Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

He shook his head again. I rested my arms against my knees and looked toward the city. From the roof of a building near the Washington Monument, a flag flapped like crazy in the wind. The dark and the distance obscured the details, the stripes and the stars, the color. It had to be American from the soil it was on, but in the dark you’d never know.

I tried to change the subject to get him talking again. “What did you think of Jill?”

“She’s cute.” He paused and looked out over the city. “I’d do her.”

I grinned. “Yeah, she’s cool.”

“How long have you been with her?”

“About a year. She was friends with somebody Stan was dating, so they introduced us.”

“White chick?”

I snickered. “Of course. As soon as I started seeing her I deleted all my booty-call numbers from my phone, changed around my work hours to spend more time with her, you name it. It was crazy. I was eat-sleep-and-breathing her.”

“You felt the same way about Piper.”

I crushed out the smoke against the earth. “Not even close. Anyway, Piper’s long gone. And I was in high school then. That doesn’t count.”

Elias gave a scornful laugh, exhaling hard, clouding the air between us. “Man, don’t ever say it didn’t count. Don’t fucking insinuate it wasn’t worth your while. I’m not sure which one of us would get a bullet in the head over that one.”

“All right, all right. Sorry.”

The silence pulled tight. Elias said, “I’m just messing with you.”

“I know,” I said. But it sounded unconvincing. “Hey, want to get a beer?”

Elias laughed again. “Man, I don’t want to get a beer. I want to get hammered. ”

“All right, then.” I held out my fist, and Elias bumped it. “This one’s on me.”

The next morning I drove Elias to the bus depot. I felt hungover as all hell. Elias, though, had put back twice as many and still looked okay. He had changed back into a tight brown T-shirt and fatigue pants that tucked into his boots. With him slouched in the seat, one foot resting on the opposite knee, it was more obvious than ever: dude was ripped. In my mind my brother was still the fat kid, the one everyone teased about his jelly-belly gut and man boobs, but now I felt out of shape next to him. He must have done nothing in the desert except lift weights.

When we pulled into the drop-off lane, Elias didn’t get out right away. He just tapped a finger against the window frame and stared at the low concrete building.

“Tell Mom and Dad I said hi,” I said to him. When he didn’t respond, I added, “And take it easy, all right?”

He grunted. After another few beats of silence, he said, “Bus isn’t here yet.”

“It doesn’t leave for twenty minutes. People say they usually run pretty tight. I’m sure it’ll get here in time. If it doesn’t, give me a buzz and I’ll come get you.”

He took his cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. Then he set the lighter on top of his pack and passed them over to me. I held up a hand to decline, but my willpower misfired. I shook one out of the box and lit up.

“Back to reality,” said Elias.

“You don’t sound too pleased.”

He exhaled lackadaisically. “I don’t even know what reality looks like anymore.”

I turned just slightly in the driver’s seat, twisting around so I could see him better. Elias’s voice seemed to have gotten much deeper, maybe as a side effect of smoking like a chimney. His soft-edged New Hampshire accent was gone, replaced with sharp r’ s and a flat intonation. If I didn’t look directly at him, it was hard to reconcile the voice with my brother.

“You could always reenlist,” I said.

Elias snorted a laugh. “No way. My body’s too jacked up for it. I probably couldn’t even pass the physical.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve never seen you in better shape.”

He shook his head, scornful. “My leg never really healed right. I get migraines. My shoulder’s fucked up. You name it. I’m done playing in the Sandbox.”

“So what are you gonna do instead?”

Silence fell again. He held his cigarette out the window and gave the filter a few soft flicks with his thumb. He paused, dragged and finally said, “Man, don’t ask me that question.”

“Sorry. I’m just making small talk.”

“Yeah, I don’t know how to make small talk. It’s not what we do in my line of work.”

“ Sorry. Jeez.”

Elias exhaled with a frustrated sigh. The vibe between us felt tense. I smoked nervously, glad to have something to do in the dead space. In the distance a silver bus appeared, driving slowly toward us down a long, curving road.

“Good luck with your girl,” said Elias. “I envy you that.”

I grinned. The tension vanished like a wave pulling back from the sand. “Thanks.”

He leaned into the backseat and wrestled his duffel bag over the console. Probably I would have hugged him to say goodbye, but the bulky bag wedged into the space between the seats. He reached across and bumped my fist.

“Fuck her brains out, man,” he said. “It’s what I’d do if I were you.”

My mother believed in signs. Not in a superstitious way, really, but from the belief that sometimes an event catches your attention and brings to the surface of your mind, all of a sudden, a truth about yourself that you ought to pay attention to. When I was twelve she told me about the moment she knew she needed to get sober. She was driving north of Fresno, California, with me in the back of the car, and I asked her about the trees growing in the orchards alongside the road. I was four years old, she told me—she knew the date exactly—and I wanted to know what sort of fruit they were growing that was round and fuzzy and green. So she pulled the car over onto the shoulder, and we got out to take a look, because she wasn’t sure. We were in town to visit her parents for what would prove to be the last time. It was a lovely day, but she was feeling sad and angry, because her parents’ health was poor and they were mean. A couple of old, sick drunks, she said. The most pathetic type of creature in the world. All she could think about doing was getting back to our hotel and opening up a bottle of wine, to make the day go away.

We got out of the car and pulled one of those fuzzy things off a tree. She thought perhaps it was a kiwi, so she split it open for me, and inside there was an almond. I was just so amazed, she told me. And so were you. Thirty-two years old and I had no idea almonds grew that way. We both laughed, and during that moment she didn’t think about anything except the wonder of almonds.

Then she said we needed to get back in the car before we got caught by the farmer, and when she turned around she could see that we were on a hill that looked down over the entire city of Fresno. And this was what moved her—even though the sky was beautifully blue and fluffed with white clouds where we stood, the city was covered by a deep gray cloud that was pouring down torrents of rain. From that distance she could see it easily: the storm that appeared to have singled out the city, like a biblical punishment. I’d never seen anything quite like it, she said, and that’s when I knew. That’s how my parents were and that’s how I would become, walking around a beautiful world with a storm pouring over just us. I had to change. It didn’t happen right away. It took me a while. But that was the moment I knew.

Long after she was gone, I tried to remember every part of that story, to think hard on it so I could understand every aspect of her revelation. It had changed my life and hers, after all. When I stood there in the almond orchard I hadn’t any idea of what was going on in her mind just then, but in the end it had made me who I am. I wasn’t sure if I believed in signs the way she did, but I believed in the truth the sign had taught her: that it was never too late to start over, no matter where you came from, no matter who you had been or how daunting the path appeared. Her own mother had taught her what kind of a life she didn’t want, but mine taught me what kind of life I did.