Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

“What the hell were you thinking? ” he barked at her. “He almost died up there in his own goddamn bed with his own daughter right there. You don’t have the two brain cells’ worth of common sense it would take to see how sick he was?”

“Maybe I would have if she hadn’t gone dancing off to bring over Lucia. You want to talk about sense—and you never had the sense to tell her we don’t deal with those people?”

“ You don’t deal with those people. I couldn’t care less. And Jill did the right thing. I’d much rather bring Randy and his whole damn militia to my door than let Dad just keel over and die. Jesus.”

Candy shrugged loosely and plated a scrambled egg. “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”

The corner of Cade’s lip curled upward. “So courageous of you to make that decision on behalf of somebody else.”

Casually Candy pointed her spatula in my direction. “Ask your wife about the decision she made for us. Now Dad’s stuck in a hospital, probably all delirious and saying whatever pops into his mind. There’s some things around here you better hope he doesn’t start talking about.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Cade said. But Dodge didn’t agree, and whatever he said to Cade about it later seemed to convince him, as well. From that night onward they instituted a system of nighttime watch shifts, switching off every few hours and bringing in Scooter to take a shift as well, imagining the government was about to swoop in over some unregistered guns. At any hour of the night, when I woke to nurse TJ, I could hear their slow, heavy-booted footsteps creaking the hardwood floors, walking the inside perimeter. Cade kept Elias’s gun holstered on his belt all the time now when he was home. The only time he took it off was when he lay down with TJ, and then he would set it on the fireplace mantel, never more than a few paces away.

A few days into this arrangement, I awoke to the clunk of Cade’s gun against the nightstand, followed by the soft, rumpled sound of clothes dropping to the floor. I squinted awake: the clock read 2:00 a.m. Cade climbed in beneath the covers and ran his hand up against my belly. “Hey, you,” he said with affection, and rolled me onto my back. Despite the late hour he was buzzing with energy. The estrangement I felt from him in my heart should have made it easier to push him away at times like this, but instead it only made it harder. In spite of everything, I still yearned to be close to him, to feel once again the kind of intimacy we had shared in the beginning and store it away as a memory. Soon I would be gone, and who knew how long it would be before I would feel that human touch again, or feel even that tenuous sense of connection? Each time with him now the thought would flutter through my mind— this could be the last time —and for a few minutes everything I had grown to resent and disdain and even fear about him seemed to fall away, leaving only the beauty of him, which was the one sure thing he had held on to.

After he was sated, he slumped his arm across me and fell asleep. I never could get used to that unit patch tattoo, identical to the one I had traced on Elias’s skin in moments only he and I had shared. For a while I lay there awake and curled with my back against Cade’s chest, holding his arm with both hands. But the urge to cry grew stronger and stronger, and finally I unwound myself from his embrace and pulled my clothes on quietly, then tiptoed out of the room so I would not wake him with my snuffling.

From the stair landing I could see the light on beside Elias’s chair, a dim star. Downstairs I heard that slow heel-toe double-thump, working its way from the foyer to the living room and around to the addition. I walked on the outside edge of the stairs so as not to let them creak. Scooter looked up as I came down, at first in alarm, then with a somber wave of his hand.

“Hey, Jill,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“Hey.” I walked up to the front window, pushed the curtain aside and peered out in defiance of the paranoia. Nobody was there. The dark was absolute, broken only by the lacy line of the treetops and the jagged silhouette of the mountains, contrasting black against deeper black. I let the curtain drop and went to the kitchen to run myself a glass of water from the sink. The TV was off. When Cade or Dodge kept watch they left it on—muted, but with the picture on nonetheless, like a sort of electronic eternal flame lit for Elias. Yet Scooter had no such sentimentality, and so the only light came from the reading lamp beside the chair.

“Hope I didn’t wake you up,” Scooter said. “I try not to walk too loud.”

“It’s not you. I just couldn’t sleep.”

“I know what you mean.” He had made his way to the dining room now, gazing through each window at the backyard, or at least what he could see of it through the screen porch. A handgun was tucked into the back of his jeans, bunching his shirt at the small of his back. “I’m looking forward to the end of all this.”

I drank down my water. “Won’t be till Eddy gets home, I guess. And who knows how long they’ll keep it up after that. It’s the most paranoid thing I’ve ever heard of, thinking an old man’s going to start mumbling about his unregistered guns in his sleep.”

Scooter shook his head slowly. His gaze drifted up to the second-floor landing, then returned to bore into me. In a lower voice he asked, “Is that what they told you?”

He sat down in a kitchen chair, then leaned forward to tug the gun from the back of his pants and set it on the table. His face was so young, but those wire-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish look. With his pale skin and high-and-tight haircut, he had the earnest look of a missionary. I said nothing. I could only hold his gaze and wait for him to go on.

“Now’s a good time to get out, Jill,” he said. His voice had grown so quiet that the low syllables bumped against each other like marbles, but his meaning was clear enough. “Remember what I said to you about Randy.”

Fear prickled at the back of my neck. “What’s going on?”

“If I knew I’d tell you. I figured you knew more than I did. You live here.” He glanced up at the landing again. “I don’t think they trust me enough anymore to say. But I know they’re not watching the property twenty-four-seven because they’re worried over Eddy. That never even came up.”

I felt panic tightening my chest as I pictured TJ fast asleep in the laundry basket beside the bed, clad only in a diaper and a thin white undershirt, and the keys to the Jeep in the pocket of Cade’s dirty jeans. I had waited much too long to make my escape plans, as if this moment would never come, when all along I knew it would. “Well, what did they say?” I demanded. “How much time do I have?”

“It has to do with getting retribution for Elias, that’s all I know. If I knew details none of us would be here now. Maybe I would have turned him in already.” At the sight of my fearful gaze he lowered his voice to a conciliatory whisper. “I’m sure they won’t do anything till after your kid gets his ear thing done. Cade loves his son and all. I know he’s planning to be around for that. But if I were you I would go straight to Randy’s from there. I wouldn’t mess around.”

“Have you said anything to anyone? The police?”

“No, they wouldn’t do anything. There’s plenty of people up here who make that same kind of noise. I’d get thrown under the bus for it, and they’d think it was nothing special. Except Cade always wants to be the special one. That’s the one difference, I guess.”

I sat down wearily in the chair closest to his and rested my temple against my hand, gazing out the window at the Jeep. Crescents of moonlight reflected off the curve around its headlights, a sharp glint against the darkness. If only it weren’t for TJ. I wished desperately that I could call upon my mother to get us out of here, give us shelter, frame up the step-by-step plan to untangle our circumstances. But that was nothing more than an idle wish. There was only me.