Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

I stepped into the hallway and then, with a tentative turn of the knob, into Elias’s room. The bed, stripped to its white sheet, lay stark along one wall; the blue desk with its hutch empty, its chair slightly askew to face me, seemed to expect a visitor. The air felt cooler than on the rest of the floor, and the stillness and silence of it gave it the feeling of a grotto. I ran my hand along the dresser; it was clean of dust. Candy must have been in recently. I wanted a memento of some kind to take with me, but saw none. In a way that seemed fitting.

What I could really use, I thought, is his phone. Elias had owned the kind you could restock with minutes from phone cards, and on this day, with escape so imminent and the need so great, I would have gladly spent the money and run the small risk someone would discover I was carrying one. But I had no idea where it had gone. Earlier in the day, before TJ’s pre-op checkup down in Liberty Gorge, I had searched our bedroom high and low to see if I could find where Cade had stashed it, after he had been given Elias’s personal effects at the hospital. But not a thing had turned up, and his room was the only remaining place it might be.

I opened Elias’s dresser drawers and rooted around a little. His clothes were still there, folded neatly. They smelled like him, in a tidy, muted sort of way. Finding nothing else, I decided to brave a search through his old army duffel, slouched in the room’s far corner. But all it contained was a set of pressed BDUs, an old Bible with his name inscribed on the cover, an army-issue folding knife and a plastic wallet insert filled with photos of his family and a girl in a multicolored ski hat. No sign of the phone, not even a charger.

I sighed. That morning I’d called Dave from the pediatrician’s office phone under the pretense that I needed to reach my husband. Dave was already in Laconia. Ready when you are, he had said. My sense of gratitude to him was so profound that it twisted into discomfort deep in my gut. I didn’t like feeling so beholden to anyone, not for a favor so immense. But I had to get through this first so I could have choices again.

In the next room, TJ stirred, fussed. A sudden sleepy cry broke the air. I walked backward out of Elias’s room and shut the door silently, as though his spirit resided there and was owed absolute peace. Wherever he was, I hoped he had found a full measure of that.

The sound of the truck pulling into the gravel driveway woke me from a light sleep. Beside me TJ lay sprawled on his back in his diaper and undershirt, his plump cheeks moving in a faint rhythm as though dreaming of milk. The clock beside me said it was three-thirty in the morning. A car door slammed; beside me TJ shifted at the noise, but did not open his eyes. I felt relieved they had come home before morning, just as Cade had promised. I hated the thought of taking TJ away for good without seeing his father one last time.

I turned over and attempted to fall back to sleep, but within a couple of minutes the front door creaked open and I heard the heavy footfalls of Dodge’s boots, then the sound of something being dragged. Cade’s voice came in low and clipped. Dodge muttered a reply, and the dragging sound was replaced by grunts that indicated a heavy object being hoisted by both men.

I rolled over and lay still, my mind attuned to the puzzle of noise from downstairs. Perhaps they had hit a deer, like the day Cade had wrecked his car and Candy had butchered the doe in the front yard. But if that were the case, why would they have brought it inside in one piece? I lay there a while longer, listening. Then I eased myself past TJ and tiptoed down the stairs.

The front door was still open, the screen door propped with a brick, but the porch light was off. Dodge and Cade were both outside, unloading the truck. I looked around the downstairs. The only light came from the lamp next to Elias’s chair that we typically left on all night no matter what. I wandered toward the darkened kitchen. No blood or soil, no sign of whatever they had carried. A basket on the kitchen island overflowed with sweet corn. The beagles’ food bowls sat beside each other on the counter awaiting the day’s breakfast. On a slate square above the stove hung a tole painting of a house with a curl of smoke emerging from the chimney, beside a quote in country-primitive script: “He restoreth my soul, Psalms 23:3.” I could read it by the narrow band of light that blazed beneath the tightly closed door of the cellar. I looked at that door for a moment, considering. Then I threw it open and ventured down the stairs.

In the center of the room, tied with bungee cord to Eddy’s good Windsor chair, sat Drew Fielder. Above the strip of duct tape that covered his mouth he looked out at me with hollow, doomed eyes. The sleeves of his blue pin-striped oxford shirt were pushed above his elbows; his wrists were bound behind his back, and one leg of his khaki pants was slashed with a dark wet stain that appeared to be urine. Drew’s ankles were bound to the legs of the chair with tape, and his shoes were gone. Above his head the metal cord of the lightbulb swung slowly, like a pendulum marking time with great cans of milk powder and freeze-dried meats.

I screamed and, by instinct, jerked the tape from his mouth. He spit out a wadded paper towel and gasped in a deep breath of air. “Jill,” he said, “get me out of here.”

Already I could hear the rapid footsteps of the men returning to the house. “That had to be Jill,” I heard Cade saying. At the sound of his voice Drew strained his shoulders toward me, bumping his head against my arm, and I skittered back from his desperate touch. Cade’s boots and Dodge’s were quick and hollow against the stairs. Before I could turn I backed into Cade, who clapped his hand over my mouth when I startled, whispering a shushing noise like the one he used with TJ.

“Goddamn it,” Dodge muttered, coming down the stairs behind Cade. “ You better not scream, boy. We don’t got neighbors anyhow.”

“Cade,” Drew said. “What the fuck , man.”

Cade let me go, and I turned to him with a look of mute shock. “Don’t, Jill,” he said. “The guy’s had it coming for three years now. He’s alive, so chill.”

“Call the cops, Jill,” Drew said.

Dodge pointed at him. “You, shut up.”

“You better pick your loyalties wisely right now,” Drew told me. “They’ll be here by tonight, busting down his door.”

“In your dreams,” said Cade.

Drew looked him in the eye. “Watch and wait. You’re already on the shit list, man. You made a bad, bad move.”

Dodge grabbed the chair by its sides and dragged it backward toward the wall, tipping Drew back. The legs scraped the concrete with a broken and dissonant squeal before Dodge roughly righted it again and set to work securing it to the wall with a length of chain. I turned to Cade, who was moving his baseball cap up and down with a nervousness that belied his glowering expression. This wasn’t his idea , I knew all at once, knowing from that gesture that he was on the edge of a panic he couldn’t reveal. “Will one of you tell me what’s going on?” I demanded.

“We’re on plan C,” he informed me in a curt voice. Dodge tossed him a pack of zip ties pulled from his back pocket, and as Cade caught it I saw Elias suddenly clear in my mind’s eye, the way he was in the woods that day—the bulk of his curled shoulders, the sweat on his temples, the dreadful distance in his gaze. Cade pocketed the bag as if it meant nothing to him, and said to Drew, “I’m not on any shit list anywhere. So sit tight.”

“The hell you aren’t. Why do you think you didn’t get my job?” Cade looked at him sharply, his hand stilled for a moment on the brim of his cap. To Dodge, Drew said, “Are you the Powell guy? Richard or something? Yeah, he’s the guy on the watch list. The antigovernment nut job. No chance Bylina’s guys were ever going to clear you for my job when your family runs with this guy.”