first event in the chronology is when the narrator's mother, Anna Avalon, saves herself, seven months pregnant, after her flying trapeze act goes wrong. Her husband, Harold Avalon, dies when, mid-act, lightning strikes the central tent pole and brings it crashing down. Anna's daughter, the narrator, describes their act and what happened that day; her mother was taken to the hospital after the accident.

While Anna is in the hospital, she meets the narrator's father and Anna's second husband, a doctor. He teaches Anna to read and write, and she tells him about all the places in the world that she'd visited and he never has. From that time on, the narrator says, Anna has never been without a book. Her child does not survive. Eventually, Anna and the doctor get married and move "onto the old farm he had inherited."

Next, when the narrator (the daughter of Anna and the doctor) is seven years old, the family's farmhouse catches on fire. People try to reach the narrator's window to rescue her, but no one can, and the narrator waits for someone to come. Anna takes off her dress, shimmies up a tree, and leaps through the air onto the house. She taps on her daughter's window and the two jump, together, from the burning house into the firefighters' net.

In the story's present, Anna has gone blind, and the narrator's father has recently died. With "no one to read to her," the narrator has returned home.

"The Leap" is a story told from the perspective of a woman thinking about the life of her mother, Anna.

One day, Anna and her husband (together, they make up the Flying Avalons circus act) are in an accident when lightning strikes the circus tent. Her husband dies, but Anna manages to save herself; she's seven months pregnant. She gives birth to a stillborn daughter and recovers at the hospital, where she falls in love with her doctor (who will be the narrator's biological father). He teaches her to read.

The narrator grows up taking walks to look at her sister's grave, which is large and shaped like a lamb. Her mother falls in love with reading. They live nearby, instead of moving to the city, to be close to her sister's grave.

One night, there's a fire at the house. The narrator's mother and father are outside and realize that she can't be rescued through the main doors. Her mother asks her father to help take her clothes off; when he's too clumsy, she rips them off. Then she climbs up a tree and through the window and grabs her daughter, and they dive into the fireman's net below.

The narrator thinks that her elderly mother, who is now blind, doesn't often remind her of a person who used to be in a trapeze act. But she's graceful even with her lack of vision. She moves elegantly around the house in New Hampshire, a widow now, and never bumps into the items around her.

The chronological order of the major events in "The Leap" by Louise Erdrich is as follows. First, the narrator's mother, who is seven months pregnant, and her husband make their entrance as the Flying Avalons into the Big Top of the circus. A New England lightning storm brews. The Avalons are in the midst of performing their finale in which they kiss in midair when a vicious bolt of lightning strikes the Big Top causing disaster.  The mother has a split-second to make a decision about whose life to safe and whose life to risk. She grabs a lightning heated cable to save her baby instead of grabbing her husband and joining him in a death fall.The mother is hospitalized for her burns and injuries. The baby is born safely. The mother's New England doctor teaches her to read. They fall in love and marry. They settle with the new baby in a farm he has inherited. Later, when the narrator is a little girl a fire breaks out while the mother is away from home. The babysitter calls her and upon her return she finds the firemen at an impasse as to how to rescue the narrator from an upstairs window. The mother strips off her clothes and climbs a tree and leaps from a dangerous limb to the edge of the house's roof. She digs her heels into the roof's rain gutter, hangs upside down and smiles at the narrator through the open window through which she then makes a midair rescue. Much later, the mother is blinded by severe cataracts. Her husband the doctor reads to her habitually. His time then comes to die. The narrator, whose own life has not gone very well, returns home to comfort and read to her mother.