All This Life

That’s what happened to Sara. First, her junior high school boyfriend, Rodney, her perfect Rodney, lost in a ridiculous mishap. They had been inseparable, kindred spirits, who couldn’t stop kissing, couldn’t stop laughing and stargazing, sleepovers in a tent outside Sara’s house, roughing it on the tough desert floor. But one afternoon in the park changed all that, an accident turning Rodney into someone else, barely able to talk. Sara can remember crying to her parents, using the real F-word, FAIR. Saying to them, “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” and they consoled their child, cooed platitudes at her and tried to help her heal, to move on, you can still be his friend, they said, he’s still alive. Mother and father tried to help her until they couldn’t. Until it was they who weren’t alive. A car accident. Both gone. Just like that.

Sara was fifteen when they died, three years ago. Fair had nothing to do with it. Fair has nothing to do with anything. Things happen. Period. And you careen from one event to the next.

These are things you know with certainty when your parents die. When they’re taken away and you’re fifteen and the courts, in all their voluminous, wide wisdom, give your older brother custody, just because he’s eighteen years old. Hank, who’s never met a steroid he won’t shoot and a fight he won’t delight in winning, and he’s in charge. Are you absolutely sure that’s a good idea?

They were sure. Good enough for the courts, so it had to be good enough for Sara.

So she wouldn’t have jumped off the Golden Gate today, but she empathizes with the instinct, that itch to wonder whether things might be better; and if that possibility, no matter how remote, offers a kind of sanctuary you can’t crawl inside here, Sara says So be it, jump.

She keeps scrolling around CNN, clicking links, following paths. This latest article produces a detail that surprises her:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The morning commute turned tragic earlier today when several people jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Multiple witnesses confirmed that twelve people playing musical instruments walked to the middle of the bridge and took turns leaping over the railing.

“They threw their instruments over the side and jumped,” an eyewitness said.

The Coast Guard responded to the scene and found one survivor in the ocean. She is in critical condition at a local hospital.

“She’s one of the lucky ones,” a spokesperson said. “Not many people survive that fall.”

The woman’s identity has not yet been released.

There have been over 1,500 documented suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge since its opening in 1937.

Sara shakes her head, trying to fathom surviving something like that. You think you’re going to some place better. You think your days of being trapped are done. You think you’ll come to feel inspired and free and pure. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. But you expect to at least go on the journey. This poor jumper has to awaken back here, in this life she tried so desperately to abandon.

No beautiful getaway.

Just things happening.

Sara needs a break from all these doomsday proclamations, so she puts her phone down on the bed next to her, peeks out the window at the desert’s long shadows, the sun still making its way to high noon to release its rays in full hellish glory. Sara sees all the scrawny leafless trees, the mesquite, the acacia, sticking out of burned earth. For years, she’d stare at these sad, stuck things and it was obvious that Sara would escape this place; she wasn’t going to spend her whole life cooking in Traurig. No way. All she had to do was turn eighteen and she was out, but here’s the rub: That eighteenth birthday came and went six months ago, so what’s she doing here? Why is Sara still planted here?

She can tell herself next week, next month, can tell herself she’s saving up money. And those can all have merit. But this can be equally true: She can wake up and be fifty years old, divorced — at least once — with a child — at least one — still waiting tables, still hoping to flee her cinderblock life but doing nothing to dilute that dream into her reality.

But that jumper — she can’t shake that jumper — waking up, thinking she’s somewhere fantastic, some place erased of all pain. She comes to, enthralled to understand the complexities of this new reality, but there are restraints on her wrists. There’s a nurse in the room. There’s a doctor. There’s a psych eval. There’s a prescription. There’s a therapist. There’s a battery of consequences for her recklessness. There’s a new reality, sure, but not the one she yearned for.

Sara keeps chewing on this, masticating away but not making much progress.

Sara having no idea what a luxury it is to chomp on the story from a safe remove, until that distance dissipated.

Until she’s the thing being devoured.

Sara suddenly getting all these texts.

The first one is from her friend Kristine and says: Um. . hey, slut?