Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Natalie stops in her tracks. “OK. Look. I don’t want to sound like I’m questioning your credentials as an amateur psychic, but this is starting to feel like a pretty futile endeavor.”

  “It was your idea,” Olive points out.

  Natalie pushes her hands deeper into her pockets, refusing to meet Olive’s eyes. “I wasn’t really thinking it through.”

  “That guy thought he recognized her, Natalie!” Olive insists.

  “He was stoned.” Natalie huddles in her parka. “Sorry, Olive. But I’m cold, and it’s getting late. My mom will have a conniption if I don’t get home for dinner. C’mon.” She stalks off up the street.

  The optimism that has kept Olive going all day departs her in a rush. She looks around her, counting the number of homes left on this street; multiplying that times the number of streets stretching back from the sea; and then that times the number of beaches and neighborhoods in this area alone; and concedes defeat. Her leads are flimsy. Her one avowed supporter is starting to waver. The loneliness of this pursuit is growing clear.

  The next thought lands like a sledgehammer. What if her mom is simply biding her time down here, her hair bleached blond, surfing? Yes, it’s possible she has amnesia and doesn’t know who she is, but how often does that really happen? Wouldn’t someone have figured out her identity by this point? And sure, it’s possible that she’s disguised because she’s in some kind of trouble—held against her will?—but hanging out on the beach doesn’t exactly seem like a call for help. So what has she been doing for the past year? What if Olive finally locates her and it turns out she doesn’t really want to be found?

  The truth, Olive recalls unhappily, is that they had not been getting along as well as they used to in the year before her mom disappeared. Some invisible rift had opened up once Olive hit high school. It’s not that she wasn’t close to her mom, or that she didn’t love her, but she could feel herself pulling away, chafing at her mother’s lofty expectations and immovable opinions. Her mother—maybe in response?—started going off on her all-weekend sports adventures with Rita, and the gap widened.

  Not long before she died, Billie had insisted on a mother-daughter hike along the John Muir Trail, which was probably an attempt to compensate for all those other weekends when she didn’t invite Olive along. Except it turned out that Olive’s mom considered the hike to be some kind of lesson in conjuring your inner warrior, a test that Olive was doomed to fail. Billie raced ahead, trying to make it to the next camp before nightfall, while Olive limped behind her, nursing her blisters. At first she worried that her mom was disappointed that she’d invited Olive to come; and then, as the hours passed, Olive began resenting her for thinking that Olive would be OK with this. At camp that night, Olive called Billie a slave driver, and Billie accused Olive of being afraid to challenge herself. By the time they got back to the car, they were barely talking.

  Just as Olive was unloading her backpack, though, she felt Billie’s hands on her shoulders. Her mother murmured in her ear: “I’m sorry I push you so much. You’re not me, I forget that sometimes. And you shouldn’t be me. You can be anyone you want to be. Don’t ever forget that, no matter what, OK? Anyone.”

  Olive knew she could turn and give her mom a hug and everything would be OK again; but in that moment, she was still angry at her mother for assuming that the things that were easy for her—being beautiful and strong and so sure of herself—were easy for Olive, too. And so she stiffened her body and fiddled with the buckle of her backpack and ignored her mom’s invitation. She felt powerful, knowing that she had the ability to hurt her mother like that. Eventually, Billie’s hands slid off her shoulders. “Fine,” Olive heard her mother say under her breath. “Be that way.” Then Billie walked back to the driver’s seat and started the car, waiting impatiently for Olive to climb in.

  And then a few weeks later, she walked off into Desolation Wilderness, and Olive never had a chance to make it up to her. That has remained a painful penumbra around Olive’s memory of her mother: the mystery of whether Billie was still upset with her when she died.

  But this scenario would be even worse: If her mom wants to be gone. If Olive is the reason she fled.

  Thinking of this possibility, she begins to feel ill, a weird throbbing nausea that spreads from her stomach straight up into her head. She notices dizzily that Natalie has vanished around the corner and hurries to catch up with her, stumbling a little, catching her balance against a streetlight. The light flickers on just as she touches the post, and she pauses to look up at it and marvel: Did I do that? She feels stoned; maybe she has a secondhand high from those surfers.

  When she looks back down, her mother is sitting there, on the edge of a planter box a few feet away. She’s wearing a neoprene wetsuit, her hair (not blond, not short) wet and slicked back, her knees tucked up under her chin as if she’s just sitting there contemplating the view. She lifts an arm and points in the direction of the ocean: “Surf’s up, Olive.”

  Olive looks at where her mother is pointing—there’s actually a pink stucco monstrosity blocking the view—and then back to her mother, who is shimmering in the damp fog like lamplight reflected in the mist. Not real. Of course not. Her heart sinks.

  “I can’t surf,” Olive says. “You know that.”

  “I can’t. You’ll never catch up with me if you keep thinking like that,” her mother says. “Repeat after me: I can. I can I can I can I can I can I can I can I can I can I can I can.” Her mother goes on like this in a singsong voice, a stuttering recording, until her words start to sound less like encouragement and more like taunting. Olive feels like crying; what’s she supposed to do now? She closes her eyes and puts her hands over her ears. This isn’t her mom at all, not the way she wants to remember her. What happened to I miss you, why aren’t you looking for me?

  But then she feels something wrapping around her, barely perceptible, like tendrils of fog, a finger of mist across her cheek. Some kind of ethereal embrace; is she imagining it? Probably. Yet somehow she feels better, even when she opens her eyes and discovers that her mother has vanished again. Because why would her mom keep showing up like this if she was angry with Olive? That first vision, it was a summons. So there’s got to be an explanation for her mom’s absence, she tells herself, one that doesn’t involve Olive driving her away.

  Natalie is right: The surfer was stoned. That blond woman isn’t her mom.

  She jogs up the road, looking for her friend. When she turns the corner, she bumps into Natalie, cold and annoyed.

  “Sorry,” Olive says. “I’m ready to go. I’ll try another beach next weekend.”

  They trudge down the street, along the windblown cliff back toward the beach. In the distance, Olive can see where the Subaru sits, alone in the middle of an otherwise deserted parking lot. A wooden staircase leads back down to the beach, and Olive follows close behind Natalie as she picks her way down, clutching a weathered handrail worn smooth by surfers’ hands.

  Natalie stops halfway down the stairs as if struck by a thought. She turns to look back up at Olive. “What if you’re not seeing the present in your visions,” she says. “What if it’s the future? Maybe your mom isn’t at this beach now, but she will be in a month.”

  Olive thinks of her mother in the neoprene wetsuit. “They call that precognition. I hadn’t even considered it. But how would I know?”

  “You should consult with a real psychic. You know? Someone who knows how the whole thing works and who can help you interpret your visions. Or even teach you how to have more visions, clearer ones.”

  Olive thinks about this. Where would one find a legitimate psychic? She knows better than to ring up one of those $9.99-a-minute late-night TV hotlines; and while there is no shortage of tarot readers in Berkeley, the neon signs that hang in the windows of their peeling bungalows don’t exactly inspire confidence.

  A blast of freezing wind blows up the cliff, whipping sand into their eyes. Olive reaches out to steady herself
against the wooden rail as she jabs at her tear ducts with her thumb. With the arm of her jacket, she wipes off a fine film of grit that the wind has deposited on her face. And then she looks down at the rail gripped in her hand, noticing for the first time that the soft wood has been completely carved with graffiti up and down the stairway. It’s some sort of surfer signpost. TONY G 11/2/12. Santa Cruz Tablista Piratas. An MK inscribed in a heart. ANGELA DA WAVE HOG. Olive steps slowly down the stairs, examining the surfers’ cryptograms. And then her eyes catch on one particular piece of graffiti, the wound of this one deep and bold in the weathered rail.

  She reaches out and grabs Natalie’s shoulder and spins her around. “Check it out,” she says, pointing at the carving in the rail. Natalie looks at it and then raises a hand to her mouth, her eyes huge above her flattened palm. They stare at each other, connected with electric thrill:

  SYBILLA

  The problem with being married to a beautiful woman is that other people are also going to notice that she is beautiful. At first you’ll feel almost flattered by the attention to her—as if the nimbus of her beauty includes you inside it, a reflection of your own good taste, of your own desirability. Because, after all, this glorious creature chose you.

  A decade in, though, as the novelty wears off, this will start to become a kind of test of your marital confidence: How strong do you believe your union is? How much do you trust in the us that you are? Because it’s inevitable that other people will want to try to break inside that equation, to claim some of your partner’s beauty for themselves.

  Men looked at Billie all the time, and Billie looked right back at them. She liked to be admired.

  There was a guy in our neighborhood who used to come watch Billie stretch in our front yard before she went on her runs. Seven A.M., like clockwork, the creep would somehow always be walking his dog right outside our house, letting his terrier urinate on the lantana while Billie loosened up her calves on our steps. He’d ogle her rear end in its black spandex, her breasts strapped tight in the jog bra. Balancing there against the post, she would casually stare right back at him, a wry little smile on her face. Like, Go on, fool. I know you’re looking.

  It happened one time too many, and one day, after watching this play out through the window, I marched out to the street to tell the guy off. But Billie grabbed me as I passed and held me back. “Oh, let him get his kicks,” she said breezily as the guy scuttled off down the street. “It’s probably the highlight of his day. Sad little man.”

  Honestly, though, the gawking strangers weren’t the ones that bothered me. It was the besotted friends who were harder to stomach.

  After Harmony moved to town with her boyfriend, Sean, we found ourselves spending most Saturday nights with them. Potluck dinners that ended in drunken games of Monopoly or Rummikub, Olive passed out on the couch in front of a movie. The two of them stumbling home in the dark long past midnight.

  At some point in the evening, a drink too far gone, I would often notice Sean was leaning away from Harmony and in toward my wife. His face would be a hair too close to hers, his eyes firmly locked on Billie’s, as if utterly absorbed by her. He loved to draw her into long theoretical debates, in that academic way he had, and the former activist in Billie was happy to engage—Is there such a thing as acceptable cultural appropriation? Can radicalization ever be a social good?—but I also couldn’t help noticing how much attention he paid to the movement of her lips when she talked.

  I remember one night, after goading my wife into a political argument of some sort, Sean abruptly cut her off mid-speech. “What is a woman like you doing here, baking cupcakes in Berkeley?” he demanded. “Why aren’t you off running the world?”

  “That’s incredibly dismissive,” Harmony interjected, but Billie just waved a hand at her friend as if she weren’t at all bothered.

  “Ah, but see,” Billie said, leaning in toward Sean, her eyes fixed on his. “I do run the world.”

  “You run a world,” he clarified. His mannered bow tie was askew, shirtsleeves pushed up to his elbows. He rubbed a finger across his dry lips, and when his hand dropped, he let it land on her arm. “But I can’t imagine that’s a big enough world for a woman with your brains and beauty and self-regard.”

  My wife’s eyes flickered toward me, widened just enough for me to notice: Can you believe this guy? And then she turned back to Sean, batting her lashes coyly. “Is this how you think you flatter a woman? With insults? Or are you attempting to neg me?” She laughed, and dropped her hand on top of his, and then gave the back of his hand a sharp little flick with her fingertip. He winced but didn’t look away. “It’s not working, in case you’re wondering. I like myself enough not to be cowed by a man who thinks he knows more about me than I do.”

  Sean grinned. “Oh, really.”

  I remember that Harmony looked helplessly over at me, and I rolled my eyes at her as if the whole thing were a four-handed game of bridge rather than a one-on-one challenge. “Believe me,” I said to the group, “no one’s holding Billie back. If Billie wants something, she gets it.”

  “Indeed,” Billie drawled, and sat back in her chair. “And what I want right now is another cocktail.” She snapped her fingers in Sean’s face.

  “Oh, yes ma’am,” Sean said, and stood up. He looked over at me and shook his head as if to say, That woman of yours, and then disappeared into the kitchen.

  Once he was gone, Billie raised an eyebrow at me. “Methinks that man has been overserved. Harmony, please cut him off earlier next time, for all of our sakes.” She reached over and laced her fingers in mine, and then looked at Harmony and laughed, as if we were all in on the joke together.

  I remember feeling drawn in by her: Sure, she’d been flirting with a mutual friend right in front of me, but I had been included, so what was the harm?

  I must have watched this performance, or a variation on it, hundreds of times during our marriage. With the other dads at Claremont Prep; with my friend Marcus; with my father once. I always felt safe because of the final act of the routine: the flirtation Kabuki that broke the fourth wall to include me. The wink, the widened eyes, the fingers intertwined in mine: This meant that Billie wasn’t trying to hide. It meant that there was nothing to hide.

  “MAYBE THE FOLDER CONTAINS super-secret spy plans,” Jonathan’s friend Marcus is saying. Billie’s laptop lies on the desk between them as the two men sit in Marcus’s office in a tech campus on the Oakland waterfront, the door closed against any errant employees who might wander in. “Maybe Billie was working for the CIA, assassinating Colombian drug lords on behalf of the government.”

  “Ha ha?” Jonathan says, failing to match Marcus’s forced levity.

  Marcus doesn’t seem to take Jonathan’s hint. “Or maybe the folder has pornography in it,” he continues. He leans back in his desk chair, his bulk threatening to tip the whole seat backward. “Selfies! Naked self-portraits, dirty home videos. That would be worth password-protecting. You guys do anything naughty that you’ve forgotten about?”

  “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t forget something like that,” Jonathan says drily. He runs his hands across the laptop’s titanium cover, feeling the tiny dings and scratches it incurred during its lifetime in Billie’s bag. He spent the rest of his weekend methodically spelunking through his wife’s digital junk pile but found no obvious evidence of an affair. No compromising emails, no naked selfies or photos of strange men with six-pack abs. After a while, he began to doubt the very premise of what he was doing. Maybe those mysterious trips in their calendar could be explained away. Was she just ditching Rita in order to go hiking by herself? he wondered hopefully. Perhaps her lies were a forgivable feint rather than a deliberate deception: She didn’t want him to worry about her being out there all by herself.

  And yet there is that RR folder, a second secret that Billie deemed worth keeping. Plus, dug up from her computer, a few additional odds and ends that give him pause:

  1) Photographs o
f a house that he has never seen before: a small cottage, its bottle-green paint job feathering along the edges of the clapboard. A tangle of bicycles in the front yard; a faded decorative flag with a blue whale on it, hanging from the eaves; a dusty kettle barbecue parked between two patio chairs on the lawn. There are three daytime photographs, taken from different angles and, judging by the movement of the objects, on different days; and then two more, taken at night. In these last, you can just make out the silhouette of a person through the curtain of the front window. Jonathan squinted at this shape, trying to determine identity or age or gender, but the picture is blurry and dark. The photos disturb him with their murky stalker quality. Had his wife taken these?

  2) A bookmark, buried deep in a folder of Billie’s browser, for a company called Lim & Partners Research Services. When he clicked over to the website, he discovered that Calvin Lim was a private investigator based in San Francisco. What on earth would Billie have needed with a private investigator?

  3) An email from the corporate offices of Motel 6, dated seven months before Billie’s death. Dear Mrs. Flanagan, it reads, I was informed about the bedbug problems you experienced during your April 20th stay at one of our motels. I’d like to extend you our apologies and offer you a complimentary night during your next stay with us at any of our many locations across America. Jonathan cross-referenced the date—it was the same weekend that she was supposed to be backpacking in Yosemite with Rita. Why would she be staying at a bedbug-riddled Motel 6 when she was supposed to be camping in a national park? And yet this also didn’t exactly seem like a romantic choice for a tryst (he couldn’t imagine his wife voluntarily choosing a budget chain hotel under any circumstances). Which Motel 6 had she stayed at and where? But the email offered no clues, and the Motel 6 website listed 165 locations in California alone. A dead end.

  4) An Amazon.com receipt for a product called Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax. At first glance, he assumed this was something kinky—evidence of the affair he was seeking? Certainly, she hadn’t used whatever it was with him—but on closer examination, it turned out to be a wax for surfboards. And yet, as far as he is aware, his wife didn’t know how to surf.