Heaven Should Fall

seeing Lindsay Vogel: waving that cookie around for my grandbaby, maybe—or maybe not—putting on a show for Elias of how nice she was with babies. And she was a nice girl, even if she never would have been his sort of girl. Anyone could look upon Elias then and see that now he was turning into the type of man who might be able to get a Piper Larsen to give him a second or a third look. And Lindsay—well, she only had three days left in this world. So whether or not she caught Eli’s eye didn’t really matter anyway.

Because it was three days after that when all the kids in town—the mostly grown ones included—went down to the quarry for their after-Christmas hockey game. For as long as I could remember it had been like a reunion, when the college and moved-away kids would get together just for a few hours and play like they had in years gone by. I stayed home with John, but Candy brought Mark and Matthew down to watch Cade and Eli play. The quarry lake was so big that all the girls usually brought their figure skates, and they’d amuse themselves that way when they got tired of watching hockey. When my boys got back that day, Cade was so generous in his praise of his brother, bragging about how well Elias was skating and how he’d made two goals. Elias brushed it off, but I knew he was proud. His confidence was like a bud popping out on a tree. It was still fragile, but I believed it would grow. I wondered if Piper was home from school, and if he would see her before he shipped out on the first of January.

It was hours before Candy came home. She didn’t have any kind of cellular phone, and as night fell I started to get worried. So did Dodge. He left the house and started driving around town, asking people if they had seen her or the boys. And it was on that drive that he learned what had happened—that during the last hockey game of the day, one of the girls who was off figure skating had cracked through the ice where it was thinnest beneath the overhanging trees, and the others hadn’t been able to get her out. As soon as I heard that, I knew it had been Lindsay Vogel. She had been so sheltered, kept away from socializing with the other town kids so much, that she didn’t know the quarry ice very well. I guess they all thought she was old enough to know what she was doing, so nobody noticed when she got into trouble. By the time they managed to pull her out, she was gone. Candy was the only one who saw her go through, the one who called to everybody else for help. She told me her boys hadn’t seen any of it, that she’d kept them and the other little children away while the other young people tried to get her out. I suppose that’s a mercy, that they never saw such an awful thing. For all that Candy seems calloused up against brutality, at least she didn’t let them see that.

Chapter 30

Jill

Lucia was right. Eddy was in renal failure, and the afternoon turned into a mad scramble to get Cade down to the hospital to make decisions on behalf of his mother, whom Dodge was bringing back from Concord. His father would need dialysis, and even if he got well enough to be released, coming home wasn’t a viable option for the immediate future. Cade didn’t know what to do about that, and so, like so many other things these days, he could only patch up a temporary solution: to set up Leela in a motel adjacent to the hospital so she could come and go easily for the duration. He got home at 11:00 p.m., exhausted both physically and mentally. But the next morning, once he came in after the chores were done and found Candy cooking up breakfast as if everything were normal, he tore into her.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he barked at her. “He almost died up there in his own goddamn bed with his own daughter right there. You don’t have the two brain cells’ worth of common sense it would take to see how sick he was?”

“Maybe I would have if she hadn’t gone dancing off to bring over Lucia. You want to talk about sense—and you never had the sense to tell her we don’t deal with those people?”

“You don’t deal with those people. I couldn’t care less. And Jill did the right thing. I’d much rather bring Randy and his whole damn militia to my door than let Dad just keel over and die. Jesus.”

Candy shrugged loosely and plated a scrambled egg. “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”

The corner of Cade’s lip curled upward. “So courageous of you to make that decision on behalf of somebody else.”

Casually Candy pointed her spatula in my direction. “Ask your wife about the decision she made for us. Now Dad’s stuck in a hospital, probably all delirious and saying whatever pops into his mind. There’s some things around here you better hope he doesn’t start talking about.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Cade said. But Dodge didn’t agree, and whatever he said to Cade about it later seemed to convince him, as well. From that night onward they instituted a system of nighttime watch shifts, switching off every few hours and bringing in Scooter to take a shift as well, imagining the government was about to swoop in over some unregistered guns. At any hour of the night, when I woke to nurse TJ, I could hear their slow, heavy- booted footsteps creaking the hardwood floors, walking the inside perimeter. Cade kept Elias’s gun holstered on his belt all the time now when he was home. The only time he took it off was when he lay down with TJ, and then he would set it on the fireplace mantel, never more than a few paces away.

A few days into this arrangement, I awoke to the clunk of Cade’s gun against the nightstand, followed by the soft, rumpled sound of clothes dropping to the floor. I squinted awake: the clock read 2:00 a.m. Cade climbed in beneath the covers and ran his hand up against my belly. “Hey, you,” he said with affection, and rolled me onto my back. Despite the late hour he was buzzing with energy. The estrangement I felt from him in my heart should have made it easier to push him away at times like this, but instead it only made it harder. In spite of everything, I still yearned to be close to him, to feel once again the kind of intimacy we had shared in the beginning and store it away as a memory. Soon I would be gone, and who knew how long it would be before I would feel that human touch again, or feel even that tenuous sense of connection? Each time with him now the thought would flutter through my mind—this could be the last time—and for a few minutes everything I had grown to resent and disdain and even fear about him seemed to fall away, leaving only the beauty of him, which was the one sure thing he had held on to.

After he was sated, he slumped his arm across me and fell asleep. I never could get used to that unit patch tattoo, identical to the one I had traced on Elias’s skin in moments only he and I had shared. For a while I lay there awake and curled with my back against Cade’s chest, holding his arm with both hands. But the urge to cry grew stronger and stronger, and finally I unwound myself from his embrace and pulled my clothes on quietly, then tiptoed out of the room so I would not wake him with my snuffling.

From the stair landing I could see the light on beside Elias’s chair, a dim star. Downstairs I heard that slow heel-toe double-thump, working its way from the foyer to the living room and around to the addition. I walked on the outside edge of the stairs so as not to let them creak. Scooter looked up as I came down, at first in alarm, then with a somber wave of his hand.

“Hey, Jill,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“Hey.” I walked up to the front window, pushed the curtain aside and peered out in defiance of the paranoia. Nobody was there. The dark was absolute, broken only by the lacy line of the treetops and the jagged silhouette of the mountains, contrasting black against deeper black. I let the curtain drop and went to the kitchen to run myself a glass of water from the sink. The TV was off. When Cade or Dodge kept watch they left it on—muted, but with the picture on nonetheless, like a sort of electronic eternal flame lit for Elias. Yet Scooter had no such sentimentality, and so the only light came from the reading lamp beside the chair.

“Hope I didn’t wake you up,” Scooter said. “I try not to walk too loud.”

“It’s not you. I just couldn’t sleep.”

“I know what you mean.” He had made his way to the dining room now, gazing through each window at the backyard, or at least what he could see of it through the screen porch. A handgun was tucked into the back of his jeans, bunching his shirt at the small of his back. “I’m looking forward to the end of all this.”

I drank down my water. “Won’t be till Eddy gets home, I guess. And who knows how long they’ll keep it up after that. It’s the most paranoid thing I’ve ever heard of, thinking an old man’s going to start mumbling about his unregistered guns in his sleep.”

Scooter shook his head slowly. His gaze drifted up to the second-floor landing, then returned to bore into me. In a lower voice he asked, “Is that what they told you?”