Mirage

by Tracy Clark

  “Soon.” I don’t know why, but I find myself telling her the truth: Yesterday, after talking to my dad in the B-17 and after interpreting the message from Dom’s origami tiger, I had an epiphany. “I need to get back in the air soon. It’s the only way to really live.”

  One side of her mouth lifts into a smile, and she limps away to go fuel and preflight the plane for the golf-course demo. Jumpers begin to arrive, disheveled in that roll-out-of-bed-and-roll-out-of-an-airplane, it’s-just-another-Saturday kind of way. But they’re excited. Everyone loves jumping into a new location, and the golf-course grass is a luxurious change from the scrubby desert sand.

  Soon my dad is too busy checking people in on the manifest, answering questions, and going over the flight plan with Yvon to notice me sneaking into the restroom with my duffel bag. My heart pounds against my ribs as I slip my legs into the black jumpsuit. I shouldn’t be this nervous, but I am. Doubts settle on me. Maybe I interpreted the tiger’s message wrong. I don’t know if I can do this. Hundreds of jumps mean nothing when they feel like they were performed by someone else.

  The jumpsuit is too small for my height, and I curse myself for picking the wrong size off the women’s rental rack. I’m Catwoman with a tiger’s head. Hiding in a toilet stall in the bathroom until right before the hop is the only way I can think of to stay concealed. Goggles and gloves help, but an extra body in the jump plane is going to be hard to hide. For the hundredth time, I remind myself that this is who I am. I need to do this. I cannot go from being fearless to fearful. It’s alienating me, making everyone question the differences between the old me and the new me​—​and my seeing the eyes has made them question my very sanity. Most of all, though, it’s making me feel like I’m less than what I was.

  I can’t believe that Avery accused me of faking. She’s full of crap, but she got one thing right: I’m standing out for things opposite from what made me stand out before. I’m standing out because I’m acting like the walking dead.

  My hands are shaking when I check the time. The demo jumpers are to board the plane in five minutes. I take deep breaths as I slide my legs through the leg straps, heft the parachute pack onto my back, and slide my arms through the harness before buckling it to my chest.

  There is a tiny gold angel pin on the nylon chest strap. I finger it before sliding the helmet over my head. I’ve got nearly three hundred jumps under my belt. I can do this. So why do I feel like I’m about to walk to the electric chair? Trembling, I steel my resolve and force my legs to move.

  It’s go time.

  Outside, the wind kicks up the smell of wet sagebrush and moist earth. The windsock complains, shaking its fist at the eastern sky. Engines are already humming. Jumpers file out of the hangar in a disorderly procession​—​demo team and solo jumpers mixed together. The lack of organization is good for me. I’m just another bird in the flock.

  I slip into the troop without anyone taking much notice except to gawk at my body in the skintight suit. Trying to catch my breath isn’t easy as the engines push wind into our faces. We wait under the wings for our turn to board. When it’s mine, I heft myself up through the jump door. With the thrust of the engines, the metal vibrates under my hands, sweaty in the gloves. A hand reaches out and pulls me up. I suck in my breath when Dom and I lock eyes.

  The astonishment on his face quickly fades. His brows crinkle in confusion, and he chews a moment on his lip. That’s the evidence of the war within him: whether to say anything about the fact that I’m suited up and ready for action.

  “Nice helmet,” he finally says, and nods me toward the back of the plane.

  I make my way to the metal wall behind the pilots and scrunch into a ball. I’m not sure I can go through with this . . . When my father spoke of how alive skydiving makes him feel, when he spoke of how similar we are, I wanted nothing more than to feel both those things in my body instead of the unvarying static of detachment. I wanted to feel the muscle memory of being me, not just see me in the pictures in my head.

  I am Ryan Poitier Sharpe.

  I am bold and fearless.

  I show people how to live life to the fullest. Pushing limits is in my blood, right?

  So why am I so terrified? Why are my heels tapping a strange song on the floor of the plane? I need to relax, trust myself. My body is humming, but I can’t tell if it’s pure fear or the ghost of me inside, longing to fly free again.

  I can do this.

  I must do this.

  It will prove to everyone who I am. That I’m back.

  It will prove to me . . .

  . . . the only thing that matters​—​I am alive.

  Everyone is seated in two long rows. I’m glad to be in the very back of one, so that my trembling might only be felt by the person in front of me. I keep my eyes closed for the eternity it takes us to climb to fourteen thousand feet.

  Someone has opened the jump door. The engines throttle back. The plane lurches a bit in the wind.

  Burbles of laughter erupt from me as we dip and sway, and a few people gasp.

  The guy in front of me turns around. “What could be funny?”

  I don’t know. It’s all funny. It’s terrifying and hilarious.

  I don’t answer him. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy.

  “Only thing funny is the boss’s brain,” he says. “Bright idea, going ahead with this weather.”

  “You didn’t have to get on the plane!” I yell over the noise.

  Dom is suddenly standing over me. “Neither did you. Stand up.”

  As if on cue, everyone stands and begins checking each other’s equipment.

  “Slow is fast,” I hear a girl next to me mumble as she fixes something on her rig. Dom moves behind me to perform the same checks on my gear. “If this means you’re coming back to yourself, then I’ll trust you,” he says against my ear. I turn my face toward him.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  He rolls his eyes and grins. “I know this body.” His fingers cling possessively to my hips. He taps on my newly painted helmet. “But the tiger gave you away.”

  Heat warms my cheeks. Despite all our times together, Dom feels like a stranger to me. His familiarity with my body is unnerving but scintillating, too.

  “Let the demo team and other jumpers go first, and then go out right after them, okay?”

  I nod, swallowing down my fear, but the plane pitches to the right and terror courses through me again. I realize I’m clutching Dom’s hand. He kisses my cheek. “You got this. Have fun, tiger.” He heads to the doorway.

  Everyone but me is huddled in a pack near the open jump door. They need to go out in a group to be able to track to one another in the air and get into formation. Spatters of rain have made the doorway slippery with wetness. Yvon continues in slow flight, and Dom calls out a count. Our eyes meet, and I see the barest hint of a smile.

  The plane does a sudden drop in the increasing wind from the storm. I was slowly moving toward the doorway, but that drop stops me. Lightning cracks outside the window. In its spectral glow, her face looks in on me.

  “Go!” Dom yells to the team over the wind.

  Bodies fly out the door, and my own body is pulsing with admiration and fear. With every beat of my heart, I hear her voice.

  Death whispers, Go, go, go.

  She’s challenging me.

  I take another step, but as the last of the team hurls itself out of the opening, the plane lurches again. Dom is supposed to jump with them, but he’s still in the plane and staring at me with an anxious look on his face. I hear an incessant buzzing sound from the front of the aircraft as the tail dips lower. “Goddamn it!” Yvon yells. “Stall warning! Get out! Get out!”

  Terror pushes me flat against the wall. Opposite me, rain coats the windows with rivulets, and another crack of lightning illuminates the sky outside the plane. In that eerie light, her face stares at me.

  “Get out!” Yvon yells again.

  I shake my head
. I’ll stay in the plane. No way am I jumping into the rain and lightning, right into her arms.

  Strong hands vise my biceps, and before I can protest, before I know what’s happened, Dom forcibly throws me out of the airplane into the rain.

  Twenty-Two

  MY BODY TRIES to curl in on itself. I remember being in freefall once and wondering if I wasn’t real. If I could be someone else’s dream. I want someone to wake up now, to make this nightmare end, but a lucid alarm within me trills and forces me to open my eyes. Needles of rain hit my lips and chin. I am falling so fast, it’s as though it’s raining up into my face. My right arm jerks, and I realize Dom has tracked to me and has hold of one of the grips on my jumpsuit. We are plummeting together toward the ground. He holds his free hand out and gives me a hand signal. His fingers are spread and his palm is in a flat position.

  I don’t understand. Panic is a blindfold. Panic is mind bleach. Panic has frozen me.

  But then my mind snaps back into what I know.

  I uncurl my arms and legs and flatten my body, but I’m buffeting and rocking as if I’m on my stomach on a waterbed. Nothing is going as planned. I’m stiff with terror and, more than that, disbelief that I’m not in Death’s hands but in Dom’s.

  This is all her doing. She’s after me. Maybe it wasn’t my own mind convincing me to jump but her evil whisperings. I glance at Dom’s intense face. Because of me she could get a two-for-one deal.

  I need him to let go of me. I can’t be responsible for his death.

  When I attempt to pull my arm free of his grasp, he grits his jaw into a rigid mask and grabs for my upper leg. His helmet crashes into my ribs. The world tilts and rotates violently. I feel like I’m rising up as Dom plummets below me. My upper body jerks upright, pulling my spine straight, knocking a grunt out of me. My legs sweep underneath me, swinging forward past my chest before gravity pulls them toward the ground.

  Dom has pulled my chute.

  The parachute snaps in the wind over my head. My goggles fog up, blinding me to the wet desert below. I can’t see him. The thought comes to me that I’ve never been so alone. But that’s not true. I’ve been the kind of alone that you think you’ll never come back from.

  Yet I came back.

  Turbulence throws me into a sudden drop and startles me into action. I have only one job right now, and that’s to land without killing myself. I reach up the risers and clasp the toggles, freeing them, and try to maneuver toward the large patch of green in the desert that must be the golf course the demo team jumped for. Soon I realize there’s no way I’m going to reach it. All I can do is stay stable and calm despite my racing heart, dry throat, and shaking limbs.

  Sagebrush and cacti are splashed haphazardly all over the flat canvas of desert. This isn’t like landing at the DZ, where there’s an enormous circle wiped clean. It’s like landing in a minefield. Rain coats my goggles, making it difficult to see, and I’m too scared to let go of the toggles to wipe them. It wouldn’t matter anyway; they’d just be coated with water again within seconds.

  The closer I get to the ground, the faster my descent feels, like the earth is pushing up to meet me hard and fast. The wind kicks me around, and I’m too afraid to turn or do anything but keep myself straight as possible as I drop. Brush catches my legs right before impact, and I hit face-down, rolling over and over. It’s like rolling on boulders of cut glass. My legs sting, my cheeks burn, and I’ve got scrapes under my chin.

  Mercifully, I roll to a stop. I’m wound like a burrito in my parachute. Rain pelts down on it so that the nylon fabric clings to my face. I will be smothered. Fighting and clawing at the chute, I wiggle one hand free and unclasp the helmet, rip the goggles off my face, and gasp for air against the material. I’m so bound in the chute and lines that I’m hogtied on the desert floor.

  There’s laughter in my head. Laughter. I want to cry through her amusement.

  Crazy is starting to look more and more plausible.

  Burned-red anger spreads like fire from my belly through my body. I don’t want to hear her now. Never again. She has become my tormentor. This moment should have been my victory for booming back into life, my triumph for being bold and fearless, and I’m being laughed at for crash landing. I’m humiliated by a spook.

  I flail and struggle to free myself. Will I be stuck here like this? Will someone eventually find me, mummified in my own parachute among the Joshua trees and sagebrush, eyes staring at heaven?

  My name. I hear my name. And footsteps in the dirt. Hands touch my cheeks through the fabric. “Are you okay?” Dom’s breathless voice asks. I croak out a yes. “Don’t move,” he says, kneeling over my legs. I hear a metallic click. “Not . . . one . . . move . . .” he warns as he puckers a wad of the chute above my face, creating a tent over my nose, and then the glint of a knife slashes through the fabric from my nose to my navel.

  Cool air and rain hit my skin, and Dom pulls me to sitting, shaking me. “What the hell happened?”

  “You​—​you threw me out. I could have died. Do you want me to die?” At once I’m filled with such certainty that he did want that. I don’t know where this is coming from, but I know I’ve been at this fork in the road before, facing someone who didn’t care if I died. There’s a memory, or a dream, faded like an old photograph, of me asking that question before, and the answer was yes. It’s too painful to be expendable. I can’t look at his face.

  Dom won’t let me hide. He squeezes my cheeks until I’m facing him again. “You think I wanted you to die?” Incredulousness rips his voice into splinters. “I was trying to save you, Ryan! Yvon was fighting with a stalling plane. That’s nowhere you want to be. You fucking froze up there. I’ve never seen you like that, like everything you knew was wiped from your goddamn head!” Tears fill his eyes. His voice descends into a whisper, like he knows I’m in a deep, dark cave where it’s only safe to reach me through whispers. “What’s happened to you?”

  “I don’t know. The plane was jerking around, the rain . . . I saw . . . I think I hallucinated. I was scared.”

  He shakes his head, casting drops of water from the ends of his black hair. “Hallucinated? So what Joe told me is true? What Avery said wasn’t lies?”

  I can only imagine Avery’s version of events of that night in the kitchen with the knife. But Joe? “Joe talked to you about me? When? Why?”

  “He wanted to know if you’d said anything strange to me before the LSD. He was worried about you. He told me that he came to me because he knew that, besides your parents, I’m the only other person who wants what he wants: for you to be okay. I don’t know what happened between you two, but Joe said he was done with you for now. Needed time away. He said I had to do everything I could to help you.”

  “Joe said that?”

  “He threatened me, actually. I think it was the start of a friendship.”

  I want to explain, but I’ve been trying to explain to myself​—​and in my journals​—​what happened to me. I feel like I split in two. Nothing makes sense. “That night in the trailer​—”

  “No. I know what happened that night in the trailer. What happened to you? Where’d the Ryan go who was fearless, brave, so bright with life that she was all I could see? You saved me after my mom died, but you won’t let me save you. I feel like I’ve lost my family all over again. It’s like you died.”

  “I did die, Dom!”

  “How can you say that? The doctors never did. You had a bad trip, and I hate that I had something to do with that, but ever since, you’ve been someone else.”

  “I know what I know. I died! I went someplace else. It was dark there. Now I’m back. Changed. I’m never gonna be that girl again! I’m trying and it’s not . . . I came back as . . . this! Only nobody wants this! All of you loved someone else.”

  “You’re wrong about that. I want you. I’ve never stopped loving you, but you’ve done nothing but turn your back on me, on us. Losing my mom was the worst pain, Ryan. You know that!
But losing you because you’re choosing it”​—​he pounds his fist on his chest​—​“it’s killing me.”

  “Why do you think I jumped? I wanted to feel! I may be alive, but I don’t feel things anymore. I’ve gone numb to everything but fear. I want to feel and I . . . I can’t. You don’t know what that’s like, to feel nothing good.”

  The fear of a little boy, the desperation of a drowning man, the starvation​—​all these emotions rage in Dom’s eyes. His grip on my cheeks softens. His thumb runs over my wet lips, and his eyes trace the lines like he’s memorizing them. He presses his rain-drenched lips over mine.

  I tense with surprise, my hands in fists at my sides, but when he pulls me to his body, my palms find their way to the ridges of his chest. I may not be able to reach my frozen heart beneath the ice, but I can feel his heart crackling with fire under his soaked shirt as he clasps the back of my neck with one hand and runs his other down the small of my back.

  “Do you feel this?” he asks, breathy against my mouth. My lips open to his, and his soft tongue meets mine. His mouth is so warm, I’m drawn to it. I can’t stop from immersing myself. This time, when the world tilts, I don’t notice it until the earth is against my back.

  He covers my body with the length of his. I’m surprised by the fit of us. We fit together like a puzzle, a beautiful picture I saw long ago. His mouth trails heat down my neck. My fingers wind in the silky wetness of his hair as his tongue paints designs on my collarbone. He unzips my jumpsuit and rolls his fingers under the tank top I’m wearing. A moan of pleasure escapes his lips as he touches my skin. His hungry touch is the most exquisite sensation. Each gust of his fast breathing sends waves of heat spreading through my body, like he’s blowing on kindling, waiting for it to catch.

  A faint thawing warms my center. He found a way to reach through the ice.

  Back arching up to meet him, mouth opening to be devoured again and again, legs inching apart, straining against the confines of the parachute to encircle his waist, my body screams its remembrance of us, its remembrance of our love.