Mirage(43)

Burned-red anger spreads like fire from my belly through my body. I don’t want to hear her now. Never again. She has become my tormentor. This moment should have been my victory for booming back into life, my triumph for being bold and fearless, and I’m being laughed at for crash landing. I’m humiliated by a spook.

I flail and struggle to free myself. Will I be stuck here like this? Will someone eventually find me, mummified in my own parachute among the Joshua trees and sagebrush, eyes staring at heaven?

My name. I hear my name. And footsteps in the dirt. Hands touch my cheeks through the fabric. “Are you okay?” Dom’s breathless voice asks. I croak out a yes. “Don’t move,” he says, kneeling over my legs. I hear a metallic click. “Not . . . one . . . move . . .” he warns as he puckers a wad of the chute above my face, creating a tent over my nose, and then the glint of a knife slashes through the fabric from my nose to my navel.

Cool air and rain hit my skin, and Dom pulls me to sitting, shaking me. “What the hell happened?”

“You?—?you threw me out. I could have died. Do you want me to die?” At once I’m filled with such certainty that he did want that. I don’t know where this is coming from, but I know I’ve been at this fork in the road before, facing someone who didn’t care if I died. There’s a memory, or a dream, faded like an old photograph, of me asking that question before, and the answer was yes. It’s too painful to be expendable. I can’t look at his face.

Dom won’t let me hide. He squeezes my cheeks until I’m facing him again. “You think I wanted you to die?” Incredulousness rips his voice into splinters. “I was trying to save you, Ryan! Yvon was fighting with a stalling plane. That’s nowhere you want to be. You f*cking froze up there. I’ve never seen you like that, like everything you knew was wiped from your goddamn head!” Tears fill his eyes. His voice descends into a whisper, like he knows I’m in a deep, dark cave where it’s only safe to reach me through whispers. “What’s happened to you?”

“I don’t know. The plane was jerking around, the rain . . . I saw . . . I think I hallucinated. I was scared.”

He shakes his head, casting drops of water from the ends of his black hair. “Hallucinated? So what Joe told me is true? What Avery said wasn’t lies?”

I can only imagine Avery’s version of events of that night in the kitchen with the knife. But Joe? “Joe talked to you about me? When? Why?”

“He wanted to know if you’d said anything strange to me before the LSD. He was worried about you. He told me that he came to me because he knew that, besides your parents, I’m the only other person who wants what he wants: for you to be okay. I don’t know what happened between you two, but Joe said he was done with you for now. Needed time away. He said I had to do everything I could to help you.”

“Joe said that?”

“He threatened me, actually. I think it was the start of a friendship.”

I want to explain, but I’ve been trying to explain to myself?—?and in my journals?—?what happened to me. I feel like I split in two. Nothing makes sense. “That night in the trailer?—”

“No. I know what happened that night in the trailer. What happened to you? Where’d the Ryan go who was fearless, brave, so bright with life that she was all I could see? You saved me after my mom died, but you won’t let me save you. I feel like I’ve lost my family all over again. It’s like you died.”

“I did die, Dom!”

“How can you say that? The doctors never did. You had a bad trip, and I hate that I had something to do with that, but ever since, you’ve been someone else.”

“I know what I know. I died! I went someplace else. It was dark there. Now I’m back. Changed. I’m never gonna be that girl again! I’m trying and it’s not . . . I came back as?. . . this! Only nobody wants this! All of you loved someone else.”

“You’re wrong about that. I want you. I’ve never stopped loving you, but you’ve done nothing but turn your back on me, on us. Losing my mom was the worst pain, Ryan. You know that! But losing you because you’re choosing it”?—?he pounds his fist on his chest?—?“it’s killing me.”

“Why do you think I jumped? I wanted to feel! I may be alive, but I don’t feel things anymore. I’ve gone numb to everything but fear. I want to feel and I . . . I can’t. You don’t know what that’s like, to feel nothing good.”

The fear of a little boy, the desperation of a drowning man, the starvation?—?all these emotions rage in Dom’s eyes. His grip on my cheeks softens. His thumb runs over my wet lips, and his eyes trace the lines like he’s memorizing them. He presses his rain-drenched lips over mine.

I tense with surprise, my hands in fists at my sides, but when he pulls me to his body, my palms find their way to the ridges of his chest. I may not be able to reach my frozen heart beneath the ice, but I can feel his heart crackling with fire under his soaked shirt as he clasps the back of my neck with one hand and runs his other down the small of my back.

“Do you feel this?” he asks, breathy against my mouth. My lips open to his, and his soft tongue meets mine. His mouth is so warm, I’m drawn to it. I can’t stop from immersing myself. This time, when the world tilts, I don’t notice it until the earth is against my back.