“Goddamn,” said Elias. “Terrorists’ wet dream, this little crow’s nest here. Can’t believe they don’t have it secured.”
“Nothing you can do from here.”
“You can look.” Elias took a few steps closer, then stopped and crossed his arms. A siren blazed down the parkway; the sound, from where we stood, was lonesome.
“That’s my city,” I told him. “Someday, man, that’s gonna be my fuckin’ chessboard. Not a room I can’t get into or a rope I can’t get past.”
“You planning on getting elected king?”
I laughed. “No, I’m gonna be like Ted Kennedy. Not right away. Not even real soon. But eventually, over time.” I pointed toward the Jefferson Memorial. “That’s where I proposed to Jill.”
Elias nodded. He slid a box of cigarettes from his pocket and clenched one at the side of his mouth, then asked, “You want one?”
I hesitated. Sophomore year I’d worked late nights on a contentious campaign for state delegate. That season, I’d picked up the habit from the other staffers. I told myself I’d quit as soon as the election was over, and I did. But goddamn—was it ever a murderous struggle. I didn’t have the money to support the addiction—that was the bottom line. Otherwise I would have kept it up forever. It gives you something mindless to do when you’re sitting around waiting for things to happen, and there’s a lot of that in politics. It helps you focus and relax at the same time. In no time flat I had gone from being a nonsmoker to the guy who rolled out of bed and lit up before he peed. I’d stayed away from the stuff ever since I quit, because it was so hard the first time I figured I couldn’t quit twice. But this was Elias. That’s the other thing smoking does—it helps people bond.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
He handed me a Marlboro and his lighter. As soon as I lit up, the pleasure of it was visceral. Tasting the smoke in my mouth was like sex after months of jacking off. Sex with the wrong person. Right away I knew this had been a bad idea.
Elias exhaled through his nose like an angry bull. “Mind if we sit down?”
We sat on the bristly grass on the curve that overlooked the city. For a few minutes neither of us said a word. I asked, “So how was Afghanistan?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“’Course I do. Not like you ever wrote.”
He shrugged. “It sucks. It’s hot. Sand shits up everything you brought with you inside of a month. And the people. It’s still the Stone Age over there. Trying to fix anything’s like pissing in the wind.”
“So what do you think about how the president’s allocating troops? Do you think he should have gone with Congress’s recommendation instead?”
Elias gave a slow shake of his head. “Man, politics is your bag, not mine. I don’t give two shits.”
“How can you not care? It was your job.”
He shook his head again. I rested my arms against my knees and looked toward the city. From the roof of a building near the Washington Monument, a flag flapped like crazy in the wind. The dark and the distance obscured the details, the stripes and the stars, the color. It had to be American from the soil it was on, but in the dark you’d never know.
I tried to change the subject to get him talking again. “What did you think of Jill?”
“She’s cute.” He paused and looked out over the city. “I’d do her.”
I grinned. “Yeah, she’s cool.”
“How long have you been with her?”
“About a year. She was friends with somebody Stan was dating, so they introduced us.”
“White chick?”
I snickered. “Of course. As soon as I started seeing her I deleted all my booty-call numbers from my phone, changed around my work hours to spend more time with her, you name it. It was crazy. I was eat-sleep-and-breathing her.”
“You felt the same way about Piper.”
I crushed out the smoke against the earth. “Not even close. Anyway, Piper’s long gone. And I was in high school then. That doesn’t count.”
Elias gave a scornful laugh, exhaling hard, clouding the air between us. “Man, don’t ever say it didn’t count. Don’t fucking insinuate it wasn’t worth your while. I’m not sure which one of us would get a bullet in the head over that one.”
“All right, all right. Sorry.”
The silence pulled tight. Elias said, “I’m just messing with you.”
“I know,” I said. But it sounded unconvincing. “Hey, want to get a beer?”
Elias laughed again. “Man, I don’t want to get a beer. I want to get hammered.”
“All right, then.” I held out my fist, and Elias bumped it. “This one’s on me.”
* * *
The next morning I drove Elias to the bus depot. I felt hungover as all hell. Elias, though, had put back twice as many and still looked okay. He had changed back into a tight brown T-shirt and fatigue pants that tucked into his boots. With him slouched in the seat, one foot resting on the opposite knee, it was more obvious than ever: dude was ripped. In my mind my brother was still the fat kid, the one everyone teased about his jelly-belly gut and man boobs, but now I felt out of shape next to him. He must have done nothing in the desert except lift weights.
When we pulled into the drop-off lane, Elias didn’t get out right away. He just tapped a finger against the window frame and stared at the low concrete building.
“Tell Mom and Dad I said hi,” I said to him. When he didn’t respond, I added, “And take it easy, all right?”
He grunted. After another few beats of silence, he said, “Bus isn’t here yet.”
“It doesn’t leave for twenty minutes. People say they usually run pretty tight. I’m sure it’ll get here in time. If it doesn’t, give me a buzz and I’ll come get you.”
He took his cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. Then he set the lighter on top of his pack and passed them over to me. I held up a hand to decline, but my willpower misfired. I shook one out of the box and lit up.
“Back to reality,” said Elias.
“You don’t sound too pleased.”
He exhaled lackadaisically. “I don’t even know what reality looks like anymore.”
I turned just slightly in the driver’s seat, twisting around so I could see him better. Elias’s voice seemed to have gotten much deeper, maybe as a side effect of smoking like a chimney. His soft-edged New Hampshire accent was gone, replaced with sharp r’s and a flat intonation. If I didn’t look directly at him, it was hard to reconcile the voice with my brother.
“You could always reenlist,” I said.
Elias snorted a laugh. “No way. My body’s too jacked up for it. I probably couldn’t even pass the physical.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve never seen you in better shape.”
He shook his head, scornful. “My leg never really healed right. I get migraines. My shoulder’s fucked up. You name it. I’m done playing in the Sandbox.”
“So what are you gonna do instead?”
Silence fell again. He held his cigarette out the window and gave the filter a few soft flicks with his thumb. He paused, dragged and finally said, “Man, don’t ask me that question.”
“Sorry. I’m just making small talk.”
“Yeah, I don’t know how to make small talk. It’s not what we do in my line of work.”
“Sorry. Jeez.”
Elias exhaled with a frustrated sigh. The vibe between us felt tense. I smoked nervously, glad to have something to do in the dead space. In the distance a silver bus appeared, driving slowly toward us down a long, curving road.
“Good luck with your girl,” said Elias. “I envy you that.”
I grinned. The tension vanished like a wave pulling back from the sand. “Thanks.”
He leaned into the backseat and wrestled his duffel bag over the console. Probably I would have hugged him to say goodbye, but the bulky bag wedged into the space between the seats. He reached across and bumped my fist.
“Fuck her brains out, ma
n,” he said. “It’s what I’d do if I were you.”
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 asshole,” 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.
Heaven Should Fall Page 3