Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Watch Me Disappear is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblence to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Janelle Brown

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brown, Janelle, author.

  Title: Watch me disappear : a novel / by Janelle Brown.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Spiegel & Grau, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016045555| ISBN 9780812989465 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812989472 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.R698 W38 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016045555

  Ebook ISBN 9780812989472

  randomhousebooks.com

  spiegelandgrau.com

  Book design by Liz Cosgrove, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover photograph: © Martin Johansson

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Janelle Brown

  About the Author

  IT’S A GOOD DAY, or maybe even a great one, although it will be impossible to know for sure later. By that point they’ll already have burnished their memories of this afternoon, polished them to a jewel-like gleam. One of the last days they spent together as a family before Billie died: Of course Jonathan and Olive are going to feel sentimental about it. Of course they will see only what they want to see.

  Still, Jonathan will think, on the spectrum of all their days together, ranging from that time the whole family got food poisoning at Spenger’s Fish Grotto to the day Olive was born, this one certainly ranks closer to the top.

  It is, for one thing, a clear sunny day, which is no small piece of luck when you’re on a Northern California beach in October. The sand is actually warm between their toes, instead of dank and gritty; but the air also has the crisp autumnal bite that makes you want to wrap yourself in something soft. No one acts crabby, or restless, or bored. Billie has packed some particularly delicious sandwiches—pesto chicken for the adults, hummus for Olive (who has recently gone vegetarian)—and they wash these down with tepid cocoa from a thermos.

  After they eat their lunch, Billie and Jonathan sit on the beach while Olive goes down to the water’s edge and mucks about barefoot in the surf. There’s a tree-sized piece of driftwood that’s been deposited near the crest of the tide line, and Jonathan sits with his back braced against this. He’s brought printouts of a half-dozen Decode features that urgently require his attention, but the whole point of the day was family time, to compensate for all those days and nights vacuumed up by his job. Besides, how can he focus on narrative coherence and Oxford commas when the tide is low and the surf is high?

  Billie uses Jonathan’s bent legs as her chair, her long hair draping down his thighs. She studies the surfers bobbing out at the break as she scoops up sand and lets it trickle through splayed fingers, absently picking out rocks and twigs. Jonathan reaches out and takes a strand of her hair, one of the silver threads that are starting to lace through the dark brown. He rubs it gently between his fingertips, testing its texture, testing the temperature of his wife.

  “What are you, a monkey?” Billie says. She’s built a tower of smooth stones, and she examines it, then flattens it again.

  “Still hungry. Looking for snacks,” he says. He looks up to see Olive at the edge of the water, studying them from a distance. He waves at his daughter, and she arcs her own arm back in a half-moon of acknowledgment. She looks happy, but sometimes it’s hard to tell: Her down-turning mouth frowns even as it smiles, contradicting itself. A wave washes up the sand, licking at her bare toes, and she dances away from it.

  Billie follows his gaze. “How is she going to manage?”

  He releases her hair. “What do you mean?”

  “In life. The world is tough on soft things. She’s going to need to grow a thicker skin or she’s going to spend her whole life being too afraid to try anything.”

  Jonathan studies his daughter, silhouetted by the crashing sea. She’s spied something beneath her feet—a shell or a hermit crab or a piece of trash—and her brow furrows as she leans down and picks it up to examine it. He feels a flash of empathy for her, the bookish child he used to be in silent communion with the child she is. “She’s just sensitive. That’s normal for fifteen.”

  “I was bold at that age,” Billie says crisply.

  “You were not the typical kid,” Jonathan says. Billie laughs at this and tips her head backward over Jonathan’s knees to smile at him. There’s sand speckling her cheekbones, stuck in the delicate lines around her eyes, and he gently wipes it away. “Anyway, Olive is tougher than you’re giving her credit for.”

  She lifts her head and examines their daughter in the distance. “OK. Good.”

  “If you’re so worried, talk to her,” he adds.

  “I tried when I took her hiking last month. Didn’t go well.” She sits upright and leans forward and away from him, running a hand through the tangle of her hair. “She used to soak up every word I uttered like it was gospel. She doesn’t do that anymore.” Jonathan notes the edge of pained querulousness in her voice.

  “Oh, please. She still worships you,” he says. “She’s just a teenager, she’s individuating. Keep trying, she’ll come around soon. And it’s good for her to know you care.” As Jonathan watches Billie, he thinks that the person it really would be good for is his wife, who perhaps needs to feel needed by their daughter again. You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.

  “Always the optimist, my Jonathan.” She says this as she’s looking out to sea, her words swallowed up by the pounding surf, so that for a moment he’s not sure he’s heard her right.

  He blinks, a flush of gratitude. “Billie? I still think—”

  But she cuts him off, her words cooling quickly: “I can tell by your tone of voice where you’re going, and don’t. Just don’t. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Down at the other end of the beach, the group of surfers has emerged from the sea, and they strip their wetsuits back like banana peels, bare flesh emerging from black neoprene. The boys jostle up against the girls, crowding their space, grabbing at their towels while the girls pretend to be indignant. Billie carefully wipes the sand from her hands as she stares at the surfers, the muscles in her back going taut under the thin cotton of her T-shirt. Jonathan wonders if she’s seeing a former version of herself in the girls, in their loose-limbed freedom, in the way they demand t
hat the entire beach notice them. He remembers that Billie—the girl he fell in love with sixteen years earlier, and honestly, not so much changed—and he reaches out to massage the tenseness away, but she shrugs him off.

  They sit there like that for a while, silently watching the surfers collect their towels and then disappear in the opposite direction. Once they’re out of sight, Billie’s shoulders go slack. She stretches, lets out a muffled sound that’s a cross between a sigh and a groan. “You know, I might do a backpacking trip one of these weekends soon. Maybe up the Pacific Crest Trail.”

  “Again? With Rita?”

  “No, by myself.” She gives a little laugh. “You know, just me alone with my thoughts.”

  “Sounds nice. But is that such a good idea?” he says, hiding a small hiccup of anxiety: Alone with what thoughts?

  Billie ignores this and stands up, crumpling the waxed paper from her sandwich with efficient finality. She beckons to Olive, who walks toward her mother with her hands full of some algae-covered flotsam that she’s plucked from the sea. “If we’re going to see those butterflies before it gets too late, we should head up,” Billie announces. She turns and jogs up the dunes without checking to see if her husband and child are following her.

  The monarch preserve is crowded, but not with butterflies. The arrival of the annual migration was announced in the local news earlier that week, and apparently Billie wasn’t the only one to flag the story, because the tourists are out in force. Olive trails after her parents as they wander up and down the wooden walkways, craning her neck to scan the trees. The occasional butterfly flutters by overhead, an orange fleck backlit by the sun. The place is loud with the squeals of kids and shouting parents, unlike the reverent, hushed temple to nature that Olive had imagined. She dodges a woman now, followed by another, all of them busily Instagramming any old insect that flits by, as their children lunge at the butterflies with sticky hands. Alarmed, Olive wants to shout: Don’t they know that if they touch the butterflies’ wings, they’ll die? Did no one teach them to Leave No Trace? She looks around at the overflowing trash cans, the parents wielding aerosol sunscreens, and worries that this is why there aren’t more butterflies here today. Or is it global warming, pesticides? So many potential reasons why the monarch population is declining precipitously; she should really get her mother to plant milkweed in the garden.

  Her mother disappears for a while, wandering off without warning, as she sometimes does. But as Olive turns back along the path, she hears Billie calling her name. Olive follows the sound of her mother’s voice and finds her lying on her back in a little hidden corner of the wooden walkway. She has her hands crossed over her belly, the collar of her fleece zip-up spread underneath her head as a pillow.

  Olive lies down beside her mother on the sun-warmed wood. She follows Billie’s finger to where she is pointing. There, directly above them, the eucalyptus trees are pulsing. Hundreds of monarch butterflies are clinging to the branches, their wings moving in syncopation. The leaves droop under their weight, swinging heavily in the breeze.

  Olive’s breath stops in her throat, something huge and beautiful aching within her.

  “Why do you think they come here?” her mom asks in a low voice. “Of all the places in the world they could go, they come here, to this zoo, every winter. Couldn’t they find a secret place, somewhere they could be more alone? Or do you think they want to be here, where people are? That they instinctually want to be seen?”

  Olive considers this. “I think it’s dew hydration and wind protection. There’s a sign at the entrance. That’s what butterflies need most, and they get it from the eucalyptus and the fog off the ocean.”

  Billie flaps her hand as if thrusting this explanation aside. “There are lots of other places with eucalyptus up and down the coast that they could choose. They come back here, to this one place, despite the hordes.” She is quiet for a minute, watching the butterflies clustering above them, as thick as barnacles on the eucalyptus leaves. “All that glory. And the worst part of it is, no one here really appreciates what they’ve been allowed to see. Instead they take this precious thing and just fuck it up.”

  There is an odd, angry hitch in Billie’s words. Olive turns her head to look at her mom. Billie has her eyes closed tight, but a tear has escaped from one corner and is slowly working its way down toward her earlobe. “Mom?” Olive says, alarmed. “I’m sure the butterflies are OK here. It’s a sanctuary, right? So someone’s watching out for them.”

  “I know.” Billie’s eyes are still closed, but she turns to rest her face in Olive’s hair before turning back to gaze up at the butterflies. Olive hears footsteps on the boardwalk, and then her dad is lying down next to her. He reaches across Olive for her mom’s hand. They lie there like that for a while, Olive’s parents’ hands clasped over her body, silent. It feels like they are breathing in time with the pulsing of the butterflies and the swaying of the trees. In the distance, Olive can hear the waves crashing against the rocks.

  Finally, a pack of schoolchildren comes thundering along the walkway, and the butterflies lift in unison and fly off in search of a safer branch. As the three of them also rise, Billie dries her face with the back of her sleeve, and Jonathan snaps a family selfie for posterity (their last family photo, and it’s not a good one, Billie’s face blurry as she tries to avoid getting her picture taken; and Jonathan squinting from the sun; only Olive in clear focus), and then they head back down the path toward their car.

  As they drive back home—Billie nodding off in the front seat, Olive absorbed by her iPhone in the back—Jonathan thinks about his wife’s tears and smiles. He assumes that Billie, like him, was touched by the grace of that moment: the fragile butterflies triggering an exquisite consciousness of the miracle of existence, of the growing girl lying between them, of the stretch of days stringing out behind them. Of the days that he believes are still ahead.

  OLIVE IS CROSSING from the Sunshine Wing to the Redwood Wing, on her way to her third-period English class, when her dead mother appears for the first time. Weaving through the eddies of girls, twenty-six pounds of textbooks tugging at her shoulder, the blue skirt of her uniform clinging stubbornly to her thighs, Olive suddenly feels as if she might faint. She assumes at first that she is just overheating. Claremont Prep is housed in a rambling nineteenth-century Craftsman mansion that has been neglected in the name of “authenticity”—the knobs to the classrooms are all original cut crystal and spin uselessly when you turn them, and the windows don’t actually open because they’ve been lacquered over too many times, and Olive often has to take cold showers after badminton practice because the boiler can’t keep up with the demand of twelve girls simultaneously shaving their legs—and on rainy days, like this one, the overworked furnace fills the hallways with a moist fug of girl-scented heat.

  Olive stops and presses her hand against the cool glass of a display case to stabilize herself. She digs in her backpack for a bottle of water and closes her eyes. She feels as if she is standing at the center of a turntable, the hallway whipping around her in dizzying circles. She catches an acrid whiff, as if something is burning.

  When she opens her eyes again, she is somewhere else entirely. Or, rather, she is still in the main hall of Claremont Prep—she senses the thrum of bodies swinging past, the drumming of the rain against the stained-glass clerestory windows—but somehow she is also somewhere else entirely. A beach, to be exact.

  The beach isn’t really there, of course it’s not, and yet…there it is: the overcast sky, the pebbly sand, the dunes lashed with sea grass, waves that are dark and hungry. She can almost feel her Converse sneakers shifting in the sand, the salty air sticking to her skin. This alternate world seems to exist as an overlay draped across her surroundings: Through the waves Olive is dimly aware of two other junior girls—Ming and Tracy—hanging up posters for the Fall Frolic; and just behind the ragged dunes is a line of lockers; and somewhere inside that thrashing surf is the double-doored entrance
of the Redwood Wing. It is as if the two worlds exist simultaneously, each overlapping the other, a kind of waking dream.

  She blinks. It doesn’t go away.

  The time they gave her nitrous at the dentist’s office: That’s how she feels now, her brain opaque, diffuse, as if someone has reset its dial at half speed. Time seems to have stopped, or at least slowed. She senses her body tipping backward, the backpack full of books losing the battle against gravity. The third-period bell is ringing somewhere faintly in the distance.

  That’s when she sees her mother.

  Billie stands a few yards away, right where the sea meets the sand, the water slapping at her bare toes. It is as if she’s been standing there the whole time and Olive has only just grown aware of her.

  Her mother’s hair is long and loose, the brown giving way to silver at the part. It flies in a wild halo around her face. She is wearing a gauzy white dress that whips around her bare legs as the wind blows off the sea, its hem dark with ocean spray. Her mom was never a wearer of dresses (she tended toward performance fleece), so this strikes Olive as slightly weird (as if nothing else happening here is weird?), but still. It’s her. Mom. Olive feels the word swell up inside her, painfully filling her lungs until it stops her breath entirely.

  “Olive!”

  Despite her diaphanous appearance, Billie’s voice isn’t at all spectral; it’s strong and clear, as if right inside Olive’s brain, and loud enough to drown out the frothy shrieks of the girls down the hall. Olive opens her own mouth and gasps out the only word that she can muster: “Mom?”

  “Olive,” Billie says, her voice lower now, almost chiding. “I miss you. Why aren’t you looking?”

  “Looking for what?” She’s hallucinating, isn’t she? She isn’t really talking to her dead mom. She closes her eyes and opens them again.