Jumper
Gabrielle Hovendon
Not that you know what this is, but when they find you they’re going to call in a Stokes basket. The holy trinity of rescue crews – the fire department, paramedics, and police – is going to stand by while you hang off the edge of the Thousand Islands Bridge, 103 feet above the St. Lawrence River, and beg you not to become a statistic.
You’re actually outside the walkway already, your heels on the edge of the bridge and your elbows crooked around the rail behind you. See, once they coax you back onto terra firma, they’re going to have to immobilize you for the long ambulance ride back. For this they’ll use the Stokes basket, a long metal stretcher with straps.
And you’ll struggle, of course you’ll struggle, because the noise of the sirens, the whirring of the helicopter standing by in case you actually do take the plunge, and the shouts of the trained suicide responders will all make it impossible for your plea to be heard: “This isn’t what I meant at all.”
The call had come at 4:13 a.m., a time when no one was supposed to have been on the road. Route 81, a lonely stretch of highway between the bridge and the military base nearby, was often so dark at night that approaching headlights would throw veterans into PTSD attacks, and it was this darkness that actually saved Jeremy’s wife from discovery when the caller, a trucker heading to Canada, rumbled across the bridge.
The headlights had cut through the darkness as Natalie scrambled into their parked car and Jeremy, perched on the other side of the rail, had remained in place to buy his wife time: No one would think twice about a lone car if they saw a jumper ready to let go.
Although Jeremy was entirely compliant with the rescue workers when they arrived twenty minutes later, it still took a fair amount of time to maneuver his unresisting form into the Stokes basket. As a result, it was just light enough for him to make out the face of a spectator beyond the ring of flashing lights and haphazardly parked emergency vehicles when they were carrying him into the ambulance.
He or she was smiling.
Not that you know how these work, but your wife will have set up an keystroke tracer on your home computer to keep your kids, ages ten and twelve, out of mischief. It’s through this that she’ll first find the emails to Krystal, the ones you composed late at night to keep anyone else from seeing.
She’ll confront you about them, but only after she’s found what she thinks is the coup de grace, the message scheduling a rendezvous at Turner’s Point on July 18.
“Come prepared,” the email will say. “If you have any questions, email me on my work account. Remember, my wife can’t know.”
Your words will stare at you incriminatingly from the screen, and though your wife will face you with an icy silence, you’ll feel that not even a screaming match will drive your point home: “It’s not what you think at all.”
The drive had been frigid, to say the least. Natalie sat with her arms folded across her seatbelt in total silence for nearly forty-five minutes, a time made much longer by the lack of light, conversation, even radio static.
They had paid the toll to the near-catatonic booth operator, then pulled off the side of the road. It was illegal to walk on the bridge after dark, as both Natalie and Jeremy knew, and it was with synchronistic stealth that they had crept around the orange pylons and onto the bridge’s concrete walkway. Though they were dressed alike, both husband and wife appareled in dark, baggy clothes, it was only in outward appearance that they resembled each other; inwardly, and despite the pinpricks of nervousness that had not abated since the still-hostile Natalie had confronted him with the emails, Jeremy was pulsing with adrenaline. The bridge was not a cliff, but his wife had delivered her bold ultimatum – now or never – and Jeremy had been forced to face the risk of diving into unknown water over the possibility of losing his marriage.
The 200-watt fluorescent lights of the bridge had made the short uphill walk into a climb through a surreal, shadowless sci-fi world. Jeremy felt the wind biting through his sweatpants and the Speedo shorts underneath and stifled an urge to put a warming arm around his wife; the chill was practically radiating from her body. For Natalie, it was far easier to believe a husband was an unfaithful cheater, something that thousands of women discovered every day, than a cliff diver.
Not that you have any way of knowing this, but the moment you set your foot on the lowest rung of the railing and prepare to step outside the walkway, your wife will be convinced. It won’t be until you see her, that one spectator outside the ring of action, that you’ll catch her smile and know everything will be all right. In a few short minutes, this warmth of assurance will be replaced by chilled sedatives administered through I.V., but for the moment it means everything.
One of the paramedics will answer his cell phone, a silver-encased touchscreen with a Flight of the Bumblebee ringtone, and you’ll hear him speak to his own wife.
“Honey, I’ll be home soon. I’ve just got this one guy to transport back to Samaritan and then I’ll be off. Yeah, some nut who tried to jump off a bridge. I know, right? Probably some divorcee or something. Okay, love you too. Bye.”
And your last cognizant thought before you drift into unconsciousness will make you smile: “That’s not what I am at all.”
Author’s Note
Gabrielle Hovendon is a junior at Fordham University currently studying abroad at the University of Oxford. A native of Northern New York, she keeps warm during the frigid winters by burning first drafts of her manuscripts. After she graduates with a B.A. in English, she plans to work in journalism, the next best thing besides writing fiction.
