I thought of how warm and broad his body felt when I rubbed his shoulders. Of the dense wall of muscle deep beneath his skin, and the way his hair bristled along his neck in a line so clean, and the smell of him that changed as I touched him. I remembered how he looked in the apartment that first day, stretched out on the futon. Even though I knew that was not the real Elias, only the perfect one that the real world could not sustain, I couldn’t believe the one in the easy chair had been the real Elias, either. I wondered if any of us had ever seen the real one, or if he was all soul, never finding a body to inhabit that could feel like a home to him.
Cade slipped a hand beneath my shoulders and pulled me up to kiss him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and moved willingly to the edge of the table. All the thoughts that my loyalty to Cade had held at a distance now flooded my mind, and that image of Elias fell over Cade’s body like a projection onto a screen. I felt no shame from it because we all knew—every member of this family—that the moment Elias died we dropped our shallow and insular battles and turned all our loyalty to Elias: to love and mourn him, to avenge and remember him, to imagine the life he might have lived and to carry it forward like a glowing ember wrapped in a leaf.
Once it was over, Cade breathed hard against my neck, and pressed his temple against mine, and said, “I need to get that guy on the phone.”
* * *
Opening the door was enough to wake TJ, and I attended to changing him while Cade got back to the business of negotiating with the police. As I fastened TJ’s new diaper, the lights suddenly cut out. The sky outside was overcast, and the attic instantly fell into shadow. TJ whipped his head back and forth, regarding his surroundings with large, nervous eyes. I made a few comforting noises and carried him down the stairs.
Cade was taking a seat on the sofa as we walked in, moving things around on the coffee table with a restless energy I didn’t like. The holstered gun was back on his belt again. No longer was he attempting to stay away from the windows, and he was smoking a cigarette that looked hand-rolled. A dozen gutted cigarette butts lay scattered across the coffee table, the obvious materials he had used to come up with the one he was smoking now. Across the shaded room he shot me a glance that looked almost resentful.
“Don’t know what the hell Candy did to him,” Cade said, “but he’s not looking real good.”
“Drew?”
He grunted assent. I considered asking more questions, then decided my knowing more wouldn’t help anyone. I crossed the living room on the way toward the kitchen.
“Where you going?”
“I need food for TJ. I’m all out of the snacks I packed in the diaper bag.”
“There’s too many open windows along the porch.”
“Well, what do you want me to do? The kid needs to eat. All he’s done is nurse all day. Everything in the pantry is dried stuff in those giant cans. Same in the cellar—”
“You’re not going in the cellar. No way.”
“Of course not, but I’m just saying, I need to get to the fridge.”
Cade gave the kitchen a long look. Then he said, “I got on the phone with them again—not the guy you know, but the first one. They asked about the condition of the hostage. I went down to take a look so I could tell them correctly.”
I waited for him to continue. “And?”
He gave a slow shake of his head, then looked up at me from where he sat. “Jill…this was Dodge’s idea. It wasn’t mine.”
I didn’t really believe him, but I nodded.
“If I go upstairs and put this gun in my mouth, you know what that accomplishes?”
“Cade.”
“Absolutely nothing. It’s the same thing Eli did. It’s like I put all this work and time and effort into doing right by him, and the whole time I was just circling the block. I can’t make any kind of grand statement now, like I meant to down in D.C. Can’t even kill Fielder with any fair reason, because Candy already did most of that job, so far as I can tell. That’d be like shooting puppies in a box.”
I winced.
“If I walk out of here with my hands up, they send me to jail. And Fielder, he’ll get the last laugh on that one, because I won’t make it two days before some big guy makes me his bitch. Basically I’ve got zero options.”
He took his phone out of his pocket. It was buzzing energetically, and turned in a slow spin against the wood once he set it on the coffee table. We both looked at it, and I said, “I think you should choose what’s best for TJ.”
He nodded. I walked into the kitchen and took an orange from the bottom drawer of the dark refrigerator. I sat TJ on the kitchen island and cut a small piece off the top of the orange with a kitchen knife, then pulled it in two and handed TJ a section before beginning to peel off the skin from the rest. He worked the orange section into his mouth, nursing out the juice, watching with interest as I peeled. His legs swung in a carefree way. It occurred to me that he was as oblivious to my anger and fear and sense of betrayal as I had been to my own mother’s suffering that day, but I loved him no less for it. I was glad he didn’t know, glad he could sit and eat an orange in the calm of the eye of the storm, and if I could have held things that way for him forever, I would have. For the first time since my mother’s death I forgave myself a little for walking past that television. I understood then that if her spirit could have guided me it would have marched me away from that scene, sent me about my business to keep the peace in my soul as long as possible.
And then a gust of air blew across the kitchen, light filtered in and I looked up to see the front door open. Cade racked the gun and stepped outside. The screen banged shut, and as I gathered TJ into my arms with a sense of great caution, several loud pops ripped the air. I dropped to the floor with TJ, holding him against my side as I crawled with the other arm toward the corner beneath the table. Shouts rang out, a chaos of voices peppered with more gunfire. I curled beneath the table, enveloping my son with my body in an embrace that all but crushed him. Boot steps crashed into the house, voices, the sudden sense of exposure and broken boundary. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and breathed in the cold smell of the stone floor, the muscles of my back steeled against the world beyond me.
That this was a rescue did not enter my mind. These were only strangers, Cade’s adversaries, invading our home.
A gloved hand fell against my side, and then I was dragged back against the stone, not moving from my position around the baby. TJ, his mouth no longer stilled by my sleeve, twisted his head upward and let loose with a furious cry. So close to my ear, it filled my mind. My thoughts and his scream became one and the same.
It was that cry that shook away my fear and thrust me forward into the next of what life held for me. The cry was the punctuation that acknowledged the terribleness of what had gone before, and gave it a stopping place past which I might believe things would be better.
I got to my feet, planting them against the stone. Someone had me by the arm. I shifted TJ to my hip, and as if to declare the Olmsteads had never claimed me, said, “I’m Jill Wagner.”
Chapter 33
Cade
For the past couple hours especially I’ve had some time to think about my regrets with regard to the current situation. When they put me on the phone with this guy, Dave Robinson, he said to me, “Don’t you think Jill’s been through enough the past few years, losing her mom and all, without you making threats on your own life now? That’s kind of selfish, don’t you think?” I gave that some real thought. I knew Dave had her best interests at heart and had helped her a lot previously. Jill had told me all sorts of wild stories about the kinds of people they taught at that camp, crazy paranoid types who live in the woods in their vans, and it irked me to think Dave might think he was dealing with that kind of individual when he was talking to me. I’m not like that at all. I’m a reasonable person. So in talking to him I tried to kind of meet him halfway, because after all this is over I hate thinking he’ll be talking to Jill about what happened
and have negative things to say about me.
When he said that about her mom, though, what came into my head was this: the thing I pity Jill over, more even than what happened with her mother, is that she’s an only child. I mean, every family has its issues, its sad circumstances and crises they never saw coming, but there’s also people you can look in the eye and know that they’re carrying it with you. Whatever happened in my own family, I could sit with Elias and know he thought the same of it as I did. Candy, she’s added her own share to that whole pile, but at least I knew the Olmstead business was her burden, too, whether she liked it or not. Jill never had that. The whole thing with her mother dying, she had to deal with it all on her own. They say no man is an island, but Jill pretty much is an island. It’s kind of hard to watch, like when you see a woman carrying a really heavy suitcase and she keeps insisting she doesn’t want your help in getting it across the airport.
My regret is that it’s looking as if I won’t get the chance to give my son a brother. I can’t really put to words the ache that comes with just thinking about that. If they burst into the house and kill me, or if I do it myself, or if I step out that door and start shooting down the driveway so I at least go out in a battle instead of cornered in my own home—any way this ends, TJ’s going to have to carry it, and there’s no way around that. Only a brother could make that any lighter.
So I’ll put it out there as my final statement, these two messages to those two people I love most.
Thomas Jefferson Olmstead, if you take away one noble thing from the deeds I did on this earth, let it be that I chose to stand in opposition to the full crushing force of the Government of the United States of America—its history and rule of law and sheer power to enforce its will—to right a roaring injustice done to my family. I would have done the same for you. For you I would have stood against the entire world.
And Elias Olmstead, for the wrongs I did you, and for the love I cost you, know that I always believed that among family we struck the bargain with our loyalty. I’m paying up now. And if I see you on the other side of this, I hope you’ll call it even.
Epilogue
Jill
Nobody had told me about the magic of a toddler’s first spring. Through the long months of winter TJ grew used to the skeletal trees, the fractured shapes they made against the sky, the clearness and plainness of looking up. And then all at once, in April, they burst out into a great banner of shimmering pale green, as suddenly as all the fans in a stadium rising to cheer. At first it frightened him. He stared up distrustfully at the new canopy, listened to the rustle of animals he could no longer see. When we stepped out the door of our little cabin at Southridge, even if only to walk the twenty feet to his grandmother’s cabin next door, he hid his face against my shoulder and muttered, over and over, his most powerful word: no. He was too young to remember that he had seen all this before, but old enough to feel unsettled by the realization that the world will change without warning.
On the morning I put Leela on a train back to New Hampshire—a week’s visit to see her grandsons at Randy’s, Eddy at the nursing home and possibly Candy, if she had earned visiting privileges—I decided it was time to take TJ on a hike. I tied his winter cap beneath his chin to block the April wind and strapped him into the backpack carrier Dave had given me as a welcome-home gift. Before Dave could see us, I hurried down the trail behind our cabin and into the woods. I knew he would insist on coming—fearing bears, twisted ankles and all sorts of hazards that might befall a lone hiker with a special burden. But the walk wasn’t far, and I wanted TJ to know I was not afraid.
Without a blanket of thick and heavy snow beneath my feet, the journey went much faster. Dry twigs cracked beneath my boots, and the last fall leaves, worn thin and lacy from the storms of winter, shuffled to the edges of the path. TJ chattered about the birds, piping his two-word sentences punctuated with mimicked animal sounds; his feet patted my sides as if coaxing a racehorse. Since his ear surgery the previous fall, he had begun imitating all the sounds around him with an enthusiasm that delighted me. To TJ, Frasier had been a quiet, muffled place, but all the music of this forest belonged to him now.
In a short time we arrived at the clearing, and I stopped near the campfire pit, turning to face the mountains whose ski trails the spring had reclaimed.
“You see that, buddy?” I said. I twisted my neck, looking up to catch a glimpse of my son. “It’s pretty, huh? You want to get down?”
I eased off the backpack and set TJ loose. For one long moment he stood and surveyed the land around him, taking in the breadth of the space and the height of the trees, cocking his ear toward the rush of the waterfall nearby. Sometimes I was certain he had Cade’s mind—analyzing everything he saw, planning his moves one by one, yet not immune to temper tantrums and petulance. I wished I could feel the pride of an ordinary mother who sees the best of her child’s father reflected in his spirit, but a bittersweet ambivalence was the best I could do.
From the direction of the trail came the sound of a bounding dog. I scooped up TJ, and a moment later Tess appeared, tail wagging and tongue lolling, with Dave following close behind with a walking stick in hand. “What are you doing?” he asked, but his tone was cheerful. “You know there’s bears here, right?”
“I have yet to see a bear. In ten years I have never once seen a bear.”
“That just means they’re good at hiding.”
I grinned. “Well, we’re fine. I’m trying to help TJ get over his new fear of trees.”
Dave nodded and looked out at the mountains. “He’s had a lot of change lately. Can’t blame the kid for wanting everything to just stand still for five minutes.”
TJ squirmed in my arms, and I set him down on the ground once again. As he toddled forward to pet the dog, I remembered the day Dave and I had hiked here—that Christmas afternoon two years or an eon ago—when I first knew of his little life. That day Dave had spoken of his doubts about Cade, and I had ignored him. But even now, after all my son and I had traveled through to return to this place, I wasn’t sorry for that. Cade had only been human, with a savage side and a pure-hearted one, the same as everybody else. The same as me, or Leela, or Elias. As good a man as Dave was, even the help he offered me had not been purely selfless. He welcomed the excuse to bring me back, and not just because I was a hard worker, either. I think I had known that, in the packed-away part of my heart, for a long time.
And I could find a way to make room for it. Because grief always gives way eventually and cracks open into something new, the way my mother had once stood beside a highway with me, looking out over a thunderstorm, knowing it was time to usher in a change that would make things better. It was my turn now, and I could do the same—for the sake of my child’s life, yes, but also for mine.
It’s not too much to ask of a person. It’s love, that’s all.
Author’s Note
The first stirrings of this story entered my mind over a late-night dinner with a friend at IHOP. The friend and her former husband had both been in the army—she was still on active duty—and had each served in Iraq. Sitting across from me with her hands wrapped around a cup of hot cocoa, she began a slow and heartbreaking reflection on the end of her marriage. As she described her then-husband’s transformation from a loving partner to a man who struggled to put his harrowing experiences behind him, and the toll that it all had taken on his psyche and their marriage, the war finally came home for me. I know many people in the military, but very few who are on the ground in a war zone. I’d heard about post-traumatic stress disorder, but overall I had been very insulated from soldiers’ experiences and those of their families. Yet as I listened to my friend that day, I started to put together how far-reaching are the effects of PTSD, how devastating and how permanent. There was no optimistic hook to this story, where the soldier ends up running a marathon and becoming a motivational speaker, nor the defining end point of a suicide or line-of-duty death. There was only a quiet
and ordinary loss that went on and on and on.
Over 212,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have been treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs for PTSD, but because half of vets seek health care elsewhere, the number affected is likely far higher. Soldiers affected by PTSD may experience flashbacks, feel tremendous anxiety and hyper-alertness, and suffer from intense feelings of guilt, all of which make it extremely difficult to function in society the way they did before the war. Recently, greater awareness and greater focus has improved some services for soldiers with PTSD, but many soldiers and their families continue to find the treatments offered to be inadequate or superficial. The suicide rate among combat vets is already alarming, and it is rising. As the drawdown continues and more and more soldiers come home, the United States and its allies will be faced with societies that include more than two million veterans of those wars—and by VA estimates, more than one-quarter of those men and women experience PTSD.
I don’t have any illusions that Heaven Should Fall represents anything more than my imaginative ideas about one soldier’s, and one family’s, experience. To do justice to those who served, I researched extensively to be sure Elias’s symptoms, his feelings and his experiences of war would be as credible as possible. I spoke to soldiers, read accounts written by those with PTSD, watched videos of patrols in Afghanistan and sought out affirmation of the smallest details, and sometimes made sweeping changes to accommodate some aspect I’d gotten wrong. At the end of it, quite honestly, I loved Elias more than any other character in the book; if I have made any errors in the physical details, I apologize, but I most of all hope the emotional details of his story tell the truth.
Heaven Should Fall Page 31