Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

While Candy and Jill were cooking supper, I coaxed Eli downstairs. It didn’t take a whole lot to do it; nothing ever changes around there, so even a hint of anything different gets those people all hot and bothered. Once he was standing at the bottom of the stairs he looked straight at the weight bench and said, “You crazy son of a bitch.”

I grinned. “Hey, everybody needs a hobby.”

“You actually went and stole that guy’s equipment.”

“I borrowed it. He hasn’t been back to look in what, five years? He’ll never know it’s missing.”

Elias walked up to it as if it was an unfamiliar dog. Touched the weight I’d already set on the bar, ran a hand along the top of the bench. I said, “Try it.”

He sat down and slid beneath the bar, braced his hands on it and lifted. Three times, up and down, and that wasn’t any small amount of weight, either. “Hoo-ah,” I said. “That’s the spirit. Knew you had it in you.”

“It’s nothing. At Bagram I was lifting twice this much, sets of ten reps, all damn day.” He did two more and then let it rest in the frame. “Guess I’m out of shape, though.”

“We’ll get you back into it. We’re gonna get you laid, buddy.”

He laughed. “Never had a lot of luck with that in Frasier. No reason to think it’ll change now.”

“You don’t know that. Get back in shape and see what happens. Even Jill thought you were pretty hot last fall.”

He’d lifted the barbell again, but shifted his head to glance at me. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious. If Jill thinks so, you know she wasn’t the only one.”

He shook his head and worked through a set of five. “We’ll see about that.”

“How’s the new medicine working out for you?”

“I hate it.”

That was not the expected answer. I said, “Huh?”

“I told Jill the old stuff made me feel like a ghost. Just numb and lethargic. I couldn’t even jack off half the time.” I laughed, but he shot me a reproachful look. “I’m serious. It makes it so you can’t, and if you think that’s funny, you try living like that for six months. Now I’m off that, and they gave me Xanax instead, which is supposed to just stop anxiety. Fine.” He sat up on the bench and shrugged his shoulders around a little to loosen them. “I figured I’d just take it when I needed it. But it doesn’t work like that. It’s like I was standing in a canyon, turned around and saw a wall of water coming toward me. All the stuff I wasn’t feeling while I was on the first drug, it came right at me. The happy, the sad. Loss. Anger. Wanting things.” He rubbed his forearms, the way people do when they’re cold. “It’s too much.”

“But that’s good, though, right? That’s the human experience.”

He chuckled. “Man, fuck the human experience. Don’t even give me that line. Here we are, right? The day I sat on this bench and you sat across from me and told me you’d knocked up Miss Piper, don’t tell me you were all jazzed up about the human experience. You just wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.”

“Yeah. But it worked out. Everything always does.”

“Didn’t work out for that baby.”

I had nothing to say to that. It kind of pissed me off that he said it, even. I shrugged, and when Elias stood up I slid onto the bench. The remark irritated me enough that I figured I could probably match him with the lifting. Hostility is good for things like that.

“Feelings are overrated,” Elias concluded. He stood with his arms folded, his skin marked up like the margins of a high schooler’s notebook. “I’m done with ’em. Wouldn’t mind getting laid, though. Not fair only one of us is getting all the fun.”

I briefed Jill about the whole thing the next day, once I’d more or less stopped stewing over what my brother had said. When I found her, she was reading some kind of parenting book by the small lamp in the living room. The rest of the lights were off for Candy’s kids, who sat in front of the TV watching cartoons and eating Potato Pearls out of a giant metal can. They stuffed their hands down in it and scooped them out while the Looney Tunes flickered over their faces. Potato Pearls kept falling out of their hands and bouncing across the floor like plastic BBs. The beagles were on alert, chasing down every one that went astray.

Once I got her attention, Jill followed me out back and heard me out. I’d backtracked to talking about my weight-lifting idea when she interrupted me.

“I don’t care where you got the bench from,” she said, “but did you say he’s on Xanax? ”

“I think that’s what he said, yeah.”

She looked alarmed, and laughed without any humor at all. “That’s not good. You definitely don’t give that drug to someone with a drinking problem. It’s a benzo. I wonder if they even asked him about that or if they just wrote the scrip and stuffed it in his hand before they kicked him out the door.”

“Elias doesn’t have a drinking problem.”

“Of course he does. When have you ever seen him go to sleep on less than six beers? You don’t call that a problem?”

Beats the hell out of me, I thought. I just stared at her.

“Make him another appointment,” she said. “Make it for soon. Like, next week. This time I’ll actually go back to the examining room with him. And if they try to kick me out I’ll tell them they’re idiots. My mom would freak if she heard this. It’s one of those basic questions they should have asked automatically.”

“I don’t think he’ll go. I think he’d rather be on nothing at all.”

“That’s not a good idea at all. Cade, this is getting more and more stupid. You know what I think?” I hated it when Jill said that, because she didn’t actually care whether you wanted to know or not; you were going to hear it, either way. “I think I should call up Dave and see if he’ll let us live down there for a couple months. You, me and Elias, I mean, once the baby gets here. He might, and you’d be closer to all your interviews.”

I was shaking my head before she was even finished. “At that camp you worked at? No way.”

“Why not? We’ve both got enough skills that we could pitch in and teach. And Dave’s a great guy. He’s got the space, and I’m pretty sure he’ll let us all stay. We need to get Elias out of this house, away from Candy and Dodge and that damn TV. He needs a fresh start, and there’s no better one than Southridge. Believe me, I know.”

Any words of explanation that came to mind would only make me sound petty. I was remembering the picture I’d seen of her and Dave standing together in the woods, his arm thrown around her shoulders, both of them leaning toward each other and smiling for the camera. He was older for sure, but not by a significant margin—ten years, maybe twelve. It was the kind of age difference that would have been huge when she was fourteen or fifteen, but wouldn’t be all that noteworthy now. And I’d been in the room when she called him to tell him she wouldn’t be back this summer. At the end of the call she said, quiet but matter-of-fact, I love you, as if that was just something she always said. There had been a pause after it, and my brain filled in his voice saying I love you, too. No way would I take my girl and my new baby and go live next to the other guy she loved, owing him favors, letting him be my boss. Screw that.

“It’s the most therapeutic thing,” she said. Her hands were slicing the air, as if she had this whole thing specced out on a grid. “I’m telling you. Dave used to be an army ranger—well, he was almost one. Elias could relate to him, and it’d be way better than leaving him up here with Dodge and Candy.”