Heaven Should Fall

He and Scooter spent nearly every evening, deep into the night, sitting in a tree stand watching for bears. They dressed head to toe in camouflage, sprayed themselves down with scent-eliminating chemicals and wore their rifles slung on their backs like jungle commandos. Matthew copied his father, dressing in his own miniature set of fatigues and carrying his rifle around the house in a similar fashion, even during his dining-table school lessons. Candy thought this was adorable.

“Look at him, Eli,” Candy prompted one afternoon, nudging Elias as she served him a sandwich during one of his rare awake hours. “Looks just like you at that age. Remember you used to get dressed up and chase me around with that BB gun of yours?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Always the soldier even then. What do you think, Matty? You going to be a soldier like Uncle Elias?”

Matthew grinned. “Uh-huh.”

“You hear that?” Candy smiled at her brother. “Remember? Those were some good times, huh? Running around like a bunch of ninnies, crawling around under the porch getting filthy dirty. Kids don’t hardly ever play like that anymore. All they want to do is watch TV and fool around on the internet.”

“They ought to be playing with their cousins,” said Elias.

The room went silent. Dodge, who had been sitting in a dining chair pulling on his boots, shot Elias a sharp look and let the stare linger. Candy set down the plate beside Elias with a muted thunk, and even Matthew cast a nervous gaze between his parents. Elias, for his part, didn’t shift his gaze from the television. On it, Rachael Ray sprinkled pepper flakes into a pot of chili, her wooden spoon moving energetically to match her voice.

“They don’t have any cousins,” said Dodge.

Elias’s expression didn’t change. When he spoke, his voice had a shrug to it. “Family’s family.”

Dodge slung his gun over his shoulder and left. Candy had retreated to the kitchen, where she tidied up from the sandwich-making in chilly silence. From my nest in the chair nearest his, a cotton blanket thrown over my shoulder and the baby nursing beneath it, I watched him steadily. My eyes implored him to look at me, but he only shifted in his seat, flicking the ash from his cigarette without even looking to see if he’d hit the glass ashtray. I missed the sense of connection I’d once had with him—the rolled eyes when Candy misspelled a word on her lesson chalkboard, the shadowy smirks at the corner of his mouth when Dodge said something even more ignorant than usual. But now he seemed to have turned inward, not bothering to send those subtle messages. His mind was as impenetrable to me now as it had been the day I met him. And speaking his mind about Randy made me wonder all the more what was going on in there.

Maybe he’s angry at you, I thought. The idea caused anxiety to well up inside me, but I knew I couldn’t blame him if he was. In the five weeks since the baby’s birth I had paid little attention to him, easy enough to do when he was almost never awake. The more time I spent apart from him, the more unnerving details wormed their way into my memories of the hours before TJ’s birth. I remembered the power I felt in Elias’s arms when he threw my hands off him, and the muted electric thrill it stirred in me. When he hugged me and pressed his face into my hair, I heard him inhale deeply. All along there had been so many solid walls that made our friendship safe: our filial relationship, my growing pregnancy, his heavy and hurting body, the complete lack of privacy. I had meant no harm, but I loved him in a way that wasn’t fair to him. It was so easy for me to share my affection generously, knowing at the close of each day I would lie down with Cade and offer him the best of it. But Elias spent each night alone, and there was no place for him to channel whatever feelings welled inside him. Without ever meaning to, I had been cruel.

Now that TJ was here, I felt chagrined by it all. I needed to learn to live beside Elias in a way that would not hurt, or tempt, either of us. I needed to get over my judgment of Candy and look to her as a model for how to be with Elias. She knew how to care for her brother without adding complications to his already overburdened mind.

On the afternoon after his comment to Dodge, I caught up with him sitting on the back porch, looking out over the backyard from his mother’s white wooden rocking chair. He wasn’t smoking, wasn’t drinking and wasn’t asleep, so it was immediately noteworthy.

“Jill,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to apologize to you.”

I laughed in surprise. “For what?”

“For not doing anything to help when you were bleeding out on the sofa. It just got to me, and I felt frozen by it. I’m sorry for standing there screaming like a little girl.”

“But you did help,” I pointed out. “Cade said I would have been dead by the morning if you hadn’t alerted everyone.”

Elias’s expression changed. He seemed to be considering that. Then he shook his head. “I’m trained in field medicine. There’s a lot I could have done besides watch Cade throw you in the car. If you’d died, it would have been on me. I’m the one in the house who knows how to handle that. But I couldn’t handle it.”

“And I’m not dead. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose in his weary way. “Just accept my apology, all right?”

“No. I don’t accept that you have anything to apologize for in the first place, so I can’t.”

He frowned. “I really wish you would.”

“You were trying to wean yourself off the medicine,” I said. “Nobody would have expected you to do anything differently. I’m sorry I’ve been preoccupied these last few weeks. I’ll get Cade to make you another appointment, okay? And you and I can drive down together, like last time.”

He shook his head. The chair’s wooden rockers creaked in rhythm, and he gazed out over the yard. “I already know what they’ll tell me. They’ll lower my dosage and I’ll just take twice as many. I can see it coming. Every time I try, I just binge on it the next day. They can’t stop me from doing that, and neither can I.”

I touched his shoulder, but he shrugged my hand off. “Maybe they have an inpatient program,” I said.

“Detox, you mean?”

“Maybe.”

He chuckled. “Put it on my tombstone,” he said, and drew a hand slowly in front of him as if envisioning the sign. “‘This man was a shitbag. May he rest in peace.’”

“Elias, come on. You’d hardly be the first veteran to deal with that. They can’t all be shitbags.”

He shook his head again, and I sighed. “Eli,” I said, “would you like to hold the baby?”

“Sure.”

I handed TJ to him. He took him easily, nestling him into his arm, and looked down at his face. At first it surprised me how easily he handled the baby, but then I remembered he had been here through the births of all three of Candy’s sons.

“He looks just like Cade,” he said.

“Yeah, I think so, too.”

“Got that arrogant li’l mouth.” He leaned back against the chair, looked out at the yard again, and rocked.

“You want me to take him back?”

“No, he’s fine.”

I walked off to get some lunch, pleased for the opportunity to eat without having to keep an eye or a hand on the baby. And when I came out to the porch to take TJ again, he was still asleep in the crook of Elias’s arm, and Elias, for all that his face was ever unreadable, looked almost content.

* * *

That night Dodge and Scooter joined the rest of the family for supper before hiking out into the woods to sit in their hunting spot. Elias happened to be awake, so he joined everyone, too, then returned to his room. The house was quiet and cool, and when Cade came in to undress for bed, he glanced at TJ asleep in the laundry basket and threw me a pleading look. We made love for the first time since the birth, very carefully. Cade seemed almost apologetic, and grateful; only afterward did I realize how much we had needed it to take away the feeling that as a couple we were fragmenting, becoming two employees of the same baby rather than a man and a woman irresistibly attracted to each other.

TJ slept well that night. Not until two o’clock in the morning did I awake to the muted report of a gunshot from outside that I realized must be Dodge and Scooter having finally crossed paths with a bear. The noise woke TJ, and regretfully I pulled myself away from Cade’s warm bare chest and lifted the baby from his basket.