Heaven Should Fall

for it. Like she had a backhanded idea and wanted to make it up to you ahead of time.

Honest or no, it was her nature, and that grieved me something terrible. Before I ever had children I wanted sons for my husband, for certain, but with all my heart I wanted a daughter just for me. I dreamed of the things we’d do together. Years before I married Eddy, when I was carrying the first of my babies, I pictured our heads bent over a quilt together—her with long hair in a clip and a skirt I’d made for her—pinning up the squares. That baby wasn’t for this world, and when she left me I grieved not only for what had happened, but for all that never would. Later, with Eddy at my side and the second child in my belly, I didn’t allow myself those same imaginings until Candy was born safe and in my arms. And even then, I was wary. Maybe she felt it through her skin, the way I didn’t give myself all up to her from the first. See, there are worse things you can say about me, where Candy is concerned, than that I loved her too much. Shameful things I don’t dare to think.

One day the three of them decided to build a tree house in the oak nearby to the barn. I suppose Candy was fifteen then, because Dodge was hanging around the place too often and I suspected he had designs on her, so it pleased me for her to have a task that got her away from the house. My children were born two and a half years apart, just about, so Cade would have been ten and Eli someplace in between. Candy had appointed herself a kind of supervisor, which was sensible because she was always a dresses girl and you can’t very well build a tree house if you won’t wear pants. A couple times a day, when I had business in the barn, I’d walk past and see what they were up to. Usually Elias would be up the tree working, and Cade and Candy would be shouting at one another, because they were too alike in being headstrong. Cade was just a little skinny thing then, and Candy such a tall girl with hips on her and everything else, that it was funny to see those two squabbling.

It was easy to see why Cade had such a temper over it. Candy had some foolish ideas, like she was making Cade paint the tree house board by board before sending the boards up to Elias to be nailed in place. I let them do their thing and stayed out of it. In life, once you’re grown, there isn’t anybody going to step in between you and the other person and make you work together to straighten it out. God rest my mother, she was so fair that she always stepped into every argument and helped us see one another’s sides, and so once I was grown I didn’t know how to assert myself in any disagreement. I always kept on waiting for the fairness to become apparent to the other person, and that just isn’t the way people are.

Then one afternoon I heard Cade running up to the house yelling, yelling, yelling. His voice carried clear into the kitchen, and I came out in a hurry. He took me to the tree, and there was Elias lying on the ground curled up like a snail, his eyes closed and his arm at an angle that wasn’t right. I grabbed him and shook him, not even thinking how that was the wrong thing to do. If a body falls down from a tree, their back could be broken, their neck—you don’t go and shake them. But I did, because seeing my Eli in that state made my wits just disappear.

“She told him to go up to that next branch to make a lookout,” Cade said. “I told her it’s too thin, but she said if it sits just one person at a time it’s all right. Then it broke—”

“Where’s Candy?” I demanded of Cade. He said he didn’t know. I could see, then, that Elias had knocked his head on a rock that was embedded deep in the dirt, and that scared all the warmth right out of my body. I looked Cade dead in the eye and I said, “You get the phone and you call 911.”

His mouth got a nervous look about it, like a grimace, and he hesitated. I knew what was going through his head—that foolish line Eddy always said, that we don’t call 911, which was meant to say if a burglar tries to break into our house, he’d better count on being shot dead before we fiddle around with calling the police. So I said, “Cade Daniel, you pay no mind to that nonsense your father says. You call them right away and tell them your brother’s hurt bad.”

He ran to the house, and then I started shouting for Candy. I needed an explanation from her, but more than that I couldn’t move Eli on my own. He was thirteen or thereabout and he weighed more than I did. But she wasn’t anywhere—it was as if she’d vanished into the air, like vapor. Finally I managed to get him conscious, and then the ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital. He had a concussion and a broken arm. I sent Eddy out that night to tear down the half-built tree house, and I told those kids my nerves couldn’t take them ever trying a project like that one again.

Candy, though—when I got back from the hospital with Eli that night, she was standing at the kitchen sink pretty as you please, washing dishes. I got her brother settled into his bed and then I came down and, standing very close to her, said, “You ready to give me some explanation for why you disappeared when your brother was about half-dead?”

She said, in this very light voice, “I was praying for him.”

“Come again?”

“I found me a peaceful spot over by the garden and I knelt down in prayer for him. And the Lord delivered.”

For at least a full minute I was real quiet. Then I said, “I think you know whose fault it is he got hurt, and you were running away to hide from me. He needed you and you abandoned him.”

She kept washing, but gave me a sidelong look that was reproachful. “He looks okay to me now, so I suppose it’s all fine.”

I felt angry at her then, wicked angry, but I felt frightened for her, too. I wondered where I’d gone wrong to make her turn out the way she was. But here I’d brought up Cade just the same way, and while one of them was stepping up to be his brother’s hero—overriding even his fear of his father—the other one was strolling off to pray for him or hide from me. I wish I knew how it is one mother can raise two children to be complete opposites. So it was too easy, you see, to feel so proud of Cade that I didn’t better keep him in check, and so nervous of Candy that maybe I held back some of the love she needed and deserved. Every little girl has the right to a mother who thinks she’s the most wonderful girl in the world, and God forgive me, I don’t think Candy ever had that. God forgive me.

Chapter 8

Jill

My mother’s cesarean scar was a jagged little ridge that ran from her navel to the top of her underpants, a slim vertical line that divided her abdomen in two. When I was very young she explained to me that usually the surgeon cuts the other way, in a crescent slung low beneath the belly, but when I was born the doctors needed to work quickly. They didn’t have time to be neat or to work with the contours of her body. I nearly lost you, she said. Now, as I stood on the children’s step stool before the Olmsteads’ bathroom mirror and regarded my rounding belly through the fading steam from the shower, I wished I had known to ask her more questions. What had caused the emergency? Had her life been in peril as well as mine? How had she felt, waking up after the chaos and trauma of an emergency birth, to find herself without a partner to worry over her and rejoice with her, without a mother to help her recover?

I yearned to hear her voice reminding me how lucky I was that Cade was with me. To counsel me on how to get through this without her. But then, if she were here, I wouldn’t need to know.

Be a girl, I thought, an order directed at my unborn child. Please be a girl. I ran both hands across my belly, strangely solid and newly convex beneath my taut skin, and imagined a daughter who would link the chain between me and my mother, helping me to understand who she had been, to repeat the wonders she had done for me and honor her for them. I wouldn’t know how to raise a boy; I would have to defer to Cade on everything I didn’t understand, and that encompassed so much that I wondered how the child would even feel like mine at all. Cade and I had already decided that I would choose the name for a girl and he for a boy; without any hesitation I chose Miranda, after my mother. It was a fair agreement, but secretly I wished to choose the boy’s name, too, so that no matter how much he emulated Cade, he would still turn his head at a name I loved.

I stepped down off the stool and pulled on my clothes—the jeans that still fit if I pushed the waistband down beneath my stomach, the radio station T-shirt that had once been relegated to the sleep-shirt drawer before its roominess gave it a new appeal. At least I had Leela now—not my own mother, no, but a woman who had raised sons as well as a daughter, who knew the pain I would be facing and might hold my hand through it. I had only a few months to build a relationship with her before the baby arrived, and since she was a farm woman I had a guess