Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

“It’s getting darker,” I said. The temperature was dropping and the air felt sharp and clear, with the smell of new snow enlivening it. “We should go back.”

“Don’t be mad at me. I’m just trying to look out for you.”

“I’m not mad,” I told him, and it was true. After this week, once Cade was back, we could let the situation unfold in an organized way, unimpeded by his brother-in-law. I wasn’t afraid that Cade would shirk his responsibility. I only feared that I would decide he was unworthy of it, and if that was the case, I didn’t want to know.

It’s not as if it was the first time this had happened to me. Senior year of high school, barely more than a month after I lost my virginity, my girlfriend Piper pulled me aside during open lunch in the courtyard and told me she was pregnant. She always wore a lot of eye shadow that made her eyes look huge, and so all the fear in them came right at me. Do something, Cade . There was some accusation in there too: you promised . But what did I know? I was seventeen. Of course I’d thought it would be fine to have sex. I would’ve sworn to her I could beat Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France right then if I’d thought it would help me close the deal, and I would have believed it, too.

I’m not sure what my excuse was at twenty-one. Overconfidence: it’s a problem. It’s probably why, when Jill came to me and told me she was pregnant, I took it in stride. Part of me was definitely freaked, but by then I’d spent so much time knocking on doors, talking up candidates, that my gut reaction in an uncertain situation was to project total confidence. Here Jill was caught in this fight-or-flight response between hightailing it to some camp in the woods or else to the abortion clinic, and I’m all, hey, it’s gonna be great! I’ll teach the kid to play hockey!

It definitely wasn’t like that when it happened with Piper, when for the first few days I was in denial, mulling over all the reasons it wasn’t even possible, along with these spikes of cold-sweat, hyperventilating panic. I’d envision this showdown in the living room with my folks, my dad grabbing me by the collar and shoving me up against the wall like he used to do with Elias, my mom all stoic, but radiating utter disappointment. After about a week I couldn’t take it anymore. I drove down to the U-Store-It to talk to my brother alone. I didn’t know who else to go to.

When I got there the parking lot was empty except for Elias’s green Jeep, which was a relief. If he’d been driving the van I would have suspected my brother-in-law, Dodge, would be there, too, but the Jeep was Elias’s own, and he didn’t want Dodge Powell to so much as breathe in the smell of its air freshener. I parked next to it and went around back to find him. The storage units were basically garages, three sets of four arranged in a U shape around the little office building. We had this one customer who kept a weight bench and a full set of weights in his. Lately Elias had taken to driving down there and letting himself into that unit with the master key so he could lift weights. It went against policy, and if he ever got caught either by Dad or Dodge or the customer, he would have been in trouble. But Elias was nineteen and kind of in a “fuck it” stage at that point. He’d graduated high school a year before and had been working with Dodge ever since, managing the U-Store-It, and since then he’d gotten a lot quieter—part Clint Eastwood, part serial killer.

Sure enough, I found him in the last unit on the right, lifting. He was lying on his back on the bench, with an impressive amount of weight on the crossbar. His shirt was hiked up and under it, his gut was jiggling with every pump of the bar. Elias’s body was like one big temper tantrum. If Dodge brought home doughnuts one Sunday, Elias would eat as if his own execution was the next day, and I swear he’d go up by five pounds overnight. But now that he’d taken to secret weight lifting, in no time he was bulking up like the Incredible Hulk. Unfortunately it still had all the doughnuts on top of it, so mostly he just looked fatter.

He clunked the bar back in place and sat up once he noticed me there. It’s not as if I ever dropped by just to say hello, so he knew something was up. He fanned out his shirt at the front—it had a big V of sweat down it—and asked, “You need something?”

“I got a problem, man.”

Now, Elias was a good guy. He was the guy you called in the middle of the night if you snuck out to see your girlfriend and then inadvertently locked yourself out of the house, or if you needed an emergency ride back from, say, Massachusetts, or had to borrow fifty bucks. Stuff like that didn’t shake him. He’d just go. And so it surprised me when he shot me this glare . The kind where a person’s eyes look to be two different sizes and one of them is twitching underneath. He got up and started yanking weights off the bar.

“I’ll bet you do,” he said. “I sure as hell bet you do.”

For the life of me I didn’t know what was up his ass. Mentally I went over anything I might have done wrong to him lately, but nothing came to mind. Whatever it was, I figured he had to be on the wrong track, so I said, “Piper’s pregnant.”

“Oh, I know.”

That was unexpected. “No, you don’t. How would you know that?”

“A friend of a friend told me.”

“Who?”

“None of your business.” He clunked the weights back on the storage bars.

Asking more wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I gave up. “I don’t know what to do. I’m completely freaked.”

“Shoulda thought about that before you nailed her, shouldn’t you?” The bench was between us now, and even though he was standing normally his bigger arms made the stance look threatening. I stood there feeling all sheepish, and his face shifted to this look of total disgust. “Fuck you, Cadey ,” he said, using Dodge’s asshole nickname for me. “Fuck you sideways.”

By then I didn’t know what to say anymore. I’d sort of figured out what his reaction was about, but I didn’t know where to go with that. I didn’t know where to go at all . There were a lot of boxes lying around, and I sat down on the closest one behind me and planted my elbows against my knees, dropped my head down and started to cry.

“Jesus Christ,” said Elias. No chance was I going to look up at him, but I could feel him standing there looking at me, stuck on what to do. When he was much younger, eight or nine at the most, our father used to come down really hard on him for crying. He’d shove Elias down into a chair and bend over him, screaming himself hoarse, one fist up all threateningly, like someone about to beat a dog with a newspaper.

Elias came around the bench and sat on the box next to me. All I could see were his shoes, beat-up sneakers stretched all wide at the bottom. I was still making little gasping, sniveling noises and wiping my nose against my shoulder. It was bad. Years later the memory still makes me cringe.

“What am I supposed to do about that problem?” he finally said. “I can’t unfuck her for you.”

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

“I won’t.”

“If Dad finds out—”

“He isn’t going to do shit to you. I’ll knock him out if he does. But you’re his favorite anyway. He won’t.”

“I just ruined my life.”

“Naw. Least it’s Piper. Worst thing that happens is you’re stuck with her—that doesn’t count as ruined.”

I didn’t say anything back, and kind of awkwardly he put his arm over my shoulders. He never hugged anybody, so that was a stretch for him. He didn’t have any real answers for me. There wasn’t anything he could do but sit there and assure me Mom and Dad weren’t going to kill me and bury me in the backyard. But he did that. And for a really, really long time I felt like shit about all that, because I knew—I always knew—that he loved her.