Mirage(33)

I don’t believe what I just said.

Joe’s jaw is clenched tight as he responds. “You expect parents to be ignorant asses, their visions of the perfect child dashed by our annoying tendency to be different from them. But you . . . you turning on me now hurts worse.”

My father is background scenery as Joe and I stare at each other. I feel as though I should avert my eyes, but he’s the only person I’ve felt any real emotion for since I reentered this world. I don’t know how I got it so wrong. I feel like I’ve spoken someone else’s words.

Finally Joe says, “This you . . . and me . . . we’d have never been friends.”

His words slice right through me. He’s out the front door and gone. Like that, my best friend is gone.

A hurricane of fury blows through me. Beneath my hands, under the white cloth, the table fractures like a gigantic slab of ice. Glass and my heart shatter to the floor. I stagger back. “I didn’t do that,” I say to my father, who’s rushed over. “I swear I didn’t break it. How could I? It had to be her. You have to believe me!”

“I believe you need serious help, and?—?like I was?—?you are too damn sick to know how badly you need it.”

“If you’ve decided I’m sick, then nothing I say has any credibility. Nothing I tell you matters.”

I take a step toward him, but glass crunches under my shoes and I halt. His eyes snap down to the fractured table, then back up to my face.

“Nothing you tell me will matter more than what I can see with my own eyes.”

“What about what I see with mine?”

Nolan doesn’t answer me. My question hangs in the air before dropping to the floor with the other broken pieces.





Eighteen


“A FEAR OF REFLECTIONS often reveals that there are things you don’t want to see about yourself, hence the covering up of all the mirrors in your house. Spectrophobia is the fear of mirrors. It’s possible that you may be suffering from this phobia, Ryan. Therapy and medication have proven useful to overcoming it.”

I don’t respond, just openly scribble in my journal, which I’ve begun to carry everywhere because I’m assaulted by random images and daydreams that feel more like memories. The night dreams are worse. Five nights of hell since the fight with Joe. Days and days battling a ghost only I can see. Gran’s rice didn’t manage to stop that.

Writing in front of Dr. Collier without showing it to him is a statement. My thoughts are my own. Besides, I have to capture the dreams I had last night before I forget them. It’s always the same. People want me dead. People I love but do not recognize. In the dream I always feel utterly abandoned.

Except for my pen moving across paper, the room is so quiet the carpet makes sounds, rustling like dry wheat.

“Is there anything that you feel ashamed of? Anything about yourself that you’d rather not look at?”

I glance up from my journal. “In your opinion, is everyone crazy who believes in ghosts?”

“Does your scar trouble you?” Dr. Collier asks, pointing toward his own cheek with his pen.

“I’m alive and happy to be so. I care more about that than the scar on my face.” I realize my fingers betray me by tracing my raw scar, and I stuff my hand in my hoodie pocket.

“In and of itself, a belief in the paranormal does not mean someone is suffering from a mental illness. You did not disclose this in your assessment the last time you were here. You did not disclose much at all. But by your parents’ reporting of the events they do know about, you have exhibited behavior consistent with someone who suffers from schizophrenia. Someone who believes in ghosts does not normally display such a marked difference in personality.”

When I say nothing in response, the doctor forges on. I know from the hollow feeling in my stomach where this is going.

“Since you’re a minor, your parents have the authority to medicate you for your own safety and for the safety of those around you. This decision has not been made lightly. Their highest priority is to see you well and adjusted. Able to live your life as close to normal as possible.”

“Normal,” I whisper, mostly to myself. “I’ll never be normal.”

I’ve been fighting medication because the night I cut my mother in the kitchen, the sedative made me feel weak, less concrete in my body. And because the phantom was still there even beneath the haze of the drug. She wants to climb inside me, claim me. I can feel it, like she’s pounding on the door of my soul. What if, by taking the pills, I become too weak to fight her off? And somewhere, deep inside me, I think medication is poison. I don’t know where that thought comes from, but it feels like a conviction. Now they want to force me to take it, and because I’m a minor, they say I have no choice.

“Ryan, this is not your fault, nor is it something you can will away. The bravest thing you can do is to come to a place of acceptance so you can move forward in life, healthier and better able to cope. You don’t have to suffer.”

You do. Yes, you do.



We fill my new head-med prescription, and after the first week of taking it, I don’t feel much difference. My mom is worried that the prescription isn’t effective. “Maybe that’s because I’m not mentally ill?” I offer with some sarcasm.

My mom cries openly while driving home from my follow-up visit to Dr. Collier’s. “I feel like I’m losing everyone I love. Your bodies stay here, but your minds become a room I can’t enter. It’s been a long road with your father’s PTSD. He’s having bad dreams again. Did you know that?” I didn’t, but she doesn’t wait for my answer. “Your grandma slips deeper into herself every day, and you . . . you’ve changed before my very eyes.” She wipes her face with the sleeve of her flowered blouse.