Heaven Should Fall (5 page)

I didn’t say anything during the drive home. Nothing about him smoking in my car. We stomped back into the house, right into the kitchen where my mom was washing dishes and my sister, Candy, was fussing around with a jelly roll cake. She had a big bowl of frosting on the island and was spreading it onto the cake in the pan. Mom asked, “You give the Larsens those cookies?”

Elias grunted a yes.

Candy licked her thumb and looked at Elias with reproach. “Well, you’re not giving them my Yule log cake.”

“Nobody wants your Yule log cake, Candy.”

“I’m just making sure. Since three-quarters of the Christmas cookies in this house just went down the street and now my boys hardly have any.”

“Don’t worry about it, Candy,” Mom scolded, low voiced. To Elias she said, “Did she like the cookies?”

“She,”
Candy blustered. “Is there only one Larsen now?”

“Goddamn it, Candy,” said Elias. “Lay off.”

She shrugged and sucked the frosting from her index finger. “Don’t bark at
me
, Eli. Cade’s the one I’m surprised at, getting engaged while he’s off at school and then coming home to visit a girl he had a relationship with.”

I set my gloves on the table and didn’t dignify that with a reply. She hadn’t brought it up for any other reason except to imply to Elias that he was pursuing my sloppy seconds. Elias, though, took the bait like a raccoon to a tin of cat food. He kicked out the chair he’d been unlacing his boot against so it skidded across the kitchen floor just past Candy. His voice projected in a straight line. “What part of ‘lay off’ don’t you understand?”

“Eli,” said our mother in her soft voice, soothing, imploring. She said it again, and for a second I flashed on the time he fell out of that oak tree while we were building the tree house, knocked himself unconscious. She had pulled his head onto her lap then, whispering to him while we waited for the ambulance.

“She doesn’t know when to quit,” he shouted, still looking at Candy. “Mind your own damn business, will you? Bake your stupid cake and shut your freakin’ mouth for once.”

He shoved another chair across the floor for good measure, then stormed off through the back porch, his bootlaces ticking against the floor. The back door slammed. A minute later we all heard the whack of that ax slicing into what was left of the tree. Then again, and again.

It was things like that that made me leave Jill back in Maryland for the second year in a row. And it wasn’t even Christmas yet, and Dodge hadn’t even showed up.

I still remembered the day Elias announced he’d enlisted in the army. It was during that whole Piper pregnancy scare. Mom looked really startled, and Dodge gave him this peeved-off look and said, “What the hell’d you go and do that for?” That was the giddiest I’ve ever seen Elias look. I knew what he was thinking:
I’m finally getting out from under your thumb, you redneck motherfucker
. He and I had both left home for damn good reasons. We didn’t belong here in this house. It was like the year Dodge built Candy a garden edged with pressure-treated lumber—it didn’t look too bad from the outside, but all season the chemicals leached in and leached in, poisoning everything that grew there. And here we all were again, boxed in by the same dirty lumber. But not for long. Not together.

* * *

Maybe half the reason I was so smooth about it when Jill broke the pregnancy news to me was that last time all my histrionics had turned out to be nothing. Maybe I felt that this time would have the same outcome, because the panic with the Jill situation was more of a slow burn. But this time it wasn’t going away, and in addition to that, after a few weeks she was
so
sick. She couldn’t even go to class anymore, and her stupid roommate was complaining. I called up Stan, and he said it was fine if she crashed at his place for a little while until we figured out what to do next. At first it was a good solution. Stan was out a lot and worked weird hours, so when I came by after work every day we usually had the place to ourselves. We’d cook dinner, watch TV, try to work out a better plan. She kept talking about going to live at her camp around Deep Creek Lake, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with that idea. I couldn’t stomach the idea of her calling in that kind of favor from her camp friend Dave—a man I’d barely even met—and asking him to carry us until we could get on our feet. Even her living with Stan galled me every single day—seeing her purple toothbrush in the holder with his, watching him walk in the door with a bag of candy for her mixed in with his groceries, and worst of all, getting a call from him late one night and hearing him say he’d taken her to the emergency room because she looked dehydrated. The
little while
that Stan and I had agreed to wore on into two months, then three, and I hated feeling as if I was turning into a third wheel in the coming of my own child.

And then exams ended, and it was nearly summer. Ever since I left home to go to school, I’d found a way to stick around College Park between semesters. There was always someone whose apartment I could crash at. But this year I looked at Jill, who was pretty damn pregnant, and at my job, which paid about the same as a shoe factory in India, and knew the old plan wasn’t going to work anymore. The baby was due August 24. If I wanted there to be any chance of me going back to school in the fall, my life between now and then needed to be as cheap as possible. So I had no choice. This summer I was going back to Frasier, and Jill was coming with me.

My hero, then and now, was Teddy Roosevelt. He was all about the qualities that make a man a real man and how to be admirable and noble and all that stuff. Right there on my wall, on a postcard Jill had seen a hundred times, was his Rough Riders portrait with my favorite quote underneath it: “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” I wish I could say the situation with Jill brought out the best in me, but in all honesty that would be a lie.

You wouldn’t believe how thin the line is between gratitude and resentment. The more you owe somebody, the more you hate them for all they can afford to give you when you don’t have shit. After all those months he sheltered her, Stan had given us more than I could ever repay. And I knew when we got to Frasier, Elias wouldn’t think twice about how he had stood by me through a stupid mistake years ago and now, 112 college credits later, I still couldn’t figure out how to operate my own dick. I should have felt really thankful about all that, but somehow it just made me want to punch somebody in the face.

Chapter 5

Jill

Seeing Stan’s futon folded up and pushed against the wall finally drove the point home: Cade and I were leaving. Up until then I hadn’t even realized I had developed an attachment to the thing, as if it were a large teddy bear given to me during a hospital stay. In a way, it had been. The worst of my pregnancy-related illness—hyperemesis, the medical term for puking too much—had lasted only a month before Stan got spooked one night and dragged me to the hospital.
Dead white girl in my living room would not look good for me
, he had joked on the way. They hooked me up to a bag of rehydrating solution, kept me overnight and sent me home with a prescription for antinausea drugs. It’s possible I
would
have been a dead white girl if it hadn’t been for him.

During those weeks and the few that followed, I spent most of my time curled up in a nest of pillows with a bag of Starbursts and my mother’s copy of the Big Book from AA, reading inspirational quotes and stories from people who had turned their lives around. Stan thought I was nuts. Sometimes, propped up on a stack of pillows beside me and channel surfing as I read, he would glance over and shake his head before commenting about how wrong it looked to see a pregnant woman reading an addiction-recovery book.
You remind me of those people on that show you always watch
, he said. But it was pure comfort, all of it. Starbursts seemed to be the one thing I wouldn’t throw up. And from the Big Book I could cobble together a pep talk for myself, something that held an echo of my mother’s voice.

But as comfortable as I had been there, now was a good time to leave. As I grew heavier, the futon had grown less comfortable; I’d taken to napping in Stan’s bed when he wasn’t home, and it was awkward when he came stumbling in the door with a pack of half-drunk and cross-dressed friends after
Rocky Horror
to pass them in the hallway as I made my way back to the living room. All of them knew Cade and I were together, and I lived in fear that somebody in the group would voice a suspicion about me and Stan to him that would cause drama. I wasn’t concerned about Drew, because Cade was above listening to anything that came out of his mouth, but Stan had other friends Cade respected, and their judgment worried me. I could feel only relieved when, at the end of May, Cade admitted defeat with the summer-job hunt, told Bylina’s head of staff to call him the minute any job opened up and we packed our bags for New Hampshire.

The drive up to Frasier took twelve hours. The farther north we drove, the quieter Cade grew and the more grim his expression became. When he filled up the car in Massachusetts and I went inside to use the bathroom, I came out to see him resting his head against his arms on the steering wheel, like a child at a school desk.

I didn’t force the conversation. For all that Cade treated each toll road as another coin for the ferryman into hell, I was happy to spend the summer in New Hampshire. Dave had been so disappointed when I called to tell him I wouldn’t be back this year, and that I’d be graduating late on top of that, but there was no sense in brooding over what couldn’t be helped. I’d thought about my mother a lot in those past few months, trying to coax my confused mind to produce a little of her wisdom, and I was at peace with this decision.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it
, my mother would have told me. At Southridge I would have just been a burden, too ungainly to perform my usual tasks, and any help I requested would have saddled me with guilt. But among family—and Cade’s family counted—it would be natural to ask and receive, because this baby was their own.

We crossed the border at the southern end of the state and drove through the Lakes Region, where Lake Winnipesaukee glittered between the trees and tall-masted boats clustered at docks that stretched far into the water. Cade looked singularly unimpressed with the scenery and drove along the gray highway in silence. His music selections grew darker as we crept farther north. The mountains loomed closer and closer; the woods grew more dense; the towns became farther apart and abandoned 1950s-era motels cropped up by the side of the road in numbers I had not imagined possible. We saw moose-crossing signs and the sheer faces of cliffs. Cade made a left turn onto a smaller road that passed through a faded town of Victorian structures; we passed a gas station and a sandwich shop, then a boarded-up bed-and-breakfast with a charred roof, then two miles of nothing. Then a house.

It was set far back from the road and flanked by trees, a sprawling and ancient white farmhouse with two lichen-flecked boulders marking the entrance to the long driveway. At first glance it seemed ordinary enough. The wooden siding was badly in need of paint, but the large kitchen garden at its side was neatly kept, and a gray barn was dilapidated but stable. An American flag flapped from a pole attached to the front porch, with a frayed yellow bow waving beneath it. A much smaller house built of cinder block stood a slight distance away at the edge of the forest. If the Olmsteads owned thirty acres here, I guessed at least twenty of them were wooded. The driveway turned from asphalt to gravel, then hard-packed dust, and here Cade stopped and jerked the car into Park.

Inside the house, two beagles began howling. Cade tossed his sunglasses onto the dash and twisted his body sideways to face me. For a long moment he said nothing, but the muscles in his jaw looked tense enough to snap. Finally he said, “Jill, tell me you love me.”

“Of course I do.”

“Just say it. Say, ‘Cade, I love you.’”

“Cade, I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He unclasped his seat belt and got out of the car. From the porch came the sounds of a banging wooden screen and general commotion, and then a woman stepped toward us, heavyset and in her thirties, wiping her hands on a dishrag. Her hair fell to her waist, and she wore a dress of smocklike calico.

“Cadey’s home,” she cried. I looked at her with some confusion. Too young to be his mother, too old to be his sister, I could not identify who this woman was in the scheme of the Olmstead family. She hurried to Cade and threw her arms around his neck, enveloping him in a powerful hug. “Praise God,” she said. “You made it here safe.”

He extracted himself from her arms and cocked his head toward the car. “Jill, Candy,” he said. “Candy, Jill.”

So this
was
his sister. I extended my hand, but Candy used it to pull me into her embrace. “We need another woman around here,” she said over my shoulder. “We’re outnumbered.”

Cade watched us with long-suffering patience. A trio of small boys, all shirtless, rushed out the front door and into the side yard, circumventing their mother. Cade mounted the porch stairs and I fell in step behind him, into a living room crammed with objects and looking as if it hadn’t seen an update since 1979. A faded sofa and matching recliner, strewn with multicolored crocheted afghans, bracketed a grungy braided rug. The television rested on a discount-store corner stand with several dust-flocked ceramic figurines on top. Above the sooty fireplace hung the mounted head of a deer, elegantly alert, surveying the poor scene before him. And despite a small fan in one corner of the room, the air was dense with the smell of cigarette smoke, both fresh and stale. Right away I could see that it would be a lost cause to try to keep clear of secondhand smoke. If I wanted that, I’d have to stay in the barn.

Cade’s mother, Leela, blonde like him and, like Candy, looking older than I expected, rose to meet me as I stepped into the room. She shook my hand and greeted me warmly, then hugged Cade before quietly following Candy out to the back porch, where they seemed to be in the midst of assembling an egg incubator. The bright light of a clear bulb flashed on and off.

“I’m home, Dad,” Cade said to a man seated in a leather recliner in front of the television. The words sounded more ceremonial than anything else; his father, after all, could not have missed him coming in the door. But Cade had warned me that his dad, Eddy, had been foggy since his stroke, and he looked at his father with a gauging eye, as if to determine whether he had gotten worse since Christmas.

“So you are.” But his father looked at me, not Cade. A cigarette burned between his index and middle fingers, the long ash on the end lingering precipitously. He wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt despite the warmth of the room, and his hands bore dark red patches, the color of dried blood, that seemed to originate beneath his skin. Cade had told me Eddy was in his late fifties, but to my eye he looked much older, and his voice was thick. His gaze traveled from my feet to my eyes and back again. “That’s your girl, huh?”

“That’s my girl.”

“I’m Jill,” I offered. “Nice to meet you.”

He nodded unevenly but didn’t offer his hand. Cade asked, “Know where Elias is?”

“In the den. Same as always.”

Cade circled around the back of the recliner and led me into the room behind it. The space was larger and airier—an addition that encompassed a modern-looking kitchen-and-dining-room combination, as well as a nook that contained another TV and a couple of chairs. In one of these sat Elias, whom I recognized by his features and haircut but who was otherwise strikingly changed. Gone were the hard stomach and muscled chest that had flaunted themselves even from beneath his sandy-beige T-shirt. In their place were a significant gut and soft pectorals, and he carried the weight in his face, as well. When I had met him in the fall, his forearms were notable only because of their strength and deep golden tan. Now both were covered in tattoos. I blinked at him and tried to match the image I remembered with the one in front of me.

Cade took my hand and guided me to follow him. He stepped directly into Elias’s line of vision before he spoke. “Hey, bro,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”

Elias looked up from the television. “Hey,” he grunted. He met my eye and said, “Hi, Jill.”

I threw him a warm smile. “Hey, Elias. Great to see you again.”

“Did Mom and Dad tell you?” asked Cade.

“Yep. You knocked her up.” He half grinned and flicked a glance toward Cade. “Good job there, buddy. You ever heard of Trojans?”

“Yeah. They don’t work if you leave ’em in the box.”

“They sure don’t. Jill, hope to God it doesn’t come out looking like me or acting like Candy’s kids. If it has to be an Olmstead, at least its dad came from the deep end of the gene pool.”

“If you say so,” I said, and Cade threw me a joking scowl that made Elias snicker. “He’s got endurance, that’s for sure. I can’t believe he makes that drive all the time. It’s
long
.”

“Not long enough,” Cade said under his breath, and his brother chuckled again. I followed Cade up the stairs to a bedroom sandwiched between two others. He closed the door, then lay down on the full-size mattress and rubbed his eyes. “I’d like to go home now,” he said.

“You
are
home.”

He groaned and threw both arms over his face. I glanced around the room, taking in the white walls decorated only with a large American flag, the plain childish furniture, the windows shaded by artlessly stitched homemade curtains. I peeked out between them and saw the three little boys running around in the yard. “So those are Candy’s hellions, huh?”

“Yep. Wait till you meet their dad. Hoo boy.”

“They look pretty wound up. Bet she’ll be glad to get them off to school on Monday.”

“They don’t go to school. They’re homeschooled. By Candy, no less. The girl who spells
religion
with a
d
in it.”

“At least it’s not part of the curriculum.”

“If you’re Candy, it
is
the curriculum. Wait and see.”

I let the curtain drop. “Where’s your parents’ room?”

He tapped the wall beside the bed.

“Wonderful.”

“You’re telling me. Elias sleeps on the other side, but he isn’t going to care, so we can move the bed to the opposite wall. Of course, that would probably scandalize my mother. But it’s not like she can pretend otherwise, with you pregnant and all.”

“True. Hey, what’s happened to Elias?”

“What do you mean, what’s happened to him?”

“He’s gained a lot of weight. And the tattoos.”

Cade shrugged. “Yeah, he’s gotten pretty chunky. But to tell the truth, that’s what he looked like before he joined the army, more or less. The shape he was in when you saw him before—that’s not normal for him. Hey, speaking of food—follow me. You’ve got to see this.”

I followed him back down to the first floor where he pulled open a hallway door that led to the basement stairs. Candy peered over from the kitchen and called, “Hey, Cade, you going down cellar? You want to bring me up a can of black beans? I need ’em for tomorrow.”

“Sure thing.” He sounded almost gleeful. As we descended the dark steps I could tell by the smell of it that this cellar must be finished and not earthen; that much was good, because low dirt cellars gave me the creeps. Then he pulled the chain for the light, and what I saw made me pull in my breath.

The entire wall that faced me, running the length of the house, was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves stacked with giant-sized cans of food. Each bore a dusty yellow label printed with a cornucopia spilling out with produce. Only the black lettering differentiated their contents.
P
EAS
. B
LUEBERRIES
. C
HEESE
P
OWDER
. P
OTATO
P
EARLS
. R
OAST
B
EEF
F
REEZE
-D
RIED
. Six fifty-five-gallon drums, in a cheerful shade of blue, sat along the adjacent wall beside a chemical toilet and a stack of military-green sleeping cots. An old television sat on a wooden crate, and next to it, a camp stove and a large gasoline-powered generator.

“What is this, a bomb shelter?” I asked.

“Kinda-sorta. You see the gun safe over there?” asked Cade. He waved a hand toward a wall holding the brackets for at least a dozen hunting rifles, and to the side, a tall brown metal safe that must have held the rest of their collection. “If the army ever runs short, they know who to call. Actually, they don’t. Which I think is half the point.”