Heaven Should Fall

by Rebecca Coleman

  Also, there was the Saturn. On top of the usual problems, every time I braked it felt as if I’d just pulled onto gravel. I handed it over to Dodge so he could figure out what the problem was. Sometimes with a car you get a sense when it’s going to be a cheap repair and other times you can feel in your gut that the fix is going to cost you an assload of money. This was one of the latter situations.

  “It’s your rotors,” Dodge said once he got back from the very short test drive. He dangled my keys in the air and I pocketed them. “Feels like you’ve got bags of marbles where the brakes ought to be. I wouldn’t drive it.”

  “I got no choice.”

  “We got the Jeep, right? Just use the Jeep.”

  I shook my head. I hated driving the Jeep. Jill could drive that thing and shift like a NASCAR driver, and I still dropped gears every time between second and third. It was the hesitation that got me, and I knew it, but I couldn’t seem to overcome it.

  “Well, you got a choice,” Dodge said patiently. “Drive the Jeep, or get your ass killed. Pick one.”

  I got in the Saturn and slammed the door. Dodge just shook his head at me. Thunder, the larger of Dodge’s beagles, jumped against the door and bayed, scrabbling his nails against the paint. I opened the door again and he hopped in. His tail smacked my face as he climbed straight into the back looking for fast-food wrappers. I figured he was better off with me than getting kicked around the house by Candy.

  “Don’t you get my dog killed,” Dodge shouted. I gave him a thumbs-up and backed out of the driveway.

  I kept the car at fifty-five so I wouldn’t have to brake suddenly for speed traps. On the open road, I rolled down the window. The violent throttle of the wind was satisfying. It was only a couple of miles to Piper’s house. It was set far back from the road at the top of a little rise, a battered Victorian with a new American flag on a pole in front of it. Two cars sat in the driveway and I didn’t know if either of them was hers. I steered the car into the gravel pull-off right in front of it, stopping just behind the little shack where they used to sell produce in season. The signs were faded but still nailed up: Fine Fresh Lemonade. I shut off the ignition and eased the seat back so I could look past that shack to the house. Thunder climbed into my lap and rested his muzzle on my leg. After a minute I cut the engine back and turned my Dave Matthews CD on low. If the car was about to shit the bed anyhow, it didn’t matter much if I ran the battery down. And the music made me think about better days, high school and college both.

  Piper had had this hat from Guatemala, knitted, with earflaps and strings that hung down to about her elbows. She had mittens that sort of matched. They were made from about four hundred colors of yarn and she started wearing the hat as soon as the weather got cool. That fall when we were both seventeen, I’d get on the school bus in the morning and see that hat pointing up above the green vinyl seat and I’d go over and sit next to her. We were an item then and she expected it. She was always huddled over whatever book was assigned to her for English, reading like a madwoman. Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter—she plowed through them at light speed. The catching-up was necessary because neither of us was getting a lot of homework done. Halfway between her house and mine there was this house we biked to in the afternoons. In my part of New Hampshire there are a lot of broken-down buildings—old motels, lodges, cottages too small for more than one person and a skinny cat—along the side of the road. Abandoned, and nobody comes back to pay the taxes or fix them up, and so they just rot back into the earth. This one house between ours, it was a Victorian that still had most of its shutters and the original gingerbread along the porch, but the roof had rotted out in the back and so water had gotten into what had once been the veranda. It was essentially a ruin, but it was also a shelter, and one where nobody was going to bust in to milk the cows or watch TV. That’s a priceless thing when you’re seventeen.

  Most distinctly I remember the feeling of biking there—pedaling as if the cops were chasing me, tires crackling through the leaves, the trees arching overhead and throwing sunlight at me like javelins. Most of the time her bike was already there, white but hidden beside the encroaching woods. She was still afraid to go in without me—bad men always ranged near the forest, so they said. We were done exploring the house. We knew the crumbling plaster in the bedrooms upstairs, the gutted kitchen, the fireplace all walnut splendor and filthy black ash. What we weren’t done with was each other.

  Before it happened there wasn’t any real anticipation. We’d brought in a couple of old quilts during the summer, but we didn’t discuss what we did on them or what we might do later. One afternoon, fooling around, we kept getting closer and closer. The intent was to ride the edge of it, to drink down how tantalizing it was to be this close, but at a certain point a million years of evolution kicks in and starts giving really loud instructions. The thing I remember best—not just in my brain, but along my nerves when I think about it—is the feeling of unbelievable pleasure when I pushed into her, at exactly the same moment her voice in my ear shivered a long, rising scream of pain.

  Not long after that, the weather got too cold to use that place anymore. We switched to the shed behind my folks’ place, because from the main house it’s pretty hard to see people coming in and out of it, and I could block the door from the inside with the circular saw. There was light and even a little space heater. For about a month we met there all the time, three or four days a week probably. I spent 97 percent of my waking hours thinking about being with her. The other 3 percent, we were in the shed.

  Then Dodge got wise to it. He made eye contact when we were coming out of the shed one day. I didn’t think he’d say anything, because he was a guy, even if he was also an asshole, and I figured he’d have my back. And he didn’t say a word. Instead he took up this major project building new cabinets for his kitchen all of a sudden—the kitchen in their house that they didn’t use for anything except making cereal. Every day, all afternoon, he’d be in that shed sawing and staining wood, screwing stuff together, pulling out tools that hadn’t seen the light of day since I was in elementary school. God, did it ever piss me off.

  And then came that lunch hour when Piper pulled me aside and told me she thought she was pregnant. The whole weight of how careless I’d been crashed down on me all at once. Even after the whole scare was over I couldn’t get past the feeling of being estranged from her; I could barely even look her in the eye, let alone go out with her. For five months we were each other’s whole world, and then in no time each of us shriveled to nothing.

  In the end I regretted everything about it. I regretted not knowing how to hold on to her, not knowing what to say to her, not preventing that situation from happening at all. I got older, and spent time with more women, and regretted what a crappy lover I’d been to her, now that I knew how to be a good one. TJ came into the world, and sometimes I’d look at him and wonder whether Piper and I really had conceived a child together back then, and felt awe and remorse welling up in me at the same time. It felt like something I’d never be able to fully put to rest, the way I’d both loved her and hated everything that happened between us.

  And so I sat in front of her house and stared at it like a beagle at a prairie dog hole. There were a million things I wanted to say to Piper now. It seemed crucially important to tell her I was sorry for being a dick to her back then, but that wasn’t the only thing. I wanted to talk to her about Jill and why it always happened to me that this shell grew over me when things weren’t going my way, even when I loved the girl. I felt that maybe if she looked me in the eye and told me how it was—said the things I had a hunch she’d thought about me for years—it might snap me out of it. I wanted to hear her talk about Elias again, as someone who’d lived in our world and knew what he’d been like before the war. I’d tell her about how since he died I felt I was walking around with a cannonball-sized hole in my chest you could see clear through, stick your hand right in there and have it pop out the
other side, like surrealist art. And while I was at it, I wanted to tell her I was sorry for being such a shitty lover, and we’d laugh about it, and between us we’d understand that I could own up to everything I’d done wrong because I knew better now.

  But she didn’t come out. I rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, then sat there scratching the dog behind his ears while I watched the house. The sun was starting to go down behind the mountain. The flag flapped in the wind, and on the tree out front, the dark leaves rustled all at once like bats flying out of a barn.

  Once dusk came I threw the car back in gear and drove home. I didn’t have to touch the brakes once the whole way. I was feeling like a pro, as if I’d beaten the Saturn at its own game. And then, right as I was coming up the road with the house in view, my headlights swooped across the yard and a deer took off from Candy’s goddamn vegetable garden. It burst across the road in front of me, and I slammed on the brakes. They made an awful grinding noise, but beneath my foot the pedal felt like it was just poofing on a bottle of perfume. The deer thudded against my windshield. Glass shattered like a spiderweb, the dog thumped against the door and yelped, and finally the deer tumbled to the road and the car came to a stop.

  I opened the door and climbed out. Thunder slunk out behind me and sniffed at the deer, then bayed. The Saturn was destroyed. The windshield was in a million tiny pieces, the hood caved in, the bumper dented where the car had finally stopped against the deer. I stood there looking at it, half my brain whimpering my car, my car, the other half an absolute blank. The blank half won out, and I reached back in across the driver’s side to get my cigarettes and lighter from the passenger seat. Thunder was still sniffing at the deer, wagging his tail and doing his obnoxious beagle bark, getting all excited at the chance to hunt the roadkill. From the house I heard Lightning start yapping back, and then the door slammed and footsteps, human ones, started hurrying across the lawn.

  “You dumb son of a bitch!” Dodge said. “Didn’t I tell you this would happen?”

  “The car was trashed anyway.” I exhaled smoke and looked down at the deer. Dodge was still looking at me in incredulous silence. After a minute or so I said, “We ought to field dress it and butcher it once we get it in the house.”

  “Goddamn, Cade.” Dodge was staring at me as though I’d lost my mind. “There’s better ways to hunt a deer than to slam into it with your car.”

  Lightning came tearing across the lawn with Jill and Candy close behind her. “Holy crap,” said Jill.

  I looked at Dodge. “Guess I’m driving the Jeep now.”

  Jill stroked down my arm. “Are you hurt or anything?”

  I shook my head.

  “Cade,” she said.

  I couldn’t even look at her. I knew it wasn’t her fault. I swear to God I knew. But it was as if the whole thing was past her now. It was like hearing Piper cry out that first time I was with her—you can love somebody and they can love you back, but when they suffer or you do, the pain stays where it started. You can say, wow, that sounds like it must have hurt, but you don’t actually feel it one bit. In fact, in the midst of it, you’re free to go ahead and feel something exactly opposite. Love tricks you into believing that together you complete a circuit, that everything flows between the two of you in a current, that the two become one flesh. And that’s bull even in the metaphorical sense. Jill couldn’t feel what I felt about Elias, and so she wasn’t responsible for it. By extension, she wasn’t responsible for anything I would do with it. She was free of all of that, and I didn’t begrudge her for it. Not at all. I was glad.

  Chapter 28

  Jill

  Candy slashed the deer’s throat with a single clean cut, and the blood poured onto the ground with a lush splashing sound. Dodge had strung it up from the tree nearest the garden, where Candy thought the smell of its blood in the earth would drive away others of its species. Belatedly, Dodge thrust a bucket beneath the carcass. The sound was identical to that of flowing water. Candy slapped the deer on its flank and said, “This baby’s gonna feed us all winter long.”

  From around the front of the house I could hear a loud metallic banging, then the sound of shattering glass. Walking over, I found Cade standing next to his Saturn with a sledgehammer, beating the crap out of the hood. The windshield was smashed, and glass littered the driver’s seat. For a couple of minutes I just stood there, watching him destroy the car. When he worked his way around to the back windshield, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  He took aim at one of his taillights and whanged it with the hammer. “Talk about what?”

  “Your accident. Your brother. How angry you are and where you’re going with it.”

  “Pretty broad range of subjects.”

  “Cade.”

  He looked up at me with the defiant expression of a young man called to the principal’s office. A riot of small scratches from the glass and metal covered his arms.

  “This is not what you do with grief,” I said. “Stop it. You’re better than this, Cade. If anybody can take what happened to Elias and make something positive come out of it, it’s you. But look where you’re at right now. You need to—”

  “Save your intervention for somebody who cares,” he said. His voice took on a jeering note. “Life isn’t a fucking AA meeting, Jill. Not everybody wants to sit around talking about how powerless they are and how they turned it all over to God. ‘Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.’”

  “So that’s where you’re going with this, then? You’re not going to try to get over what happened to Elias at all. You’re just going to keep beating and beating against that wall until somebody pays.”

  “Somebody owes.” He whacked the back windshield. “I’m the collection agency.”

  I knew right then that I was going to leave him. There was no redemption to be had here, no moment of clarity when Cade would realize it was time to pull it together. Months ago, TJ’s birth had shown me that I could be as strong as my mother when I needed to be; what she had endured, I could get through, as well. I couldn’t remember that day we stopped in the almond orchard, and yet here I was again, standing in her place this time, knowing it was time to leave this family behind.

  I would leave as soon as TJ recovered from his ear surgery. I owed my son that much, not to delay his medical treatment so I could get away from the dead end of Cade. If I could make it with him this long, I could tolerate him a little longer. And then, with the same sudden surety of knowing I was leaving, I knew my destination: not Randy’s, but Southridge, the place where I’d belonged all this time. You’ve got a home, and it’s here, Dave had assured me. I hoped he meant it, because I was about to show up on his doorstep either way.

  I watched Cade for another minute, standing clear of the shattering glass and plastic. Then I slipped into the house, and as I made my quiet way up the stairs to check on my sleeping son, it struck me that this was exactly how my mother had done it: to walk away from my father because she saw no place for him in her future with me. I wondered if she had once loved him as I had loved Cade. Always, he had seemed so remote from my mother that I’d felt as though I was, and always had been, hers alone. I mused on whether TJ would one day feel that way, too, indifferent to who his father had been or the love that had created him. And as I lifted him from the laundry basket and cuddled him awake, I wondered if that was a victory or a loss.

  * * *

  Eddy was sick as a dog. On the morning Cade drove Leela down to Concord for the craft fair, when I came in with Eddy’s coffee, I could not wake him up. He breathed, and behind his lids his eyes fluttered, but the usual soft shaking and calling his name did nothing to rouse him. His skin bruised so easily that I was afraid to shake him any harder. All of a sudden I felt very nervous.

  “Eddy,” I said more loudly, almost a reprimand. I laid my hand on his bristled cheek and patted it firmly. A crust of drool traced a line from his mouth down his chin, like a ventriloquist�
��s dummy. I left his coffee beside the bed and called for Candy from the landing.

  She thumped up the staircase and brushed past me into the bedroom. With a jaded gaze she glared down at him, ruffled the sheets a bit and said, “He’s fine. He’s tired, is all.”

  “He won’t wake up.”

  “He just needs his rest. Leave him alone. He doesn’t need your damn coffee.”

  She started toward the door. “Candy, stop,” I pleaded. “It isn’t normal for him to be like this. Don’t you think we ought to call an ambulance or something?”

  The corner of her mouth lifted in a smirk that was unlike her. “We don’t call 911,” she said, imitating Dodge. “And the phone’s out anyway.”

  This was true. Eddy had been the one who paid the phone bill, and since he had gotten so ill, no one had bothered with it. Dodge and Candy’s house had no landline, and Dodge and Cade made do with their cell phones. But Candy didn’t have one, and I’d let mine go long before, when money got too tight.

  “I can walk over to the Vogels’ and call from there,” I challenged her. “Or we can take him to the firehouse. We can’t just leave him like this. What if he doesn’t wake up?”

  “He’ll wake up once he’s had his rest. Jeezum, Jill, let the man be. Don’t need to call out the National Guard ’cause an old man’s sleeping.”