Mirage(19)

I hear Ayida’s quaking voice from the foot of my bed. “What’s happening?”

His voice doesn’t shake like hers. It’s a trained calm. The first sergeant is on duty, giving orders. “Call her doctor. I don’t know what’s wrong. I think she cut her eye. She’s?—?she’s crying blood. She was crazed, tearing everything off the ceiling. Could be a flashback from the LSD. Jesus, I don’t know. Get them on the phone. Now!”

Quick footsteps retreat. He blows out one long exhale and whispers a whiskey-soaked statement from above me: “Goddamn. And I thought you scared me before.”





Twelve


“DO YOU THINK you can watch over your grandmother while I go to work for just a couple of hours?” Ayida asks a week later, during breakfast.

She looks haggard. None of us have slept too well recently. Me due to seeing those eyes every time I close my own. My mother because she wouldn’t leave my side. My father because he hasn’t had her by his. Gran . . . well, she hardly sleeps anyway. I think I have an inkling why: old people know their time is short and don’t want to waste it sleeping. The best sleep I got was yesterday afternoon when Joe came over, sat silently next to me, and held my hand until I drifted off. When I woke, he was gone.

“I want to trust you,” my mom ventures. Her eyes bear no trust. Especially since my newly appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Collier, casually tossed around terms like mental disorders, psychosis, phobias. Now those words lie scattered on the floor around me like grenades, and we wait for Dr. Collier to pick one up and lob it at us.

Gingerly I take her warm hand. “I want to be trusted again. Go. It’ll be all right.” My stomach protests at the thought of being alone with my grandmother for a few hours. I have been tiptoeing around her ever since the incident. I want to be the strong version of me again, but I’m timid around her. She batters me with strange proclamations and opinions. It’s like she hears every thought I don’t voice.

There are so many thoughts I don’t voice.

My mother clears the table and her throat. “We have another appointment with Dr. Collier this afternoon.”

My teeth grind. I don’t like his narrow pea eyes, which look like the wrong end of a telescope examining the deepest crevices of my brain. I’m playing nice, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to label me crazy. Dr. Collier has no idea what’s in my head. Only Joe has any clue that I’m being stalked from a dark place in my reflections. Only I know that the more I see her, the more I’m sure she’s trying to get inside me. Possess me.

As the thought of possession comes, I sense dark eyes on me. I’m being watched. Her angry presence swirls around the room as if my thoughts have summoned it. The hairs on my arms rise to points, and I shudder. It’s terrifying to glance around the kitchen and know that our eyes will meet.

Not in the stainless-steel surface of the fridge, or the shiny teakettle on the stove, or the windows over the sink. My breaths come faster as I search. The eyes aren’t in the glass surface of the table beneath my elbows, or the half-drunk bottle of water left on the counter. Anxiety fills me. I know the girl is with me. I feel her like shade over my life.

Mom comes over to kiss me goodbye, and I nearly recoil from her. The vengeful eyes reflect back at me through my mother’s reading glasses. She removes them and sets them on her folded newspaper on the table next to me like a vial of poison. It’s all I can do to not swipe them to the floor. I curl my hands into fists and smile.

She leaves, and the house suddenly feels both spacious and suffocating. I decide to seek out Gran, to see if I can cross our broken bridge and make things right. I find her sitting at the silent piano, staring straight ahead. Her head is bowed, gray hair pulled into a low, curly bun. She is so still, she looks as though she could be sleeping. Or . . . dead. My breath hitches. My steps are tentative as I approach with my hand outstretched to touch her shoulder. I want to be as far away as possible from the ice of death.

“Pancakes,” she says, flinging her head up, which startles the ever-loving snot out of me. “I want pancakes.”

“We just had breakfast, Gran.” Every atom in my body vibrates faster.

“What difference does that make?”

Since I can’t think of a difference, I don’t answer. Sometimes you want what you want. I, of all people, should understand that. “Are you going to play something?” I ask.

Gran nods solemnly, places her fingers on the keys, and begins. A flash of memory pops in, that this is her song and that I was supposed to be listening for mine. My fingers twitch as I watch her play. I place my hands on the keys. There is a song in me, written on translucent vellum. It feels like it’s been tied to a rock under a cold stream, but when my fingers touch the keys, it is freed, floating to the surface. I tap out the melody on the smooth keys. The song flows through me, stronger now; it moves my fingers without effort.

Gran snatches her hands back as if the piano has burned her. I keep playing, wishing she would watch my hands instead of staring at me with blind eyes. It’s my hands and heart that are making music for her, not my bandaged face. But I’m glad that I’ve found a way to connect with her again.

“That’s a hymn,” she says when I finish. “?‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee.’”

There is no pleasure in her voice. It’s something more like flabbergasted. This is not the reaction I expected. I thought she’d be delighted. “So?”