Heaven Should Fall

everything that happened, it’s my guilt, too. It’s a sadness and a shame, the things loneliness can do to you.

Chapter 11

Jill

That night, after my morning with Leela in the craft room, I lay awake feeling the baby tumble and kick inside me, jabbing its little feet against my diaphragm muscle in a slow jog. From downstairs I heard the clicks of a magazine being pushed into a gun, then the slide pulling back. Elias was up and settling into his routine. Sometimes when I heard him downstairs I’d think about how lonely I’d felt in the dark living room of Stan’s apartment, long after Cade had come and gone from his daily visit to me, lying there listening to the gentle clatter of the vertical blinds above the air vent, their movement letting in shards of harsh light from the courtyard lamps. If Stan was asleep in the bedroom alone, somehow the loneliness seemed to echo. I felt right only when he’d come out and sit beside me, channel surfing with the volume down low as I drifted off to sleep, resting his big heavy hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t Stan that I wanted, not especially; it was just the presence of another human being. The touch of one.

Go down and say hello, I thought. Make an excuse. You promised Scooter. I slipped out of bed and crept down the stairs, letting the boards creak once I reached the bottom two. I was 98 percent sure Elias wouldn’t do anything hasty with that gun, but that 2 percent gave me pause. He glanced over and nodded as I reached the landing.

I murmured a hello and got to work searching through the cupboards. I’d decided to make us a batch of Fudgies—a camp treat made up mostly of rolled oats, which we’d kept around in Olmstead-sized quantities, along with peanut butter and the scraps of chocolate from s’mores-making. In the kitchen I found no chocolate chips, but stuffed in the back of a cabinet was a stash of miniature Hershey bars; they might be Candy’s private hoard, but if so, I could claim ignorance later. As I moved ingredients to the kitchen island I caught the sound of a familiar voice from the television: Just be breezy, y’know? Abruptly I laughed, and Elias whipped his head around to look at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I like Kendra. She’s funny.”

“You about startled the piss out of me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” I abandoned the ingredients and came around his chair to watch the segment. “This is the one where she gets into the fight with the girl in the chow hall. I’ve seen it, like, twelve times.”

“I was just channel surfing. I hate this show.”

“Oh, really? That’s too bad. I love it. My mom and I used to watch it together all the time.”

“Your mom?” He shot a quick glance at me. “Never even heard you mention your mom before. I figured you didn’t get along.”

I shook my head. “She died four years ago this October. I try not to bring her up too much. People get uncomfortable hearing stories about people who are gone.”

“That they do.” He set down the remote, as if changing his mind about switching to a better channel. “How’d she die?”

“In a plane crash.”

“A plane crash? Shit.” He was quiet for a minute as I watched the show, leaning on one arm against his chair. “That’s why you moved in with us instead of your own people, then, huh?”

“Yeah. I don’t have ‘people.’ Her parents were alcoholics. I’m sure they died years ago, but anyway, I haven’t seen them since I was four.”

“Shit,” he said again.

I shuffled back into the kitchen and began peeling the waxed paper from a stick of butter. “We all have our traumas.”

“That we do. But most people’s don’t involve plane crashes. You get some kind of extra credit for that one. How old were you, then?”

“Eighteen. Too old to be an orphan, so no extra credit for me.” I set down my work for a moment and leaned toward him in a conspiratorial way, my hands resting on the edge of the kitchen island. “You want to hear the weird thing? I saw the clip on the TV at school while I was on my way to class—the wreckage of these two planes, they’d flown into each other—and I didn’t give it a second thought. I looked right at it. You’d think you’d get some kind of gut feeling when you see something like that, right? Or you’d have some sense of dread or that uneasy feeling that something isn’t right. But I got none of that. I just went about my business, clueless the entire day. That really screwed me up for a while.”

“Wasn’t your fault. So you’re not a psychic, so what.”

“I know, but since then I overcompensate a little. I see things like that on the news and I can’t shake the feeling that it must be personal until I can prove otherwise. One time, there was this avalanche near Deep Creek Lake, which is near the camp where I worked, and these two hikers died. I couldn’t get in touch with my friend Dave, the camp leader, so I drove all the way out there to check on him. Three and a half hours each way.”

He replied with a low, sympathetic laugh. “Are you serious?”

I nodded. “He thought I was nuts. But I was in college, and it was a Friday, so I had the time to spare. It turned out to be a good excuse to see him.”

Elias fell silent again, but there was an expectant feeling within the quiet, as if he wanted to keep the conversation going yet didn’t know what to say. I measured oats and peanut butter into a bowl, added in the butter softened in the microwave. After a minute or two he said, “You know it’s midnight?”

“Yeah, I know. I’m hungry. I’ve been eating like it’s going out of style.”

“You don’t show it. It’s all baby.”

“I hope so.” I watched as he cracked open another can of beer with one hand and took a sip from it. “What’s the shield tattoo for?”

“It’s my unit patch.”

“Were you pretty close with those guys?”

“Of course. You can’t not be.”

“You ever talk to them these days?”

He didn’t reply. The TV flickered with the scene in the chow hall. I said, “You know, you could probably meet people like that at the VFW, if you miss spending time with them.”

His voice was scornful. “I know that, Jill.”

“Sorry.” I dropped Fudgie mix by the spoonful onto a piece of waxed paper and slid the tray into the fridge. “My mom was a big advocate of group support like that. She was an AA sponsor.”

“That means she was an alcoholic, right?”

“One who didn’t drink anymore. She’d done her step work.” I nodded toward the beer can on the side table. “She would tell you not to mix that with Prozac.”

His laugh came out as a single note—a bark of surprise. “Guess you were the one who hung the bag on my door, then.”

“It’s no big deal. I was on it for a while myself.”

“I just started it a couple months ago. Scooter picks it up, since I don’t drive anymore, and he won’t say anything to Dodge. If Dodge found out he’d start razzing me about it, and that’d work my nerves, and it wouldn’t end so well.”

“I get that. But mixing alcohol with antidepressants won’t end so well, either.”

“Eh, who cares. I’m okay so far. And I’m already a shitbag, so just put it on my tab.”

“Why do you say you’re a shitbag? Nobody thinks that about you.”

He took another drink of his beer. “That’s the term. It’s an army thing. People who can’t hack it, can’t pull their weight. I wasn’t feeling so hot by the halfway point of my last tour, but no way in hell I was going to come out of there labeled a shitbag. It’s funny, though—over there, I could make it work. I could push through it. Back here, not so much.”

“How come?”

“Because I’m supposed to relax. There, it’s normal to be on edge 24/7. You hear a