Mirage

by Tracy Clark

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Tracy Clark

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Cover photographs © 2016 by Shutterstock

  Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-51790-5

  eISBN 978-0-544-51792-9

  v1.0616

  This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever bravely leaped into their fear and been altered by it. Fear is a transformative fire when you face it. I salute your courage.

  Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die”— and find that there is no death.

  ​—​Eckhart Tolle

  One

  IT’S MY JOB to open the jump door. I love the look on the first-timers’ faces when the door slides open like a gaping mouth. Wind shoves its way into the cabin, elbowing through the rows of people sitting on the floor of the plane, their jaws so strained with nerves, they look like they could bite through a steel pipe. It’s go time and they know it. The air slapping their faces makes it real.

  When I open the door, it’s crazy loud. To me, the blasting wind, the unending bowl of blue sky, screams freedom. But I think some of them hear a different voice than I do. Judging from their expressions, Death herself rides on the wind, whispering in their ears.

  And yet they jump.

  That’s so sick. I know how they’re gonna feel when they touch ground. Badass. Superhuman. Nothing makes you feel more alive than giving Death the finger and having fun while you’re doing it.

  I kneel in the doorway and hang my head out into the wind to spot the drop zone, then signal the pilot. The engine immediately powers down from a roar to a satisfied purr. I smile at the petrified faces of the new jumpers as they lumber through the hollow cabin to the opening, take a beat to register the insanity of what they’re about to do, and leap into their own fear. The air snatches them, pulling them away from the aircraft and from who they were before this moment.

  The plane is nearly empty now, except for this one guy. He shuffles toward me and the open door with the distinct resistance of a man who’s clearly not having fun. I remember him coming in this morning, all bravado and balls, to skydive for his twenty-first birthday. But now he looks like he might barf.

  Our best jumpmaster, Paco, does the last-minute safety check of his equipment and gives the guy another quick run-through of the hand signals he’ll need to follow if he doesn’t want to die on his birthday.

  “You forgot one!” I yell through the roar of wind.

  Paco looks at me quizzically while the guy looks at Paco in this terrified How could you forget a hand signal? What in the hell am I doing trusting you with my life? kind of way.

  I raise my fist and shake it menacingly in the birthday boy’s face. “Did he tell you what this means?” He swallows a wad of spit and terror but doesn’t answer.

  “It means, ‘Do what he says or he’ll beat you!’”

  Paco laughs and shakes his head, but the scared guy just blinks as small beads of sweat form on his upper lip. I smile. Birthday Boy will jump. He can’t be out-balled by a seventeen-year-old girl with Red Baron Snoopy on her jump helmet.

  I blow them a kiss and fall backward out of the plane.

  It’s my favorite way to exit. Surrender into gravity. Baptism by air. It’s cobalt summer sky, rushing wind, the scrubby expanse of the Mojave Desert, and . . . survival. It’s pure. When I’m out here, nothing else exists.

  I watch the guys leap from the jump door together before I tuck one arm under me to flip over and face the ground. Land is rushing at me, yes, but I don’t feel the sensation of falling. I’m cradled, like I’m balancing on my stomach on a ball of air, flying.

  I check my altimeter. Just dropped through seven thousand. There’s still time to enjoy the ride before I have to pull my ripcord. The view never gets old. The desert stretches on forever, a big open palm with roads grooved across it like lifelines. The tail end of the Sierra Nevada is on my right, and a few pimply hills dot the flat land to the east. An occasional wisp of cloud rises past, reminding me how fast I’m falling.

  Since I have no one out here with me, I play with my body, experimenting with the effects of small movements. The air is the opposite of land. Reach in front of me, and I move backward; pull my arms in, extend my legs, and I move forward. Relax my arch, and my body buffets a bit. People don’t realize that skydivers aren’t just falling. We’re dancing with the current. Our movements are even more crucial when we jump with other people. A formation dive is like doing the tango . . . with twenty people at once . . . at 170 miles per hour.

  I pull when I’m high enough to still enjoy some canopy time. My legs dangle from the harness like I’m a kid in a swing; then I press them together as I make my final turn into the wind and run out my landing in the large, flat circle of cleared sagebrush. There’s enough of a light, heated breeze that I have to spin around and drop one toggle so my canopy won’t fill with air, become a sail, and try to drag me across the desert.

  The distinctive putt-putt sound of my parents’ drop-zone golf cart bounces toward me, my cousin Avery behind the wheel. Her approach reminds me of when Dom and I were on his motorcycle and we had to totally alter course because we spotted a swarm of Mormon crickets advancing like a low red cloud.

  I sigh with disappointment. My dad never comes out to get me. He does it for his “boys”​—​all the military guys with their faded Army Ranger caps with their Army “blood wings” pinned on the front who make the drop zone their second home. If you can’t be in a combat zone, you might as well be skydiving, right? I think they’re addicted to risk.

  So what’s my excuse? People always want to know why I nonchalantly do something that to them is inconceivable.

  I’m addicted to the rush.

  Avery doesn’t jump, but she recently discovered she likes to hang out here. For a boy-crazy girl, a skydiving center is a very target-rich environment. She skids to a halt in the packed dirt, casting billowing clouds of copper dust around the tires and my feet. “I thought you had to work today,” I say, a little breathless from my landing and the afternoon heat.

  “Oh, I worked . . . until I didn’t want to anymore. Then I claimed ‘female issues.’ My boss let me go faster than you can say ‘superabsorbent.’ He can’t stand it when a woman brings up that she is, in fact, a woman.”

  “Most men can’t,” I answer. “My dad would g
ive his remaining testicle to have had a boy instead of me.”

  “How many does that jump make?” she asks, quickly deflecting the topic of my dad’s post-IED balls and saving me from how I sounded nine years old for a second there.

  “Two sixty-eight.” I’ve racked up a good number of jumps since I convinced my parents to sign for me when I reached legal jumping age last year. I argued for it on the grounds that it’s not good business if you’re not confident enough to let your own offspring jump. My dad shrugged indifferently and signed. My mother stared at me long and hard before shaking her head and mumbling something about destiny and that she has no control over how and when I die. “Death doesn’t want me,” I reassured her. “Too busy working for the government.” The way Dad jerked his head up and scowled made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

  I can’t say anything right around him.

  Birthday Boy intercepts us with his hair blown back all Einstein and rings around his eyes where his goggles indented his skin. He’s smiling the broad smile of a man who is temporarily insane with his own superpowers.

  “You are so drinking tonight,” I predict, at which point he lets out a huge whooping yell and punches at the sky in triumph.

  Avery grabs my arm, startled, and leans in. “He’s positively primal.”

  “Yeah,” I mumble, tugging impatiently at a corner of my chute that has snagged on a green ruffle of sagebrush. “Watch out for him, though. He’s high on adrenaline. It’s like twenty buckets of caffeine. For the next three hours he’ll be invincible.”

  “Excellent,” she says, fixing him with lowered lashes and a sideways look.

  “Yeah, excellent. Until you’ll find him curled up in the fetal position under a picnic table, sound asleep from the adrenaline crash.”

  “Or the whiskey.”

  “True that.”

  “You guys make it look all cool and thrilling, but normal people don’t actually like jumping out of airplanes,” Avery says.

  “I make it a point not to be normal.”

  “Clearly. You’re you. But something about humans pretending they can fly is a definite major violation of the rules of nature.”

  “Would we do it otherwise? Humans break rules to prove we can.”

  “Yeah, well,” she says, “I could live my whole life without falling out of a plane, thanks.”

  I stop short of calling her a whuffo for hanging out here when she has no intention of ever jumping. But if she eyes my Dominix again with those lashes like she’s eyeing Birthday Boy right now, it’s on.

  “Falling is the easy part. Trick is,” I say, tapping her on the chest, “taking the leap.”

  Avery snorts, but not without some blend of admiration and incredulity in her eyes. “You’re nuts.”

  “Oh, hell, yes.” I pull the rest of my chute into my arms and climb aboard the golf cart. “I’d rather be crazy and fully alive than safe and half-dead.”

  Two

  THE DROP-ZONE HANGAR has its back to the westerly winds. It’s open, with jumpers getting their rigs on for the next hop, riggers on the mats meticulously folding and packing chutes, and a couple of guys napping in lawn chairs. One has his mouth hanging open. It’ll be a matter of minutes before someone shoots the air compressor in his piehole or glues his shoes to the floor.

  Under the row of flags on the back wall, a large group of guys slide around the concrete floor on creepers, practicing their formation dive. Their bellies are on the boards, feet in the air, as they move and switch patterns. It’s like synchronized swimming on wheels, only sweatier and with lots of laughing and swearing.

  I dump my rig in a pile on the carpet and run over to the group, take a flying leap, and land on Dom’s back. We roll across the floor, bounce into the wall, ricochet, and spin in a circle. All the while I hold on tight and kiss the back of his warm neck, burying my nose in his jet-black hair, which reminds me of rippling water at midnight.

  “Now this is my idea of a tandem,” Dom murmurs. He reaches behind him and squeezes my butt.

  “Ryan Poitier Sharpe!” My mother’s Caribbean accent cuts through the chatter in the hangar. I roll off Dom and sit on my knees. She stands right outside the hangar doors. Late-afternoon light glows behind her vivid flowered shirt and red head wrap. Her lips are color coordinated with the wrap and glowing like a stoplight against her smooth black skin. My mother is a hibiscus in the eternal beige of the desert.

  I shrug the what’s up shoulders and am met with a stern look. “Be right back,” I whisper to Dom when she crooks her finger at me.

  “I don’t like to see that.” She points vaguely in the direction of Dom and leads me to the office. “This is a public establishment. A business. Our business.”

  “He’s my boyfriend, Mom. That’s my business. We were just goofing around.”

  “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.