Mirage(49)

Never have I seen myself like this. A candid picture of me walking with my chute crumpled against my chest after a jump, a mass of ringlets, and a mass of attitude. No one is in the picture with me, but I’m smiling. I appear to be smiling to myself, giddy with an inside joke about how badass life is. A picture of me and my mother, belly laughing. Our smiles are the same. A side shot of me giving the bare ass to my father with his back turned to me as he briefs a bunch of his boys before a jump. The smile on their faces says it all. The first sergeant has momentarily lost their attention.

The memory of this thought rushes in: Now he knows how I feel.

These are all pictures of me, but . . .



Babe, I love strong women. Hell, I was raised by one. And now both of my strong women are gone. I’d give anything to go backwards and erase that night in the motor home. Everything changed that night. You changed that night. Does it have to be forever?





The skydive calendar proofs scroll by. I gawk at the brazen images, feeling disassociated, like the girl I see is so completely foreign to me, I can’t even say she’s me.

It is no longer me but her.

Her with her cola skin, her full lips sauced with shimmering gloss, and her skintight red skydive jumpsuit unzipped down her ridged belly. Everything in her cat eyes says she’s blatantly unafraid of being looked at, of showing the world exactly who she thinks she is.

She. Is. Unafraid.



Being unafraid of experience is what made you extraordinary.





On top of a mountain. Her naked body is a silhouette, a dark S of curves against the night sky. Wind blows her puff of wild hair, licks her skin. A lightning storm rages and strikes out in the distance in front of her. Arms overhead, she is powerful: it’s as though she can shoot lightning straight from her soul and out through her fingers. Watching her, I’ve no doubt she can.

Video now, of different jumps. Dom wears a camera on his jump helmet, flying toward me, her, floating in the sky; wind makes her cheeks ripple like water. She zooms closer, reaches for him with muscled arms in a tank top, and kisses him in freefall. Does everyone fall to the earth with such peace? Does everyone look so radiant after a kiss?

There are video clips of multiways of synchronized jumpers. I feel like God watching from above. It’s a dance in the air. A colorful snowflake falling to earth. I’m in awe. And confusion. I’m watching superheroes. Do these people know how special they are? How dynamically alive and rare they are?

One jump is filmed from the ground. I hear Dom behind the camera, talking to someone next to him, excited anticipation and pride evident in his voice. One by one, parachutes burst open. The camera zooms out, then in, trying to focus on a dot of color hurtling toward the ground.

Falling so fast.

Falling.

Then, my father’s voice: “Open, baby. Open, goddamn it. Jesus, Ryan, don’t do this to me . . . open the damn chute.” Hearing such anguish fills my eyes with tears. “I love you, Ryan, please . . .”

He’s never said that to me.

My eyes are glued to the screen. There is no way that chute is going to open. I know who I’m watching, and somewhere inside, the memory is there, but it’s like watching a movie of my own death.

Her death.

My whole body vibrates in terrified anticipation as she plummets toward packed dirt. My hands cover my mouth. I’m pleading with her now, like her father, to please pull. I want to look away, but I can’t.

I’m watching my life flash before my eyes.

In an exhalation of color, the chute gusts open just in time to catch her before she tumbles to the sandy ground. Dom yells out and runs, the desert floor bouncing by onscreen. I dread what he’s about to see, until I realize the camera has stopped moving and is pointed at the smiling face of the girl who haunts me in every reflection. She’s holding something toward the camera.

“The penny, bitches!”

For the first time, I really see what everyone else sees. No wonder they miss the old Ryan. No wonder they want her back. That Ryan was larger than life. I’ve tried to be that Ryan, but it’s like she’s died in me. She deserves to live on. I don’t know whose side I’m on anymore: mine, or . . . mine?

In a daze, I wander to Gran’s empty room. It smells like her: warm skin, strange medicinal creams, cigar smoke. Magic.

I feel her.

Her soft, aged skin in the bath water. Her wrinkled hands, limber only on the piano. Her blind eyes, which saw through me. She was magic. I’m so privileged to have known her.

I realize I can’t think of her proper name. This baffles me. How can I not remember my grandmother’s name?

The Obeah religion Gran practiced was a lot of the “dark water” my mother spoke about. Unknowable, mysterious. She probably made much of it up. I think Gran was her own religion. Her philosophy of life and death rings true, though.

Live with integrity. Die with integrity.

If you don’t do one right, you can never do the other right.

Wishing I could use magic to rectify things, I finger the objects of her altar. Placed around a creamy hand-spun bowl are a shell filled with cigar ashes, feathers from various birds that look like they died in a fiery crash, and four flat, smooth stones that feel as solid as vows when I press them into my palm.

I light a half-burned stick of incense and walk to the freestanding antique mirror that’s in the corner of the room, between two windows. Smoke curls up into the air behind me.