Heaven Should Fall - By Rebecca Coleman Page 0,123

“Stop here,” I said, and as he swerved to the curb I felt that same gut feeling as when a plane is landing, the forward motion, the wheels suddenly grinding against the ground.

Chapter 32

Jill

I packed while Cade was in Maryland. Into the diaper bag I sorted the simplest and most necessary elements of what I had carried with me into the Olmstead house only the year before. Nearly everything was TJ’s—his toys and clothes, the blanket that Leela had crocheted, sized to fit around him in the laundry basket. On the surface of our dresser, in a modest display, rested the small tokens of my romance with Cade: the tickets from our first football game, a Valentine card he had given me, a pressed rose from our wedding day. All these things I left behind.

I zipped the bag and set it heavily on the bed. When Cade had first told me he was going to Maryland, a red flag had snapped up in my mind, but he had said he wouldn’t miss the surgery, and I believed him. No matter how angry he was about Elias or what he was plotting, Cade loved his son. Knowing that would add to my grief and guilt, a day from now, when I would call the police from the hospital and turn him in.

I wished I could call Leela, or see her one last time. Even though I couldn’t tell her that I was leaving, I wished I could hear her voice again, asking me how the garden was doing or chuckling over TJ’s baby mischief. She was a good woman. For a long time after I figured that out, I had puzzled over why a person as clear minded as her had tolerated a life with people like Dodge and the younger Eddy. But I couldn’t judge her; I had tolerated so much from Cade in the name of keeping the peace and hoping, through my faith in him, that things would turn around. I might have kept on doing that forever had Cade not lost sight of the difference between a patriot and a traitor. It reminded me that some lines might blur but others stand surely apart, and one can’t be a good mother and also a coward.

In the laundry basket, on top of a folded wool blanket, TJ slept. For the remainder of the day I could give him no food, only breast milk, in preparation for the next day’s surgery, and I dreaded the struggle when he awoke expecting dinner. I watched him from the corner of my eye, attuned to signs of wakefulness, as I quietly packed our bag. Gray shadows from the window fluttered against his chest, which rose and fell in a rhythm so drowsy and content that it soothed me, even in my agitated state. His cheeks moved to suckle, his fists clenched and loosened. The shape of his brow was just like Cade’s. I wondered if he would hate me one day, looking into the mirror through his own eyes and seeing his father’s reflected back at him. I gave all I could, I thought. I would have to be the most perfect mother, because only the existing parent is real. The other is made all out of myths.

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,