Heaven Should Fall by Rebecca Coleman Read Free Book Online

situation. Eventually she would slip back out, hang up the phone in its cradle and lie down softly on the other side of the futon, because this bed was technically hers. Some nights I would move to my bedroom, but usually I feigned a deep sleep so I could nestle near her warmth all night, like a chick beneath her mother’s wing.
    Sometimes now, when her absence became less bearable, I would imagine those moments with her until the line between reality and memory seemed almost to disappear. In a warm bed, with my eyes closed, it was so easy to imagine. But even then there was a bittersweet edge to it, because for all my belief that she and I were inextricably connected to one another, at the critical moment it proved not to be true at all.
    On that day, the day it happened, I was rushing to class—I had lingered too long over my lunch in the Student Union, browsing through my notes for the midterm that was now only ten minutes away. As I hurried up the stairs, I pressed through a crowd gathered around the two televisions suspended from the ceiling in the entryway. They were riveted on some news broadcast. For only a second I glanced up at it—a stretch of red desert, the wreckage of two small planes, an excited voice-over—before squeezing between two students and pushing out the door. It would be hours before I checked my voice mail and found the message from the police in Las Vegas, requesting that I call immediately.
    I had spoken to my mother only the day before. I knew she was in Las Vegas, finally taking a well-earned vacation now that her only child was away at school—a girls’ weekend with a couple of friends from AA. When I’d called her she sounded breezy and excited, telling me about the shows and the buffets, the tour of the Grand Canyon they planned to take the following day and how she should have done this years ago. I’d caught the glow of her euphoria and mirrored it back to her, enthusiastic on her behalf and envious, in a good-natured way, of the fun. She told me that the next time, she’d take me with her, and wished me luck on my midterm before dashing off to what sounded suspiciously, from her vague description, like a Chippendales show. If she had mentioned the Grand Canyon tour would be by small plane, I hadn’t paid attention. And so when I saw the flash of the television screen, heard them say Las Vegas, I had only the briefest moment of thinking my mother is there before the thought followed, but that’s not her .
    Before it all happened I would have been certain that, in such an event, I would know . A sudden feeling would arrest me, a sense of disturbance or perhaps even a premonition, and I would scramble to call her to discover what was wrong. Never would I have believed that I would sense nothing, that I would look up at the very scene of my mother’s death and hurry along to my next class, utterly ignorant. The guilt that came along with it stalked me, uninterrupted, for a year. I’d pushed on through the semester believing that it was what my mother would want me to do, but even then I nursed the suspicion that I had a lot of nerve to assume I knew what my mother would think or want. The image of those two wrecked planes, having clipped each other and fallen simultaneously to the earth, lingered in my mind like the flame of a vigil candle. Even now it remained there, flickering in the background somewhere, always. It was as if I believed that by holding it in my mind, I could make amends for my indifference to it at first sight.
    That year, Dave had insisted I come to Southridge for the holidays rather than spend them alone. It had turned into a tradition-by-accident, as every year circumstances dropped me there, and this year was no different. When my car emerged from the trees that pressed closely against the road I saw a single light on in the main lodge, in spite of the fact that it was two in the morning on Christmas Day. I thought I would slip past, drive up the side road to