Heaven Should Fall

say, Massachusetts, or had to borrow fifty bucks. Stuff like that didn’t shake him. He’d just go. And so it surprised me when he shot me this glare. The kind where a person’s eyes look to be two different sizes and one of them is twitching underneath. He got up and started yanking weights off the bar.

“I’ll bet you do,” he said. “I sure as hell bet you do.”

For the life of me I didn’t know what was up his ass. Mentally I went over anything I might have done wrong to him lately, but nothing came to mind. Whatever it was, I figured he had to be on the wrong track, so I said, “Piper’s pregnant.”

“Oh, I know.”

That was unexpected. “No, you don’t. How would you know that?”

“A friend of a friend told me.”

“Who?”

“None of your business.” He clunked the weights back on the storage bars.

Asking more wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I gave up. “I don’t know what to do. I’m completely freaked.”

“Shoulda thought about that before you nailed her, shouldn’t you?” The bench was between us now, and even though he was standing normally his bigger arms made the stance look threatening. I stood there feeling all sheepish, and his face shifted to this look of total disgust. “Fuck you, Cadey,” he said, using Dodge’s asshole nickname for me. “Fuck you sideways.”

By then I didn’t know what to say anymore. I’d sort of figured out what his reaction was about, but I didn’t know where to go with that. I didn’t know where to go at all. There were a lot of boxes lying around, and I sat down on the closest one behind me and planted my elbows against my knees, dropped my head down and started to cry.

“Jesus Christ,” said Elias. No chance was I going to look up at him, but I could feel him standing there looking at me, stuck on what to do. When he was much younger, eight or nine at the most, our father used to come down really hard on him for crying. He’d shove Elias down into a chair and bend over him, screaming himself hoarse, one fist up all threateningly, like someone about to beat a dog with a newspaper.

Elias came around the bench and sat on the box next to me. All I could see were his shoes, beat-up sneakers stretched all wide at the bottom. I was still making little gasping, sniveling noises and wiping my nose against my shoulder. It was bad. Years later the memory still makes me cringe.

“What am I supposed to do about that problem?” he finally said. “I can’t unfuck her for you.”

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

“I won’t.”

“If Dad finds out—”

“He isn’t going to do shit to you. I’ll knock him out if he does. But you’re his favorite anyway. He won’t.”

“I just ruined my life.”

“Naw. Least it’s Piper. Worst thing that happens is you’re stuck with her—that doesn’t count as ruined.”

I didn’t say anything back, and kind of awkwardly he put his arm over my shoulders. He never hugged anybody, so that was a stretch for him. He didn’t have any real answers for me. There wasn’t anything he could do but sit there and assure me Mom and Dad weren’t going to kill me and bury me in the backyard. But he did that. And for a really, really long time I felt like shit about all that, because I knew—I always knew—that he loved her.

* * *

When I was home for Christmas, almost right away I noticed the hacked-up tree in the backyard. It was over by the barn. What had still been a giant oak when I’d last come home was now a four-foot-high pile of splintered wood, with these long raw shards sharp enough to kill a man sticking out in all directions like some kind of lethal haystack. I asked my mom, “What happened—that tree get hit by lightning?”

She shook her head. She was standing at the stove with the teapot, raising and lowering a couple of tea bags into it to steep them. “That’s Eli’s.”

“That’s Eli’s what?”

“His tree for when he’s mad.” She closed the lid, letting the tags and strings dangle down the side of the teapot. She nodded toward the back-porch windows and said, “Your father and Dodge cut off most of the limbs a few years back anyway, you know, because it had a disease. When Elias needs to blow off some steam he goes out there and he chops at it. Doesn’t bother me any. I wanted that tree gone years ago.”

I looked out the back window again and saw the ax wedged in a hunk that used to be a branch, off to the side, almost buried beneath the snow. We’d tried to build a tree house in that oak years ago when we were kids. “That’s a lot of steam to blow off,” I said.

She shrugged. “Olmstead men,” she said. Then she poured a cup and drank it black, without any sugar.

A little while later Elias came downstairs. He’d been locked up in his room all day, sleeping off a migraine. When he saw me he said, “I need your help with something.”

I glanced up at a motion behind him. My mother was pushing a big cellophane-wrapped plate piled high with Christmas cookies across the kitchen island. It had an oversize red bow on top.

“Need to run over to the Larsens’ real quick,” he said. “Be good if you could ride with me.”

The Larsens were Piper’s family. “Sure,” I said, and he shrugged on his coat and picked up the plate of cookies. The cellophane was bunched up so high it got in the way of his face.

“Take your car,” he said. “I don’t like driving anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Too many distractions.”

That seemed like a weird reason. In Frasier, New Hampshire, there’s really nothing but woods and fields and the occasional rotting house here and there. But whatever, I didn’t mind driving. It was only a couple of miles to Piper’s. When the house rose up along the road, a boxy white Victorian at the end of a long drive that curved uphill, Elias said, “Pull up on the shoulder a sec, all right?”

I parked on the gravel, right behind the family’s old fruit stand. The wood was gray, like driftwood, with a darker slush slopped up against the decaying boards on the bottom. You could still see the shadows of the painted watermelons, and the yellow letters, faded almost invisible but not quite, that read Fine Fresh Lemonade.

“How come you didn’t bring Jill up here for Christmas?” he asked.

“Dodge.”

He nodded. Looked out at Piper’s house, squinting. “You’re still engaged and all that?”

“Yeah. What, did you think I was going to try to move in on Piper?” He made a face but didn’t answer. “That one’s dead, junked and sold for parts, man. She’s all yours.”

“I just want to say hello.”

Sure you do, I thought.

“You’re not going to feel awkward about seeing her, are you?” he asked. “After that stuff that happened?”

I shook my head. “’Course not. Maybe if she’d had an abortion I would. But a miscarriage isn’t anybody’s fault.”

“Maybe she was never even really pregnant in the first place.”

I shrugged. Sometimes I’d wondered that, too. One day she had a positive pregnancy test, and then another three weeks went by and all of a sudden she told me not to worry anymore, she’d had a miscarriage. I’d gotten used to living in despair over it and then ta-da, the whole problem was gone. It was as if someone had kidnapped me at gunpoint and driven me all over town with their boot against my neck and then, without warning, dropped me off in my own front yard. Except that the whole experience made things so weird between us that we broke up over the phone and never really talked much after that. It had made everything too heavy, too fraught.

“Probably not,” I said, for my brother’s sake. I knew it was what he wanted to believe.

I turned the car back on and pulled up into her driveway, and we crunched through the snow and up onto the porch. Elias rang the bell with one gloved finger, trying to hold that huge plate of cookies in both arms like a squirming calf. When Piper opened the door she saw me first, because the cellophane was blocking Elias, and smiled.

“It’s the Olmstead boys,” she said, noticing my brother under there and taking the plate out of his hands.