“Hey! No abuse until after the jump!” Luke says as he straps on his helmet.
The jumpy video went on for a few minutes while all of them checked each other’s packs and hardware and things I couldn’t begin to name or understand what function they serve. There was a lot of laughter and Luke and Landon were exactly like I always imagined close brothers would be. And although Luke was right about him and his brother looking and being so much alike, it’s a surreal and heart-wrenching experience to finally place the face with the name of Landon Everett, who I’ve heard so much about and who has been such a force in all their lives.
Kendra jumps off the edge of the cliff and I absently dig my fingers into the sofa cushion.
And then Landon jumps and my heart sinks into my toes when the edited video switches to his head cam and shows how fast he’s free-falling toward the desert landscape below.
And then Seth jumps and does a front flip on his way down; his camera view seems so close to the sheer rock wall that my hands begin to shake.
And then Luke jumps …
My stomach swirls with panic as the ground comes up so fast toward him. He’s shouting his excitement all the way down, and all I can think is, Please pull the parachute, please pull the parachute, hurry and pull the parachute, and, I hope the parachute opens, even though Luke is sitting right next to me, alive, and this video is old. As I watch him fall to the earth and the blue sky spin around his body, I can’t help but be terrified he won’t make it.
Then Luke pulls his chute and the canopy opens up above him with a snapping sound that fills my heart with relief. He hits the ground softly, on his feet as if he’d just walked right out of the sky, and the camera wobbles and jumps until he comes to a stop. The bright yellow canopy falls like a giant windblown blanket off to the side of him.
Luke shows me several of these videos, and I can’t understand how I can feel so afraid and inspired at the same time. I can see how Luke can say that BASE jumping is the most freeing experience, just by watching them do it. A part of me, a part so small yet so powerful wishes I were that brave, because I’d love to drink the sky and feel what they feel, but I know I never could.
“No disappointment,” Luke says beside me.
“Huh?” I glance over, snapping out of my spinning thoughts and back into the moment.
“Kendra”—he reaches out and presses stop on the DVD—“there’s no disappointment in that girl after any of those jumps.”
“Definitely not,” I say. “She seemed as happy as the rest of you.”
Seth’s bad brakes whine briefly, sharply, as his Jeep pulls into the drive out front.
Luke turns the television off.
“Don’t say anything about those videos with Kendra here,” he suggests. “She’ll want to watch them. I told her I got rid of them.” He crouches in front of the television again and puts the DVDs away, sliding them back in between other clear, square jewel cases.
I get up from the couch.
“Maybe she needs to watch them,” I say. “It might give her some closure. You can watch them and he was your brother; maybe she can handle it, too.”
Luke pushes himself to his feet and looks at me, a somber expression in his eyes.
“Kendra watched my brother die, Sienna.”
I gasp sharply, quietly, and my heart stops.
“She was at the bottom,” he goes on, “not experienced enough to make that jump in China herself, but she was there, standing two thousand feet below him, waiting for him. When he hit the ground she saw and heard everything.” He says this all so casually, with absolutely no emotion, as though he’s worked very hard toward being able to explain without breaking down, despite working even harder to never have to talk about it at all. This I find incredibly sad, that Luke would ever have to work to suppress such emotion because he knows it’ll kill him if he can’t.