Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

A dullness descended over his gaze. “No. I don’t need people making special exceptions for me like I’m a friggin’ invalid. I’ll work it out. I’ll probably take one in an hour or two so I can get some sleep. Right now I’m just trying to remind my body who’s boss.”

I hesitated, but then reached out and stroked his forehead. It was beaded with sweat. “I’m sorry, Elias,” I said.

“Fuck, don’t be sorry for me. Jesus, Jill. You know that’s the last thing I want to hear anybody say.” He laid his head back against the chair and allowed me to stroke the sweat back from his forehead, massage his scalp with my fingertips. “This sucks,” he said. “I wish I’d stayed on the other stuff.”

“I’ll take you back to the doctor. They’ll straighten it out.”

“No. I’m starting to feel like a goddamn science fair project. Forget that. I’m just gonna get myself off this stuff and go back to what I know. It’s not worth it.”

“There’s got to be something that’ll work better than what you had before.”

“I don’t even care. I can live with that. I just don’t want to be like this.”

I rubbed his shoulders reassuringly, but when he didn’t lean forward as he normally did, I ran my hands down to his arms and kneaded the muscles there. “I love it when you do that,” he said. Then he laughed a little and said, “I totally fucking hate it.”

My hands froze in place, then retreated. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t stop. God. ”

I began again, but hesitantly, feeling the sudden rangy energy his body was putting forth. He tolerated it for a few moments, then threw my hands off with a flail of his arms that was almost violent.

I took two steps back. He rose from the chair and walked around it to the refrigerator, retrieving a beer from the produce drawer. As he cracked it open and drank, I watched him from a distance. He wore a T-shirt that was large even for him, shorts that hit below his knees and, despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, a pair of battered running shoes. Elias was never without shoes. He slept in his sneakers. Now, for the first time since I had moved in, he looked as though he might need them to escape the house.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, my timing awkward, my voice small. “You can be hard to read, Eli.”

“I know it.” He sounded calm and ordinary. The refrigerator door closed, and the kitchen went dark again. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just bugged out about the medicine.”

“We’ll take care of that next week, okay? Or as soon as we can get you in to the doctor, anyway.”

He leaned back against the kitchen island. “I’ll figure it out. Are you headed back to bed?”

“Sort of. I came down to sleep on the sofa. It’s too hot up there. Right now I’m so tired I’m dizzy.”

He set down his beer and held out his arms. It was the first time he had ever done that. I walked into the hug, and despite the complication of my giant belly, he found a way to pull me close with his arms around my shoulders. The bulk of him was too much for my arms to encircle, but I did the best I could. When he buried his face in my hair, his bristly crew cut scratched my cheek.

“It’s good you’re here, Jill,” he said.

I nodded, but I felt so exhausted and light-headed I couldn’t really reply. Unsteadily in the dark, I made my way over to the sofa and curled up on my side beneath the lightest afghan. In the cool and the white noise I fell asleep quickly. And then—I don’t know quite how much later—I was vaguely aware of Elias’s shadow passing over me, leaning in. Somewhere in the core of my mind I recognized the weight of his steps against the floor, the scent of his body. But that was all, until I vaguely heard the vibrato of someone yelling in the distance, over and over, and I could not tell whether it was Cade or Elias because the voice carried the pure raspy note of the Olmstead men, the common song of all of them, the one my son would sing someday.

The screaming woke me from a dead sleep. By reflex I clutched for Jill, but her side of the bed was empty. I scrambled over the bed to the stairs, barefoot and shirtless. The voice was my brother’s. From the landing I could see Elias’s silhouette: broad back, thuglike neck, arms out just slightly at his sides as if he had tried to react but got frozen in place. Over his shoulder I could make out Jill’s face as she rested on the sofa, sleeping peacefully through his raw, haggard screams.

I rushed down the steps and started toward Elias. Only then did I see that the lower half of Jill’s body—my boxer shorts that she’d slept in, her legs entangled in the afghan—was soaked in blood. It streaked her legs to the knee and seeped into the bottom edge of her T-shirt.

“Jesus Christ,” I shouted. I shoved Elias aside and tried to shake Jill awake, calling her name, but she wouldn’t wake up. Faintly, she breathed. I yelled for Dodge, but of course he was in his own house, too far away to hear me. Elias’s screaming kept on in a gravel monotone, an alarm that wouldn’t goddamn quit. I looked at him and shouted, “What did you do to her?”

Elias just kept on yelling.

My mom had appeared at the top of the stairs, clutching at the neck of her nightgown. “Get Dodge,” I ordered her.

I tried to loop my arm beneath Jill’s knees, but her legs were too slippery from blood to let me get a solid grip. The blanket beneath her was too bloody to use. To Elias I yelled, “Get me a different blanket, quick.”

Elias didn’t budge. That never-ending Tarzan yell was more than I could take. I crossed the room to where he was standing and shoved him in the chest. “Stop it. Stop it. Tell me what you did to her. What did you fucking do to her?”

The screaming stopped, and Elias panted but said nothing. I shoved him again, but he was too heavy for it to move him or even register. I was losing time. I wrapped the bloody afghan around Jill’s legs and hoisted her up. My mother scuttled past Elias and opened the door, and I rushed outside into the warm night air.

The porch light cut through the blackness, but only far enough to get me partway across the lawn. Dodge was sprinting across the grass toward me. I could hear his ring of keys clinking on his belt. When he came into view he was dressed in his jeans as if he kept them fully outfitted beside his bed like a minuteman. “What happened?”

“Jill’s hurt. There’s blood everywhere. Open the car door.”

Dodge pulled open the passenger door of the Saturn and put his arms behind Jill’s shoulders to help ease her in. I got her legs onto the seat, then stopped and said, “Fuck . ”

“What?”

“I don’t have enough gas. I don’t get paid until tomorrow.”

Dodge nodded toward his SUV. “Take mine.”

“You’re blocked in. Get her in the Jeep.”

“I’ll drive.”

“No, you better stay here with Elias. I don’t know what the hell he did to her, but we can’t leave everybody else here with the goddamn psycho.”

He shouted to my mother to bring me the keys while we maneuvered Jill into the back of the Jeep. As I started the car he laid a hand on the windshield to stop me. I rolled down the window, and he said, “Take her to the firehouse. They can get her to the hospital faster.”

“Right. Yeah, okay.”

When I spun out of the driveway onto the pitch-dark road and the car lurched between gears, I felt nothing but afraid. Jill was the one who would know what to do in this situation. She would know how to stop the bleeding, how to prevent shock, how to change gears without leaving the goddamn transmission in the middle of the road. I should have let Dodge drive after all. I had overestimated myself once again, as I always did, because I was so used to being golden that I had missed the fact that in the face of gritty reality I was less than nothing.