Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

His voice rose in frustration. “C’mon, Jill. Don’t be cold to me. I don’t want to feel like I’m raping you or something.”

My laugh was short and sharp. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to relax. Do you?”

He shrugged. His expression was entirely benign. He slapped his phone onto the table, then his gun, before unbuckling his jeans and letting them slide down. “Clear your mind,” he suggested.

I diverted my gaze to the space above his shoulder. Leela’s barn stars, each painted in a cheerful variation of the Stars and Stripes, marched across the wall just below where the roof vaulted. Here and there yellow bows stiffened by wire and starch curled beneath them, like fossils recalling a battering wind. I remembered, all at once, Elias singing “ Two Highways” in quiet harmony, watching out the window as we flew past the deep woods, the last of his cigarette smoldering between two fingers. A terrible ache for him opened in me out of the clear blue. My eyes burned inside and a sob choked into my throat, but I held both at bay. Cade tugged down my shorts by the waistband, and I closed my eyes, but it only made my mind’s image of Elias grow sharper and more true.

I thought of how warm and broad his body felt when I rubbed his shoulders. Of the dense wall of muscle deep beneath his skin, and the way his hair bristled along his neck in a line so clean, and the smell of him that changed as I touched him. I remembered how he looked in the apartment that first day, stretched out on the futon. Even though I knew that was not the real Elias, only the perfect one that the real world could not sustain, I couldn’t believe the one in the easy chair had been the real Elias, either. I wondered if any of us had ever seen the real one, or if he was all soul, never finding a body to inhabit that could feel like a home to him.

Cade slipped a hand beneath my shoulders and pulled me up to kiss him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and moved willingly to the edge of the table. All the thoughts that my loyalty to Cade had held at a distance now flooded my mind, and that image of Elias fell over Cade’s body like a projection onto a screen. I felt no shame from it because we all knew—every member of this family—that the moment Elias died we dropped our shallow and insular battles and turned all our loyalty to Elias: to love and mourn him, to avenge and remember him, to imagine the life he might have lived and to carry it forward like a glowing ember wrapped in a leaf.

Once it was over, Cade breathed hard against my neck, and pressed his temple against mine, and said, “I need to get that guy on the phone.”

Opening the door was enough to wake TJ, and I attended to changing him while Cade got back to the business of negotiating with the police. As I fastened TJ’s new diaper, the lights suddenly cut out. The sky outside was overcast, and the attic instantly fell into shadow. TJ whipped his head back and forth, regarding his surroundings with large, nervous eyes. I made a few comforting noises and carried him down the stairs.

Cade was taking a seat on the sofa as we walked in, moving things around on the coffee table with a restless energy I didn’t like. The holstered gun was back on his belt again. No longer was he attempting to stay away from the windows, and he was smoking a cigarette that looked hand-rolled. A dozen gutted cigarette butts lay scattered across the coffee table, the obvious materials he had used to come up with the one he was smoking now. Across the shaded room he shot me a glance that looked almost resentful.

“Don’t know what the hell Candy did to him,” Cade said, “but he’s not looking real good.”

“Drew?”

He grunted assent. I considered asking more questions, then decided my knowing more wouldn’t help anyone. I crossed the living room on the way toward the kitchen.

“Where you going?”

“I need food for TJ. I’m all out of the snacks I packed in the diaper bag.”

“There’s too many open windows along the porch.”

“Well, what do you want me to do? The kid needs to eat. All he’s done is nurse all day. Everything in the pantry is dried stuff in those giant cans. Same in the cellar—”

“You’re not going in the cellar. No way.”

“Of course not, but I’m just saying, I need to get to the fridge.”

Cade gave the kitchen a long look. Then he said, “I got on the phone with them again—not the guy you know, but the first one. They asked about the condition of the hostage. I went down to take a look so I could tell them correctly.”

I waited for him to continue. “And?”

He gave a slow shake of his head, then looked up at me from where he sat. “Jill…this was Dodge’s idea. It wasn’t mine.”

I didn’t really believe him, but I nodded.

“If I go upstairs and put this gun in my mouth, you know what that accomplishes?”

“Cade . ”

“Absolutely nothing. It’s the same thing Eli did. It’s like I put all this work and time and effort into doing right by him, and the whole time I was just circling the block. I can’t make any kind of grand statement now, like I meant to down in D.C. Can’t even kill Fielder with any fair reason, because Candy already did most of that job, so far as I can tell. That’d be like shooting puppies in a box.”

I winced.

“If I walk out of here with my hands up, they send me to jail. And Fielder, he’ll get the last laugh on that one, because I won’t make it two days before some big guy makes me his bitch. Basically I’ve got zero options.”

He took his phone out of his pocket. It was buzzing energetically, and turned in a slow spin against the wood once he set it on the coffee table. We both looked at it, and I said, “I think you should choose what’s best for TJ.”

He nodded. I walked into the kitchen and took an orange from the bottom drawer of the dark refrigerator. I sat TJ on the kitchen island and cut a small piece off the top of the orange with a kitchen knife, then pulled it in two and handed TJ a section before beginning to peel off the skin from the rest. He worked the orange section into his mouth, nursing out the juice, watching with interest as I peeled. His legs swung in a carefree way. It occurred to me that he was as oblivious to my anger and fear and sense of betrayal as I had been to my own mother’s suffering that day, but I loved him no less for it. I was glad he didn’t know, glad he could sit and eat an orange in the calm of the eye of the storm, and if I could have held things that way for him forever, I would have. For the first time since my mother’s death I forgave myself a little for walking past that television. I understood then that if her spirit could have guided me it would have marched me away from that scene, sent me about my business to keep the peace in my soul as long as possible.

And then a gust of air blew across the kitchen, light filtered in and I looked up to see the front door open. Cade racked the gun and stepped outside. The screen banged shut, and as I gathered TJ into my arms with a sense of great caution, several loud pops ripped the air. I dropped to the floor with TJ, holding him against my side as I crawled with the other arm toward the corner beneath the table. Shouts rang out, a chaos of voices peppered with more gunfire. I curled beneath the table, enveloping my son with my body in an embrace that all but crushed him. Boot steps crashed into the house, voices, the sudden sense of exposure and broken boundary. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and breathed in the cold smell of the stone floor, the muscles of my back steeled against the world beyond me.

That this was a rescue did not enter my mind. These were only strangers, Cade’s adversaries, invading our home.