Heaven Should Fall

any prenatal care?”

“We couldn’t afford it.”

She scowled at me. “It’s a potentially fatal condition for both mother and child. A simple sonogram would have detected it.”

“Oh.” I looked down at the baby. “Do I need to sign him out or anything?”

She gave me a funny look. “He’s going to the nursery. What did you think, you can just walk out the door with him?”

“Well—Jill can’t take care of him, right? She’s sick and all.”

“That’s what the nursery is for. He hasn’t even been bathed yet.” She took the baby from my hands as if he was a prize she’d decided I hadn’t earned after all. “Sit tight. As soon as your wife gets into a room, I’ll let you know.”

My wife. When the nurse said that I felt ashamed that she was wrong. It was yet another thing I’d dropped the ball on, like the prenatal care and getting a better job, keeping the fences in good repair and getting Elias taken care of before he turned into a raving lunatic at the sight of somebody bleeding.

It was a relief, at least, that Elias had nothing to do with why she was bleeding. I felt kind of bad about that, the more it sank in. If he hadn’t started screaming, Jill would have bled out right there on the sofa and nobody would have realized it until it was too late. It was such a weird response for him. The guy had seen carnage on a level I could never imagine. He’d seen dead Afghan people by the score, kids even, and he’d told me about some of those, mutilated or partially eaten by animals. He’d seen his own buddy blown apart into a dozen pieces by an IED. In those situations he had acted decisively, and we knew that for a fact because he’d lived and come home, a Purple Heart veteran, honorably discharged. And then in his own house he acted as if his legs were stuck in concrete, screaming as though a truck was barreling down on him. Those anti-anxiety pills he was taking weren’t doing a damn thing. I made a mental note to talk to him about that.

But it might not be anytime soon. I had a son to look after now, and that son had a mother I needed to watch out for, too. At least we knew now that under pressure Elias didn’t lash out—he froze. That made the whole thing a little less urgent. At least he wasn’t a danger to anybody.

I wish it had been that simple.

Chapter 19

Jill

It was seven in the evening when the painkillers wore off. My eyes slit open to the view of a faded pink wall fractured by the beige plastic bars of my bed. On the little cabinet there sat the incidental items of an ordinary birth—an opened package of blue trauma pads, a stack of tiny diapers, a kidney-shaped dish, a glass jar of Hershey’s Kisses with a single balloon tied to its neck—but I knew the birth had not been ordinary. I tried to roll over onto my back, but a slice of pain seared through my abdomen. I winced and eased over more gently. Not long after I’d awoken from the surgery, in a busy room washed in a greenish light and the beeping of many machines, I had laid a cautious hand on my belly and felt the incision, a vertical one, the same as my mother’s. The surprise of it had filled me with an odd sense of peace. Her experience is yours now, I had thought. She came through it, and so will you.

I reached for the call button, but as I did my door swung open and a bassinet rattled through it, pushed slowly by a nurse.

“Here he is,” she said. “Chewing on his fists. Let me give you your meds and then you can feed him.”

I looked up to see Leela craning her neck to peek around the doorway. Strands of her gray hair, bunched up in its usual bun, had worked themselves out to form a disheveled halo around her face. “Oh, good, Jill, you’re awake now.”

The room was dim, the stiff green drapes drawn tight across the windows, and Leela didn’t offer to turn on the lights. When the nurse left she lifted the baby with competent ease and handed him down to me. I hadn’t seen him for hours, and already he seemed older, his round little face evenly pink and the tips of his ears unfolded from their squashed state. I pulled up the sheet for modesty while I nursed him, and Leela said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Goodness. How do you feel?”

“I’m okay.” The baby was so warm, his body soft and as radiant as a coal. I couldn’t help but think of Elias then, how dry and heated his skin always felt when I massaged his shoulders, like a clay dish lifted from the oven. My gaze caught on the little index card at the end of the clear bassinet. On it was the cheerful image of a blue teddy bear beside a name blocked in thick marker: “OLMSTEAD, Thomas Jefferson.” “I thought it would be a girl,” I told Leela.

She settled into a chair beside my bed and patted my arm. I expected her to murmur a platitude that perhaps the next one would be or that God liked to surprise us, but instead she said nothing. The sudden quiet felt almost like a moment of silence for someone lost. I stole a glance at her and wondered if she had hoped for one, too.

“I guess I expected a girl,” I continued, “because I’d know how to raise one. With a boy I don’t have the first clue. So I thought obviously it would be a girl, since my mom used to always tell people that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”

Leela uttered a small but disparaging laugh. “Well, that isn’t true, is it?”

I turned to her, feeling my eyes tighten with confusion.

“God gives people more than they can handle all the time,” she said, her voice lilting with the obviousness of her words. “Shoot, babies in the Third World aren’t dying because they just didn’t try hard enough. You’d be a fool to try and predict how God will hand out pain. We all just love the world enough that we want to stay in it. See the day through to a better day past it.”

“But you believe in God.”

“Of course I do. But I believe in hunkering down till life gets better, too. And it does. You’re here, after all.” The baby’s cap had slipped, and she slid it back over his head. “Besides, your child might surprise you. Maybe he’ll love chasing the hens around the yard and helping people in little quiet ways that make them happy, and he won’t care a thing about power or influence. You just never know. He might be a mama’s boy.”

“I’m sure Cade wouldn’t like that.”

Her mouth went tight and, even as she touched my arm in a soft way, her voice was firm. “You let him be who he is, no matter what Cade or anybody else says or thinks. In the end he isn’t either of you. You remember that. He’s himself. If I could go back and do just one thing over again as a mother, I’d hold tight to that and never let anybody make me feel bad for it.”

But Cade is his own person, I thought. I looked down at the baby, batting his loosened fist against my chest, and stroked his brow that was creased high by the effort of his nursing. I tried out the idea that I might one day see elements of myself in him after all, and the thought of it cheered me. But most of what Leela said was beyond me then. I filed it away for later, not even realizing that she had not been speaking of Cade at all, but of Elias.

* * *

I stayed in the hospital for nearly a week. Once TJ and I finally came home—walking in under a paper banner made by Candy’s boys and treated to a celebratory dinner of roast beef and buttery Potato Pearls with a messily frosted cake for dessert—we found ourselves carried in by the tide of a household that had been taken over by hunting season. Men from the gun club gathered on a nightly basis to clean their weapons, discuss strategies and trade tall tales about their past successes. Eddy sat in his recliner in the midst of all this, nodding and making approving comments, looking deeply pleased to be, for once, at the center of a social gathering. As they spread out their equipment all over the living room, I retreated to the chair beside Elias’s to nurse TJ in front of the TV. But Elias was almost never there anymore. He stayed in his room constantly, either to detox himself, get away from the crying baby or avoid the pressure to participate in the hunting expeditions. It could have been any one of those things, but I was too exhausted to give it much thought. For once I was distracted from my annual dread of the upcoming month of October. It was difficult to reflect on the events of four years ago while caring for someone whose needs kept me lodged in the present moment, and I didn’t mind at all.

Once bear season officially started, the men mostly vanished, and even at mealtimes we saw little of Dodge.