Mirage (20 page)

Saw me.

Could there be a message written inside? It seems a shame to ruin the tiger to find out. We stare at each other, this tiger and I.

I rip it in half.

Tumbling from its belly is a small memory card. The rumble in my chest is unwelcome​—​I don't know anymore if it's the girl who disturbs me or my own broken mind, but I do my best to ignore the feeling of eyes on me. I put the memory card into the laptop on my desk and press play.

Dom's deep voice fills the room.

Dear Ryan, I made you this video to remind you of who I see every time I close my eyes. Who I dream of at night. Who I miss. You . . . in all your wild glory. You are the most beautiful creation.

Never have I seen myself like this. A candid picture of me walking with my chute crumpled against my chest after a jump, a mass of ringlets, and a mass of attitude. No one is in the picture with me, but I'm smiling. I appear to be smiling to myself, giddy with an inside joke about how badass life is. A picture of me and my mother, belly laughing. Our smiles are the same. A side shot of me giving the bare ass to my father with his back turned to me as he briefs a bunch of his boys before a jump. The smile on their faces says it all. The first sergeant has momentarily lost their attention.

The memory of this thought rushes in:
Now he knows how I feel.

These are all pictures of me, but . . .

Babe, I love strong women. Hell, I was raised by one. And now both of my strong women are gone. I'd give anything to go backwards and erase that night in the motor home. Everything changed that night. You changed that night. Does it have to be forever?

The skydive calendar proofs scroll by. I gawk at the brazen images, feeling disassociated, like the girl I see is so completely foreign to me, I can't even say she's me.

It is no longer
me
but
her
.

Her
with her cola skin, her full lips sauced with shimmering gloss, and her skintight red skydive jumpsuit unzipped down her ridged belly. Everything in her cat eyes says she's blatantly unafraid of being looked at, of showing the world exactly who she thinks she is.

She. Is. Unafraid.

Being unafraid of experience is what made you extraordinary.

On top of a mountain. Her naked body is a silhouette, a dark S of curves against the night sky. Wind blows her puff of wild hair, licks her skin. A lightning storm rages and strikes out in the distance in front of her. Arms overhead, she is powerful: it's as though she can shoot lightning straight from her soul and out through her fingers. Watching her, I've no doubt she can.

Video now, of different jumps. Dom wears a camera on his jump helmet, flying toward me,
her,
floating in the sky; wind makes her cheeks ripple like water. She zooms closer, reaches for him with muscled arms in a tank top, and kisses him in freefall. Does everyone fall to the earth with such peace? Does everyone look so radiant after a kiss?

There are video clips of multiways of synchronized jumpers. I feel like God watching from above. It's a dance in the air. A colorful snowflake falling to earth. I'm in awe. And confusion. I'm watching superheroes. Do these people know how special they are? How dynamically alive and rare they are?

One jump is filmed from the ground. I hear Dom behind the camera, talking to someone next to him, excited anticipation and pride evident in his voice. One by one, parachutes burst open. The camera zooms out, then in, trying to focus on a dot of color hurtling toward the ground.

Falling so fast.

Falling.

Then, my father's voice: “Open, baby. Open, goddamn it. Jesus, Ryan, don't do this to me . . . open the damn chute.” Hearing such anguish fills my eyes with tears. “I love you, Ryan, please . . .”

He's never said that to me.

My eyes are glued to the screen. There is no way that chute is going to open. I know who I'm watching, and somewhere inside, the memory is there, but it's like watching a movie of my own death.

Her death.

My whole body vibrates in terrified anticipation as she plummets toward packed dirt. My hands cover my mouth.
I'm
pleading with her now, like her father, to please pull. I want to look away, but I can't.

I'm watching my life flash before my eyes.

In an exhalation of color, the chute gusts open just in time to catch her before she tumbles to the sandy ground. Dom yells out and runs, the desert floor bouncing by onscreen. I dread what he's about to see, until I realize the camera has stopped moving and is pointed at the smiling face of the girl who haunts me in every reflection. She's holding something toward the camera.

“The penny, bitches!”

For the first time, I really see what everyone else sees. No wonder they miss the old Ryan. No wonder they want her back. That Ryan
was
larger than life. I've tried to be that Ryan, but it's like she's died in me. She deserves to live on. I don't know whose side I'm on anymore: mine, or . . . mine?

In a daze, I wander to Gran's empty room. It smells like her: warm skin, strange medicinal creams, cigar smoke. Magic.

I feel her.

Her soft, aged skin in the bath water. Her wrinkled hands, limber only on the piano. Her blind eyes, which saw through me. She was magic. I'm so privileged to have known her.

I realize I can't think of her proper name. This baffles me. How can I not remember my grandmother's name?

The Obeah religion Gran practiced was a lot of the “dark water” my mother spoke about. Unknowable, mysterious. She probably made much of it up. I think Gran was her own religion. Her philosophy of life and death rings true, though.

Live with integrity. Die with integrity.

If you don't do one right, you can never do the other right.

Wishing I could use magic to rectify things, I finger the objects of her altar. Placed around a creamy hand-spun bowl are a shell filled with cigar ashes, feathers from various birds that look like they died in a fiery crash, and four flat, smooth stones that feel as solid as vows when I press them into my palm.

I light a half-burned stick of incense and walk to the freestanding antique mirror that's in the corner of the room, between two windows. Smoke curls up into the air behind me.

I lean toward the mirror. The old glass ripples my image. Flecks of black paint shadow the glint in the glass. Shafts of moonlight slice through the night air and land at my feet. I'm so tired, my heart is sagging against restraints in my chest.

She's been chasing me for weeks, filling my head with strange words and memories. I'm ready to be done with our battle. I'm exhausted. I want to step into the light with Gran. My palms press against the cool glass of the mirror as I stare into myself, willing Death to come. Closer and closer, I inch my face to my reflection, until my forehead knocks against itself.

This feels familiar, this pressing my face against the glass, this longing to merge with something larger than myself.

This is how we found each other.

I whisper against my own lips, “Come and get me.”

N
OTHING HAPPENS.
This is more startling, now that I've requested her presence, than seeing her face would be. I pull back, angry.

“Did you hear me? I give up! Come for me!”

The glass vibrates under my fists. “I don't want to live this life anymore. Do what you're going to do and quit playing with me.” A sob escapes. “I give up.” I'm angry at myself for thinking it, saying it, but it's true. Everything is wrong. Everything.

I saw who I used to be. Like everyone else, I'm mourning the spark of that person. I'm not her. I'll never be her.

Death is after me, speaks to me, watches me. She took Gran. Who will be next if I don't let her win? Why not submit?

Death always gets her way in the end.

T
HE SHADOW OF
Gran's head indents her pillow.

Strange, the shadows we leave behind.

I've stared at it so long, the sun has risen and set on its wrinkled surface. The sun rises and sets on everything. On every life. When the last shaft of golden light tiptoes away from her bed, I crawl into it. I want sleep, the dark kind. I want to never wake up. Gran's sweet, old smell envelops me as I burrow into the covers and wrap myself in silence.

Night comes. Day passes. The earth tosses and turns in its big black bed.

Black morning.    Black mourning.

I hear whisperings. They drift in and out like oysters opening and closing in the current.

“We should call the doc.”

“Depression?”

“It's been two days.”

“This is what heartbreak looks like. She loved her grandmother.”

“This is scaring me.”

I want to tell them I love them before I'm gone, but love is stuck like a pearl in my closed heart.

I dreamed I was somebody else.

I wake, and still I feel like somebody else.

Both lives equally real.

Both lives equally dreamlike.

Clear water and deep water.

Not fully rested, not fully awake, I'm tired down to my soul.

I figure that today is a good day to

fall.

T
HE JOURNAL SITS
on my lap, and I snap it closed. I said once that nothing is more fun than to give Death the finger and have fun while you're doing it. But Death's a relentless hag. When you cheat Death of its prize, it keeps coming after you. Death never forgets a debt. Those eyes will follow me everywhere. Always.

This is no life.

The destructive force I've become to the people around me makes
me
a reaper. There's only one way to stop it. I have to face the fact that I wasn't supposed to live.

I have to right the wrong. So much of me has already died. Why not give up the rest?

The few final notes I scribble into my journal aren't supposed to be a goodbye, though I realize that anything I write will read like one. I wish I could take away the only question they will have afterward, but
Why?
isn't the right question.
How?
will be self-explanatory. The right question is
What?
What happened? What
really
happened to the girl we used to call Ryan Poitier Sharpe? I tried to tell them I wasn't mentally ill. I tried to tell them I was being haunted. If anything drove me crazy, it was that.

And not being believed.

Doubt is a chain-rattling ghost.

T
HE DESERT WIND
is so hot, I feel like the devil is breathing on me. My body isn't working right. It's uncooperative. Slow movements, fumbling with buttons and zippers, struggling to clip my parachute chest strap. It's built to snap together, but it's like the clips are opposing magnets, resisting. Finally I force them together and get the pack secured. There's a fleeting thought that I shouldn't bother with a parachute. What's the point? But then they wouldn't let me on the plane, would they?

I have to get on the plane. There are lots of ways to die, but this is so right, it's poetic.

The drop zone is a hive. People dart in and out, worker bees and drones ready for flight. Excitement is a thing you can feel here. It's a sugary syrup over the beige of the Mojave. With the big-way and the site visit from the X Games people later in the afternoon, it's the only day busy enough for me to get in the air without trouble. I'm just another drone. I'll get on the plane, and when I jump, I'll track my body as far away from the DZ as I can so they won't see. They won't have to find me. I'll come to rest in the harsh, beautiful, unforgiving desert.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

We all get on the airplane. My eyes meet the exhilarated eyes of a familiar guy. Only skydivers look exhilarated at eight a.m. He flicks a thumbs-up at me with maniacal happiness, and that's when I see him in memory . . . Birthday Boy. I teased him one day, scared him for fun. Then I blew him a kiss as I fell out of the plane. I guess he came back for more.

My father once said,
You don't become a part of the skydiving life. Skydiving becomes part of you. Some people do it once, to say they did. Others do it and realize they were living a half life before that and they'll only feel alive on the edge.

Half life. That best describes mine. It isn't enough of a life.

Birthday Boy looks at me quizzically, and I turn my head toward the wall of the plane, focus on the dots of rivets holding the aluminum panels together. “Scared?” he asks.

“No,” I answer. “I've done this before.”

Only I know we're not talking about the same thing.

The wind skims through the cabin; the air slapping our faces makes it real. I think I hear a song riding on its currents. It feels good to hum, to feel the vibration of my voice, so I do. But once I start, I can't stop. This song rises from a deeper part of me than my self-control.

My song.

“Siren,” I say. “Of course you're with me now.”

I'll never leave.

“You don't have to sing to me. I'm already yours.”

My song!
she yells in my head.

Someone opens the jump door. The spotter signals the pilot, and the plane powers down. Everyone stands. I rise to my feet.

Birthday Boy places a gentle hand on my arm. “You're talking to yourself,” he says, then looks at me closer. “I recognize you. From my first jump. You seem . . .
different
.”