Heaven Should Fall

“Whose stuff is that in the shed?”

His grin evaporated. “What stuff?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

The nurse padded over with a loaded syringe on a tray. I sat TJ up to allow him to get his shot, setting off a new round of hysterics. Cade took him from my arms and lifted him to his shoulder, settling into the same bounce that had failed to lull him an hour before.

“You don’t understand how it is around here,” said Cade. “We used to blow stuff up at the quarry all the time, just for the hell of it. What else are we going to do around here, play croquet? There’s nothing to do on a weekend except drink, fish and screw. And I don’t like fishing.”

I kept my own gaze locked with his, trying to gauge the honesty of his words. He looked at his shoulder, where the baby had just spit up milk on his T-shirt. “Nice,” he said.

I tried not to smile. “So you’re telling me it’s all leftover stuff from high school?”

“Yeah. I can get rid of all that. Do you have a burp rag in your bag there? This smells disgusting.”

I handed him the cloth from the diaper bag and watched him mop himself up. As he did, a doctor stopped short beside us, looked at his clipboard and then at our baby, and asked, “Thomas Olmstead?”

“That’s him,” said Cade. “The one who just puked on me.”

The doctor’s smile was stiff. “Can I have a word with both of you in the exam room?”

Chapter 25

Cade

The day Maryland beat Wake Forest in the ACC tournament, I stood up and cheered. No joke: when the team scored the final two points I jumped up from the recliner and did this cowboy yell, both fists in the air. Jill, who was lying on the sofa half-asleep with the baby corralled between her knees, almost jumped out of her skin. “Good Lord, Cade,” she said.

But I was wired. Down in College Park I knew they were going crazy in the streets. Normally I would have felt bad about missing the celebration, but at that moment I was exhilarated just to be part of the tribe. My team was going up against Duke, our archrival, and had every chance of advancing to the NCAA tournament. It was a great day.

For the month of March, watching basketball was pretty much all I did. At work I could get away with switching the TV channel from local news to basketball, and every chance I got I kept an eye on the play-offs. On game nights you couldn’t budge me from that television for love or money. Even Dodge got in on it. He started buying the beer. For the first half I’d have TJ lie on my chest while I watched. Ever since the day we took him to the E.R., when they told us he had to have this ear surgery that would require general anesthesia, we were both especially freaked out about the baby. It was as if we felt that at any moment someone might come knocking on the door and tell us it was time to return him like an overdue DVD, and so one of us was carrying him around every second. But as agitated as I got during these games, I needed to hand him off to Jill after a while. The kid would have gone flying.

It all made me nostalgic for college, and not in a good, glory-days way. It ached. I thought about the street hockey games in front of the White House, how good it felt to sail over the pavement on my skates, fighting for the ball, everybody yelling and cheering. Police and security people, uniformed and armed, were everywhere, and none of them stopped us, because we were permitted. The white marble buildings and monuments gleamed in the sunlight. In my pocket I had an ID card that allowed me into the halls where the legislators met. I had a good haircut and I was in shape. That card felt like a golden ticket, an infinite VIP pass. It wasn’t, but it sure felt like it then.

I kept thinking about all that—the person I’d been back then, the person I was now. I kept telling myself I needed to reapply for work-study, hit the deadline this time, but I couldn’t find the heart to do it. Every time I sat down to work on it I pictured a thin letter declining my application, something with “Dear Applicant” at the top, and I’d push the whole thing away like a plate of food I couldn’t eat. If my school rejected me now, I knew I’d lose it. I wasn’t even sure that I hadn’t lost it already.

One weekend—it was a Saturday, the day we played Memphis—I gathered up all the stuff from the box in the shed and drove it out to the quarry, just as I’d promised Jill. I hadn’t been exactly honest with her when I told her it was all leftovers from high school. It was true we used to set off fireworks there a lot, but that wasn’t what she’d asked. I didn’t want to tell her I’d been experimenting with a few ideas, in the beginning as a challenge to Dodge. He had all these screwy, amateurish concepts of how to blow things up, notions he’d come up with from listening to those gun-club idiots tell thirdhand stories to each other. I’d look them up on Google to affirm they were misinformation, and they always were, but along the way I’d come across things that might work and get curious to try them. And then, as I worked, I’d find myself thinking about people who had it coming—people who had wronged us, like that stupid doctor who’d written Elias the Xanax scrip, or Fielder taking credit for the work I’d done. When the work in the shed went well I felt like some kind of mad scientist in there, competent at something again, finally, and I’d start to imagine that Fielder was sitting there in the corner all tied up and whimpering, watching me ace a project he wouldn’t have the chance to claim as his own. It wasn’t serious, just an idle sort of going through the motions, a way to make me feel I could do something if I wanted to. Visualization: it was something they always talked to us about in public speaking classes and how-to-succeed seminars. You envision yourself being articulate and powerful and wowing the crowd, and then it’s way easier to walk out there as if you own the place and make it all happen. It always worked pretty well for me when I was knocking on doors for candidates. But fantasies aside, I’d made a promise to Jill. What mattered was that I was dumping it all now, and I meant well.

I parked in the same place Elias always used to, beneath the trees, and opened the pipes up one at a time with the bolt cutters. I shook out the nails and powder into the grass and watered it all down with two gallon jugs I’d stashed in my trunk, to neutralize all the powder. There, I thought as the water drained down into the earth. Clean slate. There was more than one way to vindicate Elias’s death. I’d get a haircut on my way back to the house, work on my resume while I watched the game and Sunday drive down to D.C. to put out some feelers. Watching all that basketball had filled me up with that miserable feeling of being estranged from the place where I belonged, and wanting to get back there felt like the most important thing in the whole world right then. More important even than what I’d sworn to do.

Jill was super-enthusiastic about me driving down to D.C., even volunteering to call me in sick at work so I didn’t need to be bothered. The Terps had lost the second-round game by then, but once I got down there I was so happy to see College Park that I didn’t even care. That first night, rolling into town at 9:00 p.m., I got a room at a motel up the road from campus—a place called the Mustang Inn. An orange horseshoe-shaped sign marked it from the road, and it had a reputation, which is how I knew it would be the one place I could afford to stay. I kicked off my sneakers and stretched out on the bed, had a cigarette and mulled some things over. I was back, finally, but I was an outsider now. In my absence this place had kept moving, and if I wanted my membership back I was going to have to fight my way back in.

Next morning, I cleaned up as best as I could under the lukewarm shower and took the Metro down to Capitol Hill, carrying my messenger bag full of resumes. All morning I talked to front-desk people and managers, and all morning I fought frustration that my game seemed off somehow. Before, it had been easy to talk my way into meeting with people much higher up the food chain than these. Lunchtime rolled around, and I ducked into a fast-food place to take a leak. While I washed my hands I stole glances at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out the problem. I was all ready to blame the usual things—lack of a tan, small-town haircut—when I realized what it was: I looked desperate. They could see it in my body language and in my eyes, hear it in my voice. Realizing that, I felt disgusted. How many times had I snickered at people like that myself—men talking to the candidate, trying to sound cocksure but coming off hopeful and needy; women who sidled up acting flirtatious but showing the wrong kind of hunger in their eyes. I couldn’t stand thinking that had been me all morning.

I bought a cup of coffee and was about to walk back out when I saw a group of people heading into the deli across the street. There were five of them: a guy from my old street hockey group, a campaign volunteer named Kelly I’d hooked up with after I drove her home from the office one night, a guy and girl I didn’t know, and Drew