Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

“I think TJ’s getting another ear infection,” I said. Her face softened, and I added, “And we’re out of wood, and it’s cold, and I can’t split any because I can’t find the right tools. I think the furnace is broken.”

She reached out and cupped my chin. Her face had gone blurry. “Well, there, don’t cry about it. Dodge’ll be back in a bit, and we’ll get him to look at it. Surely we’ve got some of those fire-starter logs in the cellar. Did you take a look?”

I rubbed my cuff beneath my nose, and she pulled me to her. Her hug pushed my face against her shoulder, and I choked a sob. “I know, I know. It’s hard when your baby’s sick. He’ll be all right, now.”

I nodded and pulled in a shaky breath. It made me so terribly weary, this business of having family that I loved but could so easily lose. Whatever I had seen in their shed wasn’t worth a rift with Leela. Nothing would be worth it, I thought, except TJ, and I tried not to think about how it might come to that, the way things worked in this family.

It was three-fifteen in the morning when Cade and I loaded TJ into the Saturn and drove to the emergency room, navigating the pitch-dark roads to the furious soundtrack of TJ’s squalling. In an hour his fever had spiked to 103, and Cade, bouncing the purple-faced baby against his chest, had cast ever-more-frequent glances at the road beyond the front window before asking me, in a defeated and vaguely frantic tone, to bring him the car seat. Now he raked his fingers back through his hair with his left hand, flexed his right against the steering wheel and mumbled that he was going to lose his mind if the kid didn’t quit screaming.

“He’s in pain,” I reminded him. I had to speak up to be heard above the baby. “He’s not doing it to be obnoxious.”

“I know, but God. It’s as bad as the night he was born. Remember?”

“No. I was unconscious when he was born.”

“I mean Eli. Well, you wouldn’t remember that, either. The way he just kept screaming and screaming until I was ready to punch him in the face just to make the noise stop.”

I glanced at him. Only half-seriously, I said, “Okay, well, don’t punch the baby.”

“I’m not going to punch the baby. Jeez, Jill. I feel sorry for the poor kid.”

He pulled into the circular drive of the hospital and I carried TJ inside. By the time Cade had parked and followed us in, TJ was nursing desperately at my breast in a plastic chair in the hallway, awaiting a promised shot of antibiotics. Cade sank into the chair beside me with weary grace, letting his head drop back against the wall so that his ball cap popped partway off, and stared up at the acoustic tile of the ceiling.

“I’m so freakin’ tired I can’t see straight,” he said. “And I gotta get up for work in two hours.”

“Call in sick.”

“I can’t. Not after what this hospital visit is gonna cost.”

“The state has a program for—”

“Fuck the state. C’mon, Jill. You know we don’t do stuff like that.”

I looked away. TJ gulped noisily, but at least he sounded contented. I pulled his feverish body more tightly against me, less for his comfort than for mine.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“You sound like Dodge.”

“Oh, please. Not everyone wants to sponge off the government, is all. Dodge didn’t invent that concept himself.”

“Maybe not, but it annoys me when you agree with him. You never used to.”

“That’s because his ideas used to be dumber.”

I turned to look at him again. He sat with his knees splayed wide, bootlaces half-undone, pulling his Terps cap down over his eyes and then pushing it up again in an idle way. The copy of Elias’s tattoo was too dark against his pale arm; his brother’s complexion had been swarthier, and Cade couldn’t pull off the look. Seeing him now was like looking into a chrysalis to see Cade’s half-formed, new incarnation: from the elbows up he was still his old self, but below that, he was turning into Dodge.

“Maybe his ideas are as lousy as ever,” I proposed.

Cade glanced at me and cracked a grin. “ I’m getting dumber, huh? Maybe so.”

“Whose stuff is that in the shed?”

His grin evaporated. “What stuff?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

The nurse padded over with a loaded syringe on a tray. I sat TJ up to allow him to get his shot, setting off a new round of hysterics. Cade took him from my arms and lifted him to his shoulder, settling into the same bounce that had failed to lull him an hour before.

“You don’t understand how it is around here,” said Cade. “We used to blow stuff up at the quarry all the time, just for the hell of it. What else are we going to do around here, play croquet? There’s nothing to do on a weekend except drink, fish and screw. And I don’t like fishing.”

I kept my own gaze locked with his, trying to gauge the honesty of his words. He looked at his shoulder, where the baby had just spit up milk on his T-shirt. “Nice,” he said.

I tried not to smile. “So you’re telling me it’s all leftover stuff from high school?”

“Yeah. I can get rid of all that. Do you have a burp rag in your bag there? This smells disgusting.”

I handed him the cloth from the diaper bag and watched him mop himself up. As he did, a doctor stopped short beside us, looked at his clipboard and then at our baby, and asked, “Thomas Olmstead?”

“That’s him,” said Cade. “The one who just puked on me.”

The doctor’s smile was stiff. “Can I have a word with both of you in the exam room?”

The day Maryland beat Wake Forest in the ACC tournament, I stood up and cheered. No joke: when the team scored the final two points I jumped up from the recliner and did this cowboy yell, both fists in the air. Jill, who was lying on the sofa half-asleep with the baby corralled between her knees, almost jumped out of her skin. “Good Lord, Cade,” she said.

But I was wired. Down in College Park I knew they were going crazy in the streets. Normally I would have felt bad about missing the celebration, but at that moment I was exhilarated just to be part of the tribe. My team was going up against Duke, our archrival, and had every chance of advancing to the NCAA tournament. It was a great day.

For the month of March, watching basketball was pretty much all I did. At work I could get away with switching the TV channel from local news to basketball, and every chance I got I kept an eye on the play-offs. On game nights you couldn’t budge me from that television for love or money. Even Dodge got in on it. He started buying the beer. For the first half I’d have TJ lie on my chest while I watched. Ever since the day we took him to the E.R., when they told us he had to have this ear surgery that would require general anesthesia, we were both especially freaked out about the baby. It was as if we felt that at any moment someone might come knocking on the door and tell us it was time to return him like an overdue DVD, and so one of us was carrying him around every second. But as agitated as I got during these games, I needed to hand him off to Jill after a while. The kid would have gone flying.

It all made me nostalgic for college, and not in a good, glory-days way. It ached. I thought about the street hockey games in front of the White House, how good it felt to sail over the pavement on my skates, fighting for the ball, everybody yelling and cheering. Police and security people, uniformed and armed, were everywhere, and none of them stopped us, because we were permitted. The white marble buildings and monuments gleamed in the sunlight. In my pocket I had an ID card that allowed me into the halls where the legislators met. I had a good haircut and I was in shape. That card felt like a golden ticket, an infinite VIP pass. It wasn’t, but it sure felt like it then.