Forty Leap (22 page)

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?

“I came because I love you.”

Her expression remained unchanged, as if she
consciously made an effort to keep it so. I felt nothing from her
and could think of nothing else to say so I turned and began to
walk away. The separation was permanent. The fight was over.

I was on the verge of going around the corner
when she called out my name. I turned. I thought I had turned back
quickly but I guess she was quicker because I barely had time to
react as she launched herself into my arms. I lost my balance and
she lost hers and we both tumbled to the ground in a ragged and
graceless heap. Fortunately, we fell onto the grass between the
sidewalk and the street. I was slow to recover but she was quick
and before I knew it she was on top of me and kissing my head and
my cheeks and my lips. This is the part where I realize that I’m a
human being just like everyone else because all of my defenses
dropped. And with them went the fear and the self doubt and the
weirdness. I wrapped my arms around her and began kissing her back
because it was my instinct to do so. I had wanted her so badly. I
truly did love her. And now I had her and it was just exactly
everything I had hoped it would be. Everything I had ever watched
or read about love was silly and inadequate to the task of
describing the feeling. All inhibitions were gone. I wanted to hold
her forever.

I never wanted to leap again.

I spent the summer with Jennie. We went once
to go and visit my brothers and they were able to meet her and she
them. Igor was good enough to fly us out there. Jennie knew him. He
had been there before her manifest had come through and after so we
had both had the pleasure. I learned that she detested him and we
shared many laughs at his expense. She wanted me to take advantage
of his “generosity” with no intention of paying him back. I
couldn’t and didn’t. To begin with, paying him back meant going to
the Colorado Rockies facility and submitting myself for tests. I
was loath to do so.

The rest of our time was spent learning about
each other and discovering our love for one another. I had a hard
time remembering that she was my contemporary now instead of a lost
teenager, but it must not have come through. That is particularly
the kind of thing that would have annoyed her and she would not
have let it go.

The rest of what we did that summer is
private, not for these pages.

I love Jennie.

I wanted never to be without her but my
affliction loomed over us and everything we did. The closer we
became, the larger the shadow grew. I would have married her that
summer without question and without regret but for the fact that I
would one day soon be gone. As the hot days turned into cool nights
and September crept over the horizon I knew that I was reaching the
end of my tether.

I tried to hide it from her but she read me
too well. One thing about Jennie, she didn’t play games. She sensed
my anxiety and tried to get directly to the root of the problem. I
avoided it as best I could but she eventually told me to
cut the
shit or go back to Wisconsin
. So I told her. Of course, she
felt the same way. It was easier for her to have hope that,
perhaps, my time jumping had come to an end, but I knew better. I
couldn’t stand the anticipation of not knowing when I would be
ripped away from her. One day I just wouldn’t come home or we would
be embracing and suddenly our arms would be empty, separated by the
years.

Since she had forced the issue, I told her
everything that I had been thinking. My primary concern was Jennie.
The next time I returned to regular time, it would be many years
later. It could be ten years or it could be a hundred. I had no way
of knowing and she certainly couldn’t spend her life alone waiting.
She didn’t want to talk about that aspect of it the way most people
don’t want to talk about death. But, I told her, it really was a
form of death. She would be in her forties and I would still be
thirty five. That’s not much of an age difference, but she couldn’t
sacrifice more than a decade for another few months. And then what?
Another jump? She would be an old woman and I still a young man.
Her life would be almost done while mine wiled on.

She could not wait for me.

She insisted she would.

I insisted that I would not attempt to
contact her again.

She spent two days angry with me. Really
angry. I can’t really blame her. I had come into her life again and
declared my love. She had returned it with everything she had and
now I was telling her that I would abandon her. But what else could
I do? So I thought I would take a chance.

Igor had played me well. He had given all he
had to give in an effort to win my trust but somehow I believe he
knew it would come to this. My condition brought about separation.
A death for everyone while everyone remains alive and everyone is
hurt. The prospect of leaping away from this time was awful for me.
The idea that others were going through the same thing made it all
the worse. With the resources at his command, I imagined that
Igor’s research facility was my best chance at finding a cure.

I called Jeremy and Wyatt to discuss the idea
with them. I did
not
use Igor’s phone (in fact, I never used
it for anything because I was suspicious that he was using it to
track me). Jeremy thought that I was being foolish for giving up
any time with Jennie on such a long chance. Wyatt, on the other
hand, understood how hard each day had become and knew that my mind
was made up. He didn’t exactly encourage me, but he didn’t
discourage me either.

Still the focus of her anger, I approached
Jennie with this idea.

She became more angry. How I could even think
to trust him was beyond her understanding. Certainly I could relate
to what she was saying, but I felt trapped by fate and
circumstance. She felt hurt.

We reconciled.

What else could we do? The bond between us
was not built but inherent. Natural. We could not fall
out
of love. It was impossible. No matter how far ahead I skipped, the
people and the worlds I saw, Jennie would always be the one.

With leaden hearts we parted, I climbing once
again into a car driven by Wil Lowenburg. She wept. I wept. We held
each other for a long time. I tore a piece from each of our souls
that day and created a wound that would never heal. As Wil pulled
away from the curb, I sat twisted in the car and watched her as she
watched me. She stood with her arms folded and her and her jaw set,
determined to be finished with her crying. As we pulled around the
corner and away from her, I straightened in my seat, dipped my face
into my hands, and wept some more.