ankle, the toe-end of his tights, and gone down clutching him. Instead, she changed direction. Her body twisted toward a heavy wire and she managed to hang on to the braided metal, still hot from the lightning strike.

This is the first event to contribute to the rising action, the first time nature could have thwarted the narrator's existence. As a result of the storm (and the too-enthusiastic efforts of a would-be savior), Anna must go to the hospital, and this is where she meets her second husband, the narrator's father. The narrator says, "I owe my existence, the second time then, to the two of them and the hospital that brought them together." The storm sent Anna to the hospital, and this is the second event that contributed to the beginning of the narrator's life and led to the climax between her and the house fire from which her mother saves her.

"The Leap" is told retrospectively. The narrator recalls the three events that made her life possible. "I owe her my existence three times." The narrator owes her existence to her mother. The reader gets the impression that her mother is responsible for her being alive. These three events contribute to the rising action.

The first event is her mother saving herself. Lightning strikes during the acrobatic performance. Her mother's first husband is killed; the mother is able to save herself, and the first daughter dies in the hospital.

The second event is the union of her mother and father: made possible by the lightning strike and the fall because they meet in the hospital. So, the first two events are what make the narrator's life possible: her mother stays alive and as a result of the accident, she meets the man who will become the narrator's father.

The reader is now left to speculate what the third event might be. It could simply be her birth itself. But it turns out to be something more dramatic. Note that the narrator does begin the story by illustrating her mother's athletic ability:

She has never upset an object or as much as brushed a magazine onto the floor. She has never lost her balance or bumped into a closet door left carelessly open.

This is just a hint but it does add to the rising action as the narrator begins to the describe her mother's action during the fire: the third event. The two events with the most action that lead to the climax (saving her daughter/narrator from the fire) would be the initial fall and the final leap: the leaps that connect events in life. In the first, the mother saves herself which enables her, years later, to give birth and then save her daughter. There is a poetic connection between the two events. Lightning was the cause of the first fall. And when the narrator is saved in the end, her mother's heartbeat sounds like "thunder, long as the roll of the drums." The drum roll is what one would hear prior to a dramatic trapeze act. The trapeze act/accident foreshadows the "leap" in the end. The rising action is illustrated in how the three events lead/leap to another.

The most dramatic event in "The Leap" is the mother's rescue of the daughter from her burning bedroom.

While the leap of Mrs. Avalon under the circus tent is, indeed, dramatic, it is not described with the amount of detail that is present in the daughter's narration of her own rescue by her mother. With so much description of the incident and the daring of the mother's leap onto fragile tree branches, added to the fact that the daughter was successfully rescued, there seems to be a more heightened emotional impact upon the reader. Added to this, the daughter/narrator ties the first leap of her mother to the rescue of herself that she always recalls as she sits sewing in the rebuilt house where her childhood bedroom once was.

I would...tend to think that all memory of double somersaults and heart stopping catches had left her arms and legs were it not that for fact that sometimes...I hear the crackle, catch a whiff of smoke from the stove downstairs and suddenly the room goes dark....and I am sewing with a needle of hot silver, a thread of fire.

The sewing room of the narrator was once her bedroom that caught fire when her father may have inadvertently emptied warm coals that he presumed cold into a wooden or cardboard container.  While the parents were out for the evening, the baby-sitter, unfortunately, had fallen asleep in the den, and she awoke to find the stairway already cut off by flames.

When the narrator's parents returned home, volunteers had already drawn water from the fire pond and were trying to wet the outside of the house and then go inside and rescue the narrator. However, they did not realize that there was only one stairway and it was ablaze, cutting off the bedroom above. Then, when someone tried to climb the extension ladder, it broke. The noise awakened the narrator, who touched her door and realized the fire was outside it. She rolled up the rug and shoved in under the door; then she waited.
By this time the narrator's mother realized that there was no rescue; she looked at the tree and saw only a narrow branch that just "scraped the roof." Appearances suggested even a squirrel would have difficulty jumping onto the roof from this branch; however, the mother reached a different decision.

Her mother stripped off her dress and climbed what was left of the ladder in her underclothes. She reached for branches and inched along on her stomach to a bough that curved above the narrow branch over the roof. Balancing on the bough, she leaped, caught the narrow branch that broke in her hands, but only after she had already vaulted toward the edge of the house's roof.

I didn't see her leap...only heard the sudden thump and looked out my window. She was hanging by the back of her heels from the new gutter we had put in that year, and she was smiling.

The mother tapped gently on the daughter's window. When the girl opened it, her mother told her to prop it open with a stick. Then she swung down, and crawled into the bedroom. She picked up her daughter, held her girl in her lap, and with toes pointed downward, the two leaped toward the target on the firefighter's net.

I know that she's right. I knew it even then. As you fall there is time to think.

This is what the mother has always explained to her daughter about her own leap when she was young with her first husband as the Flying Avalons. No one but an experienced trapeze artist could accomplish such life-saving feats. Indeed, the narrator owes her life to her mother.