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.
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