Mirage(40)

Once home, everyone works together to get Gran into the house and to her room. She seems more disoriented than usual and keeps asking me to sing for her again. My mom and I share confused looks as we help Gran into nightclothes and get her into bed.

“She doesn’t want dinner.” My mom sighs as she shuts Gran’s bedroom door. “That’s not a good sign.”

Her attention is soon diverted to my dad, who rummages loudly in the kitchen, pulling a snack from the fridge. His car keys jangle in his pocket. My mother insisted on driving us home from the drop zone. Her eyes narrow as he walks toward the door.

“You don’t really need to go back, do you?” she asks. “Dom said he’ll keep an eye on things.”

He glances my way.

She grabs his hand. “Please, no more to drink tonight, Nolan.”

He sucks the inside of his cheek with a defiant look and says, “I’ll see you later.” And he’s gone.



Later, as soon as I’m sure my mom is asleep, I pull the jump helmet from the bag and sit on my desk with two rolls of decorative duct tape. Dom’s origami tiger stares at me from the black surface of the desk. What is the tiger’s message? I’ve been thinking about it and have an idea. The conversation with my father in the B-17 sparked it. Jumping is the thing that makes me feel truly alive. My father and I are alike. It’s true for him. Once upon a time, it was true for me.



When I wake in the predawn, I smile at the helmet, a darn good representation of a tiger head if I do say so myself. I worked on it nearly all night. It’s not inconspicuous, but it’s not the recognizable Red Baron, either. I stuff it in my bag and jog down to catch my dad, hoping he hasn’t already left. A dented pillow and tousled blanket lie on the couch.

I find him leaning on his forearms at the new kitchen table, wooden this time. When he looks up at me, I see the dark circles that rim his eyes, and his hair looks darker because it’s greasy. He’s wearing the same clothes from yesterday.

“You okay?”

One huge swig of coffee later, he nods. “Affirmative. What’re you doing up so early?”

Forcing my feet not to shuffle, I say, “I enjoyed being at the DZ yesterday.”

“So you were surprised?”

“You have no idea. I was wondering if I can go again today? Just to hang around, maybe help if I can?”

There’s an awkward beat of silence before he shrugs and answers. “You take your meds?”

I nod.

“Sure.”



On the way there, my dad turns his head away from me when he yawns. He needn’t try to hide it. I’m yawning too. The car drifts over the center line of the highway. He casually corrects course, then ducks his head to look up through the windshield. Bulbous gray clouds obscure the sky, making it look as if we’re trapped underneath the tops of jellyfish in a vast ocean. Scattered raindrops patter on the windshield.

No one else has arrived yet. The hangar looks cold and shuttered. Because of the chill of the morning, we enter through a side door and leave the main doors closed. It takes my eyes a moment to register that some of the lumps on the packing pads are actually people curled up in sleeping bags. The place is an after-party disaster. Red plastic cups and wrinkled balloons litter the countertops. Someone’s bra is strewn over a picture of the Golden Knights, the Army skydiving team. The place smells like old nacho cheese and dirty feet.

“Get on that. Christ, it’s like having twenty goddamn kids.” While my father gets to the business of readying for the demo jump, I busy myself with cleanup, tossing cups into a large black trash bag and wiping the checkin counter clean. Yvon, one of our pilots, shows up. She has a slight limp?—?I’ve no idea why she limps, but feel like I should know. She also has pretty caramel hair that sparks with silver threads when the light hits it just right.

As I’m pondering why my memory is like the shallow end of an ocean, she elbows me in the side. “Glad to see you here, little miss.” Yvon has the ready smile of someone who knows that no matter what steaming pile of crap life hands you, you can always mold it into something better than what it was. She doesn’t say these things with words, but I see it in her eyes. She’s been around and back around. “Place isn’t the same without you.”

“I’m not the same without it.”

She nods. “Roger that.” She pulls a hair tie off her wrist and tugs her hair into a ponytail before pulling it through the back of a baseball cap. “When do you suppose you’ll get back up there?”

I like that it’s when and not if. She’s more sure of the idea than I am.

“Soon.” I don’t know why, but I find myself telling her the truth: Yesterday, after talking to my dad in the B-17 and after interpreting the message from Dom’s origami tiger, I had an epiphany. “I need to get back in the air soon. It’s the only way to really live.”

One side of her mouth lifts into a smile, and she limps away to go fuel and preflight the plane for the golf-course demo. Jumpers begin to arrive, disheveled in that roll-out-of-bed-and-roll-out-of-an-airplane, it’s-just-another-Saturday kind of way. But they’re excited. Everyone loves jumping into a new location, and the golf-course grass is a luxurious change from the scrubby desert sand.

Soon my dad is too busy checking people in on the manifest, answering questions, and going over the flight plan with Yvon to notice me sneaking into the restroom with my duffel bag. My heart pounds against my ribs as I slip my legs into the black jumpsuit. I shouldn’t be this nervous, but I am. Doubts settle on me. Maybe I interpreted the tiger’s message wrong. I don’t know if I can do this. Hundreds of jumps mean nothing when they feel like they were performed by someone else.