Mirage

by Tracy Clark

  “Bad, huh?” I ask my father as the doctor prods my cheek. He’ll steel himself and tell me the truth.

  “You’re beautiful,” he answers without averting his eyes from the lie. That small, unexpected kindness from him is enough to choke me up.

  The doctor turns toward the cabinets and opens a drawer, telling me how to care for my wounds until they’re fully healed. She turns back toward me and holds up a hand mirror directly in front of my face.

  It’s me and it’s not me staring back. It’s never just me. I thrust the mirror away, but the doctor wasn’t expecting my reaction, and it clatters to the floor, fracturing into angular pieces. Dozens of different-size eyes stare up at me.

  “Ryan, please stay calm.” My mother wraps her arms around me. “It will heal. You’re going to be okay.”

  The doctor tries to reassure me, telling me that it’s always hard for people to adjust to facial scars but that it will heal and be much less noticeable over time. I hear only half her words before running out of the room, crushing eyes under my heels as I go.

  Fifteen

  THERE’S NO WAY they can catch me. It’s painful for my dad to run due to his war injuries, and my mother has nothing on my long-legged speed. I had to get out of there, out of the confining antiseptic of the medical building and into the open air. It’s exhilarating to run full-out like this, the exquisite tension and release of every muscle doing its job. Every breath is life itself inflating my lungs, coursing oxygen through my blood. No matter my confusion, uncertainty, and fears, I’m lucky to feel all of it. I’m lucky to feel at all.

  My heart pounds a cadence: I’m alive. I’m alive. Even she is quiet right now beneath the thrum of it.

  I zigzag through side streets and alleyways until my body is running on fumes, the cut on my cheek throbs with my pulse, and I come to a gasping halt on a street corner. I need to call Joe. He’ll come for me, sit with me, let me cry without explanation. He will look at me tenderly. He’s the only person in this world who doesn’t want anything from me right now that I can’t give.

  There are already three messages on my cell from my parents asking where I am, begging me to stay calm and let them come get me. Thankfully, Joe answers my call right away. I try to direct him to wherever I am. “I wasn’t exactly looking where I was going,” I say, giving him the street names of the intersection in the quiet neighborhood where I finally stopped.

  There’s something about the names that runs tickling fingers up my back. This neighborhood conjures an intense feeling of déjà vu. A knowing without knowing why. I venture a few feet down one beckoning street in particular, thinking I shouldn’t go anywhere, but I can’t seem to stop. The gentle dips and sways of the aging picket fences pull me along like the handrail of a bridge toward a mysterious destination. I glance back, looking for Joe, but I have to keep going; I have to know where the feeling leads.

  Death is still quiet in my head, as if she’s as curious as I.

  All I can do is follow my feet, which plod a deliberate path to a vague end. With each step, my agitation builds. I’m simultaneously compelled to search and yet terrified of what I’ll find. I don’t understand this. As if I’ve reached a cliff, my feet scuffle to a halt. Rocks tumble over the edge of my mind as I stop and stare.

  In front of me is a house. A modest, blah house on a modest, blah street. It’s dilapidated and looks abandoned. But I can tell it was beautiful once. The grass is dead and sparse like residual hairs on a skeleton. Stapled to the door, the corner flap of an aged notice rustles in the hot afternoon air.

  There is no life in this house. It’s a shell of what it once was.

  The memory of a death rises up. I recall thinking how a body looks so much smaller when there is no soul to fill the spaces: like a balloon, wrinkled, puckered, half-deflated on the hard, cracked ground. I find it alarming that I can’t recall right now whose dead body I viewed. Do I know anyone who has died? My father has never let me see the bodies of the skydivers who bounced. Have I ever attended a funeral?

  Tears drop onto my neck, surprising me, like a chaste peck of rain on the forehead. This house makes me inexplicably sad. I can’t make sense of it.

  A blaring honk startles me. I swing around. Joe leaves the car running as he steps out. His face shines with sweat and a frantic expression. “What are you doing over here? Why didn’t you stay on the corner where you told me to go? I’ve been looking all over for you.” He clutches my upper arms, leans forward to kiss my cheek, pauses, and switches to the uninjured cheek. I’m directed to the passenger side of the car, where he opens the door, sits me down, and buckles me in like I’m two years old.

  “I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say. I wasn’t thinking, just following an indistinct trail, mindless, like a hound with the barest whiff of something it wants. A terrified thought rushes in: maybe she led me there, somewhere random and empty where people wouldn’t be able to get to me until it was too late. Fear wraps its fingers around my heart and squeezes. That’s why she was so quiet.

  It’s not a good sign when Death holds her breath.

  “I’m glad you found me. Can we go now?” I say with a quaking voice. I want to be very far from this house, but Joe hasn’t moved the car. He’s busy punching a text into his phone. “What are you doing?”

  “Letting your parents know I’ve got you.”

  I shake my head. “You’re not going to hand me over. I need a break from them right now, Joe. That’s why I called you.” I curl my fingers over his hand on the gear. “I need you to distract me, take me somewhere where I won’t think so much.”

  “I’m letting them know you’re okay, which is what you should have done if you were thinking straight.” He sighs, regret on his face. “Sorry. But everyone is worried about you, sister love.”

  “Don’t take me back yet.” I fix him with a hard stare. “I’m not asking.”

  He blinks his agreement, and we drive aimlessly for a while with the radio blasting, top down, and warm air filling the space around us. The desert smells like sage leaves brushed with rain, then baked. I’ve held my eyes closed since we left the abandoned house. My fingers catch the wind outside, first cupping and holding it, then flexing against it. The resistance hits my flat palms and I smile​—​muscle memory of dancing in air.

  “Been to the drop zone much?” Joe asks, as if he can read my mind.

  “Not at all, actually.”

  “Might be good for you.” The car comes to a slow stop, and I open my eyes to see he’s pulled up at the airport. We bump down the dirt road adjacent to the landing circle. Out of habit I gauge the windsock, and a memory blows by. “Dom and I wanted to make a skydiving calendar of jumpers wearing only the windsock and maybe some jump gear.”

  “I know,” Joe says. “You let him take sexpot pictures of you as a test run.”

  “Oh . . . that’s right.” He hands over a bag of pistachios, and we recline our seats to watch for the jumpers. “Why don’t you like him?”

  “Why haven’t you asked before? I’ve been wondering why my opinion didn’t matter to you.”

  “My opinion mattered more, I guess.”

  Joe fights with a pistachio shell that doesn’t want to open, gives up, and tosses it in the dirt. We both squint at the jump plane roaring past us down the runway before it leaps into the air. He is thoughtful but finally answers my question.

  “A couple of years ago, my dad showed me how to use jumper cables on the car battery. He was adamant that I follow his instructions to the letter so I wouldn’t blow up the car or myself or be burned by acid or something. I was freaking nervous. I’d be heading toward the battery with these cables and clamps like I was walking to the electric chair, imagining it zapping me and frying me crispy.” He tosses more pistachio shells onto the ground. “You know the feeling when you’re playing that game Operation?”

  “I love that feeling,” I answer, remembering the exact sensation of combined fear and excitement.

 
“Right. Well, the thing about you and Dom is, you both like that feeling a little too much. Though”​—​Joe chuckles​—​“you might be even higher on the need-for-adrenaline scale than him. Anyway, your love is a white-hot electric arc. I’m afraid you’ll get burned by it.”

  Just as he says this, I see Dom walk out of the hangar. I know what it feels like to walk shoulder to shoulder with him. I remember the taste of his mouth after a long day of jumping, a mixture of sweat and excitement and his spearmint gum. I recall every word he’s ever uttered to me about how remarkable and beautiful he thinks I am. I remember my own words of love and admiration back to him. I remember one night, lying on the grass behind the hangar and staring up into the sea of stars, I told him that I thought we were two halves of the same star. He called me his Lady of Light. Our fire burned the same. Later, he gave me a painting he’d done of a split star, with tendrils of light from the two halves still connected like they were reaching for each other. All of these are beautiful memories but not sensations. I should feel, but I don’t.

  I feel dead.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  Avery jogs after Dom and follows, puppylike, at his heel. Her hands move excitedly as she talks. While his head is craned toward the sky and the airplane, hers is craned toward him.

  “I think I have to let him go,” I say, watching Joe’s face for a reaction. I can’t tell if this pleases him or not. For the first time in hours, though, the spirit reacts. I quaver like someone is grabbing the cage of my ribs and shaking them. My hands dig into the leather seat.

  Joe suddenly points skyward. “There they go!”

  The plane slows over the drop zone. Little by little, I’m able to make out the forms of bodies dropping. They’re specks, dust motes in the shafts of light between clouds. One by one, parachutes open like falling blossoms against the blue sky. It’s unbearably beautiful.

  Joe pulls me in to his side and wipes my cheek. “Don’t worry. You’ll be up there again soon.”

  “I don’t know​—”

  “Not hearing it. This watered-down Ryan can stay for a while, but sooner or later the real Ryan is going to come back to us, stronger than ever.”

  “She might be gone forever.” I sniff, curling closer to his warmth.

  “Only if you want her to be.” We sit in silence like that, watching the skydivers float down to earth. Joe shoos me back to my side and starts the car. “I know what you need: some good old-fashioned fun. I need it too. I’ve missed you. You game?” When I stare at him blankly, he whispers, “The right answer is . . .”

  I blink the tears away. “Always.”

  “That’s my girl. Let’s go.”

  Sixteen

  WE PULL UP at Joe’s house. The patch of lush green grass in front curls my toes with want. My mother says it’s the Caribbean in us that makes our skin forever thirsty for green.

  “Hello, Mrs. Lawrence,” I greet the petite woman who’s bent over a table, gluing colored shards of glass into a bright mosaic. She wipes her hands on her apron and hugs me tightly.

  “What’s this Mrs. Lawrence business, honey? Now, you come right in and sit down. Tell me how you’re doing.”

  “I’m okay, I guess.” Her shrewd brown eyes scan my face, my hands. She’s watched me grow up, and I can see in her eyes that she knows how I’m doing just by looking at me. I’m getting used to that disenchanted downward flick of the eyes that says I’m less now. “I’m a mess, right?”

  A weak smile. She’s good enough not to deny the truth.

  Joe grabs my hand and pulls me. “That’s why we’re here. Ma, do you have a robe we can borrow?”

  “A robe? I need a robe for good old-fashioned fun?” I ask into his shoulder.

  “Honey, no fun is gonna start with you​—​and I say this with complete and utter love​—​looking like you’ve been sleeping with bears on the Pacific Crest Trail for a month.”

  Joe scurries around, making lemon water, bringing me a plate of fruit and cheese, and running a bath overflowing with frothy bubbles. He unwraps a travel toothbrush and tosses it on the bed next to me with a look that says, Scrub the ass out of your mouth this instant.

  I change into the robe and sit in stupefied silence at how he cares for me, and for the first time in a while I’m embarrassed by how I look, especially as Joe stands in front of me and assesses my hair. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with that gnarly ’fro of yours,” he says, with his hands on his hips. “The fact that you’ve let it go like this worries me more than anything else. Let’s start with the basics like water and shampoo and go from there.”

  “Can we cut it?” I ask, surprising myself.

  His eyes widen. “You want to hack at that glorious mane of curls you’re so vain about? That doesn’t make me question your sanity at all.”

  He takes me by the shoulders and walks me to the bath, slipping the robe off as we go. I smell how rank I am. I clutch the robe to me, and he laughs. “Modesty? You?” I bite my lip and step toward the tub. The scent of ginger wafts around me as I sink into the white blanket of bubbles. “Lean your head back.” He pours a pitcher of water over my head. Having fingers massage soap into my hair feels luxurious and decadent. There is a cat deep inside me, purring with delight.

  Joe leaves for a bit to assemble some kind of “suitable” outfit for me to wear. My scalp tingles. I wash the rest of me, thinking of the vulnerability Gran must feel every time I’ve had to bathe her. I haven’t given myself much consideration lately. My body is foreign to me. Sticking my legs out of the bubbles, I admire the elongated power of my thigh muscles, the length of my legs, which stretch out beyond the end of the tub onto the white wall of the shower. I run my hand over my sinuous arms, even my long toes. Everything about me is stretched and strong.

  The inside used to match the outside. Even Joe misses the old Ryan. He said so at the airport. It’s the first time I can remember him wanting something I couldn’t give. I’m so lost. Makes me want to snap my fingers and be that Ryan again, but I don’t know how to begin. Perhaps it is time to skydive again. Something to jump-start myself.

  My skin is tender around the healing cuts, so I gently pat myself dry and try to pull my fingers through my tangled hair. It’s hopeless. “Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Get the scissors.”

  His brows crinkle. “I’m not so sure​—”

  “You do it, or I will.”

  Snap.

  He holds up his hands in surrender, but his pleased smile tells me he likes seeing a spark of my previous fire. “Fine, fine. It’s only hair. I’ll be right back.” He returns moments later with a chair and scissors, and positions me in front of the mirror. I fist a hunk of my ringlets and clip them off, all the way to the scalp, in one snip. Cold air swirls around me. We are not alone in this tiny bathroom.

  I hand Joe the scissors, flip the chair around, and sit. “Finish.”

  “Well, after that cut, I have to, just to make you look okay. Either that or you’ll be wearing hats for a year. You don’t want to watch?” he asks.

  “No.”

  I don’t want her watching me.

  “I trust you,” I tell him with a squeeze to his hand. “Make it really short.” Nerves fire off in my belly as the metal blades slice together. A snarled ringlet coils on the floor. I close my eyes.

  “I gotta say,” Joe says, standing back and admiring his work. “It shows off your face. It’s weird, though. You look three inches shorter without all the fluff on top.” Skull and soft fuzz are all I feel when I rub my hands over my head. But when I turn around, I don’t like what I see. “I look like a cancer patient,” I say, swallowing inexplicable tears that rise up with those words.

  Joe hugs me from behind. “You look like the rebel you are.” Then his voice softens. “You look like a fresh start.”

  We hang for a couple of hours, watching a movie and talking until the sun dips below the mountains. He’s pulled together a pretty cute out
fit, though I still don’t know where we’re going. Jeans roll up my calves, a couple of tank tops are layered, and he wraps one of his mother’s scarves over my newly shorn head.

  “Where we’re going, no one will care how you look.” With that he hands me a cargo jacket and we wave his mom goodbye. This feels good. Some kind of normal. I was right to go with Joe; I needed to get out of my own head for a while.

  Getting to the larger city of Palmdale is a bit of a drive. We pull into In-N-Out Burger, order Animal Style cheeseburgers and fries, then head to Joe’s super-secret fun place, which is apparently located in a strip mall with a doughnut shop, laundromat, and nail salon. Small groups of guys and a few girls cluster around the front door. Intermittent flashes of light slide by as the door opens and closes. Music thumps from inside.

  I clap my hands. “A dance club!” The excitement I feel is a welcome change. Misery begets misery as . . . someone used to say. Who used to say that? It’s another of those moments when memories feel as intangible as fog. Through the fog a man’s voice spits lofty phrases and Bible quotes at me: For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us!

  “Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one suffering.”

  “What did you say?” Joe asks over the noise.

  Rattled, I shake the thoughts from my head. “Nothing.”

  “This isn’t just any club, sister. This place is my new discovery. You’ll love it.”

  Our hands are stamped, even though we must look underage. No one seems to care, and when we enter, I see that we’re not the only kids here. Forget talking. The music is loud. It thumps in my bones, reverberates deep in my chest, competing with my heartbeat. It drowns out every other sensation. I love the all-encompassing soak of sound and vibration.