Jump

“White-water rafting on the Pacuare River!” William says when I meet him for dinner.

I hear his excitement, but even so, I can’t help myself: “Is it safe?” I ask.

“No!” he says with a smile.

William and I are going to Costa Rica in February, a dream vacation. It’s an odd-number year, so according to the finalized separation agreement, December vacation is my time with the kids, the February school break is Aaron’s. He is taking them on vacation and I’m thrilled, of course, to be able to go to Costa Rica with William, but the prospect of being away from the kids for a week feels scary. I concoct torturous stories of all the ways they won’t return, or I won’t. Before the divorce, I would have marveled at this amount of time to myself, but now I feel only the fear, entirely unfounded as it is, that Aaron will take them and never return; they will cease to be mine.

It’s not only my fears about the kids. The list of all that I’m afraid of follows me still. As much as I want to believe that I’ve banished my fear, I know that it needs to be conquered not once, but again and again. Travel has always been one of the things that scared me—I like browsing the travel guides in the bookstore and constructing an itinerary, but fear overtakes me as soon as I start to pack for a trip. When Dahlia told me stories of backpacking or parasailing or kayaking, I reminded myself that she was the adventurous sister. I didn’t see the point of traveling only in order to be scared.

I decide not to tell William about my urge to stay home, preferably in a fetal position, until the week of vacation passes and the kids safely return. Instead, I Google pictures of Costa Rica and stare at the green-and-yellow-beaked toucans with black bodies and bright blue tufts of feathers, more like fanciful imaginary creatures a child would draw than anything that exists in real life. A desire stronger than fear comes over me. I want to see this bird not caged in a zoo, not drawn on the front of a cereal box, but outside, in the wild.

In preparation for the rafting as well as the hiking we have planned, I browse Eastern Mountain Sports, where it’s easy to feel outdoorsy. Here, it doesn’t matter that until now, hiking has belonged to the category of activities (like exercise) that I only wanted to want to do. There had been a few halfhearted attempts to take the kids hiking when they were younger but I had no good answer to the question: What about walking is supposed to be fun? My family was not meant for the outdoors—on a rare canoe trip we took on the Wolf River in Tennessee, the water level was so low we got precariously stuck on branches and made our way to the end only because, as my mother tells it, an old man in a motorboat passed by and assured us that we were almost there. “It was Elijah,” my mother still swears—the prophet who supposedly roams the earth, takes on various forms, and makes appearances at the most fortuitous of moments.

I take a pile of clothing with me into the dressing room, hiking gear for the most extreme of locales.

“Hiker. Adventure seeker,” I say as I stand in front of the mirror. My reflection—which is complete with a pair of quick-dry zip-off hiking pants and purple rafting sandals—looks back and I try not to laugh at the new person I’m pretending to be. But maybe the only way to become her is to act as though I already am her; instead of waiting to feel less afraid, start out and trust that the rest of me will follow.

 

 

“I’m leaving my marriage,” I’d told my mother as I talked to her on the phone from my car parked alongside Crystal Lake. To say this to her felt like leaping past all that was safe and known between us. I’d said I was done so many times before, but now it was different—not just how I felt but what I intended to do. I felt a ferocity unlike anything I had ever experienced, as though in order to act, I needed to tear down the borders of my own self. All this time I had been held in by fear. Now I was propelled by a fear of inaction.

My mother sharply drew in her breath. She was sad but not surprised, having heard for years of my unhappiness. My story tumbled out between sobs. Until now this was a story I’d known only about other people, never one that might be about me. Even as I said it to her, I was still surprised that I was talking about my own life.

In a quick encapsulated version, she repeated what I’d said to my father, who’d come up beside her. I steeled myself for the possibility that she would try to talk me down, that my father would get on the phone and speak to me in the rare stern tone he’d used when I was a little girl in trouble.

“We love you,” my father said, his voice cracking with emotion.

“We are here for you,” my mother said, a phrase I clung to, the most beautiful words a parent can utter. Later she told me that she and my father had stayed up all night in worry—this, the part of parenthood that never ends.

By now, I had started sleeping on the couch in the basement, where I awoke, disoriented, every morning. My dreams and my life had the same hazy unreal cast. The kids were aware that something was wrong even if they didn’t yet know what it was. Layla joined me in the basement, sleeping on top of me on the couch. Josh started to sleep down there too, in the extra bed that had once been part of a guest room.

I took off my wedding ring, placed it in a box inside another box, and put it on a shelf high in my closet. I’d stopped wearing my engagement ring a few months before, when I’d been sitting on the bed with Layla, looked down at my hand, and discovered that the diamond in the center of my ring was gone. I’d stared at the empty prongs as though I’d imagined or willed this, knowing that if it were a detail I’d read in a novel, I’d have drawn a line through it and written Too obvious.

Watching my frantic search, Layla looked around and saw a glimmer on the bedspread. “Is this the shiny bead you’re looking for?” she asked, holding out her palm.

I took it from her, closed it in my hand and her in my arms.

Now, without either ring, my finger looked naked. All that remained were the indentations the bands had carved into my skin.

 

“You look different,” Ariel said as we sat together, whispering. By now we had graduated from coffee and croissants to a full nonkosher lunch.

I glanced at her in surprise, assuming I appeared stressed, exhausted, awful.

“Stronger,” she said. “More sure.”

I held on to her words, hoping they were true. In my body, I had a strange summoning sensation, as though an outer layer had been sloughed off. I didn’t feel smaller, just distilled and true.

I looked at Ariel. I knew she could understand what felt so complicated and unsure. This was a friendship that would help see me across. Even if you were preparing to step off the edge of the world, there would always be the few who’d remain beside you. Sometimes you didn’t need a community, just a true close friend. She knew about my friendship with William, but now I told her that I felt something more for him. I didn’t know what would happen between us—and I knew that this would only make what was already so painful and fraught even more so. But I was so used to pushing away what I felt; I didn’t want to do it again. This was never how I had imagined my story might turn out, but making one change set in motion so many others—as though once you took the lid off an ordered life, all sorts of possibilities sprang loose.

 

We met with a mediator. We hired lawyers. There was no salvaging anything. In the end, with lawyers involved, it was wrenching and it was liberating and it felt impossible that this was my life even as it felt like everything that happened until now had been leading me toward this moment.

“I didn’t say what I really thought for the last sixteen years and I’m going to start now,” Aaron said angrily as we sat across from each other in a lawyer’s conference room, and this hurt more than all the other accusations. It confirmed my sense that the most important parts between us had always been left unsaid.

The anger was terrible, his and mine. It blanketed us both. After a lifetime of trying to be good at all costs, in the end, I could only assume the mantle of bad. He railed at me as though I had become an unrecognizable creature. Now I held nothing back as well, angry that my experience all these years couldn’t be heard or accepted, much less understood. We tore at each other as though only one of us could emerge intact.

In the end, the anger made it easier to go. The sadness would have wrapped around me, held me longer inside.

I walked the few blocks to Crystal Lake, where I sat on a bench and cried, not worrying who would see me. I’d spent the morning meeting with my lawyer. There were multiple therapists now, his, mine, and ours. The end was set in motion—a long list of what needed to be done in order to actually leave. But out here, I thought only about the water and the trees and my tears, not the sprawling houses behind me, not the town full of people I knew, not the web of connections that had held me inside.

I dialed William’s number.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Crystal Lake.”

Half an hour later, I looked up and he was standing next to me. I was crying so hard I hadn’t heard him coming.

We looked out at the lake, at the trees that encircled it, and at each other, both of our faces solemn and drawn. There was still the haze of unreality to all of it—when I woke each morning, I still believed that this was a wishful dream or harrowing nightmare, both at once.

“I will be here for you,” William said to me and cupped his hands together as though his fingers could actually form a net. I saw the look of pain on his face and knew he understood.

I cupped my hands too and placed them inside his. I might no longer be good—that was a word lost now inside the wreckage—but I hoped that at least I might be able to live true.

I cried for this ending and all the endings rapidly piling up. William held me as I sobbed. The path out was forged in pain. And on the other side of that, there were no promises and no guarantees. He had the end of his own marriage still to grapple with, as well as his ever-present worries about his son. I was on the brink of a multitude of changes all at once. There was no way to know how we would fit together when I wasn’t sure yet who I was becoming. It was still a skyscraper I stood on, and he was a small figure below. But more than this, I knew I needed to be able to catch myself. Having William here made it easier to leave, but no matter what he offered, I still had to jump off alone and live through the fall.

 

 

Now, on our first day in Costa Rica, we hike near the famous Arenal Volcano, on a national park trail that takes us across a series of hanging bridges. As we hike, we scan the trees in the hope that what seems like a flower or leaf will rustle, caw, and fly. We jump at any sign of movement, but the density of wildlife—the monkeys in trees, the birds on branches—remains largely out of sight.

At the end of the hike, in which the only animals we’ve come across are a pack of fire ants that bite our legs, our guide calls us over.

“Look,” he says and points to a patch of trees closest to the restaurant and parking lot.

Coming from the branches, there is a rousing scream: a family of howler monkeys, two adults and a baby, scurrying along a branch. At first we’re enthralled, but we later grow suspicious at how close these animals are to the most crowded spot of the park. Did the staff feed them, entice them here to make the tourists feel they’d gotten their money’s worth? The possibility makes these monkeys seem counterfeit, little different than if we’d seen them caged in a zoo.

The next day, we are picked up at our hotel at five in the morning, and we travel by van over bumpy country roads. Along the shores of the Pacuare River, we get a crash course in how to paddle. Hoping my new rafting sandals lend me an air of competency, I gamely strap on my life jacket and helmet.

“Don’t be afraid,” says Alejandro, our guide and a member of the Costa Rican national rafting team. He’s able to see through to the other side of the supposedly practical questions I ask and knows I’m really wondering about all the ways you can overturn, fall out, and die.

Also on our raft are four sisters whose names all begin with the letter L. “The four sisters from Ell,” they call themselves. Each year, the four of them take a trip together. They’ve been to Africa, where they went on safari, and to the Amazon, where they hiked and kayaked. As they recount their trips, telling us of one adventure after another, I consider asking them, Are you ever afraid?, but what I really want to know is whether they will take me under their wing.

On our first day of rafting, we are setting out for an eco-lodge that is four hours away and accessible only by river. Our guide is perched at the back of the raft, reading the river, which winds through the tropical rainforest; the water is green, the trees greener. As we float along with our small caravan of rafts, I scan either side of us for any flash of movement, any rustling of life. I want to see anything, but a toucan most of all. It’s good this is supposed to be the easiest part of the river, because I keep forgetting to paddle. In the distance, there is the scream of more howler monkeys. Hummingbirds whiz by; kingfishers hover above the water; butterflies that are brown on one side, electric blue on the other, flutter past, but no toucan.

“They are not nice birds,” Alejandro tells us, without saying why. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t be dissuaded from scanning and hoping.

“There’s a class-three rapid coming up,” Alejandro warns us.

Because it’s not yet the rainy season, the water level is low and rocks jut out ominously from the river.

“Lean in,” he says sharply right before we hit one of the rocks.

I lean into the boat, paddle harder and faster, and am pulled and pushed and turned and hurtled. Instead of shrinking in fear, my body feels coiled and taut. There is no loop of thought, no spool of worry, nothing but my arms paddling furiously, my legs bracing my body in the raft.

When we reach our eco-lodge, the midpoint of our trip, where we will spend two days before rafting the rest of the way, we eat a lunch of avocados and mangoes and fish and tropical drinks the same bright shade of pink as the heliconia flowers that bloom everywhere. Instead of giving in to the temptation to lounge in the hammocks outside our hut, William and I hike through the rainforest to a waterfall. I look up while I walk, still scanning the endless canvas of green. Every rustle, every crackle of branches, offers possibility. For the guides, the sounds of the forest are all recognizable. Just as they can read the river, they know to whom the screams and caws belong. Out here, nothing is simply itself. A dash of color on a fallen tree trunk turns out to be elaborately decorated circus mushrooms. Twigs become intricate walking-stick bugs. The ground moves—green leaves carried by unseen battalions of ants.

Stopping short next to me, William silently grabs my arm and points.

In a tree a few feet from us, sitting in one of the branches, there is a toucan, black-feathered and yellow-beaked. The shape of its beak makes it looked immensely pleased with itself, smiling, almost sneering, at some private joke. The yellow is so rich, nearly fluorescent, it seems to be made from plastic. If the toucan is aware of our presence, it matters little. We are simply a few more creatures in this dense forest.

My eyes can’t open wide enough. All this green feels like a silent rebuttal. Out here in this wild forest draped in growth, there is none of that sense of enclosure, none of that deadened, callused feeling. Inside this rainforest that cannot be tamed or controlled, so much life is constantly changing and rustling and cawing and growing. Out here, the only eyes watching are the hundreds of species that we can’t see, the ones that at night will light this forest with dots of iridescence. When I’m away from the strictures and structures, it feels abundantly clear that there cannot be just one way—no rule book I’m supposed to be following. Out here, the tightness inside my body loosens. The word good seems irrelevant. The grip of bad gives way. All those rules that have for so long pressed on me are like the light from a star that’s burned out, the last flicker of something that once existed.

With a croaking scream, a flash of yellow, and the spreading of black wings, the toucan is gone.

Our room has a thatched roof and an outdoor shower surrounded by a stone wall on top of which birds of paradise flowers bloom. When I shower, I look down and discover that I’m not alone. On the floor is a lizard the exact shade of tan as the stone. Instead of screaming and fleeing, as most of my body wants to do, I stay in the shower. I wash my hair as the lizard watches me.

When I come out of the shower, the lizard still in there, William and I lie together under the white cotton bedspread. Outside, the river rushes, the water slamming against the hard rock. My arms and legs are mosquito-bitten and sunburned. Every part of my body aches from the exertion of the day. William reaches for me and I for him. Between us, it is a tangled love, all urgency and elation and escape, and I want to partake of it all, this feeling that we are riding the current between us, deeper into the wilds.

The mosquito net drapes over us, a gauzy canopy. We listen to the caws and buzz and shrieks of the forest’s night world waking. When I close my eyes I have the sensation that I am still on the river, rushing downstream.

 

Before we leave Costa Rica, we head off for the required ziplining outing, at a tourist trap that bills itself as the longest, scariest one in the country. We sign up for the full package, including lunch and a souvenir DVD of our adventures. It’s early in the day, cool and damp, and with only our light sweatshirts, we shiver as we’re strapped into our ropes, harnesses, and helmets. After a quick lesson, we set off into the cloud forest.

Ziplining is scary only for the first run, and then only if you let yourself think of all the ways there are to fall. After that, the ride along each rope is a controlled glide through the trees. A few more lines take us deeper into the forest, and we stop at the side of a cliff overlooking a vast green valley. A cable is embedded in the ground, and the guides begin to hook my line to it.

I shake my head no—this is still the word that arrives first. But before I can say anything else, the word yes crests inside me. I stand at the edge of a cliff and do as the guide instructs me.

“Jump,” he says.

My legs won’t obey. Starting to count, I promise myself that I’ll do it by the time I reach ten. But my feet are still planted—there seems no way they will ever let go of the ground. I begin counting again, but before I know I’m doing it, my legs take me by surprise and I’m jumping out and the guide’s hands are pushing me hard so that I swing out, Tarzan-style, over the canyon. I rush forward until I reach the apex, at which point I seem to freeze for a moment, then soar back. The guide pushes me out again, and this time my eyes are open, taking in all the varieties of green and a sky as much below me as above.

I know I’m strapped to this cable and have to do nothing, not even hold on. We’re hardly brave explorers and this is hardly the Amazon or Mount Everest. When we return to the starting point, tourist-filled buses will be arriving. We will eat our prepaid lunch of rice and beans and pick up our souvenir DVD. But if there’s anything I want to wrap up and take home with me, it’s this sensation of soaring. There comes, in that moment, a glimmer of what it feels like to be free.