Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

On the afternoon after his comment to Dodge, I caught up with him sitting on the back porch, looking out over the backyard from his mother’s white wooden rocking chair. He wasn’t smoking, wasn’t drinking and wasn’t asleep, so it was immediately noteworthy.

“Jill,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to apologize to you.”

I laughed in surprise. “For what?”

“For not doing anything to help when you were bleeding out on the sofa. It just got to me, and I felt frozen by it. I’m sorry for standing there screaming like a little girl.”

“But you did help,” I pointed out. “Cade said I would have been dead by the morning if you hadn’t alerted everyone.”

Elias’s expression changed. He seemed to be considering that. Then he shook his head. “I’m trained in field medicine. There’s a lot I could have done besides watch Cade throw you in the car. If you’d died, it would have been on me. I’m the one in the house who knows how to handle that. But I couldn’t handle it.”

“And I’m not dead. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose in his weary way. “Just accept my apology, all right?”

“No. I don’t accept that you have anything to apologize for in the first place, so I can’t.”

He frowned. “I really wish you would.”

“You were trying to wean yourself off the medicine,” I said. “Nobody would have expected you to do anything differently. I’m sorry I’ve been preoccupied these last few weeks. I’ll get Cade to make you another appointment, okay? And you and I can drive down together, like last time.”

He shook his head. The chair’s wooden rockers creaked in rhythm, and he gazed out over the yard. “I already know what they’ll tell me. They’ll lower my dosage and I’ll just take twice as many. I can see it coming. Every time I try, I just binge on it the next day. They can’t stop me from doing that, and neither can I.”

I touched his shoulder, but he shrugged my hand off. “Maybe they have an inpatient program,” I said.

“Detox, you mean?”

“Maybe.”

He chuckled. “Put it on my tombstone,” he said, and drew a hand slowly in front of him as if envisioning the sign. “‘This man was a shitbag. May he rest in peace.’”

“Elias, come on. You’d hardly be the first veteran to deal with that. They can’t all be shitbags.”

He shook his head again, and I sighed. “Eli,” I said, “would you like to hold the baby?”

“Sure.”

I handed TJ to him. He took him easily, nestling him into his arm, and looked down at his face. At first it surprised me how easily he handled the baby, but then I remembered he had been here through the births of all three of Candy’s sons.

“He looks just like Cade,” he said.

“Yeah, I think so, too.”

“Got that arrogant li’l mouth.” He leaned back against the chair, looked out at the yard again, and rocked.

“You want me to take him back?”

“No, he’s fine.”

I walked off to get some lunch, pleased for the opportunity to eat without having to keep an eye or a hand on the baby. And when I came out to the porch to take TJ again, he was still asleep in the crook of Elias’s arm, and Elias, for all that his face was ever unreadable, looked almost content.

That night Dodge and Scooter joined the rest of the family for supper before hiking out into the woods to sit in their hunting spot. Elias happened to be awake, so he joined everyone, too, then returned to his room. The house was quiet and cool, and when Cade came in to undress for bed, he glanced at TJ asleep in the laundry basket and threw me a pleading look. We made love for the first time since the birth, very carefully. Cade seemed almost apologetic, and grateful; only afterward did I realize how much we had needed it to take away the feeling that as a couple we were fragmenting, becoming two employees of the same baby rather than a man and a woman irresistibly attracted to each other.

TJ slept well that night. Not until two o’clock in the morning did I awake to the muted report of a gunshot from outside that I realized must be Dodge and Scooter having finally crossed paths with a bear. The noise woke TJ, and regretfully I pulled myself away from Cade’s warm bare chest and lifted the baby from his basket.

I pulled him to my breast and eased back into bed, arranging the covers over myself and the lower half of TJ’s body. Cade had left the door ajar, and the night-light from the bathroom was the only illumination in the darkness. The baby’s nursing was slow and rhythmic, and I closed my eyes in deep fatigue. When I opened them, Elias was standing in the doorway, looking at me with his plain, unreadable eyes.

I pulled up the edge of the quilt immediately, self-conscious to be caught nursing the baby bare chested in front of him. When he didn’t react, I held up a finger to let him know I would be with him in a minute. I looked down at the baby, and when I glanced up again, Elias was gone.

After a while TJ fell back asleep at my breast, and I laid him softly in the basket. I pulled on one of Cade’s T-shirts and a pair of pajama pants and tiptoed down the stairs. The entire house was dark; both televisions were off, and the lamp that always burned beside Elias’s chair when he was awake had been snapped off, as well. I checked the porch rocker and found it empty, then headed back up to my room. Only then did I notice Elias’s door was closed, and I knew he must have grown tired of waiting for me to finish nursing the baby and had gone off to bed. For that, I felt a little sorry. Elias and I needed to talk. He had put his arms out to me. That was progress. If he would do that much, maybe he would open up to me about how the rest of us could help him, too. And we could all move forward.

I slipped back under the covers and slept until four-thirty, when TJ woke to nurse again and Cade got out of bed to attend to the day’s chores. And then I drifted back to sleep for a while, until I heard Cade yelling from the barn, and then Candy’s scream, and I realized it had not been Dodge’s gun that went off that night, but Elias’s.

It was Dodge who stopped me at the door of the barn with both hands held up and out, his face a warning that he meant business, that there was no chance I would find a way to push past him. I screamed for Cade, but Cade didn’t even turn in the direction of my voice. I could see him crouched on the floor of the barn, with Elias’s legs jutting out to the side, sneakers on as always, but both he and Cade were in shadow. Candy came and went, her long hair flying behind her as she ran between the main house and the barn, then down the driveway to meet the ambulance. From the upper window came the sound of TJ squalling with increasing vehemence, but my own newborn’s crying had become a distraction from the primary event. After a while Leela appeared with TJ on her shoulder and her face bone-white, and then red and blue flashing lights twirled in the driveway, accompanied by the staticky clatter of radios. Only then did Cade reappear from the barn, both of his hands and the front of his T-shirt covered with thick red blood. His expression was stoic, and he met my eyes before pointing to the house and saying in a voice that was not to be argued with, “Get inside.”

I took the wailing baby from Leela and trailed into the house, sitting in a dining chair near the window and setting him to nurse. Instantly he went quiet. The window offered no good angle on the barn and driveway. After the sirens chirped to life, I caught sight of Cade stalking over to the shed. He pulled off his shirt and stuffed it into the trash, then squatted by the garden spigot and rinsed off his hands. I let out a shaky sigh and switched TJ to the other breast. There was nothing to do but wait for Cade.