Jumping (22 page)

I would go to help when I could, having gotten approval from Henry to do a series of articles on the state of foster care in our state. The problems are pretty much the same nationwide, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was there one weekend when they had temporary care of an infant—just what everyone seems to want most, and in theory more pleasant than sullen or abused teenagers. Well, this was an infant who seemed to be feigning his own death. Lethargic was not a strong enough word for the lifelessness of him.

“Failure to thrive,” the caseworker called it. “It's how infants express grief and loss.”

It knocked the wind out of me. All of a sudden I knew I couldn't survive the telling of his story. But my sister could and did take in all their stories, without batting an eye. These are the horrors you read about in the newspaper and maybe sometimes wonder what ever became of those kids. Well, if they're lucky, my sister and others like her are what became of those kids. Marla and Cal were a way station for something like sixty-seven kids in a two-year period.

“It isn't hard,” she said. “You just treat them as if you love them, before you do.”

Always considered the ‘wild one,’ Kelly is sort of bad-girl pretty, with unruly hair and funky clothes, everything a little unkempt and mismatched. She takes pride in this image of herself, cultivating it by being a partier, a dabbler in drugs, a singer with a heavy metal band in New Mexico, where she lives. Her boyfriends are always a little scary, with obscure histories and tattoos that could be prison art. Her day job is design—bohemian interiors, alternative store windows, ethnic restaurants.

But Kelly is a caregiver, too, in her own way. On the side, she rescues animals and has for years, both with official groups and on her own. She regularly works with hospice part time, too. She is assigned one dying person at a time and spends up to a year with that person and his or her family, helping them sort out the dying in ways that none of them could on their own. She doesn't say much about it.

“This isn't necessarily anything healthy,” she said once. “It's just us endlessly offering the help to strangers that we never got ourselves. Maybe some time I'll get over it.” Then she laughed.

We had almost never talked about the sexual abuse by our father that had haunted our childhoods, and that I had revisited when I stood at the edge of the Void. Kelly acknowledged she always thought
something
had happened, and had even had a therapist she visited for a while tell her so. Kelly stopped seeing the therapist after that because, she said, she didn't want to know. She knew her limits, and I had to respect her for that.

When I asked Marla about the abuse, she denied that any such thing had ever happened, suggesting without actually saying it that she thought I suffered from some form of mental delusion. Then she started in on her reminiscences about our childhood, always building a tidy and well-ordered picture of it. This smacked more of delusion than anything I could ever dream up, but it was so well-suited to her nature, I knew there would be no arguing her out of it. She would never admit that such an offensive thing could have happened in our family.

It reminds me of how I came to be called Babe. My real name is Elizabeth. I'm called Babe because that's what Marla named me, shortly after I was born. Everyone referred to me as “the baby,” and for Marla, it became “da babe.” Her name for me stuck, unchallenged.

“Come in! Come in! You guys are a sight for sore eyes! How long has it been?”

We come together, right there on the front porch, for our signature three-way hug, so no one gets left out. And we hold on, wobbling and laughing, as they grapple with purses, coats, and bags.

“Let me help!” I grab for the bag Kelly is thrusting at me.

“You look great! You haven't cut your hair!” Kelly cries.

“I think we saw each other last four years ago this summer, when we celebrated the signing of the final adoption papers on the kids,” Marla says over her shoulder as she wrestles her own bag through the front door.

“No!” I say. “That can't be right! Four years! We must not love each other!”

“Clearly we don't!” Kelly laughs. “Or we love our own lives more!”

“That can't be right, either! That might be healthy!”

I drag her bag through the front door, as if it was hugely heavy, which it isn't. She throws her coat over my head. We're laughing like teenagers. Kelly and I always do.

Marla is looking out the living room's bay window, and I drop everything to stand next to her, my arm on her shoulder.

“It's quite a view,” she says. She turns to look at me. “Nice place.”

“Thanks. Miles's sister Silvia found it for us. His house is not far from here.”

“Let us help pay for it.”

“We got if for free. The people are thrilled to have someone in it. We'll leave them a bottle of wine or something. Silvia will know.”

“Where can we put this stuff?” Kelly calls as she heads down the hall. “Show us our rooms!”

I pick up her bag again and follow her. “There's a bedroom for each of us, bathroom at the end of the hall. Pick whichever room you want.”

“Wait a minute,” Marla says as she follows us. “I'd like the room that faces east, so I can get the sunrise.”

“You can sleep in!” Kelly says.

“I get up early for me, not for anyone else.”

“Well, which way is east?”

“East is the front of the house,” I say.

“Okay, I'll take the one farthest back, so I can sleep in for sure,” Kelly says. I follow with her bag as Marla turns off into the first room on the right. Their rooms have double beds, mine has twins. The rooms are a lot like what we grew up with—average sized, mixed furniture, matching curtains and bedspreads, pale carpet on the floors—nice, but a little early-American for me.

As they settle into their rooms and change into more comfortable clothes, I lay out the prepared pasta, bread, and salad I've brought. I've got red and white wine—I don't know if Marla drinks anything these days.

We eat around the large kitchen table, watching the sun's fading colors on the lake. We catch up on the details of their travel, everyone's latest news—Marla's kids are preparing for the annual spelling bee, and Kelly is an extra in a television series being filmed in Albuquerque—and I answer their questions about the town. We'll tour around and eat out tomorrow.

It's like thousands of old times—who knows how many meals we've had together—in which we reaffirm who we are to each other and remember how deeply our ties go, despite the erosion of time and distance and events. We clean up the kitchen together, loading the dishwasher and then take our coffee and plate of chocolates into the living room.

Then we begin to talk about the jump.

“So, you're going to do this thing,” Marla states.

“Yeah, I am.” I wish I still smoked.

“Can we see it—the Void?” Kelly asks.

“Well, sure. Miles held class out there the other night. It's not closed or anything.”

“Held class out there! The school allows that?”

“It's not elementary school. They hold classes wherever they want.”

“That's not how I remember school.”

“Not all the time.” I pause a minute. “Come on, Marla. You're not my mother.” I'm fighting against feeling like a bad child. How can she still have this effect on me?

“I feel like you need one.” She pauses, too. “What does Silvia say about all this?”

“You can meet her and ask her yourself if you want. Miles says she's not surprised. She knew he'd jump.”

“But she has the advantage of having had someone come out,” Kelly says. “That's the thing we don't know about you.” She reaches her hand across the table between us to take my hand, and we grip hands a minute.

“I do take that seriously,” I tell her, “and we can talk about it.”

“Well, I'm horrified!” Marla blurts, getting up to pace. “And so disappointed in you! Why would you do such an incredibly selfish thing? I feel as if I'm talking to one of my children! All I can think is that you've climbed on the bandwagon, because jumping is popular now! Your job probably expects it! It will sell papers! And you must be in need of attention yourself! Are you that easily influenced, enough to risk your own life? Did you even give us a thought?”

“Wait a minute,” I try to interrupt her flow, probably not a good idea. “Didn't you read the article? You don't see any value in jumping at all?” I'm annoyed that's the only thing I can come up with, but her assault leaves me scattered. She always takes the offensive, firing the first salvo, leaving me the defensive, a position that's scrambling from the get-go.

“Value?” she laughs scornfully, an adult laugh she's good at. “In being a copycat? That makes no sense! I blame Miles for this!”

“You've never even met him!”

“Clearly, your boundaries aren't well set. It's all about working for the media, which is all about garnering attention, and boundaries go by the wayside. Clearly, Miles has romanticized jumping, to salvage the image of his nephew. He wants to make him a hero! For jumping into a hole!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kelly stifling a laugh. I feel my own emotions slide that direction, too, always the path of least resistance. It means Marla wins by default. Kelly and I have been there many times, but I'm not going there this time, even though I did almost laugh at the “hole” comment, too.

“So, I have no mind of my own. That's what you think.” Things are still deteriorating too quickly and too thoroughly to see how to salvage them.

“No, it's because you DO have a mind that I can ask these questions!”

“Alright, let's not do this all night. Do you have any real questions we can talk about? I see this as the adventure of a life time.” Oops. That doesn't help.

“That sounds like a cheap advertising slogan!”

“For condoms,” Kelly adds, and the two of us break into laughter, irritating Marla further. As the big sister, she'd still thinks she should have the definitive word on the subject, and she sees she's not going to get it. I understand that what I'm doing scares her, triggering every mothering urge she has. But I won't take the role that leaves me.

Kelly, on the other hand, is like me, drawn to the excitement of the risk and though it scares her, too, she looks for ways to vicariously share in trying it on.

“Hey, I'm writing a song about it!” We both start to laugh. Marla gets up to make more coffee and stares out the window while it brews.

“What should we call it?” She turns pages in her journal, which she's pulled from her bag, to a clean page. “And you should let me do your horoscope. We should make sure the timing is right.”

Something about the jump resonates with her, like she's got a void calling her, too, and she's just been too afraid to heed it. Now I've made it harder to ignore. Her sudden restlessness creates an unease in the room that causes her sense of humor to flee. I immediately miss it, realizing how much we've always relied on it to manage any tension. Now we have to confront the issue head on, which is pretty much never fun.

Marla gets her fresh coffee and comes back to the living room to sit next to me. They want to know why. Duncan Robert did it to find his life, to quell the restlessness that let him know he wasn't in alignment with anything.

“You like your life, your job, your friends. Why would you need to jump?” Marla asks.

Because every life needs a jump, I think, but don't say.

“Doing it scares the crap out of me, but not doing it is worse. I can't imagine wanting to live my life past this point if I don't do it. That's the truth and the best I can tell you.”

And it doesn't satisfy them. It's selfish, they say.

“We don't want to lose a sister, and you're too young to die. It's horribly unfair to put us through this.” Marla says most of this as she paces the room, but Kelly chimes in regularly. “What's wrong with a normal future—marriage and kids—you'd make a great mom. Don't you want that?”

Most of these questions aren't really answerable, or the answers are obvious—I've learned from Miles that they're just arguments, rhetorical in nature, used to further the user's position.

I'm used to it, though, having grown up with it. Most of us aren't good arguers. After a while they get tired of my answers, and of their own anger at me for choosing to do something that disturbs the order of things. Seeing honest feelings on their faces moves me. I see the consequences for others of this thing I'm doing for me. It reminds me how much I love them and they love me. I know them inside and out, and I still love them. What we have is each other.

Finally, Kelly can't believe there's nothing romantic driving my jump with Miles. “I mean, you're doing the jump together. Hello. Very Romeo and Juliet of you,” she drawls. She thinks he's probably attractive and that's what men are for, some kind of romantic engagement, when you're young—and apparently she thinks of me as ‘still youngish.’ What else could it be, in her mind? When I assure her over and over that our relationship “isn't like that, never has been, we're just the best of friends,” she raises her eyebrows and looks at me pointedly, to remind me she wasn't born yesterday. I'm left to assume she's never been “the best of friends” with any male, ever. Her loss.

Arguments exhausted for now, we head to bed. Marla's the early riser, and this trip will be no exception. Kelly's sleep paraphernalia—her lavender-scented, 100 percent light-blocking sleep mask; her hot pink, soft foam ear plugs; her sleep supplements, just in case—will ensure she doesn't get up early. She's brought her chillable, flax-seed-filled eye pillow, too, in case of headaches. Or hangovers, I think, chiding myself to be more charitable. I take to my usual routine—once in my room, I turn the lights out and stand at an open window to say goodnight to the night. It's hard for me to sleep without an open window, no matter what the weather. As I stand in the cool air now, I think of the Void, always in a state of night and always open. I know what some of the village people mean when they say they feel it out there, as if it is a living, breathing thing, waiting. As I tuck myself in, I feel sure that it will find me in my dreams. I wonder what Miles is doing.