Jumping (34 page)

“Robert comes back,” I say with conviction, knowing it must be so.

“Apparently things didn't go so well for him up north, so he comes back down here, a little the worse for wear, expecting to pick up where he left off. He doesn't like what he finds. And I think he's hardly ever sober now. So, it only takes one night for it all to go to pieces. I can tell you what I heard from others and what I know because I saw it myself. What I heard was that she agreed to meet him, out at the Void, apparently an old favorite place of theirs. I don't know if she agreed to meet him because she still loves him or just to placate him.

“I don't feel good about this and know that I must go out there, too. Benny apparently felt the same way, because he goes out there, before the appointed meeting time. What none of us knew was that Rebecca stowed away in the back of Benny's truck, apparently worried about it all and determined to do her part to preserve the family. Also, this is her father who has come to town, and she must be having some feelings about that, too. She's only eight. What could she be doing with this adult-world melodrama?

“I go out in the morning, doing ceremony at the Void. I go to pray and to seek guidance, offering tobacco, corn, and other things in gratitude for the help I knew would be forthcoming. I had visions during the day and knew someone was going to jump into the Void. I knew I wasn't meant to stop it. I was there to witness so I could be of support to others. I can't think of anything harder—not to try to save the people you care most about, but it's not the first time I've been asked to do this.

“Before I know it, night has come, and I'm sitting in the dark at the edge of the Void. There's a half moon up, and its glow pales the clearing, making it hard to see where things begin and end. I hear a car coming up the dirt road and I move back into the trees, making myself small and invisible. I'm quiet, knowing things are at work here over which I have no control. I pray.

“Robert is out of the car, and I hear him moving through the grass up to the Void. He stands at the edge, and the wind from the Void moves his hair. He pulls a flask from his jacket pocket and takes a deep drink. He puts the flask away and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. Then he turns abruptly and walks back towards his car. As he does so, I see the lights of your mother's car coming up the road. He's there to meet her when she pulls off the road. She gets out of the car and I can hear them exchanging words that I can't make out. She won't let him touch her. I continue to pray, working to surround them with prayer. Soon they're closer to me, between me and the Void. I can hear them clearly now.

“I'm married!” she says. “And that means something to me! There's no place for you in that. It was never what you wanted anyway.”

“I always wanted you,” he tells her. “That hasn't changed.”

“It has for me,” she says. “That's what I'm saying.”

“I don't believe you,” he says and moves to kiss her.

“She's wrestling with him, though I think he gets a kiss or two in. I'll never know if that's what she wanted. All of a sudden, a form comes out of the dark and lands on them. It's your father, Benny, who must have parked down the road and snuck up on them. He's trying to fight Robert, and your mother is caught in the middle of it. The three of them fall to the ground, scuffling.

“Then we all hear a high-pitched scream, a child's scream, and everything stops. It's Rebecca, who has found her way to them. All three of them start to disentangle themselves and get up, to move towards her. Before they can do so, she has moved to the edge of the Void. She stops for a moment and looks back over her shoulder at them. I can't read her expression. By then I've moved out of the woods.

“‘Rebecca!’” your mother screams, a terrible sound, and then Rebecca jumps. She's gone. There's only dark at the edge of the Void.

“The shock of it stops even the world for a moment. I feel the trees recoil, and sound and movement in the forest stops. I think of Rebecca falling into the dark of that sacred space. I have a relationship with the Void, built over many ceremonies, many prayers, many talks. Every loss I ever had was shared and healed there. I can't think of it as a bad place to fall. But I know it's bad for those who watched it happen. And I, too, want her back. That was the first time I had ever seen anyone jump.

“Then we start to move. Your mother half crawls, half runs to the Void's edge, and I think would have hurtled herself in after her daughter if both men hadn't stopped her. Robert is making unintelligible sounds or sobs. He and your father look at each other, if they can see each other in the dark, and Robert lets go of your mother. He turns and stumbles back to his car and drives off. He leaves what's left of his spirit there. I never see him again. It was rumored that he drank his way back up north and then finished the job of obliterating his memories and himself when he got there.

“Your father wants to get your mother away from the Void, hoping that will get her away from the worst of her pain, so she can begin to return to herself. Of course she doesn't want to leave. I come out of the woods to help them. I find the old comforting words, and I chant them. These words are unintelligible to them, just sounds, but on a deeper level, I know they hear them. Your mother just collapses. Your father lifts her and takes her to her car. He tells me to take his truck. He realizes I must have walked over there. I follow him, and he brings her here and we put her to bed.” She pauses to settle her emotions, taking a sip of her now-cold tea. She looks back up at me, checking. She continues.

“Her life went on after that, but she never returned to inhabit it. She just went through the motions. You and your brother stayed out with your father and his parents. I don't know how Benny managed. I hardly saw him. It seemed his heart had been broken twice. Soon he left, too, supposedly to find work, but I think because he just couldn't bear to live that close to the source of his pain. He believed your mother loved Robert, that that's why she had gone out there that night. She never said otherwise. She never said anything.

“Then one night, not long after Rebecca's jump, your mother jumped,” she says, knowing I know that. She looks at me quickly. “But not into the Void, as everybody thinks. I don't think she could have jumped into the Void. It isn't a place of suicide, but also I don't think she felt good enough to follow Rebecca into that sacred space. She must have believed everything was her fault, that she deserved some punishing. She got herself into a place where she thought she was doing you and your brother a service by removing herself from your lives, or she would doom you like she'd doomed Rebecca. She couldn't trust herself not to.” She pauses a moment, cradling her mug in her two hands. She looks at me, and I know it's hard for her to do that. I know because it's hard for me to look at her.

“She tied a rope around her neck and jumped from the tree on the north side of the house,” she says. “I'm so glad I found her and not any of you. I got the ladder and got her down. I did ceremony for her as best I could and cleaned and dressed her, burying her right away with what possessions I had of hers. She's buried a ways from here. I'll show you where.” She looks thoughtful. “It was like her to arrange her death outside so that we could still use the house.” She looks at me again. “For Navajo women, suicide isn't unheard of for women grieving the loss of a child, though suicide has always been rare for us. I think she felt cornered by her pain and killing herself was her only defense. Suicide is not so condemned by Navajos as it is by whites. But her rope goes with her.”

That stops me, and I look at her. “That's what we believe,” she says. “Your weapon for getting there always goes with you to the other side.

“Those were hard days for me,” she says. “You'll never know how much having the two of you with me helped. After Benny left, his parents asked if I'd care for you and your brother. They were getting older, and the alcohol was taking its toll. They were both diabetic and not able to get around as well. You two were a blessing to me.”

“What do you know of why Rebecca jumped?” I ask, knowing she knows.

“She did come to me in dreams for a while. She still will sometimes.” She moves the cookies around on the plate, not looking at me. “She tells me she thinks her mom would have jumped if she hadn't. ‘I just knew I was supposed to,’ she says.” She pushes the cookie plate away from her.

“She thought one of the men might have killed the other, too. She just said she knew she was supposed to jump. She was at peace about it. More than at peace—I could tell that she never questioned that jumping was the right thing to do.” She looks up at me. “That's how I got any peace with it. From her.”

Then she smiles at me. I'm startled by that unexpected brightness. “What?”

“And from you and your brother.”

“What do you mean?” I remember nothing of those things that happened when Jimmy Lynn and I were three. Both of us had no memory of either of our parents or Rebecca, even when shown pictures. I know we believed we loved them and they loved us, but that things had happened to carry us apart from each other. It probably helped that most kids we knew had lost family members and many didn't have either or both parents. It was the way things were. You were raised by whoever was handy, often one or both grandparents.

“You two never said a word about any of it—your big sister gone, your mother gone, your father leaving shortly after, and moving from your grandparents. So I never talked of it either. You were the best-natured little things! You made me laugh a lot. I think having each other helped. I know it helped me. You two were pretty inseparable.”

That made me think of what makes it possible for anyone to survive. I look back at Granny.

“We were lucky you were there for us.”

Granny has tears in her eyes, but they don't fall. “I think that's the hardest thing I ever learned from the Void.” She speaks slowly and deliberately. “You can't change the lives of others. You can only witness.” She looks at me and laughs a dry laugh. “It's still a hard lesson for an interfering old woman like me to learn! I do think I've gotten better, though, because there have been lots of lessons.”

We're quiet for a few moments. I'm saying goodbye to my mother in a new way now, saying hello to my sister for the first time, and looking at what the Void holds differently now.

Granny is still clearly in the mind-reading business. “So. Look who is jumping now. White people. Duncan Robert. Babe. Miles. Who's next.” It's not a question. She looks at me intently. I can't answer her, but not because I'm resisting the question. Something else has occurred to me.

“They all come out.” I know this to be true. “I mean, Duncan Robert has. And I believe Babe and Miles will, too. I don't know about the ones before them.”

We look at each other.

“Where's Rebecca?”

“I don't know,” Granny answers. “And I don't know about any of the others. If they came out, they didn't stay around here. Their stories end with their jumps.”

We look at each other again.

“I do know that the Void is changing itself,” Granny says, “to be of better service. It's not the only sacred spot that's changing in the world. I think they're all changing. But it takes people to change them. A hole in the ground, powerful as it is, can't do as much by itself.”

She looks at me. I'm startled for a moment. Now I'm reading her mind! She's thinking me and my friends from Miles's class are going to be part of the change—we're going to jump. And she thinks it's good.

I shake my head. All of this jumping in our family, and now I'm going to jump?

“T
HEY JUMPED
. I
SAW THEM
. Without a sound, holding hands, they jumped.”

I pause from the force of telling the five of them. I recover my breath as they stare at me. “I was at the Void this morning.”

I look at them, and I know they're all going to jump, too. They just don't know it yet.

Donal shifts his gaze to the window beyond me. “I would have, too.” He's remembering that night when we were all at the Void, when he wanted to jump with his little brother.

“They're not back yet, but we know they will be. We just don't know how they might or might not be changed.”

From the front of class, as I lean on Miles's desk, I survey them. Kevin gets up from his seat in the back of the room, to pace. Monica doodles in her notebook, head hung low over it. Nathan goes to stand at the window, hands in his pockets. Donal hasn't moved. Lonnie sits next to him, flipping his pencil in the air over and over.

Spring break has just officially started this morning, but none of us plans to leave town. We all live in town or close by, and most of us will be working over spring break, not having some mad, all-out fling somewhere south and warm. We're sitting in the classroom where we always have our writing class with Miles, at the time we always have it. Everyone came. I texted them to be there if they could, and they all came, knowing it must be important.

“How did you know they were going to do it?” Monica asks.

“First, I just felt called to go to the Void. I woke up really early, and I just had to go. It was a clear, no-excuses kind of feeling. It started the day before and then just got stronger and stronger. I hardly slept.”

I look at them and then can't help saying, with a little pride, “It's an Indian thing.” Then I blush. “My Granny knew, too.” They nod.

“So, I walked over there this morning, early, just before dawn. I came through the field by my house and through the woods and stood at the edge of the trees, just back from the Void. And as I stood there, I knew. First, that someone was going to jump. Second, who it was. I was hot and cold, as if my blood pressure was up. I didn't know if I could watch, and if I did watch, if I would do something.”

“Like what?” Kevin has stopped pacing, and beads of sweat line his forehead. He's half-nauseated by the thought of their jumping.

“I don't know. Jump myself? Scream? Try to stop them?” I rub my hands together absent mindedly, like Granny sometimes does. “But I didn't do any of those things, because I knew I couldn't interfere with their jump. This was their decision to make. My job was to keep it that way. They came just a few minutes later, together.”