Heaven Should Fall

by Rebecca Coleman

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Cade.”

  “Nothing to tell me. We’re not going—I can’t—” He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He stopped in midpace and glared at the wall for a long moment, then kicked a box of Leela’s stars across the floor with the bottom of his boot. It skidded to the fireplace and hit the tools, knocking the poker to the floor with a clatter. “Goddamn it to hell.”

  “Well, I guess you file again and hope for the spring.”

  He ignored that. “All these months, since even before we left, I thought we were going back for the fall. They let me register and everything. And all this time, there’s been no hope.”

  “That sucks, bro,” said Elias in a monotone. “I’d transfer you my GI Bill credit if I could, but they don’t let you.”

  Cade set his hands on his hips and looked at the basket of clothes at my feet. “I’ll get a job down there, is what I’ll do. Just have to try harder. Because I am not fucking staying here. Not for thirty seconds longer than necessary.”

  “Can’t blame you,” said Elias. But Cade was already heading out the back door, throwing it open so brusquely that the walls trembled. I rose from the chair, tugging my shirt down to cover my cumbersome belly, and made my way outside, taking my time to let him cool off a little. I found Cade leaning against the shed, smoking a cigarette and glaring into the middle distance. He didn’t so much as glance at me as I approached, yet once I had set my own back against the shed in a little gesture of solidarity, he started speaking.

  “We gotta get out of here, Jill,” he said. “I never would have moved back up here if I’d thought it would cut my ties this badly. I thought it was strategic, you know? Saving money so that in the fall everything would go smooth. And it’s not working out like that at all.”

  “I’m sorry about the work-study.” I turned my head to see him in profile: still so handsome, still the golden boy, but with a restless, hollow look around his eyes that hadn’t been there a few months before. “Isn’t there any way around it?”

  “No.” He flicked the cigarette away half-smoked, as if he was embarrassed to be caught by me. “I’m so pissed. So pissed. Everybody and everything I worked for is frickin’ leaving me behind. That’s supposed to be my life’s work back there. It’s not here, that’s for sure. I was never meant to be here. You know how I didn’t want to bring you here on Christmas? You see why now? It’s like an echo chamber of craziness here, and they’re taking me out with them.”

  He slid his back down the side of the shed until he sat crouched in the scrubby grass, his knees pulled up tight against him. “That baby,” he said. “It’ll all be worth it, right? This’ll all make sense once it gets here.”

  “That’s what everybody says,” I agreed. To make him smile, I added, “Candy says so. This one and the next twenty after it.”

  He rewarded me with a grin that looked genuine, if a little tired. “Soon as you get better from having the baby, we’re gone. I promise I’ll have a job by then. And I know I need to focus on getting that appointment for Elias, too. It’s just so weird that they built him up into this big brave guy and now he flips out at the drop of a hat.”

  I knew Cade meant well, but it wasn’t Eli’s bouts of anxiety that had me so worried. It ate at me, this sense that Elias was the type of person who would sit there calmly smoking and watching TV until the day Dodge made one comment too many; he would finish off the pack of cigarettes, or let the movie run to the credits, then walk over to the Powell house and shoot everyone in their sleep. Cade might think I was being fantastical and morbid, but things like that happened. They happened all the time. When I thought about my mother’s story about the almond trees—how she had found herself in just the right place at just the right time to see the light shine down on a truth that would change our lives—I couldn’t help but believe there was a purpose to our being here. Maybe we were the only two people in the world who could contain a disaster, here in this place, here at this time.

  “He needs to go see a regular doctor, too,” Cade added. “Go in and get the come-to-Jesus talk about his weight. Because, seriously, it can’t be good for you to get that fat, that fast. I’d be glad to take him out running so he can look a little better, but I can’t until he backs off eating like it’s a state fair contest.”

  I grinned—not at the insult, but at how unsurprising it was for Cade to think Elias would be happier if he made himself more attractive. I said, “I’ll coax him into going if you make him the appointment.”

  “Deal. I’ll make it tomorrow.” He sighed and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Right after I send out thirty more résumés.”

  * * *

  The next day, as promised, Cade called the VA hospital and made an appointment for Elias on the next available date, which wasn’t for two weeks. As soon as it was booked, I started looking for a natural opportunity to bring it up with Elias. The first one came on an evening when Dodge had left for the range with his gun-club buddies and the rest of the family, except for a dozing Eddy, were at midweek church. Cade made himself scarce when he saw me hovering around Elias. He knew how to take a hint.

  As soon as I sat down beside him, Elias switched the channel to Lockup: Raleigh. “Kendra’s probation hearing is coming up,” he said. “Hearing the boyfriend’s victim impact statement ought to be interesting.”

  “I thought you hated this show.”

  “It’s grown on me. Makes my own family seem normal.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. I always figured that’s why my mom liked it, too.”

  On the screen Kendra was speaking emphatically to the unseen interviewer, explaining why she felt she was ready to be released. I’ve been minding all my p’s and q’s, she was saying. If something’s poppin’, I stay out of it. I’m done with that kind of life.

  “It’s sad, you know?” said Elias. “Five years she’s burned up in that place. Her kid barely knows her. Looks like about the only skill she’s got is surviving prison. Not something you can transfer to civilian life.”

  “She seems pretty resourceful. She’ll probably find a way.”

  He watched in silence, exhaling a slow trail of smoke. The heating pad rested against his thigh, its little red indicator light aglow. “You know, all that time I was over there, I figured I’d come home and get married pretty quick. I’d have some kids, buy a house maybe down in Liberty Gorge. It seemed easy, like a board game. Get off the plane, roll the die again. Figure out how many spaces you get to move.”

  “You’ve only been back for, like, seven months, though. There’s plenty of time for all that. Who’d you expect to marry?”

  “No particular person. I figured it would just sort of happen, the way everything else does. The natural progression. But I guess everything looks easier from a distance. Unless you’re Cade.” He rolled his shoulders and rested his head back against the chair, gazing up at the ceiling. “If you’re Cade, you can just skate straight on through all of it.”

  “You know that’s not true. Cade and I wouldn’t be here if it was.”

  “It’s a minor glitch. It’s not the first one he’s had. He flounces and cries and thinks the world’s going to end, and after you shower him with pity he ends up walking out of it without a bruise. It’s the way he is. Sometimes I envy it so bad I want to knock him out. I could live a long time on just a taste of that kind of life.”

  The television showed a clip from a boisterous Lockup segment coming up after the commercial, but Elias’s gaze seemed far away. “Cade wants things to be better for you, too,” I said. “He made you an appointment at the VA hospital on Wednesday. Just a follow-up.”

  He shot the quickest of glances at me. His eyes flashed surprise. “I’m not going.”

  “Why not? It’s no big deal. I’ll drive. You’ll get some better meds, I’ll get a chance to get out of Frasier for a few hours—we both win. I’ll buy you lunch. Get you something other than Candy’s grilled cheese.”

 
“No chance.”

  “It’s not until next Wednesday. Sleep on it. We’ll see how you feel once it rolls around.”

  “I’m going to feel like shit once it rolls around,” he replied, his voice getting tighter. “Same as every day. Dodge had the nerve to say he’s taking me to work at the U-Store-It next week so I can stop ‘freeloading.’ Asshole. He’s gonna talk about freeloading, living in a glorified shed behind his in-laws’ place. Guy needs to be knocked out.”

  “Just ignore him. Everybody else does.”

  Elias grunted a reply. I stood up and rubbed his tense shoulders, and after a few moments he released a deep, slow breath.

  “Your muscles cramp up when you stay in one position for too long,” I told him. “I think that’s why your back hurts so much. Maybe we could go for a walk once a day, huh? Just up and down the street a little. Loosen you up.”

  “With you pregnant out to here.”

  “Ah, so what. I could use the exercise, too. I’m sick of not being able to run.” I kneaded his muscles, first one side and then the other, working my hands in tandem. He rolled his neck, then took a final drag of his cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. The sallow light from the lamp beside him illuminated only one side of his face, leaving the other in shadow. The memory of him lying on his back on Stan’s futon came back to me just then. He had seemed like a stone wall, nothing but muscles and uniform and an elaborate set of fighting reflexes ready to go. Now it seemed as though all of that had pulled inward, like blood retreating toward the heart when one is in danger of freezing. But pride still guarded the perimeter of his mind from invaders like me.

  “We’ll go,” I affirmed, letting his silence be his answer. “You and me.”

  “Sure.” He let his head drop back against the easy chair. “You always smell like Starbursts.”

  I laughed and scratched gently along his hairline, and he cocked his head like a dog getting its ears scratched. Candy had cut his hair in the kitchen the other day, buzzing him with the clippers after she’d trimmed each of her boys. The white of his scalp showed through clearly beneath his dark brown hair. He smiled, and I rested my hands on his shoulders. Eyes closed, he crossed his arms over his chest and laid his big hands over mine. “You kill me, Jill,” he said. “You really do.”

  I headed upstairs to my bedroom and curled up around Cade, who had propped himself up on the pillows to work on his laptop. He draped his arm lazily across my back and continued to peck at the keyboard with his left hand.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Okay. He said he’d go.”

  “That’s good. You must be persuasive.”

  I burrowed my head beneath his arm and breathed out a sigh against his chest. Guilt gnawed deep in my belly, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I thought back to the evenings I had spent with Stan, and how even as his arms had comforted me, I knew where the boundaries lay—where I belonged, and with whom. I had felt so lonely then, but my kind of loneliness was nothing more than physical separation from the one I loved. It was nothing next to Elias’s kind—to be broken and sick, shell-shocked, lost inside his own mind that could never quite come home.

  I told myself I meant no harm by it. That I carried no intention of touching him in any way that wasn’t chaste. And if he liked it a little more than he should, then perhaps he would remember that he was a twenty-four-year-old man, and he would get up from his easy chair and go out in search of a woman who could offer him more. One who wasn’t pregnant with his brother’s child.

  If it had worked even a little, then it would have been worth the world.

  Instead, it didn’t work at all.

  * * *

  The following Wednesday morning Elias climbed into the Jeep without any apparent nervousness. He said almost nothing for the long drive, taking charge of changing out the CDs at intervals, and that was all. At home he never listened to music, but on the floor behind the passenger seat he had a padded black case packed full of CDs arranged in little plastic sleeves, and his taste in music disarmed me. All of his selections were women with sweet soprano voices—Alison Krauss and Faith Hill and Kate Bush. It was a world apart from the music that blasted from the stereo at gun-club meetings. But it seemed to soothe him, and he gazed out at the scenery the whole way, chain-smoking with the window rolled down.

  At the VA hospital we settled into the waiting room for a little while, and when they took him back I opened a magazine and prepared for a long wait. But within fifteen minutes he was back again, a pink form and a prescription in one hand, looking satisfied.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “That’s it. They’re taking me off the Prozac and putting me on something else.” He held up the paperwork. “I told them I just wanted something to calm me down, and didn’t need all this antidepressant shit that screws with my body. So that’s that.”

  “So what they gave you isn’t an antidepressant?”

  “No, it’s just some sort of anti-anxiety medication. Pretty cool. It sounds a lot simpler. And they gave me better pain meds, too. You were right.”

  “What about counseling or support groups or anything like that?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t need any of that. Sit around with a bunch of other loads and talk about the past? No thanks.”

  I got up from the chair, accepting the hand he offered to help pull me to standing. “It’s not like that, though. I’m telling you, those groups can make all the difference in the world. My mom swore by them.” I glanced at the pamphlet display on the wall. “They must have something.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Jill. This’ll do me. Come on.”

  He started out the door, and I followed him. I wished Cade were here with me, able to back me up, because Cade believed as much as I did that Elias needed to reconnect with people—old friends, other soldiers, anybody who didn’t live in our one little household. Elias had lived in this town all his life—surely those people were all around us, the friends he had grown up with, the women he must have loved. And yet he seemed like someone lingering just outside the doorway of a school dance, unsure how to make his entrance, or if stepping into the crowd would only amplify the loneliness inside him.

  As we climbed into the Jeep he didn’t say anything more, and I turned my attention to the drive. Partway back, as Alison Krauss sang “Two Highways,” I cocked an ear to the harmony and realized Elias was singing along, his rough voice quiet and crooning. I reached over and patted his hand, and as if by reflex he flared his fingers the way a man would to interlace them with his lover’s, before letting his hand drop against the seat once again.

  Chapter 13

  Elias

  The little girl always unnerved him. She lived in the mud hut at the end of the road, a dust-caked old crapheap not fit to store a broken lawn mower, but her eyes were green. Green, like a regular person’s; faceted, luminous and edged all around with deep black kohl, even though she was only seven or eight years old. A tiny whore. Elias knew it was normal, all that eyeliner, that Pashtun kids wore it all the time. Many of the men in their families, heterosexual or so they claimed, used it, too. More than three years in the country, in and out, living in the grit and smelling their sweat and eating some of the shit they called food, and he still didn’t get these people. Savages all. Scrabbling to survive, living in the Stone Age. The children wore rags and threw rocks at dogs. They had their strange and vengeful God, their mothers whose hands fluttered to cover their faces with swaths of black, like caped vampires. More than anything, Elias wanted to get the fuck out of there. More than anything, he believed he had fallen through the quicksand of Pashtun country and into some sort of nightmare gnome hole where the bright upper world would never look the same again.

  The green-eyed girl wore bracelets—bangles that clinked when she played—and a ratty teal skirt too short by half a foot. Her auburn hair had a blaring reddish sheen that he would have thought was fake if he hadn’t known better, too rock-and-roll to be real, but n
evertheless it was hers. It was thick and longish and blunt cut above those eyes. There was a permanent crust under the girl’s nose. She ran back and forth from her family’s place to the market, or to her aunt’s or cousins’, because everybody here was related to everybody else and deep in the night on patrol it made your skin crawl to think of all those ancient people plotting against you, jabber-whispering in their strange language, and all those relatives fucking.

  The problem with intel was that everybody knew things and nobody could document a single one of them. In the military there were the intel people, those whose job it was to fish for information and get it all square and pass it up to the right people, and then there were the guys on the ground, the ones in Elias’s unit, who saw things and heard them but whose knowledge was met with shrugs. Little crumbs of intelligence. Piled up together, they meant something. But nobody cared what the grunts knew. They were there to protect the Afghans, not that the Afghans gave a shit.

  He saw the girl every day before Wharton died. He saw her every day after. She was one of the multitudes, but among all those other raven-haired, sand-colored children he couldn’t shake the sense that she was a plant. A crusty-nosed spy from his own tribe of real people, sent to report back about whether he performed with bravery and valor. He knew there was nothing too strange about her coloring. The region was like the hallway bathroom of the high school we call the Earth, where all the paper spitwads of every delinquent passing through merged to form a rippling topography born of every race, color and creed, and betraying none specifically. She wasn’t the only one who looked like she could have been his own mixed-blood cousin. It was the kohl that drove the point home. Look at my eyes, said her face. Taunting.

  The rumor—and it came at first as one of those crumbs—was that one of the hajjis, a young man who drifted between the various homes of his kinsmen, had funneled explosives to the ones who killed Wharton. Probably it was true. The guy came and went from the town as he pleased, never collecting enough bad associations to get himself arrested or his house raided, but they knew what he was up to just the same. It ate at Elias for months, knowing that this was the one sure guy on whom he could pin the death of his brother-in-arms, and still the man walked free as a bird. Finally word came that the man was suspected in another grenade attack in the next town over, and they got orders to arrest him. On that morning, as soon as the hajji had wandered from one house to another that was easier to secure, they formed a four-man stack at the door and rushed in. Elias knew this drill. He knew his part, knew the skills so well that they were not conscious thought so much as a dance between his optic nerve and the fibers of his muscles. His eyes transmitted orders across the web of his nerves like a cyborg, and in the moment of it he felt not pride, not competence, but like a most excellent machine. Evolved above his own humanity to something better, specialized exactly, humming along its own perfect code.