Free Mirage by Tracy Clark Page A

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
    â€œD O 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.
    â€œI 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