Mirage (19 page)

No one laughs with me, and even though Gran is blind, they exchange a look.

The skin over my mother's knuckles stretches a hair thinner as she clutches the wheel. “I . . . I don't remember that, honey.”

Well, she has to be mistaken, because the memory surfaced clear and vivid, making my toes curl in reflexive disgust. I'm flung out of the joviality of the moment and into the black void of being the girl with the crazy thoughts. I don't understand. I remember the cat. I
remember
.

“Baby”​—​my mom pats my leg​—​“we're gonna come up on the lake after this turn. Describe it to your grandmother. You know she loves that.”

The car swooshes around another bend and the mountain opens up, revealing a shimmering blue jewel in the valley of its hands. “The lake is below us, Gran, at the base of the cliffs we're driving on. With all the trees it's”​—​I search for the right description, wanting to paint it in her mind as beautifully as I'm seeing it​—​“it's like a sapphire hidden in grass.”

Gran sighs and nods contentedly. She sees it now.

“Families are on the shore. Someone's throwing a stick in the water for a dog to fetch. People are diving off bubbles of gray rocks. Clouds are lazing about, and you can see them reflected in the lake.” The truth is, it reminds me of her cloudy blind eyes, but I'm not sure if I should say that.

The moment I have that thought, the entire lake transforms below us, morphing and darkening into an enormous watchful eye in the mountain, with a deep black hole of a pupil in its center. Shivers prick my neck.

Echoing in my head are these words, a repetitive incantation, louder and louder . . .

This is the hole she crawls out of. This is the hole she crawls out of.

I scream, reach over, and jerk the steering wheel away from the enormous eye.

My mother startles and yanks the steering wheel back, swerving the car into the oncoming traffic. A horn blares loudly right in front of us as we swerve again, but too far, and we fishtail across the lanes back toward the jagged cliff and the enormous eye below. I scream and turn away from the window, not wanting to fall into that black hole where she waits for me.

Metallic screeches ring out as the side of the car swipes the guardrail. Another jerk to the right and we veer off the road on the opposite side, spinning, falling, and bouncing until we're stopped with a hard and thunderous bang.

All is silent.

T
HE FIRST SOUND
that filters in is the chirping of disturbed birds and a hissing sound that might be the radiator. My eyes blink heavily, but my chin feels connected to my chest, where a singular line of blood snakes its way from somewhere down my neck and onto my shirt. It's hard to lift my head. All my weight is forward, my body strains against the seat belt, and I realize we're facing downhill; mercifully, a large tree has stopped us from falling farther down the ravine.

Down to the eye.

Next to me, my mother groans. Her head rests on the steering wheel. Much more blood than I see on myself flows from her head, down her face like tears, and over her full lips. Her right forearm and wrist are bent at an odd angle. “Mom?” I'm afraid to touch her.

“Mom,” she repeats. Thank God, she can hear me.

Then I realize . . . she's heard my voice, she's found her own, so she's naturally reaching up the chain, grasping to know if her own mother is okay. I strain to turn around, pulling myself over the top of the seat back. Gran is folded in half, slumped against the door; the window has a spider's web of cracks in it. I call her name, struggle to reach and touch her, but she is still.

Calls bounce down to us from somewhere above through the trees. “Hang on! We're getting help!”

“Hurry!” I croak too quietly and try again. I don't see blood on my grandmother, but who knows the extent of her injuries.

I have an eternity to think about what happened.

We are the center of the universe, and the sun rotates around us as we wait for help. My mother is in and out of consciousness. I've cried out to Gran, tried to reach her, wherever she is, but the longer she's quiet, the more scared I become. She's withstood the pains and hardships of life longer than any of us, but her age makes her seem more fragile.

The girl who follows me may or may not be real. I was sure before that she was, but how can she be so big that the entire lake was one staring eye? That's not possible. Unless . . . unless I really am schizophrenic, and the drugs haven't yet stomped down the illusions of my monstrous mind. All I know is that as we hang precariously on this slope, I realize that nearly everyone in my life has been hurt by me, or by her . . .

But it doesn't matter where I assign the blame. It's all hurt. And it's all me.

Is being alive worth it if you're nothing but a wrecking ball?

The sounds of sirens wind up the mountain, getting louder and louder until they are screeching right above us. A choir of voices discusses the best way to help us. Bless the man who reaches us first, looks in my eyes, and says, “We've got you now. It's gonna be okay.”

I nod and cling to his words.

“They're here to help us, Ayida.”

“You never used to call me by my name. I don't like it,” she says​—​her voice is a crack of dry wood​—​and blacks out again.

Beginning with Gran, and then my mother, we are eventually all pulled from the mangled car and hauled up to the road, where ambulances whisk us off to the hospital. I have a gash in my neck where the seat belt cut into me, but I can sit up, and so I do, wrapped in a blanket, riding along with Gran. She's alive, the medic assures me of that, but still unconscious. Halfway down the mountain, my stomach heaves, and I throw up all over the floor.

“Am I dead yet?”

It's the most beautiful sound, Gran talking to me from her hospital bed. The nurse tells my mother that Gran's blood pressure is dangerously low.

“No,” I answer, tears rising in my eyes. Guilt squeezes my throat closed. I did this. If I hadn't freaked out, we'd be winding back down the mountain, pleasantly tired after a day in the sun with the wind blowing in her gray hair. Not sitting in the hospital, where the smell of sickness makes me queasy.

“I never got to stick my toes in the mud.”

I sniff. “I know. There's still time.”

“No.”

That word slams like gnarled hands on piano keys.

The beep of the heart-rate monitor keeps slow time.

“Instead of me singing my song, my song is singing to me.” Gran's voice is a low, scratchy purr. “That's how I know it's time to go,” she says. “It's calling me home.”

From behind me, my mother sobs into one hand. The other hand is in a cast. Tears seep through her fingers like she's dipped her onyx palm into holy water. Her reaction tells me this is not just melodramatics. Gran isn't the type for that. If she says she's going to die, she is, and there's nothing any of us are going to do about it.

My father paces restlessly across the room. Helplessness strikes a chord of anguish in me. I feel like we're letting her die, and it's strangely familiar, like I've lived this moment before. My awful dreams becoming real. I close my eyes, afraid my muddled thoughts will summon the face again.

Ayida sits alongside Gran and strokes her face with her working hand. Gran accepts the loving touch with gratitude, already looking relieved to have announced her imminent departure. She's just broken every heart in the room, yet she looks peaceful.

“Tell me something true,” she demands.

My mother bows her head reverently and thinks a moment before raising herself up proudly. “Your mothering has been solid and mystical. Mama, you've been my rock, you've been the clear waters at its edge, and you've been the deep mysteries of the darker waters. I thank you for sharing your life with me.”

My father clears his throat. I have to look away from the glassy film of tears over his blue eyes. He clears his throat a second time. His legs are tented in a wide stance, like he needs help balancing. His hands are clasped low in front of him. “You've made me a better man.”

Gran nods appreciatively. “Burn a cigar with my body, Nolan.”

She inclines her head toward me, anticipating. I swallow hard. What do I tell her? I'm tortured? Screwed up? That I feel responsible for everything that's gone wrong since I was lying in this same hospital weeks ago?

What's true is that I don't know what's true.

Those things can't be the last thing she wants to hear from me. “Gran?” I start, with a slight tremor. “Do you think people want to hear the truth no matter what it is? When someone is dying, it seems you should say what will bring them peace.”

Her weathered hand clasps my own. “That's how I know you're not yourself. I didn't always agree with you, child, but I trusted you because you spoke your truth no matter how untrue it was for the rest of us. No matter how foolish or headstrong you were being.”

Does this mean she doesn't trust me now?

A wry laugh puffs from her chapped lips. “But God, you sure live the deep end of life's pool. That's something to respect.” Ayida wipes her eyes. She gives me a sad, knowing smile as Gran talks to me. There's a long pause and a breath that seems to take more effort before Gran says, “My something true . . . you've got to live with integrity so you can die with integrity.”

Tears stream down my face. A braided knot twists in my stomach. I desperately want Gran to stay with me. I want to tell her
all
my truths, even the ones that might turn her away. The scary and confusing things I'm seeing, the visions inside my head that have no continuity, how nothing matches up, as though the puzzle pieces of two lives got scrambled and don't fit together.

I'm the imagination of myself, like that paper said in the motor home.

Gran's blind, but she sees more than anyone else. Right now it feels like she's the only one who can help me.

My mouth opens to speak, but Gran doesn't just look like she has her eyes closed. Her face has lost its expectancy. My heart stutters. Has she . . . ?

Machines are still beeping, though. She's simply fallen asleep. Her chest rises and falls slowly. The pauses between exhale and inhale are excruciating. Every gap extends. I find myself holding my breath until she takes another one. My body taps into an inexplicable knowing of how it feels to have your breath come slower and slower until that last one becomes a boulder you can't push uphill anymore.

My dad falls wearily into a chair. My mom doesn't move from the bed, just sits there staring at Gran's face, her eyes replaying a lifetime of memories as she watches her sleep. We don't know if she'll ever wake again. Every so often, the corner of her mouth tips up into what might be a grin. I wonder if she's dreaming or revisiting her own memories.

Memories are so much like dreams.

An hour passes. Maybe more. We are all suspended, not wanting to leave for fear she will tiptoe out of life behind our backs.

“Now sing me your song again, Ryan,” Gran whispers into the new night, startling my mother and me. My father was snoring softly a few feet away, but he wakes with a jolt at Gran's voice and the mention of my name. Soldiers half sleep like that.

“My song, Gran?”

She answers so low, we have to lean in to hear. “The one you were humming to me just now.”

“It's okay. She's slipping away,” my mother chokes out in answer to my confused expression. She leans in and kisses her mother, leaving tears on her cheek. Tenderly, she wipes it into Gran's skin. “It's okay to go, Mama. Nothing to be scared of. It will be beautiful there.”

I'm sobbing. I can't help it.

“Yes, it's okay,” Gran adds. “Ryan is waiting for me.”

Everyone frowns and darts glances at me. Shivers roll over my mom's skin, making her head shake.

Gran's last breath is an exhale. It sounds like relief.

I
T'S NEVER RIGHT
to go to the hospital with four people and come home with three. Never.

A scream:
It's your fault!

Rattled to my bones, I yelp and stumble into Nolan's side, and he looks at me like he wants to shove me across the room far away from him. His eyes are as accusatory as the voice. I don't know if it's the girl, who's been abnormally quiet since our accident. It has her anger but feels more intimate. Like another part of me. My throat constricts with the tears I'm trying to hold back.

Wordless, everyone disperses with heads down to their own corners of the house. I go to my room and find myself staring at the white walls, the pinholes where the lights used to hang above my bed, the books on the shelves, and scrapbooks of pictures, which I hadn't realized were tucked in with the books. Odd that I'd forget the scrapbooks were there, but I see now that there is one for each year. Yes, Joe and I made these together every summer.

Until this summer.

Life came to a halt this summer.

I flip through the years of us: me and JoeLo. God, our friendship was beautiful. I can see it in the way we make the same expressions. The way our bodies lean into each other with such comfort. We are brother and sister. Were . . .

My heart hurts.

Live with integrity; die with integrity.

Joe went and spoke to Dom after we fought. Proof of love. I need to apologize to him.

Dom's origami tiger watches me from the dresser as I flip through the pages of another life. The paper tiger was supposed to be a message. I thought I understood the message when I decided to jump. But maybe Dom intended for me to hear a different roar. I pick it up. The delicate brushstrokes of paint speak their own message: that Dom cared enough about me to painstakingly make a reminder of how he sees me.