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“Chuck, one day I will cut your beating heart out of your chest for saying that.” And Leap hears what she leaves unsaid as well:
for saying that while he is in the room
.

Even Leap's father cannot respond to that voice.

A warm September evening. Leap
is sixteen. His father is away. Leap got his driver's license yesterday, and the first dance of the new school year starts in three hours. Josette's curly black hair spills haphazardly around her amused face as she turns to see what he's wearing. Strands float up around her head, creating a hazy nimbus in front of the kitchen light. Her eyebrows go up, and her look goes from disorganized amusement to clear and genuine appreciation.

“You look great,” she says.

Leap smiles and is surprised to realize that smiling is the only way he knows to show her how much he appreciates her saying that. He suddenly imagines the whole universe around him, stretching out to infinity in every direction and still expanding. He thinks of a picture of the Horsehead Nebula, mounded and uncurling in pastel colors against the vastness and darkness of space. He isn't even an iota in all of that grandeur. And then he sees the look on his mother's face.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Do you want to drive?” she asks him, and holds out an authorization badge for the car. “I keyed you in a few minutes ago. You can start it now.”

“Yeah, sure,” he says.

He had thought he was full up with appreciation for her. But in some impossible way, his gratitude actually increases.

The old woman leans back,
away from the spoon, her angry glare focused on her son. “I'm your mother, dammit. You'll do what I say.”

“Technically,” says Leap One, pushing the spoon closer to her again, “you're one of my mothers. One of four. So I'll do about a fourth of what you say.”

The old woman, Josette, grimaces, accentuating her pallor and the mottled violet rash on her cheek and on the bridge of her nose. “Who decides?” she asks.

“What?”

“Who decides which fourth?”

“I do.”

“Humph. I'm shut out again.”

The skin of her face has a papery quality. There are sores at the tips of her fingers. Leap sees the nearness of her extinction and wants her to be angry like this. Leap wants more of her, wants her to flare up and fill the room with her anger, the intense white light that has been her for so many years. Leap wants more of her than what is left.

“Look,” Leap One says, “you haven't eaten anything today.”

“Of course not. I'm not hungry.”

Leap sits back in his chair. “Mom, you've got to eat something.”

“I ate a lot yesterday. You even told me I did well.”

Ah, how love can sharpen to condescension at the touch of a master. She sees his glum response.

“I'm sorry, Son,” she says. “If that's what you are. I'm just not hungry. Why don't you leave me be for an hour or so, and then I'll try again? What do you say, an hour? I promise.”

She's been saying this for about eight hours now, since he first tried at seven this morning. First, “In a little bit.” Then “Come back in twenty minutes.” Now “In an hour. I'll try then. I promise.”

Leap has always known that unmet promises are rarely empty; rather, they're filled with the unspoken things people don't want to do or can't do. Both of Leap One's parents, as they grew older and could do less, promised more. His father's promises, like banknotes from a failed state, all ended null and void. His father did many things before passing on, but none of them involved cleaning up his affairs. His mother continues to print promises like a central banker, but at least she's transparent about her attempts to use them.

Two years ago she was diagnosed with an advanced, degenerative autoimmune disease. Rare, debilitating, it includes severe arthritis as well as symptoms similar to lupus and Raynaud's syndrome. It's one form of a collection of pathologies that had all been classified as mixed connective tissue disease. In the two years since her diagnosis, her symptoms have been progressing relentlessly. Now when it's bad, she stays in bed for most of the day.

Josette has just woken up.
She'd been severely constipated and groaning in pain for hours. Jenny, her home-care nurse, helped her get through that. Afterward, Josette had the longest uninterrupted sleep she'd had for days.

Jenny says the constipation is normal, as is her lack of appetite. Which leaves Leap in a dark mood and wondering how useful eating actually is now. It's almost a ritual the two of them are practicing so they can share something by pointing together at hot soup and saying to each other,
Life! We're miming living by arguing over whether to eat!
But Leap's mother isn't playing today. The ritual is tiring her out.

Josette won't take more morphine, and Jenny hasn't been willing to intervene. Puzzled and powerless, Leap has watched as his mother's pain has gotten worse. There are times when he's reading to her or sitting by her bedside and she starts to talk to herself, first about how bad the pain is, then about other things. Her childhood. The argument she had with Hattie about draping for the rodeo. The argument with Chuck about selling the bank. It's almost always arguments, and almost always very bad ones.

Leap wonders at the irony of leading a long, good life and then, near the end, rather than being able to stand back and appreciate the whole, endlessly revisiting the difficulties. At this moment, how much is his mother benefiting from the life she lived? And if not now, when? Well, Leap thinks, at least he can be here.

“You can do something about it,” she says, shocking him out of his reverie.

“What?”

“I don't deserve this. I loved you. I raised you. You can do something about this.”

For a moment, Leap can't follow. If she's referring to what he thinks she's referring to, then they've had this conversation. He thought she understood and that she had ultimately found the idea revolting. Her word. He says, “You didn't want that, and unless you want it, I can't do it.”

“Can't? Which one can't? Who can't? My boy could! My boy could. Who are you? I don't know you. Do I know you? Get out. Until you're ready to help me, get out of here!”

Leap One places the spoon back in the bowl and stands. He puts the bowl on a large yellow doily on her dresser top. He rubs his hand through his beard, the kinked hair rough against his fingers and his palm. He pulls at it as he thinks about what his mother is asking.

“Help me,” she says. “Help me or get out. And ask Jenny to come here. I need her. She's so sweet.”

Leap walks to the door. “Jenny's gone for the day,” he says. “She'll be back tomorrow. You'll have a new nurse tonight.”

“Okay,” says his mother. “Explain to her about the morphine before she gets in, will you. How I don't want it. Will you, love?” Her voice has become distant again. She is distracted.

Leap stops at the top of the staircase and turns to look back at his mother. Her eyes are closed.

Her face is damaged by the disease, discolored in patches. She is making an effort for each breath. In her tight forehead, clenched jaw, and rigid throat, pain uncoils and coils.

“I'll talk to her,” he says.

Josette has two weeks of
nightmares. Each night she lies groaning. Now he hears her screaming at the top of her lungs. Leap Three rushes into the room to find the nurse beside her trying to soothe her, to quiet her. Her body is so frail. But she's bolt upright, and she's still screaming, terrified of something that's followed her out of her dreams, and Leap is afraid that the knotted threads of muscle in her neck will snap through some brittle tendon or bone that holds the rest of her together.

A few very long moments later, and she's quieted. She asks for tea. She won't discuss it. None of them has slept. They're all exhausted and on edge.

Josette and Leap Two are
driving home together from a dinner out. She's had several days of improvement. Now she's quiet, tending her own personal garden of care. When they're almost home, she turns to Leap Two and says, “I'm not sick. I'm just dying. And I don't want to.”

“You are sick, but you're not going to die. You can still get better.”

Josette laughs. There's no bitterness in it. “
You're
not going to die,” she says, “but
I
obviously am. When I made my decision, I could accept it. Millions of years of inevitability. None of us had had any choice. That was how we accepted it. Your kind changed all that.”

Leap says, “You chose to stay solo.”

They drive for a while, skimming low over the forests of Douglas fir and western hemlock. In the distance, on their right and left, the forest curves up toward the slopes of low mountains. Across the mountain range on their right is the Pacific Ocean, tossing and wild, but here the day is muted, broken by broad, visible shafts of sunlight falling through high, drifting cumuli.

Neither of them is connected at the moment. Both of them are musing. Leap Two looks over at Josette to see the old woman watching her. Leap smiles.