Join (10 page)

Joins often say that the very first moment that they are aware of themselves as a join is disappointing and not significant in memory. They experience a period of disorientation from the surgery and drugs, and then events resume with a familiarity that belies the radical change they've undergone. Their access to other bodies, another gender, other memories—each of these things comes with a feeling of lifelong intimacy. Every body and every memory is brought to a join with the experience of possessing it since the day it was created. Because everything is familiar, there is no remarkable experience to create an initial threshold in memory. Joins create the threshold afterward as they experience the advantages of having multiple bodies and reflect on the magnitude of their change.

During her teenage years, Aurora believed she got too much undeserved attention. She didn't feel particularly good at anything. People might listen to her, but they also assumed they could direct her, and they'd throw in offhand comments about her looks. She didn't know how to respond. She resented it.

Months after the join, Leap realized that those feelings were no longer a concern. Rather, Leap felt a confidence that neither Ian nor Aurora alone had possessed. Leap decided that the confidence was from their faith in each other. Their love had fused into a new source of strength.

A decade after Leap One
and Two joined, Leap decided to join with Brian Dearing, and become a three. Brian and Leap Two met in a hospital ER when Leap Two's mother had a sudden low-insulin event. Brian told Leap Two that the old name for the now-treatable disease was diabetes. Of course, Leap had already known that. Everyone knew what diabetes was. Still, Leap was disarmed by Brian's earnest attention to Colleen and the absorbed and candid way he discussed the implications of her treatment.

They began spending time together. Brian said he loved all of Leap. Leap was flattered and quickly found Brian—his unexpected prickliness, his enthusiasms, his love of rock climbing, of guitar music, and of the abundant and confusing lore of physical health—indispensable. It wasn't the same kind of love that Aurora and Ian had felt for each other, but it was powerful and genuine.

After the join, when Leap asked Chance what was different about Leap as a two and Leap as a three, Chance started with easy things: Leap's new understanding of medicine and Leap's ability to describe what it's like to free-climb El Capitan. More subtly, Chance thought Leap might have become more adventurous, a bit more of a romantic, perhaps more aggressive.

A coworker of Brian's told Leap Three that it was as if he went away and then came back after fifty years, changed by experience. He was very different, but still the same person.

The night after Leap One's
father died, his mother, Josette, discovered a surprising second set of books that covered the family businesses. Then a desperate creditor tried to claim her husband's casket on the day before his memorial service. Leap One's father had apparently been forced to be more honest with some of his creditors than he had been with his family.

Josette fired her dead husband's accountants and attorneys and was immediately confronted by her husband's brother, Chuck, who was determined to part out what remained of the family businesses for cash. For years, Josette fought a long series of acrimonious legal skirmishes against Chuck and other members of the company's board.

Large swaths of land were becoming toxic. One point of bitter dispute between Josette and Chuck was her desire to obtain and preserve a string of carefully selected parcels of land. As the years passed, the value of areas she had bet on spiraled upward. The company leased its properties, or sold at premium prices, and used the income to speed the growth of its bank. After a final, decisive judgment against Chuck and his faction, Josette would say that she and her husband had made a bonbon together. He'd made the empty wrapping, and she'd made the chocolate and ice-cream treat.

Josette and Chuck met one final time, shortly after receiving the judgment, to discuss Chuck's belief that he was being treated unfairly.

Josette is motionless, watching Chuck
across the conference table. She's the cat. He's the mouse. As recently as last month, he'd thought he was the cat.

“Look at it from my perspective,” Chuck says.

“I'm trying, Chuck,” Josette says. “But, to be honest, I don't hear anything that sounds like perspective.”

“What I'm saying”—Chuck glances at Leap One; Leap almost detects a break in his façade—“is that I've spent my life building this company. You and Ian”—he checks himself—“Leap, I mean—”

“Thank you,” Josette says, causing Chuck to hesitate. Leap recently became a Three and Join has been a fact of life for years, but Leap One's family continues to resist its reality. Despite her own reservations, however, Josette enjoys defending Leap to other family members.

“What I'm saying is that you and Leap now own the fruit of my labor.” Chuck waits, creating an opportunity for acknowledgment, which isn't given. “Look, I honestly can't make sense of what Mark did.” Mark Pearsun is the attorney Josette trusted with her business. Chuck's admission is surprising. He's not one to purposefully expose a weakness. “You leveraged a minor technicality—”

“We leveraged the law,” Josette says. “And a big problem from the beginning is that you weren't paying attention to it.”

Chuck is tiring. Even at the start, while he was recounting his successes over the years and his sacrifices—not marrying, not raising a family—he looked as though he hadn't been sleeping.

“I guess I can't fault you for using leverage where you found it,” he says. “Mark is a capable attorney. But after what I've given, I do deserve, at least, a stake.”

“What do you think you deserve?” Josette asks.

Chuck straightens, believing he has finally worn her down. “The five percent I asked for. I think that would be fair.”

“You sold two percent.”

“I didn't know it was you I was selling to.”

“It wasn't.”

“It was the
same thing
.”

Josette turns to Leap One. “Ian . . .” She closes her eyes and cocks her head, then corrects herself. “Leap,” she says, “do you believe that your uncle deserves a three percent stake in our company?”

“No,” Leap says.

“Do you believe he merits any compensation, beyond what we've offered?”

Leap shakes his head. No.

“Chuck, I'm sorry,” says Josette. “It looks as though we didn't need to have this meeting.”

Chuck, holding his aggravation in check, says, “I'm an asset.”

“Then our parting should be easier to accept,” says Josette. “You'll have other opportunities.”

“There are things you don't want me to talk about.”

“I think this meeting is over. Don't you?”

“No, I'm not sure that I do.”

“You and Mark should work out final details,” Josette says.

She pushes back her chair and stands. Leap stands and, after a moment, Chuck does as well.

“This isn't right. We're family,” Chuck says, but almost chokes on the final word. When she doesn't respond, he straightens, scorn quickly replacing vulnerability.

“Okay, then. We're done here,” he says. “Goodbye, dear.”

After Chuck is gone, Josette
asks, “How did I do?”

“Maybe a little bitter,” Leap One says.

“But, overall, pretty well, considering?”

“Yeah, I think so. Considering.”

Josette looks out the window at her property, the landscaped green-and-yellow flank of native plants bordered by a strip of cherry trees, a small apple-and-pear grove, and then a steep drop into Pacific coast rain forest. “Tomohiro can be a pill,” she says, referring to her master gardener, “but he is a brilliant man. He made this place beautiful.”

“Yes, he has,” says Leap, admiring it with her.

“We're done with him,” she says, meaning Chuck.

After a pause, Leap says, “Mark said that Chuck's completely broke. He won't be able to cover medical—”

“Are you defending him?”

“Not him, just the—”

“Good, because he wanted everything when he deserved nothing. He and your father left a mess that it's taken me a
decade
to clean up.”

“I understand—”

“Do you know what else I've done during those ten years?”

“No, I—”

“Nothing. I haven't done
anything else
. This, what we won last month, is mine.”

Leap finally becomes a four
about a year after affairs with Chuck are settled, and following a confusing conversation with Tomohiro, Josette's master gardener. Tomohiro asks Leap to meet for lunch at a barbecue place called the Joined Pigs. Tomohiro and Leap have never met for lunch before.

After greetings and a brief preliminary chat, and after they've ordered, Tomohiro says, “I am . . . planning to go.”

The way he says it indicates that the news is significant, but Leap doesn't understand why. “Do you mean you're going to work for someone else?” Leap asks.