Mirage (2 page)

“Yes, but
must
you crawl all over each other in public like a couple of monkeys? It's unseemly.”

I always laugh when Mom uses that word. It's a carryover from growing up on Cat Island.
“Unseeeemly,”
I tease, imitating her island accent. Like clockwork, when I laugh, Mom laughs. And my mother doesn't just chuckle. Her laugh is full-bodied and carbonated. Her laugh is dark, sticky soda. We can never stay mad at each other.

She smacks me on the rear with her clipboard and shoos me out of her office as my father walks in. I touch his arm tentatively, but he slips away like an eel, busying himself with a pile of mail on the desk. I stare, trying to think of something to say to engage him. Dad slices the top of an envelope, shakes the letter open, and smiles broadly. It's the sun appearing from behind a curtain of clouds. The drop zone is the only place I ever see my dad's
real
smile. I stay because I want to know what's in the letter that has made it appear.

“The good news,” he says, “is that we've made the short list of locations for the X Games.”

“And the bad?” Mom asks, her painted nails resting on his shoulders.

He rubs his forehead. “If we don't get that event, our doors will close for good.”

We all sigh. I knew things were tight, but I had no idea they were that critical. This place can't close. It's our life and the only thing holding Dad's PTSD in check. It keeps him focused on something other than his injuries, his losses, his bad dreams. His razor pain. “What do we have to do to make sure we get it?” I ask, squaring my shoulders in a
reporting for duty
kind of way.

My question brings his gunmetal gray eyes to meet mine. “We need to get their attention. We need a huge big-way when they come to scout the DZ​​—​​so many jumpers in the air that the formation will look like a spaceship landing. It'll take every experienced jumper we know to pull it off.”

“I want in,” I say, a pebble of hope lodging in my chest. When he shakes his head, I firmly tell him, “I'm ready.”

“No,” Dad answers in his first-sergeant voice while riffling through stacks of mail on his desk. “I assess your readiness. You're too young, too inexperienced, and this is too important. I need perfection. Absolute precision. It's not personal; it's business. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I mumble, but it
is
personal. Do people have to be willing to die in order to earn his respect? Is having a penis a prerequisite for his regard? I back out of the office right into Dom's outstretched arms. He whispers in my ear, “Come with me. I've got something to show you.”

Dom's motorcycle growls when he revs it, and he motions for me to climb on. I settle into the leather seat, wrapping myself around him. I love the feel of his hand cupping my outer thigh and the way my heart slams into my back when we take off. I have no idea where we're going, but he's bypassed the airport gate, so it would seem the mystery location is on the field somewhere.

Steel airplane hangars flash by in neat rows. It's like we're driving up the pages of a book: every sentence another row of evenly spaced hangars. Some are singles, some double wide for larger planes. They are uniformly imperfect. We turn left at the second to last row. This is the forgotten sector of the small municipal airport. In fact, the last time I was in this section was a year ago, to help my dad hang a new windsock. You know, the little things I'm qualified to do.

Dom cuts the engine and rolls to a stop in front of one of the larger hangars. He kickstands the bike and hops off. I slide forward into the warm space his body left on the seat and fondle the handlebars. “I want one so I can ride whenever I want.”

“I got something you can ride.” Dom's dimples are in the on position as he smiles playfully. I roll my eyes. “Come with me,” he says with a gentle kiss to my nose.

I follow him to the side of the hangar where there's a regular door. Dom fishes a key from his jeans pocket and slides it in the keyhole.

“Whose hangar is this?” I ask.

“I found out from the airport manager that it's on the abandoned list. They're trying to locate the owners​—​some kind of ultrareligious nutjobs who leased the hangar and then just disappeared. The airport is trying to serve them an eviction notice because they haven't been paying.” He pulls me into the dark hangar. “The contents will be auctioned off if they can't locate the owners. Until they do, it's our secret hideaway.”

“Our secret hideaway smells like mice and dust,” I say, crinkling my nose. As my eyes slowly adjust to the dim light, I see a large motor home filling the space behind Dom. It's covered with a powdery layer of grime, but it's obvious how nice the RV is. Metallic lavender and silver paint glints in the shaft of sunlight from the open door, which Dom moves to close. As he does, the triangle of light slinks back into the shadows, and we're left standing together in the hushed room with only an occasional airplane engine whirring outside.

Dom presses his lips against mine, reminding me of our first kiss and how it was not soft, but urgent and fiery. It was me who initiated it, but he denies that. He takes my hand and leads me up two small metal steps to the front door of the motor home. I don't know why my heart is racing at simply trespassing in an abandoned hangar, but I love it when my body hums with signals​—​excitement, danger, alarm. It's when these red flares shoot up inside me that I feel most alive.

“Who would dump an expensive RV like this and just vanish?” I ask, noting an extension cord snaking across the floor of the hangar. “You wired the power?” I ask, and Dom nods. He prepped our hideaway. Dom directs me inside with his hand on the small of my back. “I can't see a thing,” I complain, reaching out in front of me into the blackness. My skin registers a drop in temperature, like the random, mystifying spots in lakes that are fifteen degrees colder. Goose bumps rise on my outstretched arms, and a wave of trepidation sweeps its rough hand down my spine.

A light switches on, and the RV is bathed in a yellow glow. I screech at my own reflection in the mirror in front of me and then bust out laughing.

Dom pokes my back. “Silly.”

“Hey, I didn't expect to see someone standing there, even if that someone is me! Wow. This place is boss.”

It's a miniature house on wheels, with a kitchen, a sofa, and an oak dining table with padded booth benches. I step farther inside. The dank smell of the hangar has disappeared. In its place rise the diminishing sharp odors of bleach and the chemical smell of new carpet. Dom watches as I open cabinets, check the fridge, flip switches. “This is camping in style,” I say, clicking my fingernail against a row of dusty glasses that are hanging upside down in an overhead cabinet. They jangle against one another. “When we're older, let's rent one of these and drive all over hell and back.”

“How 'bout I ride my bike, you follow me like my road crew and cook me dinner, and​—”

“Screw that,” I say with a raised eyebrow. “You be
my
road crew.”

While the place has obviously been scrubbed clean of both use and the personality of the owners, my poking around reveals traces of a previous life. A case of some kind of nutrition drink sits unopened under the kitchen table. A maroon Bible stands lonely in a little magazine nook built into the end of the couch. I run my finger over the smooth gold crown of the pages, coating my finger with a film of dust, which I wipe on my shorts. The bathroom still has toilet paper on the roll and a stack of white towels​—​thin, like tea towels or hospital towels​—​folded in the cabinet under the sink. I slide them aside, knocking them into something, which falls sideways with a rattling sound.

It's a prescription bottle, totally full of morphine. That's some heavy-duty pain stuff. I wonder why it's full. Why was it left here? The urge to swipe the pills comes over me like a drive-by devil before I put them back and head down the narrow hallway and slide the door into its pocket. A queen bed fills the middle of the room and is surrounded by honey-colored cabinets. Blankets, sheets, and pillows are stacked on the mattress. I glance over my shoulder at Dom.

There's want in his eyes.

It's a certain look I've come to recognize: chin lowered a bit, eyes focused and penetrating. I love that look. But instead of coming toward me like I expect, he leans a shoulder against the wall and stares at me with his arms crossed.

Dom holds his ground when I think he'll advance. Surprises when I think he has no more mysteries. Six months ago, when I pegged him for another hotshot adrenaline junkie, he showed me poetry and tender pencil drawings of hawks, my profile, and his dead mother's strong hands making tortillas.

People don't always like Dom on first impression. For instance, my best friend, Joe. Well, Joe doesn't like him after many impressions. I don't know why. But to me, Dom is like the art he loves so much: complicated and nuanced. The more I look, the more beautiful he is. My heart inflates each day, expanding and rising up, up, and he holds the rope that tethers me when I feel like I'll float away. In turn, I do the same for him. We urge each other into wild explorations, then belay each other to reality.

Needing to kiss his lips right this second, I take the length of the hallway in two strides and grab his chin. Our lips melt together​—​powerful, moist fire. His mouth, his jaw, his tongue . . . he is everything hard and soft at once. I reach under his T-shirt and run my hand down his stomach toward the snap of his jeans. He stops my advances with a gentle hand on my collarbone.

He turns me around so I'm facing the full-length hall mirror and stands behind me. “Look at yourself,” he whispers into my curls. His hand caresses my jaw with the sensitivity of a sculptor, and his thumb runs over my lips. “You're beautiful.”

I'm not sure why I feel a foreign shyness when Dom says this. When he looks at me adoringly, I feel like a lone sunflower in a field, and he's the sun I arch toward. I feel truly
seen
. I'm not going to be falsely modest and say I don't know I'm attractive. Guys look. Hell, even girls look. But I think it's more because I'm interesting, with one foot in each parent's race.

Before she lost her sight, my grandmother said I was the combination of the smooth, dark rum of her beloved Caribbean and the imperious determination of a bank of white clouds marching over the land.

Gran has poetry in her.

I look in the mirror every day, but it's different when someone's with you. I look now to see what Dom sees. It's like meeting me for the first time. My reflection watches back. Stops me cold. I look different to myself. Slightly off. A shiver passes over my skin, raising the fine hairs on my arms. I stare hard into my own eyes. They look strange, intense, as if they are studying
me
—​as if this reflection has been here in this motor home all along, waiting for me to look​—​and I'm unsettled enough to close my eyes.

Dom kisses my neck, and I shut the eerie image out, concentrating on the sensation of his lips soft against my skin, my earlobe. He nips my shoulder. “Don't close your eyes, Ry. Watch.”

His hands grasp my hips​—​a possessive move that gives me chills​—​and then slide down the outside of my thighs. He brings them up again slowly, and we watch together as he runs them over my breasts, his fingers peeling my T-shirt up to expose my stomach. I love the contrast in browns when his olive Mexican hand slides over my darker island skin.

My breath comes faster as he undoes the button of my shorts. I look down at his tapered fingers brushing along the waistband, but he gently raises my chin back to our image. He inches my zipper down and slides his hand lower. I whisper, “Yes,” because I want his hand in my pants more than anything at that moment.

I reach my arm back, seize his black hair, and tug. Dom growls softly and stares hard into my eyes in the mirror. He's right about this game. There's something about watching ourselves that heightens the experience. We are witnesses to our own beautiful, raging lives. I'm loving watching us until I catch my eyes again in the mirror, and a chilling thought hits me like a cold wind:

These eyes aren't mine.

M
Y EYES ARE
dark, moist earth.

These other eyes​—​superimposed over mine​—​are the deep Arctic Ocean with ice marbling underneath. I shiver, pull Dom's hands from my skin, and turn away from the mirror, into his chest. “We'd better get back.” I feel the foreign eyes on my spine, and the hairs rise on my neck and my stomach flutters with nerves.

“What? Noooo,” he groans, sliding his hands down my arms. “That has, like, five kinds of rejection and suck written all over it.”

I scoot out of his grasp. “My dad asked me to go up on the sunset jump,” I lie, willing myself not to look at the mirror and the ghostly
otherness
within it.

Dom does an exaggerated package shift; whether it's for show or not, I don't know and don't care. I want to feel the sun on my back instead of phantom eyes. I leave him standing in the hall as I fling open the door and hop past the steps onto the concrete floor of the hangar. I'm outside before he's even turned off the light.

I can tell he's disappointed. He takes forever to lock the door. But when he turns toward me, his eyes crease with concern. “You okay?”

I slide onto his bike, trying to remember if I've ever been so creeped out. “I'll be okay if you let me drive us back.”

“Woman​—”

I turn the key and gas it. “You getting on back or walking?”

“I know better than to tangle with you when you have the tiger look.”

“Hold on tight,” I warn, and then suck in my breath when he hooks his fingers inside the inseam of my shorts.