Forty Leap Read Online Free PDF Page B

make sure that I arrived
every morning before my boss or I got a phone call. I had to make
sure that I left late, not on time, or she would ask questions. In
the mean time, I began to feel that desperation creeping in again.
I was consumed by the idea that, at any time, I could leap forward
and not even know it. How far would I leap this time? A month? A
year? There didn’t seem to be any discernable pattern.
    I spent most of my free time trying to map
out my different leaps and researching my condition on the internet
and in the library. There were some isolated incidents that could
be deemed similar, but I was skeptical.
    I found one report of a slave who
consistently disappeared and would later reappear in the same
place. He had been branded a witch and sentenced to burn.
    There was another about a Scottish jet pilot
whose plane had crashed. Rescuers found him bewildered and unharmed
in the wreckage. He couldn’t remember the crash and described the
whole thing as if he had simply winked out of existence and then
reappeared after the disaster.
    Stories like this were all over the web and,
instead of giving me a feeling of comfort in not being alone, I
branded the lot of them crackpots and felt more alone than
ever.
    My mother fell ill again. Jeremy insisted
that my recent disappearance contributed to her poor state of mind.
I didn’t necessarily disagree with him, but that didn’t change the
fact that it was totally out of my control. I tried to explain this
to him, but, despite our earlier reconciliation, a week of tending
to our mother had left him bitter all over again. The truth was
that he didn’t believe my story. I don’t know if he exactly disbelieved it, but he was sure of a simple explanation and
without sympathy. Surprisingly, it was Wyatt who came to my
defense. Of the two of them, Jeremy had always been the one to whom
I had turned for support. As the older of my two brothers, he had
always seemed the wiser and the more in command. But Wyatt had a
compassionate streak that was hidden behind a very quiet façade.
Despite their unbreachable closeness, Wyatt painted his reactions
to Jeremy’s behavior very carefully. He did not choose to be
Jeremy’s humble servant or yes-man under any circumstances. As my
older brother became more incensed, my younger brother showed me
more kindness. Thought I knew it was only partly a sympathetic
gesture towards me, I was desperate for the support. Wyatt didn’t
necessarily believe my story either, but he was more patient about
listening to it.
    Impatient, Jeremy asked me one early November
day, “What are we going to do, Mathew?”
    The question caught me off guard. To begin
with, Jeremy would never deign to ask for my suggestion on anything
so important. Here I could not discern his meaning. Did he want to
know my solution for my time hopping or was he simply rhetorically
questioning himself? Even if I had known the meaning of his
question, I would not have had an answer.
    He didn’t wait for one. “If you can’t take
care of mom…”
    “I can’t,” I blurted, only much later
realizing how that must have sounded. As an outsider looking in, I
would have branded myself a weasel; just some lazy slob trying to
get out of a family obligation. But from the inside it made too
much sense. How could my mother count on me for anything when I
couldn’t even count on myself?
    Jeremy was silent after that and the
conversation ended without resolution. Wyatt called me a short time
later to find out what had been said, but the transcript gave him
no insight.
    “Mom will be okay,” he told me. “You’re not
her only son.”
    I didn’t know how to interpret that statement
either, but I was at a point of defensiveness so that my reaction
was not relief but anger. I had never implied that I was her only
son and I had never asked for the job of sole caregiver. It had
been thrust upon me as a virtue of not having built a family of my
own. On those rare occasions when I had