Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Olive tries to pull her hand away. “No, Dad, that’s not what I meant. Listen. I saw her, but I didn’t see her in person, exactly. More like a…vision? Dad, don’t look at me like that. Seriously. OK? I had this whole conversation with Mom this morning. She just appeared on this beach, wearing a dress….”

  Jonathan grips her hand tighter. What is this? He can hear a fire alarm going off somewhere in the distance; or maybe that’s just the ringing of his own incipient panic. “I’m confused. You were at the beach today?”

  “No, Dad.” She wrestles her hand free. “I was at school, and I started feeling strange, and then…It’s hard to put into words. But essentially I looked up and I was on a beach, and Mom was there with me and she told me that she wanted me to come find her.”

  “Come find her,” Jonathan echoes softly, trying to digest this.

  Olive’s face is radiant, pinkly glowing. She leans in toward him as if sharing a secret, strands of brown hair flying loose from her ponytail. “Yes! See? She was alive. She is alive.”

  Jonathan feels his precarious edifice collapsing around him, what little hard-won recovery he’s managed dissolving like a castle made of sand. What is going on? Is this some belated emotional fallout from Billie’s death? Should he get Olive to a therapist? Or, Christ—what if it’s a brain tumor? He is silent for a minute as he grasps for the most rational response. “Oh, Olive,” he says softly. “I know it’s hard to give up hope. It took me a long, long time to accept that she was gone, that we weren’t ever going to find her. What you experienced, it sounds like some kind of hallucination—”

  She interrupts. “Dad, you said you’d be objective.”

  “There’s objectivity and then there’s reason. I mean, you’re talking about the supernatural, Olive. Which—” He’s unsure how to finish this thought. Instead, he tries to grasp at the fragment of logic he was following before. “There was something in The New Yorker a while back—an Oliver Sacks piece, I think?—about hallucinations caused by grief, I could look it up….”

  Olive shakes her head. “Dad, I talked to her.”

  The look on her face is a needle in his heart. “It may feel like you did, but the more probable explanation is that something is going on with your subconscious. You know, it’s the anniversary coming up, and with all the legal weirdness and formalities, you’re probably feeling emotional. I know I am. Your brain can play tricks on you.”

  “My mind wasn’t playing tricks. It was incredibly clear,” Olive says. She has backed up against the cabinets, her cheeks flaring bright red, but for some reason it’s the calm certainty in her voice that stops Jonathan: as if his daughter is already beyond reach, a committed acolyte of some strange new religion. “Look, Dad. Open your mind, OK? It’s possible she’s still alive, right? They never found her body. That’s why they won’t issue a death certificate! They think there’s a chance she could have survived.”

  “That’s just the standard legal process.” There’s a sour pang in his stomach, the discordant clash of a half-dozen conflicting emotions. “They do that for any case where there’s no body, as a matter of procedure. It doesn’t mean that anyone believes that she could still be alive out there. Not anymore.”

  “I believe it.” Olive plants a palm in the center of her chest. “Dad. She told me to look for her.”

  Jonathan is suddenly furious. “Stop it, Olive. This isn’t healthy. Your mother is gone. Dead,” he snaps before he can stop himself. Immediately, he is stricken with remorse. He puts his hand to the hair at his temples and tugs on it, hard enough that it makes his eyes water. “Look, I’m sorry—” he begins.

  But it’s too late, Olive has already shut down. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” she mutters to the floor.

  “No, I’m glad you did,” Jonathan says, not feeling glad at all. “I’m just trying to figure out what to say.”

  “GOD, Dad, don’t you get it?” Olive throws up her hands. “It’s not about saying anything. It’s about doing something. I want to do something real for once. Can’t you open your mind just this one time? Mom would have tried to look for you.”

  “Hey—” he begins, taken aback. But Olive is already marching out of the room, her stride stiff and off-balance. Jonathan looks down at the pile of half-chopped zucchini in front of him and realizes that he’s cut his thumb. Blood seeps from a cut by his fingernail. He sticks the finger in his mouth and sucks at it, its coppery tang making him queasy. He thinks of Olive’s words—She just appeared on this beach, wearing a dress—and a familiar memory bubbles up: his wedding, seventeen years earlier, a hastily assembled celebration with a handful of bemused friends, his parents perplexed and out of place. They’d been married on a beach right outside Big Sur, on a misty day that was cold and dreamlike. A few glasses of champagne into the reception, Billie had run into the sea, pulling him in with her. Her filmy wedding dress dragging with seawater, his loafers full of sand: He could still remember the transcendence of being so happy he didn’t give a damn that the water was freezing, didn’t care that he wasn’t going to get the deposit back on his tux, didn’t care about anything but Billie’s slippery hand clinging to his as if he alone were responsible for keeping her afloat.

  Billie had loved it out there by the ocean, the windblown cypress and the fog that stung your eyes with salt and the cliffs clawed away by the ravaging waves. He used to feel like there was something of the sea hidden inside her, something wild and unfathomable.

  Dammit, Billie, he thinks, you left me alone with a troubled teenage girl. How am I supposed to do this by myself?

  SUNLIGHT, VICTORIOUS, has finally broken through the afternoon cloud cover, and it illuminates great square patches of the Berkeley public library, alternately warming and blinding the patrons. The towering window wall of the reading room, over two stories high, has turned the library into a greenhouse, causing its occupants to shed their fall layers. Sweatshirts and hats and jackets lie in flaccid heaps across tables, chairs, the lower-lying bookshelves.

  At the other end of the table, where Olive sits making lists in a spiral notebook, a homeless man leafs through a Stephen King novel; from five chairs away, Olive can pick up the scent of unwashed hair and dried sweat and something vaguely fecal. She feels sorry for him and wishes she had her leftover sandwich from lunch to offer, but she’s already tossed it in the trash. Wait—is that presumptuous of her? Maybe he’s not hungry at all. Maybe he needs different things: a shower, a job program, better healthcare. Or maybe he’s chosen this life for himself, and her assumption is just an assertion of her bourgeois privilege. She read an opinion piece about this last week on The Huffington Post.

  As if he can read her thoughts, the man glances up and catches her looking at him. She offers him a smile, but he just stares back with watery eyes. Olive tucks her head under her arm and continues to write, in small neat letters:

  1. If Mom is indeed alive and

  2. She has not called to tell us that she is alive

  3. Then she must be

  She hesitates for a minute and then quickly writes:

  a. In trouble

  b. Suffering from amnesia

  c. Stuck somewhere where there is no phone or Internet? (Still in Desolation Wilderness?)

  d. Angry at us

  She stops again, considering this last point. If her mom is angry with her, why did she ask her to come find her? Olive, I miss you: She said that, didn’t she? Yes. Olive scratches out the word us and replaces it:

  d. Angry at Dad?

  She thinks about this. She remembers the way her father used to grab at her mother and draw her into his lap. Her mother would curl up there like a cat, and her dad would rest his nose in her mom’s hair and leave it there, as if trying to breathe her in. It was awkward—middle-aged people weren’t supposed to act like that—but secretly, Olive loved it.

  But they hadn’t done much of that in the past few years. Instead, her dad kept getting more and more consumed with his job, and her mom was al
ways off running marathons or biking the coast or hiking mountains, spending whole weekends by herself or with her friend Rita. In that last year, Olive sometimes heard her parents fight, hoarse whispers that were indecipherable through the bedroom door.

  Though it was upsetting, it didn’t seem like a crisis. But maybe Olive had missed something pivotal. Had something awful happened between them that made her mom feel the need to run away?

  This kind of thinking—the why and the how—makes her brain hurt. She turns the page of her notebook and starts again.

  1. Places Mom could be:

  a. On a beach

  And then she stops. She might as well have written on Planet Earth. California has 840 miles of coastline. The beach she saw could have been Stinson Beach, which is, strictly speaking, the coastal beach closest to Olive’s home. It could have been a random beach on the Monterey Peninsula, which is where they tended to go to the beach most. It could have been any beach: Pescadero, Mendocino, Moonstone, Gualala, Malibu, who knows?

  And this is assuming her mom is even in California.

  Olive tries to remember more details about what the beach looked like—something about it tugs at her, something familiar—but by this point, a full twenty-nine hours after her vision, what remains is mostly a collection of filmy impressions, a tingling glow of hope, a memory of the expression on her mom’s face. Except for her mother’s message: That has lodged, stonelike, in her chest. You aren’t trying hard enough. She can’t shake this feeling, no matter how incredulous her father was. What she doesn’t get: How can he stand doing nothing if there’s even a fraction of a chance that Billie is alive?

  But what, exactly, would something be? She can’t figure out a course of action, let alone put a finger on what, precisely, happened to her the day before. If it was a vision of some sort, does that mean she’ll have more? More detailed ones, with clearer information? Is it possible to trigger them herself instead of waiting to be summoned?

  She pushes aside her notebook and looks at the pile of books that she’s collected from a dusty shelf at the back of the stacks, filed under 133.9 M817-1, SPIRITUALISM PARAPSYCHOLOGY. A Skeptic’s Guide to Parapsychology; Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World; Connections: Visionary Encounters with Your Beloved; Frontiers of the Soul: Exploring Psychic Evolution. They seem legitimate enough, except for the last one, a yellowing paperback whose cover, with its hallucinatory sunset and cheesy font, is a little too wacko. She shoves it to the bottom of the pile and picks up A Skeptic’s Introduction to Parapsychology. She flips to the introduction and starts to read. Have you ever experienced a phenomenon that you could not explain? Something that made you question the very nature of your reality? Have you ever seen or known or understood something unknowable, something that caused you to ask yourself, Am I psychic?

  Am I psychic? She lets the possibility of it wash over her. She’s always felt herself to be unexceptional. Not the prettiest or the smartest or the wildest girl in her class; neither a natural born leader nor a strong athlete. It felt like there was a big hollow zero at her center. She would soak up her mother’s stories about her own Lost Years—the decade during which Billie, a teenage runaway, had roamed around the Pacific Northwest and then traveled the world, hanging out with artists and activists and drug dealers—and would sense that she was failing her mother in some way. “Anyway, you don’t want to do what I did,” Billie would say, abruptly cutting herself off, but somehow Olive knew that she meant the exact opposite.

  Not that her mom was so radical anymore—she was the very image of normalcy, with her zippered fleeces and her suburban-mom ponytail, carrying chia-seed muffins to the Claremont Girls fundraising committee meetings, designing logos for online pet stores. Still, at the end of Olive’s freshman year, when she brought home her latest A’s-and-B’s report card, Billie had stared at it a long time, as if she couldn’t quite understand it. Then she pushed the paper away with the tip of her pinkie and leaned in to murmur in Olive’s ear. “Anyone can follow the rules. Find your own thing. Don’t just do what everyone expects you to do. Remember: You have the right to become whoever you want to be. Don’t worry about what other people might think…because you will be exceptional, Olive. But you have to be willing to try.”

  What does that mean? Olive had thought at the time. She still wonders: Who does she want to become? And how would that be unexpected? The hot impulses she sometimes feels are too nebulous and fleeting to pin down to action. So what else is there? Well, she’s a feminist…along with the entire student body of Claremont. She tends to read novels when she is supposed to be studying, but that isn’t exactly unexpected or exceptional. The abandoned animals that she rescues? When she tried to make that her thing by volunteering at a local animal shelter, it ended badly: She couldn’t bear to arrive every week only to discover that the dogs she’d snuggled with the previous week had since been put down. So she quit.

  Looking back now, she feels like the most interesting thing she’s done with her life was to start the Green Team at her school, and yeah, she’s pretty proud of what they’ve done, the carbon-footprint reduction program and the tree plantings and all that. But even that doesn’t seem remotely radical enough; it’s barely significant at all compared to the shit her mom used to pull when she was young—tying herself to trees and lying in front of bulldozers. In the year since her mother’s death, Olive has felt acutely conscious of her uselessness: just one puny human among billions.

  But to be psychic—that would be something. Something amazing. Something beyond-bonkers special.

  Why not? she thinks. Why not me? Maybe this is what I’m meant to be.

  She scans the rest of A Skeptic’s Guide—which is basically an argument in favor of the existence of paranormal phenomena—and then puts it aside in search of something with more useful advice. She picks up Connections, a fat hardback whose bold neon-hued font reminds her of the self-help books that they sell in piles at Costco.

  The Greek oracles, or psychomanteums, were able to travel to distant places by looking deep into mirrors and entering a hypnagogic state, Olive reads. The same technique can be used to visit the spirits of your loved ones virtually anytime you want. The ancient art of mirror-gazing is a proven method for bridging the natural and psychic realms, available to anyone who has the patience and discipline to train his or her mind.

  This is more like it. Connections recommends that Olive fast for twenty-four hours and then sit before a mirror at twilight in a darkened room and try to conjure up her mom’s essence. Mirror-gazing is most likely to happen in moments of relaxation, which will ease the transition into an altered state of awareness. Have photographs and personal items of your loved one around you, in order to imprint them on your mind. You’ll know you’ve entered an alternate state of consciousness when the tips of your fingers begin to tingle.

  It feels kind of silly, taking psychic instructions from a book—the exact opposite of yesterday’s spontaneous, ecstatic encounter—but what other option does she have? Olive closes her eyes and concentrates very hard on the tips of her fingers to see if it works. A square patch of sun has shifted, and she can feel it warming her face, the back of her eyelids flaring pink.

  After a while, she can sense the rhythm of her blood hurtling through the veins in her thumbs, but she doesn’t see her mother. Not in the way she did yesterday. Instead, a memory flickers across the backs of her lids: Her mom in the backyard in a winter rainstorm, soaked, as she stands with her chin lifted to the sky and her eyes closed. Turning to see Olive watching from the back porch, and shouting over the thundering of the rain, Come on out. It’s just a little water. Her mother’s skin whipped pink with the cold, her arms sweeping grandly at Olive, who, with an electric tingle, steps out into the downpour to join her.

  “Olive?”

  She opens her eyes and sees Natalie standing on the other side of the reading table, a stack of sociology books in her arms. Olive’s pulse quickens. “Hey, you,
” she says back, keeping her voice low.

  In the last year, Olive has watched a lot of her friends just kind of…fade away. Not that she was ever going to win popularity contests before, but she had a decent enough social life, mostly with other Green Team girls like Ming and Tracy, who also got worked up about things like reforestation and fracking. And then, with a stroke, she became Poor Olive Whose Mom Died in a Tragic Accident, an unfathomable new identity, and her friends didn’t really know what to do with her anymore. She tried expressly not talking about it, so as not to bum people out—Oh, I’m fine, but how are you doing? she’d quickly say when people asked—but it was there anyway, a yoke of tragedy hanging around her neck, and people were probably worried that if they got too close, they’d have to help carry it. Because now Ming and Tracy and the other girls stay a safe distance away. They’ll tag her on Instagram, or invite her to group social events, even sit with her at lunch, but never actually call, or make plans one on one, never something that would require them to think about, you know, death. Olive can’t really blame them.

  It doesn’t matter, though, because she has Natalie. And that’s all she needs.

  Natalie is dark-haired and floppy and adorable, someone you want to grab and nuzzle, like a puppy, except that she’s also edgy and funny and unfiltered, which is why Olive can’t get enough of her. She’s the school Debate Club champ and is likely to be the class valedictorian, an achievement that boggles Olive’s mind and that Natalie doesn’t seem to care about at all. “As long as I get into a college that’s on the other side of the country from my parents, I’m happy,” she once told Olive.