Heaven Should Fall

He took his cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. Then he set the lighter on top of his pack and passed them over to me. I held up a hand to decline, but my willpower misfired. I shook one out of the box and lit up.

“Back to reality,” said Elias.

“You don’t sound too pleased.”

He exhaled lackadaisically. “I don’t even know what reality looks like anymore.”

I turned just slightly in the driver’s seat, twisting around so I could see him better. Elias’s voice seemed to have gotten much deeper, maybe as a side effect of smoking like a chimney. His soft-edged New Hampshire accent was gone, replaced with sharp r’s and a flat intonation. If I didn’t look directly at him, it was hard to reconcile the voice with my brother.

“You could always reenlist,” I said.

Elias snorted a laugh. “No way. My body’s too jacked up for it. I probably couldn’t even pass the physical.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve never seen you in better shape.”

He shook his head, scornful. “My leg never really healed right. I get migraines. My shoulder’s fucked up. You name it. I’m done playing in the Sandbox.”

“So what are you gonna do instead?”

Silence fell again. He held his cigarette out the window and gave the filter a few soft flicks with his thumb. He paused, dragged and finally said, “Man, don’t ask me that question.”

“Sorry. I’m just making small talk.”

“Yeah, I don’t know how to make small talk. It’s not what we do in my line of work.”

“Sorry. Jeez.”

Elias exhaled with a frustrated sigh. The vibe between us felt tense. I smoked nervously, glad to have something to do in the dead space. In the distance a silver bus appeared, driving slowly toward us down a long, curving road.

“Good luck with your girl,” said Elias. “I envy you that.”

I grinned. The tension vanished like a wave pulling back from the sand. “Thanks.”

He leaned into the backseat and wrestled his duffel bag over the console. Probably I would have hugged him to say goodbye, but the bulky bag wedged into the space between the seats. He reached across and bumped my fist.

“Fuck her brains out, man,” he said. “It’s what I’d do if I were you.”

Chapter 3

Jill

My mother believed in signs. Not in a superstitious way, really, but from the belief that sometimes an event catches your attention and brings to the surface of your mind, all of a sudden, a truth about yourself that you ought to pay attention to. When I was twelve she told me about the moment she knew she needed to get sober. She was driving north of Fresno, California, with me in the back of the car, and I asked her about the trees growing in the orchards alongside the road. I was four years old, she told me—she knew the date exactly—and I wanted to know what sort of fruit they were growing that was round and fuzzy and green. So she pulled the car over onto the shoulder, and we got out to take a look, because she wasn’t sure. We were in town to visit her parents for what would prove to be the last time. It was a lovely day, but she was feeling sad and angry, because her parents’ health was poor and they were mean. A couple of old, sick drunks, she said. The most pathetic type of creature in the world. All she could think about doing was getting back to our hotel and opening up a bottle of wine, to make the day go away.

We got out of the car and pulled one of those fuzzy things off a tree. She thought perhaps it was a kiwi, so she split it open for me, and inside there was an almond. I was just so amazed, she told me. And so were you. Thirty-two years old and I had no idea almonds grew that way. We both laughed, and during that moment she didn’t think about anything except the wonder of almonds.

Then she said we needed to get back in the car before we got caught by the farmer, and when she turned around she could see that we were on a hill that looked down over the entire city of Fresno. And this was what moved her—even though the sky was beautifully blue and fluffed with white clouds where we stood, the city was covered by a deep gray cloud that was pouring down torrents of rain. From that distance she could see it easily: the storm that appeared to have singled out the city, like a biblical punishment. I’d never seen anything quite like it, she said, and that’s when I knew. That’s how my parents were and that’s how I would become, walking around a beautiful world with a storm pouring over just us. I had to change. It didn’t happen right away. It took me a while. But that was the moment I knew.

Long after she was gone, I tried to remember every part of that story, to think hard on it so I could understand every aspect of her revelation. It had changed my life and hers, after all. When I stood there in the almond orchard I hadn’t any idea of what was going on in her mind just then, but in the end it had made me who I am. I wasn’t sure if I believed in signs the way she did, but I believed in the truth the sign had taught her: that it was never too late to start over, no matter where you came from, no matter who you had been or how daunting the path appeared. Her own mother had taught her what kind of a life she didn’t want, but mine taught me what kind of life I did.

* * *

Thanksgiving passed quietly—Cade and I camped out for the long weekend at Stan’s, house-sitting while Stan made the rounds of his grandparents’ homes—and suddenly it was December, with Christmas carols playing in the campus bookstore and greenery strung in lopsided loops around the dining hall. This was the time of year when depression started stalking me, and I had to fight it back the way you might hold up a stick against a rabid dog. It was the same thing every year: I’d play the tough girl through October, the month in which my mom had died, and just when I was congratulating myself at having muscled through another anniversary, the holidays would be upon us. Last year, when Cade and I were still newly an item, I had packed my car and driven out to Southridge once he left to visit his family. It hadn’t been difficult to cover my disappointment at not being invited up to New Hampshire, because our relationship was still so new that it seemed excusable. This year, though, his silence on the subject was causing my case of the holiday blues to arrive at double speed. When I had told Dave I’d be going home with Cade for sure this year, I had thought there was no chance he wouldn’t ask me. But as December meandered on, I grew less and less sure.

I chalked it up to distraction, at least at first. Ever since Mark Bylina had won the election, Cade had grown obsessed with whether he would be offered a job on his staff. For months he had attended to the menial tasks of electioneering with slavish diligence, all in the hope that his good work would be rewarded with a permanent job once the election was over. Now his excitement was tempered by his suspicion that Drew Fielder, his least favorite fellow volunteer, was being groomed for the assistantship Cade had hoped for.

“I’ve put in twice as many hours as that asshole,” he said, late on a Sunday afternoon as we lay in bed. “That guy knows how to show up and look like he’s been working, then vanish as soon as the paid staff’s out of sight. And then I leave early one day this week so I can come see you, and the manager’s calling, ‘Leaving early, Cade?’”

“That sucks. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not on you. My sister’s already pissed that I didn’t come home for Thanksgiving, as if I could leave when Bylina had community service stuff going on all that week. I told her I’ll be back for Christmas, but she doesn’t get it. None of them do. The whole idea of climbing the ladder is just beyond them.”

I draped my arms loosely across my eyes and took a cleansing breath before I replied. It was time to address this. “At least you’ve got a place to go,” I pointed out.

He frowned at the ceiling. “No, all I’ve got is guilt and pressure to go someplace I don’t want to. If you were in my shoes, you’d hate it, too.”

“Not living on a farm. That part would be amazing.”

He snorted a laugh. “Amazing. Yeah. Picture this, okay? It’s minus five degrees outside. You’re sleeping in a hundred-year-old house with drafts out the yin-yang. The roof leaks, and two smokers spent all day putting the