by Tracy Clark
My mom is pale, her lips bare without bright color, like a bruised rose. I’ve frightened her, and shame warms its hands over the fire of guilt in my heart. “I’m happy you’re all right,” she says, “but I’m so disappointed in you. So very disappointed and astonished. How could you be this reckless with your life?”
“I’m . . . I’m not.”
She rolls her eyes. “Baby, what do you think you’ve got if you don’t have life?”
“Nothing. Emptiness.” It’s nothing but darkness. My voice is scratchy and flat, not my own. I feel like I need to break it in, but it hurts so much to speak. It’s easier to let them all talk at me.
My mother’s clenched fingers fly up to her mouth to hold in her sob. “You would take my only daughter from me!” She turns her back. Her words are a knife in my heart, and even now I appreciate the acute pierce of it, the evidence that I’m alive.
My grandmother shuffles over. Her tapered, wrinkled fingers hover over my skin as if she’s feeling something beyond the borders of my body. Maybe her hands see what her eyes can’t. Her hand suddenly pulls back to the breast of her flowered dress. She doesn’t say anything, just shakes her head side to side like there are no words. Side to side: a metronome of sadness.
I don’t feel like their child. Like anybody’s child. I feel like the ax that’s been slung through their lives. I guess I didn’t think at all. I simply acted. And now I have to deal with the consequences. People want to be angry or sad, and despite how bad I feel, the strongest emotion I have right now is gratitude. Gratitude just to be alive.
“Forgive me.”
Eleven
TWO DAYS LATER, I shield my eyes as I’m helped from the car to the house. My body feels alien as I move, but the more I do it, the more I sink into my skin. Being mummified in bandages from the numerous cuts isn’t helping to make me feel normal. I’m glad it’s summer and I don’t have to face all the scrutinizing eyes at school. I need time. I’ll have a lot of scars to remind me of that night. The only wound I cringe at is the one buried under gauze on my left cheek, which runs from my cheekbone to my chin. I will never look like me again.
“Thanks, Ayida,” I say to my mother as she situates me on the gray couch, bolstering velvet poppy pillows around me and handing me a glass of lemonade. She darts a look my way at my use of her proper name, but I can’t help it. Everything is suddenly changed. You don’t come back from where I’ve been unchanged.
I’m a different person now.
I look around, seeing home with new eyes. There is so much glass and luster that my reflection shines from nearly every surface. I can’t help but stare at my foreign, bandaged self, but my stomach rolls at the memories of the girl’s face and her fierce eyes. I haven’t seen her since I fell into her. I hope she’s gone forever.
My father runs through the voicemail messages. Dom’s deep voice carries through the house, saying that he’s calling to check on me. That he hopes I’m okay. He’s miserable. He says he’s sorry . . . so sorry . . . and that he tried to see me in the hospi—
My father jams his finger into the delete button and Dom’s voice is gone. I think I’m supposed to feel something, but I’m strangely removed, numb. It’s been this way since I woke up. I wonder if these are aftereffects of the LSD or if it’s just . . . me now.
My father makes maybe three or four passes back and forth across the room without once looking at me, as if by not acknowledging me, he can make everything go back to normal. His withdrawal feels like punishment. And his agitation scares me. He’s like a loaded gun. Looks like he could go off at any minute.
Finally he approaches me but doesn’t sit. His stance is military. Feet spread. Hands on his hips. He gazes down at me with impassive gray eyes. “These antics of yours, they’re going to stop.”
I nod.
“You know what we’re dealing with here. As a family, we’re facing the very real possibility of losing everything. You copy? You have got to rein yourself in. You’re our child, Ryan, but you’re clearly old enough to fuck up your own life. If that’s what you’re determined to do, I have no doubt you will do it, but not under my roof. As long as we are responsible for you, you will submit to weekly drug testing. Stay away from Dominix for a while. He’s been a bad influence on you. You will have a curfew of twenty-one hundred hours every night, and . . . no more senseless stunts.”
“Understood.”
This simple acquiescence from me seems to agitate him more, because he runs one hand over the top of his head and glares. “Don’t play games with me, young lady. What you’ve done is serious. On top of endangering yourself with that jump, you’ve begun tampering with drugs. Your own actions landed you in the hospital and nearly killed you.”
“I’m not playing games with you. I’m done with all of that.”
He blows out an exasperated breath. I’m not sure why he doesn’t believe me. It’s what he wants to hear, but it’s also the truth. He turns and marches to the kitchen. Ice clinks into a glass, which he then fills with Maker’s Mark.
Ayida watches him with her lips pursed together. “Nolan, do you really—” One look from him silences her before he disappears from the room. When she glances at me, her eyes seem to accuse—look what you’ve made him do—before she packs the expression away.
I push myself to standing. “I’m going to my room.”
“Need anything?”
“No, thanks,” I say, though that’s not true. I need a lot of things that only time will bring.
The bedroom is dark. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust. I swipe the switch with an uninjured patch of my hand. The room comes to life with a galaxy of lights. Fatigue pulls hard at me, but restlessness thrums like a pulse and keeps me moving around. I open drawers, finger stiff jeans and soft cotton T-shirts, sniff various fragrances on the dresser. I’m so disconnected that everything seems foreign and new. Avoiding the mirror is easy: I’m still not ready to look at myself. I gingerly touch the gauze on my cheek and sigh. Whatever. I’m alive. That should be all that matters, right?
I want to sleep and see if I’ll dream familiar dreams. The bed is like open arms that I crawl blissfully into. Joe’s hug comes to mind. I liked that hug.
It welcomed me back from the dead.
Because of the gash on my cheek, I can only lie on my right side. The numerous strings of mirrors and strands of lights above me sway in the slight breeze from the window. Their movement is reflected on the wall: planetary circles undulate on the white paint. My lids droop, but a whisper keeps me awake. When I force my eyes open, the many circles of yellow light on the wall are filled with the almond shapes of eyes.
I spring to my feet on the bed. My head plunges into the swirling vines of mirrors and lights. Each small cutout of glass holds a dark, fierce eye staring at me. I’m surrounded by the eyes of the ghost, boring deep into mine. Panic takes over. There’s a scream like a shrill teakettle, and I know it’s coming from my mouth.
Instinct moves my arms, swinging them through the fields of eyes, clawing to scratch them out. Lines of mirrors drop like spiders, covering my shoulders and body with eyes. Screaming, flailing, I’m attempting to fling them off me when strong arms grasp mine.
I swing again, catching something hard with my bandaged hand. “Ryan! What are you doing? What’s wrong?” Nolan shakes me. “Calm down. Look at me.”
“No,” I moan, crying through lids that are squeezed shut. I can’t open them, can’t bear to see the haunting eyes that have fallen all around me. I collapse onto the bed and hug my knees to my face. There is tugging and pulling as my father tries to free me from the ropes of lights and strings of mirrors binding me to her.
“The eyes, the eyes. Make her stop watching me.”
I hear Ayida’s quaking voice from the foot of my bed. “What’s happening?”
His voice doesn’t shake like hers. It’s a trained calm. The first sergeant is on duty, giving orders. “Call her doctor. I don’t know what’s wro
ng. I think she cut her eye. She’s—she’s crying blood. She was crazed, tearing everything off the ceiling. Could be a flashback from the LSD. Jesus, I don’t know. Get them on the phone. Now!”
Quick footsteps retreat. He blows out one long exhale and whispers a whiskey-soaked statement from above me: “Goddamn. And I thought you scared me before.”
Twelve
“DO YOU THINK you can watch over your grandmother while I go to work for just a couple of hours?” Ayida asks a week later, during breakfast.
She looks haggard. None of us have slept too well recently. Me due to seeing those eyes every time I close my own. My mother because she wouldn’t leave my side. My father because he hasn’t had her by his. Gran . . . well, she hardly sleeps anyway. I think I have an inkling why: old people know their time is short and don’t want to waste it sleeping. The best sleep I got was yesterday afternoon when Joe came over, sat silently next to me, and held my hand until I drifted off. When I woke, he was gone.
“I want to trust you,” my mom ventures. Her eyes bear no trust. Especially since my newly appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Collier, casually tossed around terms like mental disorders, psychosis, phobias. Now those words lie scattered on the floor around me like grenades, and we wait for Dr. Collier to pick one up and lob it at us.
Gingerly I take her warm hand. “I want to be trusted again. Go. It’ll be all right.” My stomach protests at the thought of being alone with my grandmother for a few hours. I have been tiptoeing around her ever since the incident. I want to be the strong version of me again, but I’m timid around her. She batters me with strange proclamations and opinions. It’s like she hears every thought I don’t voice.
There are so many thoughts I don’t voice.
My mother clears the table and her throat. “We have another appointment with Dr. Collier this afternoon.”
My teeth grind. I don’t like his narrow pea eyes, which look like the wrong end of a telescope examining the deepest crevices of my brain. I’m playing nice, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to label me crazy. Dr. Collier has no idea what’s in my head. Only Joe has any clue that I’m being stalked from a dark place in my reflections. Only I know that the more I see her, the more I’m sure she’s trying to get inside me. Possess me.
As the thought of possession comes, I sense dark eyes on me. I’m being watched. Her angry presence swirls around the room as if my thoughts have summoned it. The hairs on my arms rise to points, and I shudder. It’s terrifying to glance around the kitchen and know that our eyes will meet.
Not in the stainless-steel surface of the fridge, or the shiny teakettle on the stove, or the windows over the sink. My breaths come faster as I search. The eyes aren’t in the glass surface of the table beneath my elbows, or the half-drunk bottle of water left on the counter. Anxiety fills me. I know the girl is with me. I feel her like shade over my life.
Mom comes over to kiss me goodbye, and I nearly recoil from her. The vengeful eyes reflect back at me through my mother’s reading glasses. She removes them and sets them on her folded newspaper on the table next to me like a vial of poison. It’s all I can do to not swipe them to the floor. I curl my hands into fists and smile.
She leaves, and the house suddenly feels both spacious and suffocating. I decide to seek out Gran, to see if I can cross our broken bridge and make things right. I find her sitting at the silent piano, staring straight ahead. Her head is bowed, gray hair pulled into a low, curly bun. She is so still, she looks as though she could be sleeping. Or . . . dead. My breath hitches. My steps are tentative as I approach with my hand outstretched to touch her shoulder. I want to be as far away as possible from the ice of death.
“Pancakes,” she says, flinging her head up, which startles the ever-loving snot out of me. “I want pancakes.”
“We just had breakfast, Gran.” Every atom in my body vibrates faster.
“What difference does that make?”
Since I can’t think of a difference, I don’t answer. Sometimes you want what you want. I, of all people, should understand that. “Are you going to play something?” I ask.
Gran nods solemnly, places her fingers on the keys, and begins. A flash of memory pops in, that this is her song and that I was supposed to be listening for mine. My fingers twitch as I watch her play. I place my hands on the keys. There is a song in me, written on translucent vellum. It feels like it’s been tied to a rock under a cold stream, but when my fingers touch the keys, it is freed, floating to the surface. I tap out the melody on the smooth keys. The song flows through me, stronger now; it moves my fingers without effort.
Gran snatches her hands back as if the piano has burned her. I keep playing, wishing she would watch my hands instead of staring at me with blind eyes. It’s my hands and heart that are making music for her, not my bandaged face. But I’m glad that I’ve found a way to connect with her again.
“That’s a hymn,” she says when I finish. “ ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee.’”
There is no pleasure in her voice. It’s something more like flabbergasted. This is not the reaction I expected. I thought she’d be delighted. “So?”
Papery hands caress both sides of my face. I cringe against the sting from her searching fingers over my wounded cheek, the bridge of my nose, my mouth. “So,” she finally responds, “as far back as my feeble old mind can remember, you’ve never played the piano.” She scoots off the bench, the piano clanging loudly as she uses it for balance to stand upright.
I’m stunned. I can’t explain what happened. “I know I seem different, Gran—”
“You are different, child. I don’t need eyes to see that. I can feel it. You’re wearing yourself like an ill-fitting coat.”
Tears cloud my vision. Her wide back is still turned toward me, and it feels like a wall.
“It’s true. Since the . . . episode, I’ve been struggling to feel normal. Do you know what it’s like to play tug of war with yourself every day? I see things that I’ll never be able to explain. I’ve become afraid of everything. Afraid of life, even, because I know how easily it can be taken away. I don’t want to live in fear. I hate it.”
This burst of truth surprises me, and I wish I could reel the words back in before they’re scrutinized.
The admission makes her turn to face me, and she sighs. “Everybody’s got to clutch to their breast the things they’re afraid to lose. You’re smothering yourself. You used to be the wildfire—destructive, sure, sometimes, but alive. Now your fire has gone cold.”
I hang my head. “That’s sad.”
“Certainly it is. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read on the toilet.”
I stare after Gran’s retreating form. She is both wise and wiseass. She’s also right on the money. I want to carry my fire proudly, like the girl I was before, because right now I’m a tiny bulb plugged into a socket with too much voltage.
Per the note my mother left me, I go to the backyard to water the plants tucked into the bright orange ceramic containers that hang from the white stucco walls. Birds flit to the ground to splash in the puddles I’ve created. I like the peace back here, but I’m itching to hang out at the drop zone—to absorb the vibrant energy there. My dad probably isn’t ready to be around me, though.
Dom has left two messages on our home machine, which I ignored like a well-trained soldier. I want to see Joe, but when I called, his mother said he wasn’t home. She was very kind to me, though I’m sure she’s wondering what kind of person I’ve become that I would take hallucinogenic drugs and end up in the hospital.
As I sit in a lounge chair, the quiet hum of insects, the birds, even the puddles’ refracted surfaces—which make me uneasy, as all reflections now do—settle me into a zone where time becomes the coarse wind of the desert, eroding my hard edges.
I don’t know how long I’ve sat out here. I might have dozed, though without fully sinking into sleep. Sleep has become a swamp I’m afraid to dive into. None
of my dreams make sense. They are populated with strangers who want me dead, and the dream me is devastated.
I stretch and go into the house.
A black fly lands on the white marble of the kitchen counter where I’m writing in my journal. I’ve never kept a journal before, but everything is so jumbled, I need a place to smooth the gritty dunes of my thoughts. When another fly dive-bombs my ear, I swat at it and look up to see that the front door is wide open.
Gran has been very quiet since her . . . braille time. Too quiet. With a dry throat, I go to check on her.
First, her room. It must be said that no sane person would believe that anything but a voodoo priestess lives in this room. My grandmother follows the Obeah religion of the Caribbean. Knowing that doesn’t prepare me for the broken glass and what looks like bird beaks in a bowl sitting on her bedside table. The smell is funky, like cigars and burning feathers. Gran looks like a big hat-wearin’ Southern Baptist on the outside. But on the inside, she’s . . . witchy. In a good way.
Fingering the charm bracelet she made for me this week to, as she put it, ward against the loitering of foreign spirits, I retreat backwards out of the room. You and I were both born with the caul, she said, referring to the rare veil of membrane over our faces when we were born. For those of us with the veil, the spirit world is much easier to see. You’re a strong young woman, but right now your strength is a sputtering candle, and I’m afraid for you.
Eerie feelings quiver through me as I recall her words. I run out to search the rest of the house, with my chest constricting more by the minute. I call her name throughout the house and the backyard with no answer and no sign of her.
I’m running now, with no idea where she’s gone except the wide-open front door. I fly through it and run smack into Dom. We collide like meteors, sparks and melting rock. His arms stay tight around me.