Jumpseat - Eve Kerrigan

Hilary and Jamie sat on the roof together in silence for a long time. They were strangers. They didn't know each other's names, but they sat like old friends who don't need to talk because they already know everything about each other. Neither wanted to break the silence. It felt sacred. It was the only monument they could find that appropriately honored what they were there to do. It was the medal they wore for their bravery, their experience and their choice.  They were afraid to speak. They were afraid words would break the spell and the world would be hell all over again.

And then...

Well, then,  they would have to do what they came here to do.

Hilary had rarely felt so connected to anyone in her life. Not her parents or Lionel. They had loved her and she missed them, but she never felt connected to them, really. The choices Hilary's mother and father made had formed her, but not in the way they hoped.

They brought her to New Guinea when she was just 3 and Lionel was 1. Hilary remembered her mother's pretty dresses and perfect hair, even in the feral heat and the mad winds of hurricane season. She baked cakes that could have graced the cover of Better Homes and Gardens Magazine. How did she know how to adjust her recipes for the latitude? Hilary's father kissed her on the head as she entered the little village church, singling her out, making her special for a moment. She held Lionel through their father's sermon. Her mother led the hymns in her hose and pumps and demure lipstick.

 Hilary remembered going to her lessons. She would have been in the first grade. She was late, so she cut through the field with the tall grass. She was not supposed to go that way, she knew. Her father forbade her to leave the road but she had seen older kids do it and it was better than being late for Miss Katie's class.

She thought for a moment she was looking at an angel. There, in the tree, was the dark silhouette of a man. He was still, but wings spread out and moved at his back. She walked slowly toward the vision. The wings moved, the shape grew distorted. This was no angel. This was a man, and he was dead – a dead man covered in buzzards and flies.

The man had been garrotted and hung from the tree with the wire that had been used to cut his throat. His head hung back and his neck opened like a hungry animal's mouth. Each time the birds and insects moved to feast on another part of the man, Hilary could see a fresh horror that he had been subjected to before his last breath. She stared for what seemed an eternity at the place where his genitals should have been. She had never seen a grown man's penis, but she knew the small, bloody crater there was wrong. She didn't know how long she stood there before Miss Katie found her.

She had seen that image in her dreams every night since then. Sometimes the gash between the man's legs spoke to Hilary. Sometimes the vultures did. She could never remember what they said, but it didn't matter. They talked in a language of blackness and pain, opening their mouths to give her a glimpse of worse sights within. After her parents died, the dreams got worse.

Not everything about New Guinea was bad. Sometimes she missed it terribly. She missed the sweet old ladies that gave her pieces of a cracker-like bread they made from drying tapioca mush in sheets on the roof of the house. She missed her friend Carson. He and his family went back to Texas the year before she returned to the United States. She wrote to him a few times but eventually he stopped writing back. Her mother said in the kindest way she could that Carson was “troubled.”

Well who wasn't? Isn't that what brought her here tonight? Hadn't her parents been troubled, if not in life, then in the manner of their death? Surely this person who sat beside her was troubled. He didn't come here to see the stars, she knew. She could tell.

Ah, but it was a beautiful night. She remembered nights like this as a child, but even clearer. She remembered the stars sparkling and twinkling so much that if you fixed your gaze on one spot in the sky, you would see every other tiny light in the firmament dance out of the corner of your eye. It made you feel lonely and small but part of something all at once.

It had been centuries since Hilary had felt anything. Her heart beat in chest. She could feel it was still there. She ran her fingers lightly over the small scars on her arms, feeling their thread-like relief. She moved her palm onto the coarse masonry of the wall where she sat. She inched her hand almost imperceptibly toward the person to her right. She held her breath. She sat for what seemed like an eternity this way, gazing into the blackness between two stars.

The cool weight of a hand larger than her own came to rest on hers. Again, lifetimes passed as they sat this way.

Hilary's voice was low and hoarse when she whispered the words.

“We could both jump.”

A pause, and then the weight of his hand was gone. She closed her eyes and tilted her body forward.

Gravity is huge when you are up high. It is a profoundly persuasive force. People with vertigo know this. Gravity lives in mass. Heavy objects want to pull you toward themselves. The heavier they are, the more they want you. They want to pull you so hard and fast that you are embedded inside them and they never want to release you. There was something comforting in that, but also something terrible.

Gravity was stroking Hilary out of her jumpseat now, coaxing her forward to fall into the black spaces between the stars and thud into eternity. She had no connection to anything now except the ground that was reaching up. The hand on hers had been removed and she was alone again. This was why she had come here.

Hilary flew through the air, the tiny hairs at her neckline smarting. And then she landed. But she was not inside the earth. She was not in blackness. She was lying on her back and she could still see stars. Above her was the silhouette of an angel,  a man's shape made out of darkness. It spoke to her.

“I'm Jamie” he said as he extended his hand to help her up. She stood and looked from the square of roof where she stood out over the wall she had sat on for so long. The night was breaking and the sun was hinting at its arrival.

It had been hours since she had stepped out there ready to jump and found him, already sitting in the spot she had intended to make her last purchase on earth.

“Hilary” she said.

He took her hand in his.

“Come on Hilary.Let's go.”

The rooftop door slammed behind them as they descended the stairs like mortals and made their way, together, onto the street.