“Huh?”
“You don’t think?”
I set down the roll of solder and the gun. “Of course not. How would he be a plant? He didn’t just pop up out of no place. He’s local. And he just got out of high school, like, a year ago.”
“Sure seems like one to me. Never takes any initiative of his own. Always just does what we tell him.”
“That’s because he’s not too bright.”
“He helped Randy’s wife that one day. Didn’t bat an eye.”
I gave him a dirty look. “He helped get my dad to the hospital when Candy decided she was going to act like a small-minded bat-shit moron and let him die in his bed. That’s the only reason Jill brought Lucia over. Because your wife wouldn’t help her.”
“What’s Jill doing consorting with Randy, anyway? How does she even know him?”
“From the funeral.”
“So she says. I ran into her at the U-Store-It, all alone, making a phone call from the office. Said she was calling the kid’s doctor. What do you figure the odds are of that?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” I picked up the soldering tools again. “Jill’s not a plant either, all right? That I’m sure about.”
“You don’t think people sell out when somebody makes them an offer, huh?”
“Not Jill and not Scooter. Get a grip.”
Dodge was quiet for a couple of minutes. He stood there watching me work. Then he said, “One of these days you’re gonna work up the respect due to me. Once you grow up some and come to see things my way.”
“Whatever.”
“There you go again. Fact is, even when you know I’m right you won’t admit it. Too goddamn arrogant.”
“The problem’s not that I’m arrogant. It’s that you shove your nose into my business way too often. You’ve got to meddle in everything, whether it involves you or not.”
He was leaning on his arms against the bench, but at that he looked up at me with a gleam in his eye beneath his trucker cap. “Oh, I get it. You’re still sore about my cabinet project in here, all those years ago. When you were using this place as your little love nest.”
I kept soldering and didn’t say anything.
“Yep,” he said. “Cade sees it Cade’s way, through Cadey’s big blue eyes. Tell you what, I got tired of seeing the look on your brother’s face every time he knew you were in here messing around with that girl. You wouldn’t have seen that, though, would you?”
He waited to see if I’d reply, but I stayed silent. All I could think was I hated him more for saying that than I ever had for running me and Piper out of the shed.
“If I were Elias,” he went on, “I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate that shit. The way you treated him over that—I’d have had a mind to put a stop to it once and for all, any way it took. But nobody ever could get a rage out of Elias, and don’t ask me why. God knows I tried. Would have done him good, and God knows you had it coming, Cade.”
He held me in a kind of stare-down until I pulled the soldering gun’s plug out of the outlet without breaking eye contact. Then he shrugged and straightened up.
“You’ll think what you want to think, even when you’re wrong and you know you’re wrong,” he said.
Where Scooter and Jill were concerned I didn’t give it a second thought after that, not for a while anyway. Where Piper came in, I put it out of my mind. The project was consuming all my spare time and needed to be my priority. Sitting watch during those long, lonesome hours, watching the night through the window glass and perking up my ears at every sound—all of that made me feel paranoid enough without casting my own people as suspect. Every time I left the house to go anyplace, I felt jumpy. All of this was Dodge’s fault. New Hampshire had felt like its own kingdom to me, far apart from the spy-versus-spy political crap in Washington. It’s funny how the power of suggestion works like that. Just float the idea that somebody might be watching me, and I’m skittering away from my own shadow.
It wasn’t going to slow me down, though, as far as the project went. When I ventured out to the hardware store in Henderson, I made sure nothing about my appearance would attract attention. Grimy Levi’s worn soft and held up by a nicked leather belt, untied work boots, ball cap with the brim rolled tight, three days of beard. My T-shirt had the American Eagle logo across the chest, preppy when I bought it, but the tattered hem and the holes under the arms had long since made it work-shirt material. I looked like any low-wage construction worker who would have every good reason to be buying twelve boxes of nails at once.
I slid the boxes across the counter, told the cashier to add a pack of cigarettes and tugged my wallet out of my back pocket. As she rang me up, another customer plunked her purchase down at the end of the counter. In a quiet voice I knew right away, she said, “Hi, Cade.”
There stood Piper, looking at me with an embarrassed smile. Her hair was in a short ponytail sticking out the back of her cap, and her shirt had spatters of white paint all over it.
“Hey,” I said.
“What are you doing all the way down here?”
“Just…shopping. I was in the neighborhood.” I handed a twenty to the cashier. “You?”
“I live here now.” She pushed her one item forward: a toilet flush valve. “I got my own place after graduation. It needs a little work.”
“Paint and plumbing, huh?”
“How’d you guess.” She laughed quickly and handed over her credit card. “I’ve got the paint part down. I just need to figure out how to install this thing.”
“It’s not that hard. You’ve got to turn off the main water, and then once you drain it there’s two bolts at the bottom—” Her mouth had twisted upward with amusement. I said, “It doesn’t take long. You want me to do it?”
She lived near enough that she had walked over. She climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep to give me directions to her apartment. The drive was so brief I barely got a moment to consider the irony of it. Here I’d been mooning over the girl for months, stalking her even, and now here she turns up at the hardware store and jumps into my car minutes later. But when it happened like that, it just felt ordinary in spite of it all. It was only Piper, whom I’d known since I was born. She was just the girl in the crazy hat reading Of Mice and Men on the school bus, the one who sold ice-cold watermelons by the side of the road.
Her flat was on the top floor of an old brick garden apartment building, three stories above the street. My boots clunked loudly against the stairs as I followed her. The apartment smelled like fresh paint, but I could tell it was all coming from the bedroom. The living room was simple but all in order: an old sofa and a couple of museum posters on the walls, and a little dinette table with two wildly painted chairs. She led me to the bathroom in the hallway, and I flicked on the light. The dotted shower curtain and pink rug had been shoved away from the toilet with its missing lid, obviously a project abandoned by someone confounded by it.
I got to work. She had the right tools around, just no idea of how to use them. As I worked she talked to me from the doorway, filling me in about all the details of her life the past few years. I could have predicted nearly all of it: a backpacking trip through France, a broken engagement, a chemistry degree, grad school on the horizon. She asked about my parents, then started on the rest of the family.
“How’s your son?”
“He’s fine.”
“And your girlfriend?”
Even the mention of Jill unnerved me. I didn’t like Piper conjuring her at all. “Don’t ask,” I said, brusque to the point of being rude. The chagrin of it made me realize the answer implied a breakup, but I wasn’t about to bring it back up to correct myself.
“I’m sorry,” Piper said. “I didn’t mean to pry. That’s the same answer I always give people when they ask about Michael.”
“You two split up?”
“We had different goals,” was all she said.
I flushed the toilet and watched the mechanism work, the
n slid the lid back on with a hollow clunk. “Fixed.”
“Thanks so much.” As I washed my hands, she added, “It’s hard to believe it was almost a year ago that I saw you last. We keep meeting under strange circumstances.”
“This isn’t as bad as last time.”
“Certainly not, no. I’m so sorry about Elias—really, Cade, I am. I was as shocked as anybody when I heard. How are you doing?”
I toweled off my hands. “I’m all right. Good days and bad days.”
“I see you got a tattoo. What does it say?” I held up my arm, and she read aloud clumsily, “‘Fiat justitia ruat caelum.’ What does that mean?”
“‘Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.’” When her forehead creased up with confusion, I added, “John Adams said it during the Revolution.”
She smiled. “You’re so wonky, Cade. Even when you rebel, you’re wonky. But it’s sexy.”
I grinned.
“Well, do you want the grand tour? Or do you need to get back to work?”
“I’ll take the tour.”
“It’s not very grand, really. You already saw the living room. There’s the kitchen.” She pointed to a little galley kitchen on the right. “And here’s my room. Under construction.”
I leaned against the doorway and looked in. The dresser was still shoved against an unpainted wall, but the bed had been pushed to the center of the room and piled up with pillows and a white duvet. Blue painter’s tape lined the carpet where it met the walls. The light was off, but the room was bright from the sunshine coming in through the blinds.
“Not a lot of personality to it yet,” she said. “The landlord paid for the paint, but said it had to be white. I’ve got all my posters in the closet. Maybe I’ll call you when it’s done. I can do better than this, really. It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t like leaving it half-finished.”
I laughed at the way she said that. It summed up my thoughts exactly, but on a different subject. She shot me a quizzical look. And then I did the natural thing—the thing that came naturally because I’d rehearsed it in my mind a thousand times in the past few months. I laced my fingers into her hair and went in to kiss her.
She kissed me back. The way her mouth tasted put a lonesome ache in the pit of my stomach from the familiarity of it, from how far away the memory seemed. But that passed quickly, and the excitement of being there with her ramped up second by second. Time had taken a U-turn, at long last admitting it had gone way off the fucking highway, and now I could whiz past all my mistakes and regrets and the specific moments when I became more and more of an asshole and into my sublime original life, which began with the beautiful girl who singled me out to kiss her in the quarry lake. Me above all the others.
I held her face in both hands and leaned back against the door frame. She slid her palms up my stomach to my chest. Every nerve along their path flared on like a gas burner. I knew it was wrong to do this to Jill. She was my wife, the mother of my son, who was the only decent thing my life had to show for itself, and my regrets and mistakes weren’t her fault. I knew I ought to stop, but I didn’t want to stop. I tried pelting my guilt with a dozen justifications. It didn’t count if it was a girl I had been with years before Jill ever came along. It didn’t count because I was just horny, and in that sense it wasn’t personal against Jill but strictly biological. And it didn’t count when the girl was the one Elias had loved, and I had appointed myself Elias’s proxy on earth. In fact, this would be the first time it had ever been all right to sleep with Piper, because for once I wasn’t being a piece of shit to my brother by lying down with her.
But I knew every bit of that was a lie. It counted. Not only did it count, but it was the biggest fuck-you I could give to Jill, because I’d had plenty of chances to walk myself through this scenario in my head and end up choosing the right. And even as I kissed Piper I knew the thing that tempted me most was the opportunity to shake off the embarrassment of my former ineptitude and pleasure the hell out of her, so she’d remember that instead. Even in my compromised state I could perceive what a jackass I was to think that. Jill had taken enough hits for my ego already. She didn’t need to take Piper’s hits, too.
The challenge was to get my body to cooperate with the ruling of my brain. Piper was murmuring in my ear that she had missed me, how much she loved my body, how much she loved it in really specific ways, and when she felt my erection with one hand and undid my belt with the other one, I knew I couldn’t stop but that I had to.
I set my hands against her upper arms and pushed her back gently. Her face got that perplexed look again, and so very deliberately I buckled my belt, checked my zipper, pursed my lips and exhaled slowly.
“I’d love to,” I told her, “but I really can’t. I can’t.”
She blinked once and looked away, toward the window. Her long throat caught the light. Shadows played against the tendons, fell into the small hollows at the base. “See you around, then,” she said.
“Don’t be mad. It isn’t personal. I got married, Piper.”
She nodded. “Then you’re a giant asshole.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as a hard sigh. “Believe me, nobody knows that better than I do.”
* * *
The night I drove down to D.C. with Dodge, I put TJ to bed before I left and watched him for a long time. Elias always said he looked like me, and there in the dark, with his face all serious, I could definitely see it. He had the same type of hair I had as a kid, the really shiny kind of blond that means your mother’s always touching your head to check if it’s greasy. His first birthday was coming up, and he was right on the verge of walking. When Jill let him down from his high chair and set him on the rug, he’d pull up on Elias’s chair and stand there holding on with one hand, the other one out like a little wing, looking as if he was making up his mind about whether it was worth his time to take a step forward. Jill kept saying we needed to get him a new bed, that it wouldn’t be safe to let him sleep in the laundry basket any longer, but I kept procrastinating because I knew the truth. I wasn’t going to be there for the next stage with him. I wanted his baby days to be like a closed room or the inside of an egg. Whatever was beyond it, I couldn’t think about that.
Once he was sound asleep I grabbed my messenger bag and went out to the truck where Dodge was waiting. On my way out I heard Jill moving around in the kitchen, talking to Scooter, whom Dodge had assigned to the night watch. I didn’t say goodbye or anything. I tossed the bag onto the seat behind me, and Dodge said, “Easy,” and then he backed out of the driveway and we were off.
It’s hard to describe how freeing it felt at first. We drove past the turnoff to the quarry, past the empty lot strewn with bricks that had once been the house where I lost my virginity, past the fruit stand and the hill where Piper’s house stood. The road took us by the motel in Liberty Gorge that had been sanding down my soul for the past year and a half, and through Henderson, where the hardware store’s security lights glowed through the old windows. I was like a comet flying past these things, burning through all of it on a singular path. It wasn’t until we crossed the border into Massachusetts that the shallow exhilaration wore off. I started getting restless, and thinking about too many things, until finally I took the wheel from Dodge so I’d have something else to focus on. He fell asleep as if it was nothing, and I drove for hours and hours and hours.
Here’s what was in my messenger bag, sitting on that seat right behind him. A couple of crumpled brochures from Bylina’s last campaign. A package of mints, kind of grubby at this point, left over from that same time period. Five letters, stamped and addressed, to the Washington Post and the New York Times, to Stan and Jill, and one to the Vogels, our neighbor up the road. The picture of Elias in his body armor, in case I started to forget what I was here for. And just to twist the irony, fifteen copies of my résumé. In the event that Dodge decided to scuttle this whole thing, I didn’t want a trip into D.C. to be pointless. It was a lo
ng drive, after all, and I hadn’t been lying to Jill when I said I was still amenable to plan A.
It was dawn when I merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike. The sky was streaked pink and orange, but my eyes had gotten so bleary by that point that it was all running together like a wet painting. I pulled into the first rest stop to take a leak and buy some Red Bull. In the men’s room there was this guy helping his kid change clothes—I guess the kid had spilled a drink on himself or gotten carsick or something—and the boy was crying and crying, just beside himself, standing there in his shirt and socks and a pair of diapers. You could tell he was exhausted. The dad was talking to him real softly, saying things like “One-two-three!” as he lifted the kid’s shirt over his head, wiping down his chest with a wet paper towel. That about killed me to watch. I couldn’t pee fast enough. I hated thinking about how I was never going to be there for TJ like that, hated it like death. The thought crept into my mind then: Maybe this isn’t worth it. If it had just been me driving down there, to be perfectly honest, I probably would have turned around at that point and driven home. But this wasn’t just about me, and it was crucial that I remember that. I was already shut out of every way I knew to work the system, and it wasn’t acceptable to just roll over and let my brother be a victim of the government’s indifference. At the end of this I wanted somebody up there to sincerely regret that they had brushed off Elias Olmstead, and there was no other option but action. So I got back in the truck, and Dodge drove the rest of the way.
Just outside the D.C. line we stopped at a Starbucks and I ran in to change clothes in the bathroom. Starbucks always has these big single-toilet bathrooms, no stalls, so you can lock the door and get all that space to yourself. I ruffled up the front of my hair a little bit, left a collar button undone, tried to look the way I always did. Casual but polished. It made people comfortable. As I smoothed on some aftershave I looked at my reflection in the mirror over the sink and tried to psych myself up a little. The Most Handsome Bastard in the World. Never had any trouble winning people over to my side. Turn it on, Cade, I thought, and hustled back out to the truck.
Heaven Should Fall Page 27