Mirage (3 page)

“No fair!” I yell as I gun it so fast the front tire pops off the pavement and we lurch forward.

“I never object when you do it to me,” he yells back. We both laugh into the wind.

“Dammit, I forgot to pack my chute from the last jump. I left it lying on the mat,” I tell Dom as we pull up to the skydive center.

He slides off the bike, helps me with the kickstand, and kisses my forehead. “I'll pack it for you. I'm faster.”

“Okay.” I toss him his bike keys. “But you'd better not pack me for a hard opening like you did the other day.”

“I was mad at you for flirting with that tool in the aviator glasses.”

“I was not flirting with him!” I caress his wind-stung cheek. “You wanna go up?”

He wipes his eyes with both fists like a tired toddler. “Nah. I'd like to do one more practice session on the creepers before we try the new formation.”

I wish he would jump with me this time. The image in the mirror has me unsettled, the sensation coating my skin and sinking in, infecting my spirit. I want Dom's hand in mine as we fly. But it's just as well. There's business to handle with my dad. Surely there's a way to change his mind about the big-way, and having Dom there will only make me look like I need him​—​which I don't.

My sneakers pound the desert sand as I jog into the hangar toward my parents' office. Dad's still behind his desk, talking on the phone. I fade into the wallpaper and wait until I'm acknowledged, like I've been trained to do. He hangs up and raises his eyebrows. “Yes?”

This is a man who appreciates directness, so I get to the point. “I care about this place as much as you do. What can I do to convince you I'm ready for the big-way?”

Dad stands up from behind his desk. I hold my breath as he walks toward me, then holds my arms. “Exhibit patience, for starters. I know you love this place and want it to do well. You don't have to prove anything.”

I step out of his circle of power. “Another way to say you don't believe I can.”

His tone flips like a switch. “Don't come in here and try to browbeat me, kiddo. It ain't gonna happen.”

I fix him with what I think is a disarming smile but I'm sure comes off more like I'm constipated. “I wasn't raised to back down,” I answer with a lift of my chin. I know I sound like a tired war movie, but it's his language, so I speak it. Dad dismisses me by pointing at the door.

Dom's kneeling by my chute, straightening the parachute lines, when I stomp over.

“Whoa!” he says, grabbing my hand. “Spill.”

“Commander Crotchety in there”​—​I thumb toward the office​—​“refuses to let me be part of the big-way we're doing to lure the X Games here.” Dom's eyes go wide. I've lit up his entire brain with visions of glory. “He says I need to be perfect,
precise
. I can land my pinky toe on a penny in the middle of the DZ. I've done tons of formation jumps with you guys. What else do I have to do to show him?”

He holds my jumpsuit out for me to step into. “You know that famous thing where Babe Ruth points to the outfield and calls it?”

“Not really, but what's your point?” I ask, punching my arms into the suit.

“Call it.” When I show no sign of understanding, he zips me up and adds, “Call your opening altitude and call where you'll touch down. Be precise about it. Hotdog your descent and stick the landing. Make it pretty. I'll film it so you can show him how good you are. He's too busy to watch you, so he doesn't see that you're a badass skydiver.”

“He doesn't see me, period.”

I look away from Dom's sympathetic eyes. Already a radical plan is formulating. The most radical I've ever had. Maybe you don't have to die to earn Dad's respect. Maybe you just have to show him you're not afraid to. “Pack it to open fast,” I tell Dom.

“Boldly go.” He smirks.

“You bet your ass. Where no
man
has gone before.”

He gets back to folding my chute. Then he looks up at me. “And babe, I'm putting a penny in the dirt.”

I rip a page from the back of someone's jump log and write on it, then march it into Dad's office. He doesn't even look at me or the paper as I toss it on his desk and about-face, slinging my helmet over my shoulder.

The pilot goes full throttle for takeoff, engines thunder, and the plane vibrates with power. Cold air sneaks in under the jump door next to me as I mentally run through what I'm about to do. We rumble down the runway, and I try to ignore the eyes of the other jumpers on me; recalling the eyes in the mirror causes unfamiliar nerves to fire off in my belly. I don't know if it's the memory of ghostly eyes in the motor home or what I'm about to do, but I've never been this on edge before a jump. My stomach is a taut, jelly-filled drum.

Once every other skydiver has exited the plane, I hold the metal edges of the doorway and lean forward into the wide open. Deep breath in, blow it out, and dive. Cool air hits my skin and presses like a giant hand against my torso. I go immediately into track position, hurtling through the pink-and-blue sky like a dart until I'm directly over the clean circle in the desert where I'm to execute a perfect landing. I ease into my arch.

There's nothing to do now but fall.

It's odd being out here alone again for the second time today, not part of a formation, and not goofing off with Dom, kissing in freefall. It's extremely lonely, like I'm disassociated from what I'm doing. Like maybe I'm not real. Not as if I'm dreaming. More like . . . like I could be someone else's dream.

What if I was?

If I bounced, would another girl sit up in bed, sweating and panting, grateful it was just a dream?

This thought spooks me, makes me distrust myself for the first time, and this is one jump where I can't afford doubts. Every fluttering gnat of fear in my belly is squashed by the weight of my stubborn will. I have to do this. The risk I'm taking is worth it. It is. I'll show my father I'm precise.

The number I wrote on the slip of logbook said simply
1K
. I wish I could see his face when he realizes what it means​—​eight hundred feet below oh-shit altitude, where we must make a decision in an emergency. I had to turn off my automatic activation device to do this jump.

I'd laugh if the wind weren't pulling my cheeks back to my ears.

Dom is filming me, and I'm going to give him something memorable. But I can't fight the lonely drag as I fall; it's like no one, not even God, is watching me right now. I think of the specter eyes in the mirror, the spooky sensation of being watched instead of being the watcher. How can my own reflection scare me so much?

For a moment in that motor home, I was my own ghost.

I blow through the altitude where I'd normally pull. But this is no normal jump. I've had one jump when my chute failed to open and I had to deploy a reserve. This time, this one time, if there is a problem, I won't have time to deploy my reserve. My objectives are: Pull as low as I can. Don't die.

It's like playing chicken with the earth.

With every five hundred feet I lose, my heart hammers five hundred beats faster. My fingers are twitching to pull. It's all I can do not to reach for the cord. The ground is rushing at me so fast, and I can see people lined up around the drop zone. I'm certain I'll hear their gasps on the video later.

There's no taking my eyes off my altimeter now. I reach one thousand feet above ground level and pull, and my chute fans open in a violent gust. My legs swing hard underneath me as the chute jerks me upright. I do a quick check of the canopy and lines as I grab the toggles, realizing I have time for one-quarter of my turn before my feet touch the earth. I slam into the ground and roll. All breath has been knocked from me. Desperately I struggle for oxygen, but my body refuses to take in air.

For too long, all I see is white.

Did I ever pull at all?

Did someone just cry out in her sleep?

Peripheral vision opens up, color streams in fragments, and footsteps batter toward me. Dom stares down with the video camera pointed at my face. A wild-eyed mania has replaced his normally cool expression. I scared him. I excited him too, but the dilated fear is still in his eyes.

“Jesus, Ry! That was . . . Whooo! You are unbelievable!”

I fight to pull air into my lungs. Now the camera is annoying me. Avery skids up next to him. “What, are you crazy?”

“What, are you new?” my voice croaks. As I start to push myself up, my fingers alight on something smooth and hard in the dirt. I grab it and hold it out to the camera with a wide smile. “The penny, bitches.”

Dom stops filming and holds his hand out to help me up. “Damn, that was something. When I said ‘call it,' I didn't mean for you to call a suicide altitude. I don't know if I'd ever do that,” he says, much more serious.

I glare at him and his backpedaling support. “Well, those who can't do . . . dare.”

“I didn't dare you to do
that
.”

I gather my chute, and when I look up, I notice my father leaning against the golf cart, his arms folded and face deep red, mouth set into a grim line. Instead of looking impressed, he looks . . . murderous.

“Y
OU WANT TO
tell me what the hell you thought you were doing?” my father demands like a carnival barker in front of everyone who's gathered around.

I thrust my chin up. “I was being
precise
.”

He shoves off the cart and is in my face immediately. “You're lucky you're not precisely dead! One problem, goddamn it! That's all it would have taken. One! And you'd be in the ground, DOA!”

“I wanted to show​—”

“All you did, young lady, was prove to me how reckless and irresponsible you are!”

I fling my chute on the ground between us. “I showed I have the skill!”

“Bullshit. You showed you don't belong on my DZ. I don't need the job of shoveling your foolish ass off the dirt.”

“Girl's got balls, man!” someone yells out.

“More balls than you,” I say through clenched teeth. I know it's a low blow. “You're a coward, Dad. You're too scared to give me a chance to prove myself. I'm invisible to you. What in the hell do I have to do?” I shove him in the chest, and even I'm surprised at the rage I feel toward him. The detached observer in me wonders if it's the adrenaline.

Dad steps back, catching himself from falling. He rakes his hands over his buzzed hair like he's got to do something with his hands in order not to strangle me. His voice switches to a low growl, which is scarier than his barking lecture. “Get off this airport right now.” He throws himself into the golf cart and peels out, spitting dust at me in its wake.

Dom and I walk back to the hangar in silence. I'm numb; I don't even flinch when a snake slithers out of the sagebrush in front of us, crosses our path, and slips into the dry weeds. He puts his arm around my shoulder and stops me. “You gotta understand, your dad, he​—”

“Don't tell
me
about my dad!” I yell, shrugging out from under his arm. “Piss off.”

“Don't be a bitch to me. I didn't make you do it, Ry. You managed to fuck up all on your own.”

“Oh my God! Hop aboard the Ryan-will-slap-you express!” I shove him, too. Not once, but twice, hard in his chest. His black hair covers one eye. The other narrows with anger. Whatever. If people don't want to be attacked, why do they rattle my cage?

Mom is standing in front of the hangar as I walk up. Dad's hastily parked golf cart bakes in the sun next to her. She wrings her hands, waiting for me to approach. Her face doesn't look reprimanding; it's sad.

“You're not going to lecture me too, are you?”

“Go home, poppet. Check on your grandmother. I'll speak to you later. In the meantime, why don't you ponder the treasure that is this life, 'cause, baby girl, you spend it like it's cash burning a hole in your pocket.”

On a normal day our house is cornea-stabbing white, but after I cry in the car for ten minutes as I drive home, it's like staring into the face of the sun. I squint as I walk toward it: a study in straight lines and right angles. Modern rectangular boxes of gleaming stucco contrast with black beams and walls of glass. Mom often hoses off the sides of the house, trying to beat back the desert that surrounds us. I think she's afraid she'll wake up one day and everything in her world will have turned to beige.

We've managed to create an oasis out of the three things that tolerate the heat of the Mojave Desert: palm trees, a flowering shrub called pride of Barbados (Mom loves that), and cacti.

Cacti are creepy. Joe and I joke that they are aliens waiting for a command from the mother ship. If this happens, my family is toast. We're completely surrounded.

I admit a few are strangely beautiful, with improbable flowers that seep out of them like colorful dew. But most are otherworldly petri-dish experiments magnified by a million. Some are tall and arty, while others look like pissed-off cucumbers.

Mom is obsessed with these beautiful, strange, and prickly creatures. Maybe that's why she's attracted to my father. She doesn't say it, but I think she resents that we have to live in this barren wasteland because Dad can't take the high stimulus of cities and people.

The thought of him and our fight makes me feel like my heart tripped and fell on a cactus.

The sound of Gran's piano welcomes me on the steps. I walk in, quiet enough not to distract her but loud enough not to startle. She's bent reverently over the keys. Her eyes are closed, hiding the clouds of her blindness. She's intent, her head cocked to the side like she's listening to someone else play. Her fingers are the most youthful thing about her, still nimble and straight, and I wonder if the rest of her body would be if she used it as much as she does her hands.