Heaven Should Fall

I nodded. “If you don’t believe in it, you ought to. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He spun the can in circles with his fingers. “I’m not sure I have the right motivation.”

For a few moments I puzzled over the strange response, my attention still cocked toward Seinfeld. Then all at once it clicked. I looked him squarely in the eye. “Drew,” I said with disgust.

He shrugged.

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a reply.” I snatched the delivery bag from the table and stuffed it into a garbage can. As I bustled around angrily he watched with a bemused detachment that unnerved me.

“You know why I admire Cade?” he asked.

My shoulders twitched. “Because unlike you, he has principles?”

“No. That’s not why.” His voice disdained me. “Because he’s so fucking ambitious.”

“Thanks,” I said icily. I saw now exactly why Cade detested the guy so much, and felt shamed by my naivete. “I’ll pass that on to him when I tell him about this whole conversation.”

“If you want. He’ll be sorry you didn’t take me up on it. He wouldn’t admit it, of course. But he’ll wish you’d just done it and kept your mouth shut about it.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Cade’s not like that at all.”

“As if you’d know,” he said, “when it’s all been sunshine and rainbows and snuggle sex for the two of you. I’ve been on the campaign trail with him, and I know a little different. Let me tell you, Jill. You don’t know a guy until you’ve seen him under pressure. Cade’s like everybody else. He only cares about one thing.” He held up a single finger.

“That’s the stupidest cliche ever.”

“Not sex,” said Drew. “Recognition.”

I hurried back to Cade’s room, dressed quickly and headed back across campus to my own dorm. The sidewalks were deserted. I thought of Cade sitting around his living room with his parents, his brother and sister, and seethed at both him and Drew. Here I was alone on Christmas Eve, hurrying away from the leering creep to whom I had afforded benefit of the doubt, all because Cade wanted to avoid the embarrassment of me meeting his brother-in-law. My messenger bag beat against the side of my coat, and I breathed into my hands to warm them. I knew what would sneak in just behind this anger: self-pity. That was how I would spend Christmas, and the next year I would dread the holidays all the more, remembering how miserable this one had been.

It doesn’t have to be that way, I thought. I jogged up the steps to my building, tossed a few things into my overnight bag, tugged on the hoodie Dave had just mailed back to me and headed out to my car. I thought about calling him, but it was late already and I didn’t want him to feel he needed to wait up for me. I had a full tank of gas and a key to my old cabin, and I would find him in the morning. He wouldn’t mind. Dave never did.

* * *

In the few photos I have of my mother and me together, it’s easy to see we don’t resemble each other at all. She was fairly tall, with honey-blond hair that kinked into unmanageable curls when the weather grew the least bit humid. Despite her coloring, she had an Italian face—a regal nose and long eyes, a smile that appeared to store a secret. Sometimes I wondered if she had hoped for a miniature version of herself, rather than the baby daughter she received—one destined to be fine haired and button nosed, with eyes so round as to seem perpetually surprised. Even as a teenager she had looked like a woman, while long into college I still had to pull out my driver’s license to be allowed into R-rated movies.

She never voiced the truth we both knew: that I looked like my father. It had to be true, because I resembled her family not at all, and yet she would never tell me who he was. Around the age of eight I entered a stage of nagging her with questions: what was his name, his job, where did he live, did he know about me. She brushed them off or changed the subject, until finally, when I was twelve and began asking again, she gave me her first sort-of answer.

“If you want to know the truth, Jill,” she said, using that wry monotone that never meant anything good, “I wasn’t in a very good place when I found out I was going to have you. And once I knew you’d be joining me, I wasn’t about to go back to that place to see if anybody wanted to tag along.”

I understood her meaning—that she had abandoned him, not the other way around. I stopped asking her after that; I knew enough about addicts by then to grasp that whoever he was, wherever he was, he was sure to disappoint me. And it had to be bad for him, because my mother was not one to assume someone was beyond hope. Padding around in her panty hose, her curly hair up in a messy bun from a long day at the office, she would pull the extra-long phone cord into the one bedroom and shut the door when one of the women she sponsored in AA called. If the call went on for a long time I would turn out the lights, make up the futon and try to sleep. Always I would overhear her calming and definite voice, and even though I knew she was handling a crisis—someone’s sobriety on the brink of failure—the sound of it would lull me easily to sleep. She was a sure guide, knowing the route through every situation. Eventually she would slip back out, hang up the phone in its cradle and lie down softly on the other side of the futon, because this bed was technically hers. Some nights I would move to my bedroom, but usually I feigned a deep sleep so I could nestle near her warmth all night, like a chick beneath her mother’s wing.

Sometimes now, when her absence became less bearable, I would imagine those moments with her until the line between reality and memory seemed almost to disappear. In a warm bed, with my eyes closed, it was so easy to imagine. But even then there was a bittersweet edge to it, because for all my belief that she and I were inextricably connected to one another, at the critical moment it proved not to be true at all.

On that day, the day it happened, I was rushing to class—I had lingered too long over my lunch in the Student Union, browsing through my notes for the midterm that was now only ten minutes away. As I hurried up the stairs, I pressed through a crowd gathered around the two televisions suspended from the ceiling in the entryway. They were riveted on some news broadcast. For only a second I glanced up at it—a stretch of red desert, the wreckage of two small planes, an excited voice-over—before squeezing between two students and pushing out the door. It would be hours before I checked my voice mail and found the message from the police in Las Vegas, requesting that I call immediately.

I had spoken to my mother only the day before. I knew she was in Las Vegas, finally taking a well-earned vacation now that her only child was away at school—a girls’ weekend with a couple of friends from AA. When I’d called her she sounded breezy and excited, telling me about the shows and the buffets, the tour of the Grand Canyon they planned to take the following day and how she should have done this years ago. I’d caught the glow of her euphoria and mirrored it back to her, enthusiastic on her behalf and envious, in a good-natured way, of the fun. She told me that the next time, she’d take me with her, and wished me luck on my midterm before dashing off to what sounded suspiciously, from her vague description, like a Chippendales show. If she had mentioned the Grand Canyon tour would be by small plane, I hadn’t paid attention. And so when I saw the flash of the television screen, heard them say Las Vegas, I had only the briefest moment of thinking my mother is there before the thought followed, but that’s not her.

Before it all happened I would have been certain that, in such an event, I would know. A sudden feeling would arrest me, a sense of disturbance or perhaps even a premonition, and I would scramble to call her to discover what was wrong. Never would I have believed that I would sense nothing, that I would look up at the very scene of my mother’s death and hurry along to my next class, utterly ignorant. The guilt that came along with it stalked me, uninterrupted, for a year. I’d pushed on through the semester believing that it was what my mother would want me to do, but even then I nursed the suspicion that I had a lot of nerve to assume I knew what my mother would think or want. The image of those two wrecked planes, having clipped each other and fallen simultaneously to the earth, lingered in my mind like the flame of a vigil candle. Even now it remained there, flickering in the background somewhere, always. It was as if I believed that by holding it in my mind, I could make amends for my indifference to it at first sight.

That year, Dave had insisted I come to Southridge for the holidays rather than spend them alone. It had turned into a tradition-by-accident, as every year circumstances dropped me there, and this year was no different. When my car emerged from the trees that pressed closely against the road I saw a single light on in the main lodge, in spite of the fact that it was two in the morning on Christmas Day. I thought I would slip past, drive up the side road to my cabin. But then the storm door swung open and Dave stepped onto the porch, looking wary at first, then smiling.