Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

“Well, just move your damned vans for half a second,” Cade said. “Or have somebody take her down there, even. When you say ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible,’ you know how that sounds to me? Because it’s really the only thing I want to talk to you about.”

There was a long silence, and then Cade rolled his eyes. “Fine, never mind, then,” he said, his voice taking on a sarcastic, bitchy edge. “Then how about you call me back when you actually want to negotiate instead of just try to fuck with me? Because that’s not going to go real well.”

He clicked off the phone. “Did you really just hang up on them?” I asked. “You can’t do that. You have to talk. TJ and I need to leave.”

“They’ll let you leave. They just won’t let him get his surgery.”

“Well, fine, then. Just let us walk out and we’ll worry about that later.”

Cade laughed as if I’d made a joke. “Yeah, right. Then what incentive would they have not to break down the door and take me with them? We’re a family. Nobody’s leaving. If he can’t get the surgery there’s no point anyway.”

I looked incredulously at Cade, then at Dodge, who had eased himself down onto the sofa with one arm behind his head and his gun resting on his belly like a bag of chips, eyes still fixed on the TV. “You can’t hold us hostage, Cade.”

“I’m not holding you hostage. We’re married. We’re sticking together, that’s all. Like always.”

He raised his eyebrows in an imploring way, a puppy-dog look, but distraction shifted his gaze to the television. His phone buzzed again, but rested ignored against his hip as he watched the live helicopter shots. Its incessant vibration stirred a memory of one of our first nights together, when he kissed me with escalating passion against a shadowed stadium wall after a football game, his BlackBerry vibrating against my thigh the entire time. Once upon a time I had wished the damn thing would go silent just for a little while. Now I desperately hoped he would answer it.

“I’m getting impatient with all their back-and-forth chitter-chattering,” Dodge said in response to the sound. “Shit or get off the pot, that’s what I say. One of us ought to go out there and stir something up. Give ’em some real incentive.”

“Shut up, Dodge,” Cade said, but he sounded listless this time. From the cellar, I heard Candy’s syrupy voice speaking, smooth and level. Drew was moaning. I cast a long, measuring look on Cade, then bolted across the living room to the door.

“Stop her!” Dodge barked, but he was already up and grabbing at me, his arm folding across my chest as I scrambled with the locks. TJ howled and gripped at my shirt. As Dodge dragged me backward I felt a small cold impact at the back of my head: his gun. I braced one arm around TJ and clawed at Dodge’s arm with the other, twisting and struggling, too overwhelmed by purpose to feel afraid. The arm only tightened, and TJ squalled with fury.

“Sweet Jesus,” Cade said. Dodge’s balance swerved, and the feeling of the hard steel went away. Cade’s voice ramped up louder, tense as the springs of a trap. “Christ, let her go already.”

“Take her back upstairs.”

He released me roughly, and I pulled TJ against my chest to try to calm him. He screamed to the end of the air in his lungs, his round face inflamed with rage. “Give me the baby,” said Cade. His voice was conciliatory.

“Not on your life.”

“C’mon, Jill. Let me talk to them some more before you go running out there and get you and TJ shot up. It isn’t going to be much longer.”

I looked past him to Dodge, who met my gaze with a pointed glare. He slid his gun back into his shoulder holster, slowly. Cade prodded my waist, and I tramped back up the stairs.

Back in the attic room, Candy’s boys were still riveted on the laptop screen. The devil’s third eye, Dodge always called it. I took it back from Matthew and tried to set up the network connection again, but it wouldn’t work. “Damn it,” I muttered.

“Aunt Jilly said a bad word,” intoned Mark.

I set the laptop back in their eager hands and gnawed my nails, gazing out the window at the trucks that seemed to have doubled in number. The broken thunder of the news helicopter vibrated the glass. My hands shook, and the memory of Dodge’s gun planted behind my ear loomed so large in

my mind that all my strategic thoughts of escape seemed to have shriveled. That was the goal, I supposed—to intimidate me into obedience, to keep me quiet and scared. As I sat against the wall and pulled TJ against me to nurse, I pictured Dave standing in a hospital corridor, watching the clock, and I felt the anger inside me rise to a boil. They were destroying my plan to escape. All this time I had held out for TJ’s sake, and now they were making all those miserable weeks pointless. Now perhaps I would be charged as an accessory, because I had known things I should have reported, tried and failed to hedge my bets about Cade’s conscience and his sanity. At the very least the coming weeks would be a mess of lawyers, two-way mirrors—possibly even foster care for our son. I could lose my child. He would become motherless, just like me, but it would be so much worse for him. He would be shucked into a system whose goal was merely to keep him alive.

That’s unproductive thinking, Jill. I heard the shadow of my mother’s voice behind the thought. Calm down. Remember, don’t quit five minutes before the miracle happens.

“Aunt Jilly, I’m hungry,” said John.

“Let me see if Grandma’s got any snacks up here,” I replied, doubtful. TJ had fallen asleep at my breast, and I eased him back into the sling before rising awkwardly from the floor. There would be nothing in the craft room, but perhaps there was some food squirreled away on the shelves on the landing. I closed the craft-room door behind me to soften the laptop’s hearty chime of “Yankee Doodle” and began rifling through the clutter on the bookshelf. Three stories down there was enough food to feed all of Frasier for a year, but nobody had thought to hand up so much as a box of graham crackers before they confined us to the attic. Sixty thousand dollars, I remembered Cade saying as I looked over the basement in wonder. He had mocked his family then, so sure he was nothing like any of them.

The bookshelf search turned up nothing, and I wasn’t eager to return to tell John he would have to go hungry. My back aching from TJ’s weight, I walked with a gentle sway to my gait to keep him asleep, back and forth in front of the attic fan. Then, as I approached it once again, my eye caught a movement just beyond its slats. I stopped and peered through the mesh and past the slats. Two men in black SWAT gear were moving around behind a truck that blocked the driveway. My heart pounded, and TJ, as if sensing my surge of adrenaline, raised his eyebrows high above his closed eyes and stirred. I rushed to the craft closet and pulled out a torn length of white sheet to drape from the window. But as I unsnapped the grimy closures and braced my hands against the sash, another motion caught my gaze. The window below mine opened and the lean black silhouette of an automatic rifle appeared, then Dodge, easing his upper body out the window to sight in.

I glanced at the closed door of the craft room, then at the closet still wide open beside it. In a few efficient movements I grabbed Matthew’s rifle from the closet, reloaded it and took aim through the venting slats for the fan. The pop of the gun cut the air; I felt the flail of TJ’s arm against my back, and then Dodge slumped half out the window. The rifle fell from his hands and clattered against the porch roof. Blood bloomed on the back of his head, long streaks of it unfurling like a lily.