Mirage Read online

  “Who would dump an expensive RV like this and just vanish?” I ask, noting an extension cord snaking across the floor of the hangar. “You wired the power?” I ask, and Dom nods. He prepped our hideaway. Dom directs me inside with his hand on the small of my back. “I can’t see a thing,” I complain, reaching out in front of me into the blackness. My skin registers a drop in temperature, like the random, mystifying spots in lakes that are fifteen degrees colder. Goose bumps rise on my outstretched arms, and a wave of trepidation sweeps its rough hand down my spine.

  A light switches on, and the RV is bathed in a yellow glow. I screech at my own reflection in the mirror in front of me and then bust out laughing.

  Dom pokes my back. “Silly.”

  “Hey, I didn’t expect to see someone standing there, even if that someone is me! Wow. This place is boss.”

  It’s a miniature house on wheels, with a kitchen, a sofa, and an oak dining table with padded booth benches. I step farther inside. The dank smell of the hangar has disappeared. In its place rise the diminishing sharp odors of bleach and the chemical smell of new carpet. Dom watches as I open cabinets, check the fridge, flip switches. “This is camping in style,” I say, clicking my fingernail against a row of dusty glasses that are hanging upside down in an overhead cabinet. They jangle against one another. “When we’re older, let’s rent one of these and drive all over hell and back.”

  “How ’bout I ride my bike, you follow me like my road crew and cook me dinner, and​—”

  “Screw that,” I say with a raised eyebrow. “You be my road crew.”

  While the place has obviously been scrubbed clean of both use and the personality of the owners, my poking around reveals traces of a previous life. A case of some kind of nutrition drink sits unopened under the kitchen table. A maroon Bible stands lonely in a little magazine nook built into the end of the couch. I run my finger over the smooth gold crown of the pages, coating my finger with a film of dust, which I wipe on my shorts. The bathroom still has toilet paper on the roll and a stack of white towels​—​thin, like tea towels or hospital towels​—​folded in the cabinet under the sink. I slide them aside, knocking them into something, which falls sideways with a rattling sound.

  It’s a prescription bottle, totally full of morphine. That’s some heavy-duty pain stuff. I wonder why it’s full. Why was it left here? The urge to swipe the pills comes over me like a drive-by devil before I put them back and head down the narrow hallway and slide the door into its pocket. A queen bed fills the middle of the room and is surrounded by honey-colored cabinets. Blankets, sheets, and pillows are stacked on the mattress. I glance over my shoulder at Dom.

  There’s want in his eyes.

  It’s a certain look I’ve come to recognize: chin lowered a bit, eyes focused and penetrating. I love that look. But instead of coming toward me like I expect, he leans a shoulder against the wall and stares at me with his arms crossed.

  Dom holds his ground when I think he’ll advance. Surprises when I think he has no more mysteries. Six months ago, when I pegged him for another hotshot adrenaline junkie, he showed me poetry and tender pencil drawings of hawks, my profile, and his dead mother’s strong hands making tortillas.

  People don’t always like Dom on first impression. For instance, my best friend, Joe. Well, Joe doesn’t like him after many impressions. I don’t know why. But to me, Dom is like the art he loves so much: complicated and nuanced. The more I look, the more beautiful he is. My heart inflates each day, expanding and rising up, up, and he holds the rope that tethers me when I feel like I’ll float away. In turn, I do the same for him. We urge each other into wild explorations, then belay each other to reality.

  Needing to kiss his lips right this second, I take the length of the hallway in two strides and grab his chin. Our lips melt together​—​powerful, moist fire. His mouth, his jaw, his tongue . . . he is everything hard and soft at once. I reach under his T-shirt and run my hand down his stomach toward the snap of his jeans. He stops my advances with a gentle hand on my collarbone.

  He turns me around so I’m facing the full-length hall mirror and stands behind me. “Look at yourself,” he whispers into my curls. His hand caresses my jaw with the sensitivity of a sculptor, and his thumb runs over my lips. “You’re beautiful.”

  I’m not sure why I feel a foreign shyness when Dom says this. When he looks at me adoringly, I feel like a lone sunflower in a field, and he’s the sun I arch toward. I feel truly seen. I’m not going to be falsely modest and say I don’t know I’m attractive. Guys look. Hell, even girls look. But I think it’s more because I’m interesting, with one foot in each parent’s race.

  Before she lost her sight, my grandmother said I was the combination of the smooth, dark rum of her beloved Caribbean and the imperious determination of a bank of white clouds marching over the land.

  Gran has poetry in her.

  I look in the mirror every day, but it’s different when someone’s with you. I look now to see what Dom sees. It’s like meeting me for the first time. My reflection watches back. Stops me cold. I look different to myself. Slightly off. A shiver passes over my skin, raising the fine hairs on my arms. I stare hard into my own eyes. They look strange, intense, as if they are studying me—​as if this reflection has been here in this motor home all along, waiting for me to look​—​and I’m unsettled enough to close my eyes.

  Dom kisses my neck, and I shut the eerie image out, concentrating on the sensation of his lips soft against my skin, my earlobe. He nips my shoulder. “Don’t close your eyes, Ry. Watch.”

  His hands grasp my hips​—​a possessive move that gives me chills​—​and then slide down the outside of my thighs. He brings them up again slowly, and we watch together as he runs them over my breasts, his fingers peeling my T-shirt up to expose my stomach. I love the contrast in browns when his olive Mexican hand slides over my darker island skin.

  My breath comes faster as he undoes the button of my shorts. I look down at his tapered fingers brushing along the waistband, but he gently raises my chin back to our image. He inches my zipper down and slides his hand lower. I whisper, “Yes,” because I want his hand in my pants more than anything at that moment.

  I reach my arm back, seize his black hair, and tug. Dom growls softly and stares hard into my eyes in the mirror. He’s right about this game. There’s something about watching ourselves that heightens the experience. We are witnesses to our own beautiful, raging lives. I’m loving watching us until I catch my eyes again in the mirror, and a chilling thought hits me like a cold wind:

  These eyes aren’t mine.

  Three

  MY EYES ARE dark, moist earth.

  These other eyes​—​superimposed over mine​—​are the deep Arctic Ocean with ice marbling underneath. I shiver, pull Dom’s hands from my skin, and turn away from the mirror, into his chest. “We’d better get back.” I feel the foreign eyes on my spine, and the hairs rise on my neck and my stomach flutters with nerves.

  “What? Noooo,” he groans, sliding his hands down my arms. “That has, like, five kinds of rejection and suck written all over it.”

  I scoot out of his grasp. “My dad asked me to go up on the sunset jump,” I lie, willing myself not to look at the mirror and the ghostly otherness within it.

  Dom does an exaggerated package shift; whether it’s for show or not, I don’t know and don’t care. I want to feel the sun on my back instead of phantom eyes. I leave him standing in the hall as I fling open the door and hop past the steps onto the concrete floor of the hangar. I’m outside before he’s even turned off the light.

  I can tell he’s disappointed. He takes forever to lock the door. But when he turns toward me, his eyes crease with concern. “You okay?”

  I slide onto his bike, trying to remember if I’ve ever been so creeped out. “I’ll be okay if you let me drive us back.”

  “Woman​—”

  I turn the key and gas it. “You getting on back or walkin
g?”

  “I know better than to tangle with you when you have the tiger look.”

  “Hold on tight,” I warn, and then suck in my breath when he hooks his fingers inside the inseam of my shorts.

  “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 re
fuses 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.

  Four

  “YOU 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!”