Mirage(27)

“You want that, don’t you?” Nolan asks me. His voice is uncharacteristically gentle as he opens the door to the medical facility.

I enter, and my footsteps stutter on the gray carpet. It’s familiar. Too familiar, but I can’t say why. “I don’t want to go in here again. This place treats people like walking germs.”

My mother scowls. “Baby, you’ve never been here before in your life.”

My lips purse together. I could swear I’ve seen this place?—?though maybe it was in my bad dreams. The memory is dreamlike, hazy. Haven’t I previously shuffled down these long halls lined with enlarged glossy photographs of the desert? “You sure?” I ask. Walking the corridor is like being dipped in a vat of desolation. Every cell in my body rejects the idea of being here. I want to run.

“I’m certain.” She points to the photographs. “You’d think they’d put up pictures of the beach or forests,” my mom comments with fake cheeriness. “We see enough of the desert as it is.”

“Pictures of the beach would just be a tease,” I answer shakily, glancing at a black-and-white of a Joshua tree posing haughtily for the sun. I suck in my breath, seeing the spirit’s face flash at me from the thick, gnarled branches in the photograph.

In the next picture?—?the sun setting behind the Sierra Nevada?—?her eyes pierce mine, her face as stony as the granite mountaintops. I force myself to keep walking.

A still photograph of a menacing, coiled, tawny rattlesnake makes every hair on my body rise. I will myself to stare at it. How can she possibly harm me? But it looks as though venom drips from her open mouth. The sound of the fast quiver of a rattler morphs into her scream. My skin rolls with fear, with the sensation of shedding, like that snake.

Do snakes feel fresh and vulnerable after they’ve discarded their old skin for new? How long does it take for the new skin to thicken so that sensations don’t feel like an assault? My spit tastes like sour, acidic venom.

Photo after photo scrolls by, and there she is, in every frame. My heart pounds as if I’ve been running an endless hallway. The girl is determined, though. She tells me in a voice like the snarl of a leopard, I will haunt you forever.

I keep my head down until I’m sitting in the waiting area. My mother asks if I’m okay. Words will betray me. They already have. I nod and sit on my bandaged hands to conceal their violent trembling. We’re ushered into the exam room. There are no mirrors, thank God.

First the doctor removes the bandages from my arms and upper thighs. I crinkle my nose at the yeasty smell of the gauze. Is it supposed to smell like illness? My stomach rolls. Something about being in this room makes me feel like my blood is pulsing thick with a spreading disease.

Then, slowly, she peels away the wide swath of cotton gauze on my cheek. The air hits it with cool breath. I feel exposed. My mother’s hand flings upward to her mouth, but Nolan seizes it and pulls it calmly to his side. She turns away from me and pretends to search for something in her purse.

“Bad, huh?” I ask my father as the doctor prods my cheek. He’ll steel himself and tell me the truth.

“You’re beautiful,” he answers without averting his eyes from the lie. That small, unexpected kindness from him is enough to choke me up.

The doctor turns toward the cabinets and opens a drawer, telling me how to care for my wounds until they’re fully healed. She turns back toward me and holds up a hand mirror directly in front of my face.

It’s me and it’s not me staring back. It’s never just me. I thrust the mirror away, but the doctor wasn’t expecting my reaction, and it clatters to the floor, fracturing into angular pieces. Dozens of different-size eyes stare up at me.

“Ryan, please stay calm.” My mother wraps her arms around me. “It will heal. You’re going to be okay.”

The doctor tries to reassure me, telling me that it’s always hard for people to adjust to facial scars but that it will heal and be much less noticeable over time. I hear only half her words before running out of the room, crushing eyes under my heels as I go.





Fifteen


THERE’S NO WAY they can catch me. It’s painful for my dad to run due to his war injuries, and my mother has nothing on my long-legged speed. I had to get out of there, out of the confining antiseptic of the medical building and into the open air. It’s exhilarating to run full-out like this, the exquisite tension and release of every muscle doing its job. Every breath is life itself inflating my lungs, coursing oxygen through my blood. No matter my confusion, uncertainty, and fears, I’m lucky to feel all of it. I’m lucky to feel at all.

My heart pounds a cadence: I’m alive. I’m alive. Even she is quiet right now beneath the thrum of it.

I zigzag through side streets and alleyways until my body is running on fumes, the cut on my cheek throbs with my pulse, and I come to a gasping halt on a street corner. I need to call Joe. He’ll come for me, sit with me, let me cry without explanation. He will look at me tenderly. He’s the only person in this world who doesn’t want anything from me right now that I can’t give.

There are already three messages on my cell from my parents asking where I am, begging me to stay calm and let them come get me. Thankfully, Joe answers my call right away. I try to direct him to wherever I am. “I wasn’t exactly looking where I was going,” I say, giving him the street names of the intersection in the quiet neighborhood where I finally stopped.