Heaven Should Fall (30 page)

Chapter 33

Cade

For the past couple hours especially I’ve had some time to think about my regrets with regard to the current situation. When they put me on the phone with this guy, Dave Robinson, he said to me, “Don’t you think Jill’s been through enough the past few years, losing her mom and all, without you making threats on your own life now? That’s kind of selfish, don’t you think?” I gave that some real thought. I knew Dave had her best interests at heart and had helped her a lot previously. Jill had told me all sorts of wild stories about the kinds of people they taught at that camp, crazy paranoid types who live in the woods in their vans, and it irked me to think Dave might think he was dealing with that kind of individual when he was talking to me. I’m not like that at all. I’m a reasonable person. So in talking to him I tried to kind of meet him halfway, because after all this is over I hate thinking he’ll be talking to Jill about what happened and have negative things to say about me.

When he said that about her mom, though, what came into my head was this: the thing I pity Jill over, more even than what happened with her mother, is that she’s an only child. I mean, every family has its issues, its sad circumstances and crises they never saw coming, but there’s also people you can look in the eye and know that they’re carrying it with you. Whatever happened in my own family, I could sit with Elias and know he thought the same of it as I did. Candy, she’s added her own share to that whole pile, but at least I knew the Olmstead business was her burden, too, whether she liked it or not. Jill never had that. The whole thing with her mother dying, she had to deal with it all on her own. They say no man is an island, but Jill pretty much
is
an island. It’s kind of hard to watch, like when you see a woman carrying a really heavy suitcase and she keeps insisting she doesn’t want your help in getting it across the airport.

My regret is that it’s looking as if I won’t get the chance to give my son a brother. I can’t really put to words the ache that comes with just thinking about that. If they burst into the house and kill me, or if I do it myself, or if I step out that door and start shooting down the driveway so I at least go out in a battle instead of cornered in my own home—any way this ends, TJ’s going to have to carry it, and there’s no way around that. Only a brother could make that any lighter.

So I’ll put it out there as my final statement, these two messages to those two people I love most.

Thomas Jefferson Olmstead, if you take away one noble thing from the deeds I did on this earth, let it be that I chose to stand in opposition to the full crushing force of the Government of the United States of America—its history and rule of law and sheer power to enforce its will—to right a roaring injustice done to my family. I would have done the same for you. For you I would have stood against the entire world.

And Elias Olmstead, for the wrongs I did you, and for the love I cost you, know that I always believed that among family we struck the bargain with our loyalty. I’m paying up now. And if I see you on the other side of this, I hope you’ll call it even.

Epilogue

Jill

Nobody had told me about the magic of a toddler’s first spring. Through the long months of winter TJ grew used to the skeletal trees, the fractured shapes they made against the sky, the clearness and plainness of looking up. And then all at once, in April, they burst out into a great banner of shimmering pale green, as suddenly as all the fans in a stadium rising to cheer. At first it frightened him. He stared up distrustfully at the new canopy, listened to the rustle of animals he could no longer see. When we stepped out the door of our little cabin at Southridge, even if only to walk the twenty feet to his grandmother’s cabin next door, he hid his face against my shoulder and muttered, over and over, his most powerful word:
no
. He was too young to remember that he had seen all this before, but old enough to feel unsettled by the realization that the world will change without warning.

On the morning I put Leela on a train back to New Hampshire—a week’s visit to see her grandsons at Randy’s, Eddy at the nursing home and possibly Candy, if she had earned visiting privileges—I decided it was time to take TJ on a hike. I tied his winter cap beneath his chin to block the April wind and strapped him into the backpack carrier Dave had given me as a welcome-home gift. Before Dave could see us, I hurried down the trail behind our cabin and into the woods. I knew he would insist on coming—fearing bears, twisted ankles and all sorts of hazards that might befall a lone hiker with a special burden. But the walk wasn’t far, and I wanted TJ to know I was not afraid.

Without a blanket of thick and heavy snow beneath my feet, the journey went much faster. Dry twigs cracked beneath my boots, and the last fall leaves, worn thin and lacy from the storms of winter, shuffled to the edges of the path. TJ chattered about the birds, piping his two-word sentences punctuated with mimicked animal sounds; his feet patted my sides as if coaxing a racehorse. Since his ear surgery the previous fall, he had begun imitating all the sounds around him with an enthusiasm that delighted me. To TJ, Frasier had been a quiet, muffled place, but all the music of this forest belonged to him now.

In a short time we arrived at the clearing, and I stopped near the campfire pit, turning to face the mountains whose ski trails the spring had reclaimed.

“You see that, buddy?” I said. I twisted my neck, looking up to catch a glimpse of my son. “It’s
pretty
, huh? You want to get down?”

I eased off the backpack and set TJ loose. For one long moment he stood and surveyed the land around him, taking in the breadth of the space and the height of the trees, cocking his ear toward the rush of the waterfall nearby. Sometimes I was certain he had Cade’s mind—analyzing everything he saw, planning his moves one by one, yet not immune to temper tantrums and petulance. I wished I could feel the pride of an ordinary mother who sees the best of her child’s father reflected in his spirit, but a bittersweet ambivalence was the best I could do.

From the direction of the trail came the sound of a bounding dog. I scooped up TJ, and a moment later Tess appeared, tail wagging and tongue lolling, with Dave following close behind with a walking stick in hand. “What are you
doing
?” he asked, but his tone was cheerful. “You know there’s bears here, right?”

“I have yet to see a bear. In ten years I have never once seen a bear.”

“That just means they’re good at hiding.”

I grinned. “Well, we’re fine. I’m trying to help TJ get over his new fear of trees.”

Dave nodded and looked out at the mountains. “He’s had a lot of change lately. Can’t blame the kid for wanting everything to just stand still for five minutes.”

TJ squirmed in my arms, and I set him down on the ground once again. As he toddled forward to pet the dog, I remembered the day Dave and I had hiked here—that Christmas afternoon two years or an eon ago—when I first knew of his little life. That day Dave had spoken of his doubts about Cade, and I had ignored him. But even now, after all my son and I had traveled through to return to this place, I wasn’t sorry for that. Cade had only been human, with a savage side and a pure-hearted one, the same as everybody else. The same as me, or Leela, or Elias. As good a man as Dave was, even the help he offered me had not been purely selfless. He welcomed the excuse to bring me back, and not just because I was a hard worker, either. I think I had known that, in the packed-away part of my heart, for a long time.

And I could find a way to make room for it. Because grief always gives way eventually and cracks open into something new, the way my mother had once stood beside a highway with me, looking out over a thunderstorm, knowing it was time to usher in a change that would make things better. It was my turn now, and I could do the same—for the sake of my child’s life, yes, but also for mine.

It’s not too much to ask of a person. It’s love, that’s all.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from
The Kingdom of Childhood
by Rebecca Coleman.

Author’s Note

The first stirrings of this story entered my mind over a late-night dinner with a friend at IHOP. The friend and her former husband had both been in the army—she was still on active duty—and had each served in Iraq. Sitting across from me with her hands wrapped around a cup of hot cocoa, she began a slow and heartbreaking reflection on the end of her marriage. As she described her then-husband’s transformation from a loving partner to a man who struggled to put his harrowing experiences behind him, and the toll that it all had taken on his psyche and their marriage, the war finally came home for me. I know many people in the military, but very few who are on the ground in a war zone. I’d heard about post-traumatic stress disorder, but overall I had been very insulated from soldiers’ experiences and those of their families. Yet as I listened to my friend that day, I started to put together how far-reaching are the effects of PTSD, how devastating and how permanent. There was no optimistic hook to this story, where the soldier ends up running a marathon and becoming a motivational speaker, nor the defining end point of a suicide or line-of-duty death. There was only a quiet and ordinary loss that went on and on and on.

Over 212,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have been treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs for PTSD, but because half of vets seek health care elsewhere, the number affected is likely far higher. Soldiers affected by PTSD may experience flashbacks, feel tremendous anxiety and hyper-alertness, and suffer from intense feelings of guilt, all of which make it extremely difficult to function in society the way they did before the war. Recently, greater awareness and greater focus has improved some services for soldiers with PTSD, but many soldiers and their families continue to find the treatments offered to be inadequate or superficial. The suicide rate among combat vets is already alarming, and it is rising. As the drawdown continues and more and more soldiers come home, the United States and its allies will be faced with societies that include more than two million veterans of those wars—and by VA estimates, more than one-quarter of those men and women experience PTSD.

I don’t have any illusions that
Heaven Should Fall
represents anything more than my imaginative ideas about one soldier’s, and one family’s, experience. To do justice to those who served, I researched extensively to be sure Elias’s symptoms, his feelings and his experiences of war would be as credible as possible. I spoke to soldiers, read accounts written by those with PTSD, watched videos of patrols in Afghanistan and sought out affirmation of the smallest details, and sometimes made sweeping changes to accommodate some aspect I’d gotten wrong. At the end of it, quite honestly, I loved Elias more than any other character in the book; if I have made any errors in the physical details, I apologize, but I most of all hope the emotional details of his story tell the truth.

I encourage anyone who is moved with compassion for our veterans and their families to support organizations such as Disabled American Veterans, which offers the Veterans Crisis Line in addition to its plethora of other services to wounded soldiers. And in the difficult economic climate that exists at the time of this writing, I hope that our legislators will be mindful of the fact that cuts to community mental health services disproportionately affect veterans and their families.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks, first and foremost, to my agent Stephany Evans, whose hard work allows me the privilege of writing a set of acknowledgments at all. And I am deeply grateful to Susan Swinwood, my editor at Harlequin MIRA, for her wonderful skill and extreme patience.

To a few extraordinary people in the writing community: Ann Hite, Eleanor Brown, Keith Donohue, Carolyn Parkhurst, Alma Katsu, Gary Presley and Rick Bylina, who courteously allowed the use of his surname in this book.

To my friends, en masse, for their extraordinary support. Laura Wilcott, Hillary Myers, Stephanie Cebula, Jalin Sopkowicz, Sarah Thompson, Amanda Miller, Christine Barakat and Elizabeth Gardner; Kathy Gaertner, Erika Schreiber, Laurine Kandare, Laura Carns, Mollie Weiner and Kay. And of course, Vern Roseman, Sara Spivey Roseman and Miranda Poff, for the inspiration (as well as the fuel).

And finally, to my husband, Mike, and to my kids—James, Catherine, Breckan and Luke—thank you ever so much for your patience and your love.

Questions for Discussion

1. Jill’s relationship with her mother was a close one, which leads to her
   sense of anxiety and guilt at not having intuitively known when her mom
   died. Do you think Jill’s feelings about that are irrational or
   natural?
   
2. Cade is ambitious and outgoing, and early on he and Jill have a strong
   relationship. Did you see signs even then that a ruthless element existed in
   his personality? Did his behavior set off any red flags for you, or did you
   feel that the change in him was entirely brought on by his grief and
   circumstances?
   
3. Jill’s mother was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Jill is well versed
   in their philosophy, which becomes a kind of spirituality that she draws
   from during difficult times. Have you known anyone in a recovery program, or
   participated in one? Have you learned anything from such a program that
   applies to your life, regardless of whether you are in recovery?
   
4. At the beginning of the story Cade seems uninterested in his old girlfriend,
   Piper, but as things deteriorate in his own life he grows obsessed with her.
   What do you think is behind this change of heart?
   
5. How do you think Elias’s upbringing affects the way he feels about his
   experiences of war? What do you think is the biggest contributing factor to
   his suicide—is it his PTSD, or something else?
   
6. Candy uses religion as a way to see the world as inherently just and, as a
   result, feels no compassion for others. This backfires on her when Elias
   dies and she feels punished for her own feelings and misdeeds. What is your
   opinion of Candy’s way of approaching her faith?
   
7. Even Leela, who is one of the most sympathetic members of the Olmstead
   family, has moments when she takes a hard-hearted approach to people close
   to her—Eddy and Lucia in particular. Do you think her callousness toward
   them is justified?
   
8. It’s implied that Candy had more involvement in Lindsay Vogel’s drowning
   than she owned up to. What do you think her role was, and why?
   
9. Elias suffers from PTSD, a condition that affects as many as one-quarter of
   soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What do you think
   can be done to reach soldiers who struggle to readjust, or who need help but
   are reluctant to seek it?
   
10. Cade professes to deeply love his son, his wife and his brother, yet
    throughout the story he commits acts that violate their trust and risk their
    safety. Do you believe he truly loves them and is limited by his human
    flaws, or that he doesn’t fully grasp the meaning of love and loyalty in the
    first place?
    
11. How did you feel about Jill’s actions toward the end of the story? Did you
    feel she was doing the best she could with what she had, or that she was too
    complicit in her own problems in the end? Were you satisfied with the way
    the story was resolved?