I See Me (7 page)

At least I’d made it over the border.

I managed to sit at the table in the dinette area, only to realize I was brushing my hands across my cheeks and through my hair as if attempting to sweep away the clinging hazy bits of the hallucination. Just like a crazy person … like the crazy person I was …

No.

I wasn’t going to sit here and wallow. I’d been an idiot to not know I’d need extra meds today, and now I’d taken care of that.

My stomach grumbled to remind me I hadn’t eaten for hours. Actually, I hadn’t eaten all day. Another stupid move. The meds never held as well on an empty stomach. And I had muffins sitting beside me the entire trip.

I pressed my hands onto the table and stood up to shakily cross to the sink. I’d actually turned the faucet before I remembered I needed to hook up for fresh water. Miraculously, though, cool water splashed into my hand. I slurped sips out of my palm while silently thanking Gary for filling the holding tank. The man was an angel. If things like angels actually existed.

I turned off the water, aware that I needed to conserve it, and ran my still-shaking wet hands through my hair. Then — still holding onto every available surface for support — I made my way forward to the basket of muffins in the front passenger seat.

I kneeled on the stair bump up between the driver and passenger seats and stuffed a raspberry oatmeal muffin into my mouth. Barely tasting what I was forcing myself to eat, I peered out into the blackness of the parking lot through the front windshield. I could just make out the midnight blue sky and a sprinkle of stars behind and above the tall evergreens that buffered the rest stop from the highway. As I watched and ate, I caught glimpses of passing headlights from cars as they zoomed by the tall trees. I imagined at least one driver was racing home from a late shift. She was probably already dreaming of her warm bed, and maybe there was someone waiting up for her.

It had started to rain, though maybe only moments before I’d woken. The drops were light enough that I couldn’t hear them as they hit the windows.

As far as I could see in the dark, the parking lot was completely empty. Though that wasn’t surprising, since it was the end of January and nowhere near a long weekend.

A deep chill ran up my spine, and for a blink, the hallucination I’d just endured hovered before me instead of the rain-splattered windshield. I shook my head to knock my brain around and dispel the hold of the drowsiness, managing to lose the ghost of the hallucination. But it was the cold burrowing through my hoodie and jeans — and grappling for a hold deep into my soul — that really countered the sedative effect of the meds.

This wasn’t an auspicious start to my new life, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t handled before.

I was lucky no one had heard me screaming. I needed to dig deeper into the off-the-grid RV sites guidebook I’d downloaded on my phone, so I could safely suffer in isolation. Though maybe it was a bad idea to let the hallucinations have their way. Because, unfortunately, I always needed food and people after an incident as bad as this last one had been.

By food, I meant more than a muffin.
 

By people, I meant reality.

Sometimes I got a wicked hangover from the hallucinations — the bad ones, at least. And they never quite let go of me. If I slipped into them too deeply, the edges between what was real and what was in my mind started to get very, very blurry.
 

Unfortunately, this aspect of my condition was the one drawback to the RV lifestyle that I’d been dreaming of since I was sixteen. I’d opened my Etsy shop with this dream in mind.

I couldn’t lock myself away, alone, too deeply. Otherwise I’d get lost in my own head.

Again — normally — I wasn’t stupid about managing my condition. This was why a cell phone and data package were worth the expense. As long as I didn’t go too far off grid, I should be able to find people somewhere, any time of the day or night.

I snagged a second muffin, then headed back to my scattered belongings to grab my bag, phone, and a jacket. After a quick Google search for an all-night diner or coffee place — and happily discovering that the second muffin had apples and cinnamon in it — I was feeling up for a walk.

∞

It had stopped raining for the moment, but the air was damp in a way that let me know the sky was getting ready to open up and really hammer down. I didn’t mind the mist on my face. It woke me up a bit, actually. It kept me focused on putting one foot in front of the other as I walked to the diner I’d googled. It was supposed to be just off the highway, a mile or so south of the Custer rest stop.
 

I didn’t worry about walking alone at night, I’d done so my entire life. I had self-defense training, of course, and a small Swiss-Army knife somewhere in my bag, but I rarely needed it. In my experience, most loners out after midnight weren’t there by choice or with nefarious intent.

Mist on my face always reminded me of the one and only time I’d been to the water slides. A group of volunteers that worked regularly with foster kids had organized a trip to Splashdown Park in Delta, which was about an hour south of Vancouver. I’d been thirteen years old — almost thirteen and a half.

I’d been having a good year living with a great foster family, who had four other foster kids in a range of ages. It was a long-term placement, because I’d already decided I didn’t want to go through the matching and adoption process anymore. They had an orange tabby cat and one of the younger girls had hamsters. I didn’t have to switch schools when I moved in with them, because there was a direct bus.

I was as close to content as I’d ever been, in a well-fed, well-exercised, and well-stimulated way.

Anyway, the early summer morning was chilly after we’d showered and started to climb the ridiculously long stairs to the top of the water slides, but it was sunny and promised to be warm soon. I was with a bunch of kids I’d known forever. I wasn’t exactly part of the group, but none of us really were. We fit together, though. A couple of community program groups showed up behind us, but we didn’t mix.

The blue plastic slides were slick, like I’d expected. The seams were a little abrasive on my shoulder blades as I went down, but I loved the feeling of the ride. The weightlessness. I just jumped off at the top and rode the freedom all the way down.

While lying in bed that night, I could still feel the movement. As if the repetition had carved pathways into my brain … the twists, the turns, the speed. The moments that took my breath away, where I thought I might flip over the edge but then didn’t.

And … the mist in my face.

The sunlight had glinted off the water-slick plastic of the slide and made it difficult to see while I was riding down. My eyes were, as always, sensitive to the light. But I didn’t mind being sightless … then. Like I said, it was freeing somehow. Climbing the stairs and waiting in line for the next slide was almost excruciatingly boring, but the ride was worth it.

I must have been about a third of the way through my fifth or sixth ride down when the hallucination hit. Though I didn’t know what was happening at the time. I’d reached one of the flatter straightaways, where the sun created a blast of white starbursts off the shallow rushing water on which I rode. I squinted my eyes like crazy against this onslaught, but was afraid to close them completely. Some part of me was still sure I was going to go off the edge, though I knew that was probably impossible.

When I whipped around the next turn, my eyesight didn’t come back. All I could see was white light. The slide, the blue sky, and the other riders in the slides beside me were all gone in a wash of white.

I didn’t panic.

I was riding the high of the day, the thrill of the ride, and it happened so quickly I didn’t even think to freak out right away.

I could still feel the solid slide underneath me, the tiny bumps underneath my shoulder blades as I slid over the seams, and the mist in my face. So somehow I knew I was okay. My eyes were doing something weird — probably because of their light sensitivity — but it would be okay.

Then I saw the dark-haired man. The man who I’ve never seen out of a dark suit and crisp white dress shirt since — though that day, he was dressed head to toe in black, including his gloved hands. The man who would go on to star in my hallucinations for the next six years.
 

As I rode the water slide completely blind, in my mind I watched the man gaze reverently down at a crimson red stone necklace. It was displayed on a yellow-gold velvet pillow atop a pedestal. For years, I would fill sketchbook after sketchbook trying to capture the exact edges and shading of this amulet. The stone glowed softly. The chain was made of thick gold, and the links were individually etched with strange letters. I never managed to reproduce the markings in my drawings. Similar to how I never managed to read a book in a dream.

I had no sense of time or place — I never did in the delusions — but I wasn’t on the water slide anymore. Or my mind wasn’t, at least. I was in some sort of gallery, though I could only really see the area immediately around the dark-haired man. He lifted the amulet and placed it around his neck, then quickly skirted the velvet pillow-topped pedestal on which it had been displayed and made a beeline for a large, ornately carved gilded wooden door.
 

I caught a glimpse of thick stone walls as he exited into a hall. Tapestries, artwork, and a gold carpet that also looked like velvet ran the length of the corridor.

Someone shouted.

I tumbled off the edge of the slide into the end pool. I went under, completely disoriented, and accidentally swallowed water.

I remember thrashing, twisting in the water. I began to panic as I realized I couldn’t breathe.

In my mind, the dark-haired man spun around to see whoever had shouted at him. He smiled, his wicked look full of satisfaction and pride. Then he brushed his fingers across the crimson stone of the amulet and disappeared.

Someone crashed into me, slamming both feet into my head. I hadn’t properly cleared the area underneath the slide and the next rider landed on me.

Then I was being hauled out of the water and fussed over.

Once it was determined I would survive, I was yelled at for not following the safety guidelines, then banished to the bus for the rest of the trip.

None of that really mattered, though, because I still couldn’t figure out what I’d seen or what had happened to my eyesight.

Hours later at home, while setting the table for my foster mom, I made the biggest mistake of my life.

I told her.

I was safe, comfortable, and warm. My foster mom had made potato salad for dinner. We were going to have barbecued burgers.

And I told her what I’d seen.

She listened. Too closely, though I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew I’d had an odd experience, and that I had someone who cared about me to share it with.

She asked questions. The same questions many other people asked me many other times afterward. Turned out she was a nonpracticing psychologist, though, I didn’t piece that together in the moment.

I went to bed feeling less unsettled, less concerned about the incident. I dreamed of riding the slides. I dreamed of the dark-haired man. I woke up with an appointment scheduled to see the family doctor.

Many meetings and many doctors later, I was diagnosed with an unknown psychotic disorder. Not schizophrenia, because that manifested with auditory hallucinations. My voices presented themselves only in video.

It also wasn’t a brain tumor, and not epilepsy or any other seizure disorder — all of which were ruled out through multiple tests and MRIs.

I was crazy — pure and simple — according to the professionals. Well, they didn’t put it quite like that, but that’s what I heard and that’s what I lived with.

I didn’t stay at that particular foster home for long after that. Supposedly, my attitude changed. I withdrew and became unmanageable. I bounced around in a few emergency placements before the ministry got me into a home that specialized in troubled kids. I kept my head down and my mouth shut after that. But by then, I had a prescription, weekly shrink appointments, and a sheet on the fridge that I had to sign to prove I’d taken my meds. I wasn’t the only name on the list.

Everyone always knew what was wrong with me, even strangers, from the moment they walked into that kitchen and saw the list. The foster community was a small one in Vancouver. Too many kids in care, of course, but we all knew each other. The lifers, at least.

When the mist hit my face now, I didn’t think of the diagnosis or the pills. I thought about how the hallucination at the water slides was the only one that had ever manifested without pain, without the migraine, without the debilitating need to sleep and then draw afterward. I thought about how I hadn’t even been scared until I was underneath the water.

I hadn’t hated myself for being weak or broken. I’d felt clear and free that day.

Driving the Brave was a close second to the water slides — maybe even a better ride, because I got to stay dry, warm, and completely in control of my destination. No one was going to yank me out of the RV, label me, and then shove pills down my throat.

Happy nineteenth birthday to me.

“What are you?” a deep male voice asked, tentatively. “A witch?”

I started. As far as I’d known, I was the only customer in the roadside diner. I looked up from contemplating the full mug of very hot coffee before me — then kept looking up at least six-foot-three-inches of lanky frame and broad shoulders.
 

His skin was the color of brown-sugar caramels. I stiffened my spine and squared my own shoulders in an attempt to fill more of the booth I was occupying. My immediate impulse — as when approached by any stranger after one of my ‘incidents’ — was to burrow farther into the powder-blue vinyl seat. I wasn’t a hundred-percent clear-headed yet.

“Did you just ask me if I was a witch?” I sneered at his square chin and chiseled jaw rather than look him in the eye.