Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 5

Jill

Seeing Stan’s futon folded up and pushed against the wall finally drove the point home: Cade and I were leaving. Up until then I hadn’t even realized I had developed an attachment to the thing, as if it were a large teddy bear given to me during a hospital stay. In a way, it had been. The worst of my pregnancy-related illness— hyperemesis, the medical term for puking too much—had lasted only a month before Stan got spooked one night and dragged me to the hospital. Dead white girl in my living room would not look good for me, he had joked on the way. They hooked me up to a bag of rehydrating solution, kept me overnight and sent me home with a prescription for antinausea drugs. It’s possible I would have been a dead white girl if it hadn’t been for him.

During those weeks and the few that followed, I spent most of my time curled up in a nest of pillows with a bag of Starbursts and my mother’s copy of the Big Book from AA, reading inspirational quotes and stories from people who had turned their lives around. Stan thought I was nuts. Sometimes, propped up on a stack of pillows beside me and channel surfing as I read, he would glance over and shake his head before commenting about how wrong it looked to see a pregnant woman reading an addiction-recovery book. You remind me of those people on that show you always watch, he said. But it was pure comfort, all of it. Starbursts seemed to be the one thing I wouldn’t throw up. And from the Big Book I could cobble together a pep talk for myself, something that held an echo of my mother’s voice.

But as comfortable as I had been there, now was a good time to leave. As I grew heavier, the futon had grown less comfortable; I’d taken to napping in Stan’s bed when he wasn’t home, and it was awkward when he came stumbling in the door with a pack of half-drunk and cross-dressed friends after Rocky Horror to pass them in the hallway as I made my way back to the living room. All of them knew Cade and I were together, and I lived in fear that somebody in the group would voice a suspicion about me and Stan to him that would cause drama. I wasn’t concerned about Drew, because Cade was above listening to anything that came out of his mouth, but Stan had other friends Cade respected, and their judgment worried me. I could feel only relieved when, at the end of May, Cade admitted defeat with the summer-job hunt, told Bylina’s head of staff to call him the minute any job opened up and we packed our bags for New Hampshire.

The drive up to Frasier took twelve hours. The farther north we drove, the quieter Cade grew and the more grim his expression became. When he filled up the car in Massachusetts and I went inside to use the bathroom, I came out to see him resting his head against his arms on the steering wheel, like a child at a school desk.

I didn’t force the conversation. For all that Cade treated each toll road as another coin for the ferryman into hell, I was happy to spend the summer in New Hampshire. Dave had been so disappointed when I called to tell him I wouldn’t be back this year, and that I’d be graduating late on top of that, but there was no sense in brooding over what couldn’t be helped. I’d thought about my mother a lot in those past few months, trying to coax my confused mind to produce a little of her wisdom, and I was at peace with this decision. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it, my mother would have told me. At Southridge I would have just been a burden, too ungainly to perform my usual tasks, and any help I requested would have saddled me with guilt. But among family—and Cade’s family counted—it would be natural to ask and receive, because this baby was their own.

We crossed the border at the southern end of the state and drove through the Lakes Region, where Lake Winnipesaukee glittered between the trees and tall-masted boats clustered at docks that stretched far into the water. Cade looked singularly unimpressed with the scenery and drove along the gray highway in silence. His music selections grew darker as we crept farther north. The mountains loomed closer and closer; the woods grew more dense; the towns became farther apart and abandoned 1950s-era motels cropped up by the side of the road in numbers I had not imagined possible. We saw moose-crossing signs and the sheer faces of cliffs. Cade made a left turn onto a smaller road that passed through a faded town of Victorian structures; we passed a gas station and a sandwich shop, then a boarded-up bed-and-breakfast with a charred roof, then two miles of nothing. Then a house.

It was set far back from the road and flanked by trees, a sprawling and ancient white farmhouse with two lichen-flecked boulders marking the entrance to the long driveway. At first glance it seemed ordinary enough. The wooden siding was badly in need of paint, but the large kitchen garden at its side was neatly kept, and a gray barn was dilapidated but stable. An American flag flapped from a pole attached to the front porch, with a frayed yellow bow waving beneath it. A much smaller house built of cinder block stood a slight distance away at the edge of the forest. If the Olmsteads owned thirty acres here, I guessed at least twenty of them were wooded. The driveway turned from asphalt to gravel, then hard-packed dust, and here Cade stopped and jerked the car into Park.

Inside the house, two beagles began howling. Cade tossed his sunglasses onto the dash and twisted his body sideways to face me. For a long moment he said nothing, but the muscles in his jaw looked tense enough to snap. Finally he said, “Jill, tell me you love me.”

“Of course I do.”

“Just say it. Say, ‘Cade, I love you.’”

“Cade, I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He unclasped his seat belt and got out of the car. From the porch came the sounds of a banging wooden screen and general commotion, and then a woman stepped toward us, heavyset and in her thirties, wiping her hands on a dishrag. Her hair fell to her waist, and she wore a dress of smocklike calico.

“Cadey’s home,” she cried. I looked at her with some confusion. Too young to be his mother, too old to be his sister, I could not identify who this woman was in the scheme of the Olmstead family. She hurried to Cade and threw her arms around his neck, enveloping him in a powerful hug. “Praise God,” she said. “You made it here safe.”

He extracted himself from her arms and cocked his head toward the car. “Jill, Candy,” he said. “Candy, Jill.”

So this was his sister. I extended my hand, but Candy used it to pull me into her embrace. “We need another woman around here,” she said over my shoulder. “We’re outnumbered.”

Cade watched us with long-suffering patience. A trio of small boys, all shirtless, rushed out the front door and into the side yard, circumventing their mother. Cade mounted the porch stairs and I fell in step behind him, into a living room crammed with objects and looking as if it hadn’t seen an update since 1979. A faded sofa and matching recliner, strewn with multicolored crocheted afghans, bracketed a grungy braided rug. The television rested on a discount-store corner stand with several dust-flocked ceramic figurines on top. Above the sooty fireplace hung the mounted head of a deer, elegantly alert, surveying the poor scene before him. And despite a small fan in one corner of the room, the air was dense with the smell of cigarette smoke, both fresh and stale. Right away I could see that it would be a lost cause to try to keep clear of secondhand smoke. If I wanted that, I’d have to stay in the barn.

Cade’s mother, Leela, blonde like him and, like Candy, looking older than I expected, rose to meet me as I stepped into the room. She shook my hand and greeted me warmly, then hugged Cade before quietly following Candy out to the back porch, where they seemed to be in the midst of assembling an egg incubator. The bright light of a clear bulb flashed on and off.

“I’m home, Dad,” Cade said to a man seated in a leather recliner in front of the television. The words sounded more ceremonial than anything else; his father, after all, could not have missed him coming in the door. But Cade had warned me that his dad, Eddy, had been foggy since his stroke, and he looked at his father with a gauging eye, as if to determine whether he had gotten worse since Christmas.

“So you are.” But his father looked at me, not Cade. A cigarette burned between his index and middle fingers, the long ash on the end lingering precipitously. He wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt despite the warmth of the room, and his hands bore dark red patches, the color of dried blood, that seemed to originate beneath his skin. Cade had told me Eddy was in his late fifties, but to my eye he looked much older, and his voice was thick. His gaze traveled from my feet to my eyes and back again. “That’s your girl, huh?”

“That’s my girl.”

“I’m Jill,” I offered. “Nice to meet you.”

He nodded unevenly but didn’t offer his hand. Cade asked, “Know where Elias is?”