Jumping (23 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, M
ARLA
has gone to the grocery store early to find some suitably green things for lunch and dinner. Her cheerful mood seems unaffected by our talk the previous night and all the things wrong with my decision. Kelly is up, though not enthusiastic about it, and takes her eye pillow out of the freezer as she talks, placing the cold pillow over her tilted-back face. She tells me that she made the classic move last night, intending to go to Miles' place with a bottle of wine to get to the bottom of the
real
story of the jump. She explains that she was wide awake, unable to sleep after all our discussion of voids and jumps. She started the rental car without turning the lights on, so as not to wake us, and headed back down the road, sure she could find Miles's house, which I had pointed out on our way to the cabin.

I swallow every angry, ugly word that comes immediately to mind, having used them all before with her. This would not be the first boyfriend of mine to receive a late-night visit from Kelly—I'd lost a few to her, and we'd had knock-down, drag-out fights in which we had to be pulled apart by Marla. Once, years later, as I was bemoaning the loss of a boyfriend I had particularly liked, a therapist said to me, “She didn't lose you if she stole him, right?” I understood that fear of being left, but having some kind of logic for it helped only a little. However, when I step back, I find I'm not as upset this morning. I realize I'm not worried about Miles succumbing to her wiles, and I know I would have heard from him if she'd been there.

“I couldn't do it, though.”

“What could have stopped you? Surely not the fact I have a professional, working relationship with him that you could have destroyed.”

“No. It felt too pathetic to me, too old Betty Davis, you know, in the movie where she plays twins, one good one, one evil one,” she says. “You and I are the twins,” she clarifies. She didn't have to tell me which role she thought she should play. “Maybe you're too old to play the good twin anymore.”

I have to laugh. “Maybe you care about me too much to do it!”

She laughs and says, “No, that can't be it. Maybe I wasn't drunk enough.”

“That's hardly possible.” We laugh again.

“But I was still too wound up to sleep, so me and my bottle of wine decided to go to the Void instead. I knew it was just up the road the other direction.” She lifts the eye pillow from one eye and looks at me a little defensively, a little proud.

So the Void was calling her. I'm not surprised.

“My usual schedule would have me up half the night anyway, and I wanted to see what the attraction is.” She takes the eye pillow off her eyes and gets up to pour herself some coffee, avoiding further eye contact with me.

“I'm not exactly sure what all happened after that,” she says, “because that bottle of wine did get drunk, but,” she turns to me with a genuinely perplexed look on her face, “I think I lay at the edge of the Void and had a long conversation with it.”

She shakes her head and continues to the ‘fridge, getting her cream and returning to her chair.

“I may have tried to jump in,” she says quietly, looking at me. “But I have the distinct impression it wouldn't let me.” She stirs the cream into her coffee. “But maybe I dreamed it. I thought there was an old Native American woman there, too. She reminded me of Mom. She knew who I was and showed me lights coming out of the Void.” She sips her coffee absent mindedly. “I liked her. I don't even remember getting myself home.”

I'm upset by all this, of course. For one thing, there's already been too much attention on the Void lately, and any of it could interfere with our jump. I look at her.

“Are you mad? Did I ruin anything?”

“No. Truth be told, you did exactly what I would have done.” I look at her and smile. I'm not going to be Marla's child and I'm not going to be Kelly's parent, but it's hard. I think a minute, thankful Marla hasn't returned from the store. “Let me make some calls.”

I make a couple of well-placed phone calls, beginning with Miles.

“Your relationship with your sister is so mature!” I whisper-shout to him.

“No, it's just been repressed. It got better after Duncan Robert. Kelly sounds like one of my students.”

“She's thirty-three!”

“Still, no harm done. And it sounds like she had a bit of an experience out there.”

Dammit! He's so kind, I feel like the mean twin.

I talk to my Native American contact at the sheriff's office and find no one seems to know anything about Kelly's outing. I come back to the kitchen table and sit opposite Kelly again. “I think everything is okay. No harm done.”

“That's good news.” She sighs with relief. “I'm sorry, Babe.” She's always sorry after, but she seems a bit more genuinely contrite this morning. She searches my face a minute. “There's really something to this Void thing, isn't there?”

I nod.

“I'm not going to argue against it anymore.” She gets up to go take a shower and then turns to me with a grin. “Besides, I thought Miles wasn't your boyfriend!”

Before I can answer, we hear Marla drive up outside. Without saying a word, we know that neither of us will mention any of this to her. This is an old pattern of ours—there are things you can say to Marla and things you can't. She has her patterns, too, as self-proclaimed surrogate mother, that warrant our precautions.

Marla comes in with bags of groceries, exuding order, focus, and good planning. “You two aren't dressed yet!” she exclaims, though it's barely 8:30. “I've got plans for us,” she says, as she begins to unpack the groceries, putting them away as she pulls them out of the bags, not letting them rest on the counter for even a moment.

“What plans?” Kelly asks petulantly, putting her cold pillow back over her eyes. “I've got plans, too. To do nothing! I'm on vacation.”

“I think you'll like this,” Marla says to her and then turns to me. “I thought we'd take a picnic up to the Void.”

I look at her, surprised.

“We can see your Void and have time together,” she says, “and if I'm not wrong, we can also get some exercise in!”

“How?” I ask, stalling for time as I try to determine if I want to do this or not.

“Aren't there hiking trails up there? I thought I saw some on the map,” she says.

“Well, yes, there are.” I remember I'd heard that. I've just never gone up there with the intent of hiking. “We could do that.”

“Okay, then.” She looks at Kelly. “Are you in?”

Kelly raises the pillow from one eye to look back at her. “Okay, but I get a shower first. And another cup of coffee.”

“No problem,” Marla says, Miss Congeniality this morning. “I've got to make lunch anyway.”

Kelly heads for the shower.

“I thought I'd do wraps,” she says, starting her preparation. “You get a salad in them, along with your protein.” She looks at me speculatively. “So where'd she go last night?”

“What?”

“I heard the car leave. I'm a mom. You always hear.”

“The Void. She went to the Void.”

Marla pauses. “Wow. At night. By herself.”

I hear the admiration in her voice and, surprised, say, “You wouldn't be afraid to do that.”

“Well of course I would. I've got no experience with anything like that. I'm like anybody else. It scares me.” She looks at me. “Didn't you think I could be scared?”

“Not really. I don't think I've ever seen you scared.”

She laughs. “Well, I don't think I've ever seen you scared, either!”

I laugh, too. “I'm scared all the time!”

“You'd never know it. Look at what you're doing! Look at your life!”

“What about my life?”

“Babe,” she says intently, “you
never
stayed within the
known
. That's why I didn't keep arguing this Void thing with you. You've constructed a whole life for yourself outside anything that's known to be reliable, safe, or certain. The opposite of what I've done. I live in a community of people doing the exact same thing I'm doing!”

“I thought you disapproved of everything I did.”

“Not at all! I worry, like any mother would.” She laughs again. “You'd think I could let go of that—of thinking I'm the mother of you two—but I don't know if I ever can. It's like a curse!” She shakes her head. “But I know it has helped me be a better mom to my own kids.”

“Really.”

“Well, yes. I'm able to let them be.”

At that moment, Kelly comes into the kitchen, dressed, wet hair in a towel.

“Great shower,” she says, pouring herself yet another cup of coffee. “I'm going to dry my hair outside.” She heads out the back door to the sunny porch. “Beautiful day!” she throws back over her shoulder, and I hear her singing something under her breath.

“After all, you two didn't turn out too badly,” Marla says with a smile.

“I get up to give her a hug. She gets up, too, and we hold onto each other for a minute.

Within half an hour lunch is made, and we're packed up and on our way. From the cabin, it only takes about ten minutes to get to the Void. It's not even ten yet, and the food is tucked safely into the cooler, so we've got plenty of time for a hike. We walk through the grass to the edge of the Void. Marla stops just short of it.

“Close enough for me! I've got a little fear of heights out in the open like this, without a railing or anything.”

Kelly goes to the edge and crouches, looking into it. It's how I must have looked to Miles. “Wow,” she breathes. “You can feel it.” She looks up at me, and I see her awe. “I feel it.”

Marla points out the trail head, just east of the Void. I'd never noticed the little wooden sign marking it before. The trail leads up a gentle hill through a tunnel of trees; it's wide enough for us to walk side-by-side most of the time. The little sign has told us there is a viewpoint about a mile and a half up.

We don't talk much on the walk. It's very peaceful, the light made dim by the leaves, the forest quiet, seeming to have settled into its own morning meditation. At one point, Marla says, “Is this the first time the three of us have ever hiked together? I think it is.”

“I think it is, too,” I say. “Kelly and I do hikes sometimes when I visit her in New Mexico.”

“But you're a walker,” Kelly says, “every day, right?”

“I try. It works better than meditation for me.”

“I'm the mother of two,” Marla says and laughs. “I'm well-exercised.” We laugh, too.

Soon we've arrived at the viewpoint, an opening in the trees that lets us look out over the meadow where the Void lives. We can see our car in the distance, parked on the edge of the dirt road. There's an iron bench near the hill's edge, with a plaque on it, in memory of someone long gone. All three of us sit on it to observe the sea of trees that surround the meadow and the road, stretching out to cover the hills that surround us. A breeze moves through the trees around us and down to the grass in the meadow. We watch it move through the grass, approaching the Void as if it is going to jump. It passes over the Void and travels through the grass beyond.

Marla turns to look at me. “What if you don't come out? Cal and I had to plan for our own deaths. You have to when you have children. Have you planned for yours? Have either of you?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Kelly protests. “I'm not going anywhere.”

“We all are,” Marla says to her. Kelly has no response to that.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“The usual. Saw a lawyer. Made a will. In our case, everything goes to the kids. Decided who the kids would go to.”

Kelly and I look at each other. Nothing has ever been said to either of us, so we realize we must not be where the kids are going.

Marla sees our exchange of looks. “Oh come on! This is not about you! We were thinking of the kids. How not to disrupt their lives any more than necessary. I told you. We live in a community of people like us, who deal with fostered and adopted kids daily, in their own homes. Our kids know them. They all go to the same schools, have the same doctors and therapists. That felt right to us. But let me know if you disagree.” She looks pointedly at us, then looks away. “These are high-needs kids, you know.”

“No, no,” I say, “I don't disagree. I just didn't know what I felt. Maybe I felt responsible, as if I should offer. A good sister would offer.”

“Me, too,” says Kelly. “I mean I knew it would never work, but part of me wished it could. Those are some great kids. And I'd like to have kids someday.”

“Me, too,” I say. “I'm almost thirty-five! Tick-tick-tick.”

“I'm not far behind you! I hear that clock, too.”

Marla laughs. “Well, now that we're out of the hypothetical, let's get back to you, Babe. Have you thought about it? About not coming out?”

“It's a good question, because it has two answers. First, I have no doubt I'm coming out. None at all. And yet, it's such an odd thing to be doing—to engage in an act that seems to be courting death—that I can't help but think about it. That's why Miles and I have each created a last will and testament. Mine is in a safety deposit box at the bank I live above. I'll give Marla the key, since she's already a signer on my accounts.” Kelly and I both have Marla as co-signer on our bank accounts, something we did from the first time we ever had a bank account.

“What do you think happens when you die?” Kelly asks, leaning back on the bench. “I think there's no real death, just a transition. How about you?” She's looking at me.

“I don't believe in death, either. That's what I've always believed at some level, but Duncan Robert's jump clarified it for me. He came back from the dead, in a sense, and I believe in what happened to him in the Void, too. Everything that happened to him reiterated that life is not about anybody ending, ever.”

“I don't know,” Kelly says. “I still might scream if the plane went down.”

“Do you believe in God?” Marla asks, as she watches the trees.

“I believe in the idea of God,” I say, “and I believe we're that idea.”

She's quiet for a moment. “I can believe that about my children.”

Then I ask a question. “Do you worry how you two would get along without me as your buffer?” I'm only half-joking, because I know this fear lurks beneath much of what they've talked about.