Forty Leap

by Turner, Ivan

  Finally, I got them to talk about their lives. It had been more than thirteen years since they had moved to Wisconsin. Having lived outside of New York City, they were safe from the earliest attacks, but those outlying areas had been evacuated quickly on buses and trains. No one had been allowed more than one bag and that bag hardly more than a carry-on size. There had been a mad rush to keep track of the children as they abandoned their houses, their belongings, and their lives. Wyatt told of Jeremy’s decision to send them all on ahead while he fought his way deeper into the city in an effort to find me. They had argued, Martie strongest, against him going. In this case, I couldn’t blame her. She needed her husband more than anyone needed anyone. But Jeremy had dug his heels in and went to find me. He was unsuccessful of course and came close to being captured. But he had found his way onto one of the very last buses and rejoined his family three months later.

  Their lives after that were turmoil. They were refugees in their own country and they were housed in stadiums and convention halls and old apartment buildings. Jack enlisted soon after and went to fight. Though I knew the outcome of his decision, I let Jeremy tell the story, tears in his eyes. At that point Martie got up and left the room. I suppose she went to bed because she didn’t return. Once again, I didn’t blame her.

  Almost three years after having been displaced, the United States government began to find relief money for the refugees. In addition, lost assets were found and people were able to finally get back on their feet. With the relief and institutions clamoring to give out loans to the displaced people of the Northeast, Jeremy and Wyatt were able to pool their resources together and buy a house for the two families to share. They had meant it to be temporary, until they could each go their own separate ways. But time had passed, children had grown, and my brothers decided that they liked sharing a residence.

  Livvie had gone on to college and become a journalist. She was currently working as a staff writer for a news station in Los Angeles. She was married with two children. It was amazing to me to think of Livvie as a grown up woman with a career and a family. I still saw her as the teenage girl who had the decency to show affection for her funny uncle. Of course, for me, that wasn’t so long ago.

  Devin had gone back to New York as soon as he had graduated high school. Wyatt confided in me that tensions had arisen between the two of them and it was good that they only saw each other a few times a year. Devin, now twenty two years old, had joined the police force.

  As the evening wound down and we all grew sleepy, Attenda showed me to the guest bedroom. It was all set up as if they had been expecting me and Attenda seemed as surprised as I was.

  “Martie must have set it up,” she said with more than a measure of doubt.

  I didn’t know or care. The bed looked comfortable and inviting so I bid her good night and lay down in my clothing. It was only a moment before I realized that Attenda had not left. I looked up at her, this serious fifty year old woman who seemed not to feel the years or care about them one way or the other.

  “If Mr. Grundel finds Jennie, will you go to her?”

  I was so fatigued that I knew the only answer I could give her was, “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll go to her, Mathew. You won’t be able to stop yourself.”

  She was right, of course. I had no idea how Jennie would react to seeing me, but I would have to go.

  “Your coming here has been a great gift for your brothers,” she continued. “I don’t know if you really understand how much they care about you. I spent a lot of sleepless nights comforting Wyatt through tears and panic attacks all brought on by losing you.”

  Maybe I was tired or maybe I’m just dense, but I didn’t really see where she was going. I told her as much.

  “No one will expect you to stay, Mathew,” she said. “No one would want you to give up a chance to be with the woman you love. But don’t go tomorrow. Even if you can, just wait the weekend. Give your brothers some time with you.”

  I agreed with her immediately. Of course I would stay. Did she think that my instinct to see a woman I had left behind as a teenager would outweigh my need to be with my family? She was right.

  Igor contacted me the next day with an address. He must have thought I wouldn’t answer the phone if he rang so he sent me a text message instead. The message read, I found her and listed the New York address (no real surprise there) and, once again, the offer of being escorted to her doorstep. My gut did a flip and I wanted to go right away. But I thought about what Attenda had said and I made myself a promise. I think I needed the time with my brothers as much as they needed the time with me. Maybe more. So I thanked Igor and told him I would contact him when I was ready.

  I did not say anything about it at dinner nor at breakfast the next day. I was content in the company of my family and we used a web camera to contact Livvie. She and I spoke for a long time, thrilled to be able to see each other. I met her husband, Robert, and their two children. Jessica was just four years and Freddy was only two months old. The little girl talked a mile a minute about the TV station her mommy worked for and the hospital her daddy worked for. The little boy sucked a pacifier, cried a bit when it was taken away, and then spit up.

  I laughed delightedly.

  The days passed quickly. I had begun leafing through my journal again. Inside I found the picture of Jennie that Samud had printed for me. She was no longer even the girl in that picture. Nine years had gone by and she would be approaching her thirtieth year. Like Livvie she may very well have married and started a family. What use would it be if I visited her then? If she was happy all I could accomplish was friction. Four days brought us into the next work week and Jeremy and Wyatt were out of the house frequently. Attenda, too, led a busy life and was reviving her old career. Autism in children had risen after the occupation, but Attenda had become worn out and left her work behind her entirely. Only within the last couple of years had she started up again. That left me alone in the house with Martie. Normally that would have upset her, but she seemed to have taken a position of quiet approval towards me. She didn’t speak to me really and yet I knew that she was responsible for the fresh towel in the bathroom and the breakfast left on the table for me. I studied her often, realizing that the study of those around me had become a habit. I had done it while working for the UAN and I was doing it now. She was sad, Martie. I did not approach her on it, but I could only assume that the loss of Jack was a wound that had never healed. And it never would.

  So I ignored the message with the address that sat in my phone like a lead weight in my stomach. It called to me but I resisted it. But Igor, as always, had his own agenda. He contacted me again on Wednesday.

  Jennie Campbell works as a security officer at a high school. She has never been married and has no children

  He knew how to get what he wanted and what he wanted right now was to get me back to New York. Eventually he would want me to go to Colorado. I could see his plan as it unfolded. Jennie was just a step toward making me into his guinea pig. How long would I be with her before I came to the realization that I would absolutely have to do everything I could do to help find a cure for my condition? I would have to anything and everything possible to try and be with Jennie.

  But the one piece of the plan that Igor could not execute was getting her to accept me.

  Shall I contact her for you?

  He would be foolish to do so.

  I did not reply to any of his messages. It was my way of getting back at him for holding all of the cards. If I kept him waiting in the dark, perhaps he would feel some of the frustration with which I had been living for so long. Still, I could not put her out of my head and I stayed up late on Thursday night discussing it with Wyatt and Jeremy.

  “Mathew, you have to go,” Jeremy said to me.

  I was a little surprised, especially after what Attenda had said to me, but I was a little bit hurt also. Did they want me to leave already?

  Wyatt was nodding in agre
ement. “You’re living your life a few months at a time. Then you’re reborn and you have to adjust again.”

  “Your last jump was nine years. The next one may be twenty,” Jeremy continued. “We’ll be here for you then. We’ll be old, but we’ll be here.”

  “She won’t,” Wyatt finished.

  We talked longer but the words are just a blur. They were right and I knew it. What’s more, I knew that they were advising me out of their love for me, not any desire to be rid of me. At one point I saw something in Wyatt’s eyes that gave away his feelings entirely. There was no way we could know whether or not we would ever be able to see each other again. This could very well be goodbye forever. It was the most difficult decision I had ever had to execute in my entire life.

  That night I called Wil Lowenburg and told him what I wanted to do.

  The next day I spoke with Livvie again and cried and I said goodbye to her as well. I promised to find her before…I didn’t finish the sentence. We both knew that the before meant before I was propelled beyond the scope of her lifespan.

  Wil showed up with the car on time on Saturday morning. I had spent a week with my brothers and their wives. It seemed like but a moment. It seemed like a lifetime.

  Before I went, Wyatt typed Devin’s address into my phone and made me promise to get in touch with him. Attenda gave me a big hug and a kiss and told me to pass it on to her son. Then she gave me a smaller kiss on my forehead and told me that I should hold onto that one for myself. Martie clung to the shadows beyond the entryway but she never took her eyes from me and I knew that she was not glad to see me go.

  My brothers and I wept as we embraced.

  And then I was on my way. It should have been a heroic adventure to recapture the heart of the woman I loved. I should have been excited. But I wasn’t. Instead, I felt the sickening uncertainty of how she would react to my appearance. It was the same feeling I’d had a week before when approaching my family for the first time. But now it was compounded by the loss of that very same family. I was depressed and withdrawn. Wil Lowenburg tried a couple of times to strike up a conversation, but I was unresponsive and he gave up trying. On the plane, he sat next to me and read a book saved into the memory of his phone.

  I stared out the window.

  When we landed we did not stay at the airport to have lunch. Wil mentioned it but I was in a hurry to get to Jennie. I kept playing the scenario over and over in my mind and each time there was a different outcome. I needed to see her already, to know what she was going to do when she saw me. We drove steadily away from the airport and out of the city.

  Jennie had a house on Long Island. It wasn’t the same as it had always been, but the destruction there had been much less than in the city proper. Many of the neighborhoods had been left standing, though all of the houses had been looted and stood long in disrepair. When the United States had reclaimed the Northeast, they had redeveloped the land and repaired many of the houses. As incentives to draw people back to the region, most of the property had been sold off cheaply and with incentives. Apparently, Jennie had taken advantage of this opportunity to come home.

  It was nearing the end of the afternoon when Wil pulled off of the main road and started winding his way through a series of residential streets. It was a nice area, the kind of area in which you wanted to raise kids. The houses stood separate and strong. I told Wil to stop the car and he did, but he said that there were two blocks yet to drive. He even showed it to me on the GPS. I knew it. I could see it. I could get it on my phone. But I wanted to walk. I wanted to approach on foot. I told him he should go. I didn’t want that safety net. I especially didn’t want Igor Grundel to be my safety net. We argued. Wil seemed generally concerned about me, but I didn’t want him to stay and I told him I probably would not call him, even if she turned me away. In the end I was intractable and he couldn’t do anything about it. I got out of the car, thanked him for everything, and walked on down the road. I had nothing with me but my journal, Igor’s phone, and the clothes on my back.

  I was wondering how I would muster up the courage to ring her doorbell as I rounded the corner and saw that she was outside on the lawn. I stopped up short, my heart stopping momentarily. She was much older now. Her hair was shorter and braided back behind her head, revealing the smooth brown skin and naturally soft, yet hardened by experience, features of her face. She was facing me, but her eyes were staring down at the grass beneath her feet. She looked angry.

  At that moment, my feet began to draw me backward. There was no approach. There would be no ringing of the doorbell. I was out in the open. I was exposed. I was petrified with panic.

  Finally, she noticed me and looked up.

  …and looked down with only the barest of glances.

  My heart began to beat again. She hadn’t recognized me. Of course, for her it had been years. The last time we had seen each other, it had only been for a minute. She had been dragged onto a bus and sent away. I remembered that scene, remembered the hurt and the pain and not being able to reach her then. Yet we had been so close. Just like now. Could something swoop in between us and take her away from me again?

  With that irrational fear suddenly at the forefront of my thoughts, I panicked and shouted her name.

  She looked up at me and this time she really looked at me. Maybe years had gone by but I had not changed at all. I was the same man she had been with in a ruined New York City, the same man she had briefly glimpsed at a work camp. She was not surprised to see me, as if she had known all along that I was alive and not this martyr created by a starving government. But she was surprised to see me, as if despite my being alive she could not understand why I would want to come and see her of all people. She did not know how I felt.

  She approached me cautiously, walking away from her house and toward the end of the block where I stood petrified. I was sucked into a vacuum. I could see her approaching but couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even breathe. But she had no such problems. She came up to me confidently, boldly in fact. There was a grace to her walk and a straightness to her shoulders that hadn’t existed years ago. Whatever wounds the United Arab invasion had inflicted upon her had long since healed and scarred over. Would my reappearance reopen those wounds? Had I done the wrong thing in coming?

  She was a bit taller than I remembered, probably because she had grown since we had been together. Still I had a few inches on her and stared down the bridge of my nose at her face because my neck would not respond to a command to bend. She stared up at me as well, appraising me in a way I would not dare appraise her. In my eyes she was perfect. In her eyes, I was hardly so.

  “You haven’t aged,” she said to me. At the sound of her voice I nearly collapsed into tears. They say that smell is the sense most responsible for reminding us of our past. In my life I have found that to be so. Nothing dredges up nostalgia like a familiar scent. But Jennie’s voice at the moment was a reminder of something that had been separated from me by dimensions. It was a sound that gladdened me incomparably. And yet, there was a hard edge to it. It wasn’t the same edge to which I had grown accustomed. This time it was designed to cut me instead of the world at large. That teenaged accent was gone. She sounded comfortable and secure in her use of the language and, with just those three words, she had taught me to respect her as an intelligent adult.

  “You look like shit,” she continued. “But you haven’t aged.”

  I said nothing because I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Is it true then? How long has it been for you? A month? Two?”

  “Six,” I said, feeling guilty about something that was completely out of my control.

  “Six,” she repeated in a whisper, her eyes glassy now. But her tears were a strength, not a vulnerability. “Did you leave me, Mathew? Or was it just a conveniently timed leap into the future?”

  “I didn’t leave you,” I said.

  She snorted in disbelief. “Do you know how I felt?”

  �
��I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I hated you. Then I hated myself.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I let them catch me because I just didn’t even care anymore. After you stayed with me and supported me and I was ready to… to…”

  “Jennie, I’m sorry.”

  But it was too late. The rage of old had bubbled up to the surface and swept any good feelings she might have had aside. She no longer cared for apologies. They were useless and empty. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted to go. Or had I? I suddenly began to wonder at the circumstances under which I had leaped. When Jennie had approached me that night I had been frightened of what would come next. Maybe my body had used the leap to escape from that situation. My leap after that had also been during a situation in which I was terrified. Though the fear had been different and sprung from a different source, it had been no more or less potent. I began to think back to my other leaps but couldn’t remember all of the circumstances.

  But for now there was Jennie and I was still staring down at her and thinking she was perfect while she thought me a monster. Beauty and the beast.

  “So what do you want now?” she asked coldly. “Did you just come to apologize?”

  “No,” I told her.

  The last time we had seen each other, it had only been for a minute. She had been dragged onto a bus and sent away. I remembered that scene, remembered the hurt and the pain and not being able to reach her then. Yet we had been so close. Just like now. Could something swoop in between us and take her away from me again?