwi, so she split it open for me, and inside there was an almond. I was just so amazed, she told me. And so were you. Thirty-two years old and I had no idea almonds grew that way. We both laughed, and during that moment she didn’t think about anything except the wonder of almonds.

Then she said we needed to get back in the car before we got caught by the farmer, and when she turned around she could see that we were on a hill that looked down over the entire city of Fresno. And this was what moved her—even though the sky was beautifully blue and fluffed with white clouds where we stood, the city was covered by a deep gray cloud that was pouring down torrents of rain. From that distance she could see it easily: the storm that appeared to have singled out the city, like a biblical punishment. I’d never seen anything quite like it, she said, and that’s when I knew. That’s how my parents were and that’s how I would become, walking around a beautiful world with a storm pouring over just us. I had to change. It didn’t happen right away. It took me a while. But that was the moment I knew.

Long after she was gone, I tried to remember every part of that story, to think hard on it so I could understand every aspect of her revelation. It had changed my life and hers, after all. When I stood there in the almond orchard I hadn’t any idea of what was going on in her mind just then, but in the end it had made me who I am. I wasn’t sure if I believed in signs the way she did, but I believed in the truth the sign had taught her: that it was never too late to start over, no matter where you came from, no matter who you had been or how daunting the path appeared. Her own mother had taught her what kind of a life she didn’t want, but mine taught me what kind of life I did.

* * *

Thanksgiving passed quietly—Cade and I camped out for the long weekend at Stan’s, house-sitting while Stan made the rounds of his grandparents’ homes—and suddenly it was December, with Christmas carols playing in the campus bookstore and greenery strung in lopsided loops around the dining hall. This was the time of year when depression started stalking me, and I had to fight it back the way you might hold up a stick against a rabid dog. It was the same thing every year: I’d play the tough girl through October, the month in which my mom had died, and just when I was congratulating myself at having muscled through another anniversary, the holidays would be upon us. Last year, when Cade and I were still newly an item, I had packed my car and driven out to Southridge once he left to visit his family. It hadn’t been difficult to cover my disappointment at not being invited up to New Hampshire, because our relationship was still so new that it seemed excusable. This year, though, his silence on the subject was causing my case of the holiday blues to arrive at double speed. When I had told Dave I’d be going home with Cade for sure this year, I had thought there was no chance he wouldn’t ask me. But as December meandered on, I grew less and less sure.

I chalked it up to distraction, at least at first. Ever since Mark Bylina had won the election, Cade had grown obsessed with whether he would be offered a job on his staff. For months he had attended to the menial tasks of electioneering with slavish diligence, all in the hope that his good work would be rewarded with a permanent job once the election was over. Now his excitement was tempered by his suspicion that Drew Fielder, his least favorite fellow volunteer, was being groomed for the assistantship Cade had hoped for.

“I’ve put in twice as many hours as that a*shole,” he said, late on a Sunday afternoon as we lay in bed. “That guy knows how to show up and look like he’s been working, then vanish as soon as the paid staff’s out of sight. And then I leave early one day this week so I can come see you, and the manager’s calling, ‘Leaving early, Cade?’”

“That sucks. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not on you. My sister’s already pissed that I didn’t come home for Thanksgiving, as if I could leave when Bylina had community service stuff going on all that week. I told her I’ll be back for Christmas, but she doesn’t get it. None of them do. The whole idea of climbing the ladder is just beyond them.”

I draped my arms loosely across my eyes and took a cleansing breath before I replied. It was time to address this. “At least you’ve got a place to go,” I pointed out.

He frowned at the ceiling. “No, all I’ve got is guilt and pressure to go someplace I don’t want to. If you were in my shoes, you’d hate it, too.”

“Not living on a farm. That part would be amazing.”

He snorted a laugh. “Amazing. Yeah. Picture this, okay? It’s minus five degrees outside. You’re sleeping in a hundred-year-old house with drafts out the yin-yang. The roof leaks, and two smokers spent all day putting the smoke from four packs of Marlboros into the air. You’re getting up at four-thirty to milk cows in the bitchin’ cold because hey, you’re home, they expect you to pitch in like you always did before.”

“I don’t mind milking cows. Or the cold.”

“You’d hate it. Hate it like death.”

“I wouldn’t. It’s no different from what I’ve done every summer since I was thirteen.”

“You don’t know cold until you’ve lived in New England. And spending the holidays with my family would be hell. Believe me, Jill. Especially my brother-in-law. He’s King Jackass of the Universe.” He got out of bed, still wearing nothing but his watch and his boxers, and took a Mountain Dew out of the minifridge.

“I’ve got to meet them sometime,” I said. “And it’s depressing to be alone over Christmas. It really is, Cade.”

“You can go visit Dave, right? That’s what you did last year.”

“I could, but I was hoping to spend it with you. It seems kind of lame to go hang out with my old camp counselor while my fiancé is off with his family.” I sat up and pulled my T-shirt over my head. “It’s not normal.”

Cade laughed again. “Neither is my family.”

“Nobody’s is. Everybody thinks that.”

Still holding the soda can, he made a gesture with his arm that said, I’ll give you that one. But along with it he added, “Let me put it differently, then. I don’t want you to come.”

I glared at him. “Wow.”

“Don’t start yelling at me. I’m doing both of us a favor. You and I don’t need to be trapped in a farmhouse on the Maine border with a bunch of crazy people. You think it’s going to be some cozy Christmas reunion, but really it’s going to be like a Stephen King movie. I know it, and you don’t, and so it’s my job to spare you.”

“How are we supposed to get married if I don’t ever meet your family?”

“That’s not the question. The question is why you’d still want to marry me once you do meet them.”

“Oh, Cade.”

I rolled over and crumpled the pillow beneath my chin. Against the cheap little side table his BlackBerry vibrated—once, twice, three times. It never stopped for long. I swallowed hard and tried to force myself to believe he meant well. He wasn’t hiding anything, except whatever it was that he found embarrassing about them. It was at times like this that I wished my mother were still around. I could ask her whether it was right to trust that he would come around to it on his own time, or if he was treating me poorly and I needed to call him on it. But in her absence it all hovered in my mind as a formless question. When she died, the one small consolation had been that at least I was eighteen, an adult, not the child I had been just eight months before. But the longer she was gone, the more I knew I needed her now as much as ever, and that there was nothing merciful in losing my mother just as I was trying to figure out how to be an adult woman myself. I’d thought it would get easier over time, but three years later, I was still waiting.

* * *

As soon as he finished his last final exam, just days before Christmas, Cade left for New Hampshire. He insisted on going alone to face his parents and siblings and King Jackass of the Universe himself. Thanks to my arrangement with the university—necessary, given that I didn’t have a home—I had permission to stay in my dorm over winter break, but I moved into Cade’s room for the week anyway. Sleeping in his bed made me feel less alone, and the quad in which he lived was noisier, making me feel less like a straggler left behind on Christmas.

Technically I wasn’t supposed to be there. The resident director of Cade’s dorm, Hagerstown Hall, tolerated my presence because she knew about me and figured that since I could sleep in only one room at night, it didn’t matter whether it was my dorm or Cade’s. The only other person staying on the guys’ side of the floor was Drew Fielder. Cade always treated the guy with barely repressed hostility, but around him I tried to be friendly—after all, Stan seemed to like the guy well enough, or at least tolerated him as part of the regular Rocky Horror group. Cade’s attitude toward him struck me as a little childish, and it seemed to me that a guy with social skills as strong as Cade’s would know that it doesn’t pay to make enemies.

On Christmas Eve, Hagerstown 6 was deserted. I sat on Cade’s bed with my laptop balanced on my knees and Lockup: Raleigh on low in the background, a cup of powdery hot cocoa leaving a wet ring on the table beside me. I was musing on whether to email Dave and ask him if I could drive down to see him the next day; the thought of his judgment of Cade inhibited me, but the loneliness made it tempting even so. Down the hall the elevator door thunked open, followed by the squee squee squee of loafers on tile. A shadow fell over me, and I looked up. It was Drew, of course, leaning one shoulder against the doorway in his shirtsleeves and pinstripes, top button undone. He looked at me with his weird uncertain smile, a petulant curl of his upper lip. His hair, misted by the rain, curled toward the crown of his head like a cool-cat lounge singer’s.

“Did your boyfriend abandon you?”

I shook my head. “He’s up in New Hampshire with his family.”

“Sounds like abandonment to me.”

“I’m fine.”

He jiggled his knee through the awkward pause. Then he asked, “You want to order some Chinese or something?”

I blurted a laugh. “Chinese? On Christmas Eve?”

“Sure. My family does it every year. Nothing else is open, after all.”

“Why don’t you guys just have ham and sweet potatoes and whatever else everybody eats on Christmas Eve?”

“We’re Jewish.”

“Oh.” I tapped a finger against the side of my laptop, considering. It wouldn’t be difficult to make an excuse to get rid of Drew, but if I spent some time with him, maybe I could get some insight that would help Cade learn to deal with him. And the fact was, I was bored and lonely. And I did feel abandoned, after all.

“Sure, yeah,” I said. “Do you have a menu?”

* * *

We set up the cartons on the table in the lounge. Drew set the TV to a Seinfeld rerun. “Jewish Christmas,” he said. “A little bit fun and a little bit depressing.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Don’t you have family or anything?”

“Not really.” I watched him root around in the carton and produce a piece of shrimp. “I thought shellfish weren’t kosher,” I added.

“I don’t keep kosher.”

I offered him a slow grin. “You’re a Jewish Republican who doesn’t keep kosher. That’s original.”

“I’m not a Republican. God, no.”

“But you work for Bylina.”

“Yeah. I’m an opportunist.”

Seinfeld broke to commercial. A jangling advertising tune came on, several notches louder than the regular TV volume. Drew cracked open his soda, watching me as he drank from it. Whenever I’d been around him in the past, Stan’s friendliness toward him had led me to see Drew as harmless, if slightly arrogant, with a mild case of social awkwardness. But here, alone with him, the vibe he gave off had more of an edge to it. The arrogance was still there, but it felt creepier.

“Well,” I said when the volume died down, “why don’t you go to work for somebody who shares your views? Somebody who’s working on issues you believe in? That’s the point of being in politics, isn’t it? To make a positive change in the world.”

He eased back in his chair and set down his soda can. “Are you asking me to pull out so Cade can get the job?”

“No, I’m just asking why you’d even want it when you could get the same job working for somebody whose convictions are in line with yours.”

“I might pull out. It’s possible.”

I nodded. “If you don’t believe in it, you ought to. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He spun the can in circles with his fingers. “I’m not sure I have the right motivation.”

For a few moments I puzzled over the strange response, my attention still cocked toward Seinfeld. Then all at once it clicked. I looked him squarely in the eye. “Drew,” I said with disgust.

He shrugged.

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a reply.” I snatched the delivery bag from the table and stuffed it into a garbage can. As I bustled around angrily he watched with a bemused detachment that unnerved me.

“You know why I admire Cade?” he asked.

My shoulders twitched. “Because unlike you, he has principles?”

“No. That’s not why.” His voice disdained me. “Because he’s so f*cking ambitious.”

“Thanks,” I said icily. I saw now exactly why Cade detested the guy so much, and felt shamed by my naïveté. “I’ll pass that on to him when I tell him about this whole conversation.”

“If you want. He’ll be sorry you didn’t take me up on it. He wouldn’t admit it, of course. But he’ll wish you’d just done it and kept your mouth shut about it.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Cade’s not like that at all.”

“As if you’d know,” he said, “when it’s all been sunshine and rainbows and snuggle sex for the two of you. I’ve been on the campaign trail with him, and I know a little different. Let me tell you, Jill. You don’t know a guy until you’ve seen him under pressure. Cade’s like everybody else. He only cares about one thing.” He held up a single finger.

“That’s the stupidest cliché ever.”

“Not sex,” said Drew. “Recognition.”

I hurried back to Cade’s room, dressed quickly and headed back across campus to my own dorm. The sidewalks were deserted. I thought of Cade sitting around his living room with his parents, his brother and sister, and seethed at both him and Drew. Here I was alone on Christmas Eve, hurrying away from the leering creep to whom I had afforded benefit of the doubt, all because Cade wanted to avoid the embarrassment of me meeting his brother-in-law. My messenger bag beat against the side of my coat, and I breathed into my hands to warm them. I knew what would sneak in just behind this anger: self-pity. That was how I would spend Christmas, and the next year I would dread the holidays all the more, remembering how miserable this one had been.

It doesn’t have to be that way, I thought. I jogged up the steps to my building, tossed a few things into my overnight bag, tugged on the hoodie Dave had just mailed back to me and headed out to my car. I thought about calling him, but it was late already and I didn’t want him to feel he needed to wait up for me. I had a full tank of gas and a key to my old cabin, and I would find him in the morning. He wouldn’t mind. Dave never did.

* * *

In the few photos I have of my mother and me together, it’s easy to see we don’t resemble each other at all. She was fairly tall, with honey-blond hair that kinked into unmanageable curls when the weather grew the least bit humid. Despite her coloring, she had an Italian face—a regal nose and long eyes, a smile that appeared to store a secret. Sometimes I wondered if she had hoped for a miniature version of herself, rather than the baby daughter she received—one destined to be fine haired and button nosed, with eyes so round as to seem perpetually surprised. Even as a teenager she had looked like a woman, while long into college I still had to pull out my driver’s license to be allowed into R-rated movies.

She never voiced the truth we both knew: that I looked like my father. It had to be true, because I resembled her family not at all, and yet she would never tell me who he was. Around the age of eight I entered a stage of nagging her with questions: what was his name, his job, where did he live, did he know about me. She brushed them off or changed the subject, until finally, when I was twelve and began asking again, she gave me her first sort-of answer.

“If you want to know the truth, Jill,” she said, using that wry monotone that never meant anything good, “I wasn’t in a very good place when I found out I was going to have you. And once I knew you’d be joining me, I wasn’t about to go back to that place to see if anybody wanted to tag along.”

I understood her meaning—that she had abandoned him, not the other way around. I stopped asking her after that; I knew enough about addicts by then to grasp that whoever he was, wherever he was, he was sure to disappoint me. And it had to be bad for him, because my mother was not one to assume someone was beyond hope. Padding around in her panty hose, her curly hair up in a messy bun from a long day at the office, she would pull the extra-long phone cord into the one bedroom and shut the door when one of the women she sponsored in AA called. If the call went on for a long time I would turn out the lights, make up the futon and try to sleep. Always I would overhear her calming and definite voice, and even though I knew she was handling a crisis—someone’s sobriety on the brink of failure—the sound of it would lull me easily to sleep. She was a sure guide, knowing the route through every situation. Eventually she would slip back out, hang up the phone in its cradle and lie down softly on the other side of the futon, because this bed was technically hers. Some nights I would move to my bedroom, but usually I feigned a deep sleep so I could nestle near her warmth all night, like a chick beneath her mother’s wing.

Sometimes now, when her absence became less bearable, I would imagine those moments with her until the line between reality and memory seemed almost to disappear. In a warm bed, with my eyes closed, it was so easy to imagine. But even then there was a bittersweet edge to it, because for all my belief that she and I were inextricably connected to one another, at the critical moment it proved not to be true at all.

On that day, the day it happened, I was rushing to class—I had lingered too long over my lunch in the Student Union, browsing through my notes for the midterm that was now only ten minutes away. As I hurried up the stairs, I pressed through a crowd gathered around the two televisions suspended from the ceiling in the entryway. They were riveted on some news broadcast. For only a second I glanced up at it—a stretch of red desert, the wreckage of two small planes, an excited voice-over—before squeezing between two students and pushing out the door. It would be hours before I checked my voice mail and found the message from the police in Las Vegas, requesting that I call immediately.

I had spoken to my mother only the day before. I knew she was in Las Vegas, finally taking a well-earned vacation now that her only child was away at school—a girls’ weekend with a couple of friends from AA. When I’d called her she sounded breezy and excited, telling me about the shows and the buffets, the tour of the Grand Canyon they planned to take the following day and how she should have done this years ago. I’d caught the glow of her euphoria and mirrored it back to her, enthusiastic on her behalf and envious, in a good-natured way, of the fun. She told me that the next time, she’d take me with her, and wished me luck on my midterm before dashing off to what sounded suspiciously, from her vague description, like a Chippendales show. If she had mentioned the Grand Canyon tour would be by small plane, I hadn’t paid attention. And so when I saw the flash of the television screen, heard them say Las Vegas, I had only the briefest moment of thinking my mother is there before the thought followed, but that’s not her.

Before it all happened I would have been certain that, in such an event, I would know. A sudden feeling would arrest me, a sense of disturbance or perhaps even a premonition, and I would scramble to call her to discover what was wrong. Never would I have believed that I would sense nothing, that I would look up at the very scene of my mother’s death and hurry along to my next class, utterly ignorant. The guilt that came along with it stalked me, uninterrupted, for a year. I’d pushed on through the semester believing that it was what my mother would want me to do, but even then I nursed the suspicion that I had a lot of nerve to assume I knew what my mother would think or want. The image of those two wrecked planes, having clipped each other and fallen simultaneously to the earth, lingered in my mind like the flame of a vigil candle. Even now it remained there, flickering in the background somewhere, always. It was as if I believed that by holding it in my mind, I could make amends for my indifference to it at first sight.

That year, Dave had insisted I come to Southridge for the holidays rather than spend them alone. It had turned into a tradition-by-accident, as every year circumstances dropped me there, and this year was no different. When my car emerged from the trees that pressed closely against the road I saw a single light on in the main lodge, in spite of the fact that it was two in the morning on Christmas Day. I thought I would slip past, drive up the side road to my cabin. But then the storm door swung open and Dave stepped onto the porch, looking wary at first, then smiling.

* * *

On Christmas Day, Dave and I strapped on snowshoes and hiked out into the forest. The gray clouds sent down an occasional riot of flurries, and between that dark sky and the blanketed ground the world seemed to be holding me like a firefly between two hands. In silence I followed Dave down the trail we both knew. His green jacket and dark hair collected a dusting of flakes that melted slowly, and his hiking pole made a steady chunk against the buried ice as we moved ever deeper into the woods.

He stopped in a clearing I knew well. Hidden under a drift was a campfire ring; the fallen tree was a place to sit, as were the two slabs of stone nearby. In the summer months the staff came out here to spend time together, away from the fire pit closer to the lodge that was used nightly by our guests. Nearby was a waterfall that created a pool to wade in on the hottest days, but in the winter it ran dry, and the silence of its absence confused my ears like a distant hum. Through a break in the trees I could see the mountains—the ski trails twisting down the north face, the march of the lifts uphill, the little buildings dotting the peak. But this place felt a world apart from the comfortable resort life. The longer I stayed in college, the more I suspected that I belonged out here instead—not just as a summer job until I earned a degree that could secure me something better, but for good. When I had agreed to marry Cade, even as I said yes to him, this was the thought at the back of my mind—but how will I live in the place I love? I told myself it was a petty concern, but the truth is there’s no way to talk yourself out of the concept of home. I loved the quiet here, the distant sight of sailboats drifting on the lake in the summertime, the way the mountains framed the sky. The little log cabins were easy on my eyes, and the framework of life felt so simple and unencumbered by a tiring menu of choices. I’d believed, in the romantic, girlish way, that it was worth giving up anything for the sake of real love. But even now I sometimes wondered, which real love?

Dave pulled off his gloves and flexed his fingers, then blew into his hands. He nudged me with his elbow and lifted his chin to indicate the woods beyond. Two does stared back at us, their ears alert and tails high. The smaller one eased and nudged a patch of brush for a moment, then followed the other as she bolted into the forest.

“Jill, I’m going to be honest with you,” said Dave.

The sound of my real name spoken by him jarred me to attention.

“I think you ought to think hard about Cade,” he continued. “I know—you’re giving him a pass on this one because you understand about somebody being embarrassed by their family. I remember how your mom felt about her folks, so I know where that comes from. But if Cade felt like he had to choose between them and you, I think he made a bad decision.”

“That’s not it. He doesn’t want me to have to deal with all their drama, is all. He means well.”

He turned his head toward me and squinted, as if trying and failing to see things the way I did. “He’s been with you a year now. You told him you wanted to go, and he knew you didn’t have anyplace else to go, either.” Dave shook his head. “In my opinion he failed a loyalty check, and that means something. You deserve to be with somebody who has more empathy for you. Somebody who’s always on your side.”

I shook my own head slowly, but Dave wasn’t saying anything that hadn’t already crossed my mind. I didn’t want to hear him speaking it aloud, and so I said nothing. Because for over a week now I had been waiting for my body to give a sign that everything was ordinary—that our long Thanksgiving weekend at Stan’s had left us with a romantic memory and not an immediate problem. I’d postponed taking a pregnancy test because I feared the answer, and dreaded the possibility that Cade would receive the news and leave me behind on Christmas anyway. That would be more than I could bear. My mother had taught the women she sponsored about taking a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves to figure out who they really were; it was the Fourth Step officially, and a good idea for anybody, she often said. Know what you are capable of. Know what stands in the way of your moving forward. I had done that, and found myself sorely lacking. I wished I had my mother’s courage, but when I looked inward all I saw was the fear of finding myself in her situation, alone.

“It’s getting darker,” I said. The temperature was dropping and the air felt sharp and clear, with the smell of new snow enlivening it. “We should go back.”

“Don’t be mad at me. I’m just trying to look out for you.”

“I’m not mad,” I told him, and it was true. After this week, once Cade was back, we could let the situation unfold in an organized way, unimpeded by his brother-in-law. I wasn’t afraid that Cade would shirk his responsibility. I only feared that I would decide he was unworthy of it, and if that was the case, I didn’t want to know.