Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Small things, but taken together, they paint an alarming picture.

  There was something else, too, something more disconcerting, that he found jammed in the inner pocket of one of Billie’s purses in a manic final tear through her possessions: a condom.

  They hadn’t used condoms in years—she’d gotten an IUD not long after she turned forty and they officially decided that another kid wasn’t in the cards. He turned the condom in his palm, wondering. The wrapper was flattened and worn, its expiration date rubbed off. How long had it been there?

  He keeps turning back to the RR folder. Is it possible that it contains the explanation for everything? But he’s been unable to crack the password. It isn’t Billie’s maiden name, Olive’s birthday, the date of their anniversary, or the password that they used for their shared bank accounts. He’s tried her lucky numbers. Her Social Security number. Nothing.

  “So, how hard would it be to hack into that folder?” he asks Marcus now.

  “Not that hard. I can’t imagine that Billie used strong encryption.” Marcus’s phones pings, but he ignores it, tugging distractedly at his waistband. When Jonathan met Marcus during their undergraduate years at Stanford, Marcus had been a smart-ass string bean with long hair that he pulled into a ponytail, so broke that he owned only one pair of jeans. Twenty-five years later, the ponytail has been lopped off, swapped out for a kudzu-like beard; his paunch has grown in direct proportion with his bank account; and although he now owns at least a dozen pairs of overpriced jeans, he has a far more difficult time keeping them hiked up over his rear end.

  Jonathan envies Marcus for his fortuitous ability to exist within a hemisphere in which his physical appearance is completely irrelevant: In the tech industry, one’s sex appeal is predicated entirely on the mysterious wiring of one’s brain (and its subsequent ability to generate profit). And Marcus has an impressive brain, apparently, its gray matter unique enough to propel him into CTO positions at a succession of unicorn-aspirant start-ups. His friend lumbers through the world with the grace of a man who knows that he has been blessed: blessed by being the right kind of person, with the right skill set, in the right city, in just the right era.

  Marcus is eyeing him. “But, I’m sorry, can you explain to me again what you’re doing this for?”

  Jonathan looks out the window of his friend’s office and notices that San Francisco’s afternoon fog is starting to encroach, fingers creeping down the distant hills to enfold the skyscrapers below. Here, on the other side of the bay, they’re in the sun, but within the hour that will be gone, too. “You know. For the book.” Marcus keeps staring, saying nothing. Jonathan sighs. “OK. I’m finally going through all of Billie’s stuff, and before I box up everything and put it in the garage, I want to tie up any loose ends.”

  Marcus frowns. “And tying up loose ends involves breaking into her computer? I’m not sure I see it.”

  “How do I know that the folder doesn’t contain something important? Financial documents, a final will.”

  Marcus grunts as he uprights himself, the front wheels of his chair slamming down to the floor. “Why would she password-protect that? Wouldn’t the logical thing be to make it easily accessible if you die?”

  “You’re not answering my question. Will you crack the password for me?”

  Marcus reaches out and runs his hand across the edge of the laptop’s case, his fingers surprisingly delicate. “Jon. What’s up? You’re acting weird. Is there something going on that I should know about?”

  “Look, Marcus, if you’re not comfortable doing this, that’s fine. I’ll find someone else.”

  Marcus winces. “No, no. I’ll take care of it. But I’m busy right now, we’re gearing up for a new software release, so you’ll have to be patient. It’s going to take a week or two until I can get to it.”

  “Fine,” Jonathan agrees. Outside the window, in the middle of the bay, a barge has floated into view, carrying a giant stainless-steel cube emblazoned with a glowing neon question mark. It’s an advertisement for some sort of new social media app. He read somewhere that it’s costing over $1 million a day to keep the question mark floating out there. A fugitive shaft of pink light is shining directly on it, and he wonders if the cube purports to answer all the world’s questions or if it is intended as a repository of universal doubt and anxiety.

  He thinks of the giant question mark in the middle of his own existence: What were you up to, Billie?

  He’s barely looked at Where the Mountain Meets the Sky in days; the act of sitting down to memorialize his wife suddenly feels dishonest. As if he’s just turned on a flashlight and is pretending not to see all the dark creatures that are scurrying out of the light. Surely a few lies don’t change everything, he keeps trying to reassure himself; she’s still the same person you loved. You always knew she was a complicated woman, even if you’ve been glossing over that in your memoir. But something has shifted internally, and he’s not sure how to set it back to where he began. The discontents he had in his marriage—the ones he’s been ignoring out of, what, respect for the dead? convenience for his book?—are starting to creep through in his writing. How is he supposed to write a love story when he’s clearly been deceived by his own protagonist?

  Marcus is talking as he bundles Billie’s laptop into his own messenger bag. “Just promise me that you won’t get worked up about anything that I dredge up.” He lowers his voice, going unexpectedly earnest, and it’s as if he’s reading Jonathan’s mind: “This makes me uncomfortable, you know, undermining someone’s digital privacy. Even if they’re dead. For what end? We all have parts of ourselves that we don’t necessarily want everyone to see. Doesn’t change who we fundamentally are, right? Doesn’t mean we didn’t live the life we did. The traces we leave behind don’t mean anything on their own; they’re open to interpretation. Eye of the beholder. And without Billie here to explain to you what you find—well, I hate to think you might get upset about something that’s ultimately inconsequential.”

  “I won’t,” Jonathan lies, knowing full well that it’s already too late.

  —

  Back at home, Jonathan finds a package from his lawyer on the front porch, delivered by courier in his absence. He takes this into the kitchen and clears a space on the table, pushing aside the fruit bowl full of blackening bananas and the dirty dishes from breakfast. A precariously balanced pile of mail goes cascading to the floor, and he notices a long-missing (and possibly overdue?) water bill stuck between the pages of a Sweaty Betty catalog.

  He tears the package open to find a stack of freshly creased Sunday newspapers. He stares at these, momentarily perplexed. Then, realizing, he flips through the top paper in the stack—the San Francisco Chronicle—discarding Arts and Business and Sports, until he arrives at the cluttered, mostly forgotten section at the very back.

  There, he finds his classified ad in a bottom corner, easily overlooked:

  If you are—or have any information about the current whereabouts of—SYBILLA “BILLIE” THRACE FLANAGAN of Berkeley, California, please contact (510) 555-0131. Your family has petitioned for a declaration of death in absentia.

  He sits at the kitchen table and stares for a long time at the anachronistic newsprint, idly rubbing the words with the tip of his finger until they smudge and turn his finger black. He hates the very premise of this ad, a plea for a dead woman to get in touch, the way it generates a sense of hope where there is none. He should throw these newspapers out before Olive sees the ad and uses it to fuel her delusion that her mom is alive.

  He examines the dirty whorl of his fingerprint. Strange, unwelcome thoughts whisper in the back of his head. And then, gripped by some mad impulse, he picks up his cellphone and dials the number in the ad.

  It rings twice, three times; Jonathan is just about to come to his senses and hang up when a man with a raspy, smoke-coated voice answers. “Detective Morley, Berkeley PD,” the man says tersely.

  “Hi,” Jonathan begins. “Dete
ctive Morley? This is Jonathan Flanagan. I’m calling about the Billie Flanagan case from last winter? She—my wife—died hiking up in Desolation Wilderness last November. Well, we assume she died, although we never found her body. I’m sure you remember.”

  There’s a long silence on the other end, presumably the police detective running backward through his mental files. “Oh, right. How can I help you?”

  “I know that this is going to sound nuts.” Jonathan hesitates, not sure where he’s going with this, and then forges ahead. “But—have you received any calls about my wife in the last day or two? I’m only asking because I put a classified ad in a few newspapers, seeking information about her current whereabouts—not because I think she’s alive, of course, but because I’m required to in order to receive the death certificate.” He realizes he is babbling and stops. “Anyway, I thought I’d just check in.”

  “No,” Morley says slowly. “No calls. I’m sorry.”

  “Look, I don’t know why I bothered you with this. The whole thing is just a formality; of course you’re not going to get anyone calling about Billie.” He is aware that he is starting to sound like an insane person. “Forget it. I’ll be in touch if I need anything else.”

  Jonathan hangs up before Morley can respond. He sticks the phone back in his pocket, feeling as if he’s done something unclean. What the hell was he thinking?

  He sits there, staring at the ad, reading it over and over. If you are—or have any information about the current whereabouts of—SYBILLA “BILLIE” THRACE FLANAGAN of Berkeley, California, please contact (510) 555-0131.

  It’s impossible. Or is it?

  He realizes that a strange seed has planted itself deep in his cerebellum, and it is sending out tentative tendrils. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your wife was having an affair, could she have decided to run off with her lover? Could she have disappeared herself, instead of dying? It’s a wild leap to make; and yet he keeps coming back to the absolute certainty in his daughter’s face as she uttered those words: I saw Mom. She’s alive. Putting aside the bizarre supernatural aspect of Olive’s claim, is it at all possible that she could be right?

  The answer comes to him like an icicle driven through his chest: Nothing is impossible. Improbable, but not impossible.

  What would drive Billie to do something so extreme? He runs his finger across the edge of the kitchen table, lost in damning thoughts. She was still the Lost Years Billie at heart, and she needed more thrills, and there were no more thrills to be had with you. Maybe there were more thrills to be had with someone else. Your marriage wasn’t perfect, no matter how much you’ve been making it out to be that in your memoir. Still, he reasons, people don’t just up and vanish because of ennui. They don’t fake their own death simply because they’re having an affair, not without trying couples therapy or—for God’s sake—divorce first.

  Or do they?

  He recalls an argument they had a few months before her death. He’d been working in the downstairs office at midnight, his eyes dry and stinging with exhaustion, when Billie suddenly stumbled down the stairs. She stood in the doorway, mussed and bleary, wearing an old Stanford tee of Jonathan’s that was more hole than shirt.

  “Still working?” she said incredulously. “Don’t you ever sleep anymore?”

  “Sleep is overrated,” he said.

  “Exhaustion is boring,” she retorted. “Seriously. Don’t forget that Olive and I exist, OK? We’re getting tired of looking at the back of your head. I’m not just here to serve you meals while you work.”

  He stopped typing and turned around, chagrined. “Shit. Am I doing that? I’m sorry. This job is killing me.”

  She came closer, leaning on the back of his chair, so close he could smell the sweaty musk of sleep coming off her. “And frankly, I’m tired of hearing you say that. For years now, and it only ever gets worse. I don’t know why you don’t just quit. Go write a book, do something creative, change the world. You used to talk about that all the time.”

  “Quit?” He looked up at his wife, who was raising her eyebrows at him as if he were a particularly clueless child. He stared at her for a long time. “It’s not like I can walk away from a paycheck. A stable job, that’s nothing to take for granted. And health insurance—you have any idea what that costs nowadays?”

  “You can always walk away,” she said. “What are you so afraid of? What’s the worst that’s going to happen?”

  “I won’t sell a book and we won’t be able to pay the bills and we’ll lose our house? We’ll end up homeless? We’ll have to use Olive’s babysitting money to pay for all the pesticide-free kale she insists on eating. You’ll have to sell your eggs on the black market.”

  “No one will pay for my eggs, they’re all dried up.” She ran a hand through his hair, her warm palm cradling his scalp but tugging on the follicles a little too hard. “Really, I don’t care about all this. It’s disposable.”

  “What?” He twisted around to study her, confused.

  She seemed to backtrack. “You know what I mean. Like they say, it’s just stuff.” She withdrew her hand from his head. “But that’s not my point. You always wanted to be an artist, a revolutionary. Big idealistic talk. Now all you do is complain about brogrammers while you edit articles about Wi-Fi-enabled juicers.”

  He laughed a little uneasily. “C’mon. Everyone wants to be an artist when they’re young. And then reality kicks in.”

  “Seriously, Jonathan. Don’t be spineless.”

  “It’s not about being spineless, it’s about being responsible,” he said, bristling. “I need to take care of you and Olive, don’t you remember?”

  “You don’t need to take care of me. That’s an anachronistic delusion you’ve always had.”

  This stung a little; and c’mon, he’d been paying the bills all these years, he was supporting her. Still, he couldn’t help wondering if she was right. Was it such a terrible idea? To quit because he felt like it? Throw caution to the wind? He was unsure why he was protesting when his wife had just offered him a hall pass. Was it that he didn’t like this image of himself as a useless appendage? If he wasn’t offering his family financial stability, what was he offering?

  “I’ve been at Decode for eighteen years; there are people counting on me,” he thought out loud. “I’d need to give them a good long time to replace me.”

  Billie threw up her hands with frustration. “They’ll cry when you leave and buy you a Costco cake with your name on it and then forget about you ten minutes later when they replace you with someone younger and fresher and cheaper.”

  There was a sour taste in his mouth. “That’s a shitty attitude.”

  “That’s life,” she said. “You only get one. Don’t waste it. Don’t be average.” She leaned across him and, with one hand, flicked the lid of his laptop closed. She calmly watched as he scrambled to open the laptop again, checking the state of his work in progress. Then she disentangled herself from his chair and plucked her underwear out of the crack of her butt, drifting out of the room and back up the stairs.

  At the time, he tried to put her words out of his head, the way they tipped at some hidden contempt. She’s just tired of holding the family together, she’s tired of listening to me complain, he convinced himself. Totally understandable. I’d be sick of me, too. But now, as he recalls their conversation, he wonders if her words that night weren’t about him but about her: You can always walk away….It’s disposable. Had she already been planning to start over with someone else? Is this what she was masterminding during those days when she was pretending to be off hiking with Rita?

  Even if she wanted to disappear on me, she would never do that to Olive, he thinks. Billie had her issues, but she wouldn’t do something so cruel, so phenomenally fucked up, to their daughter. And yet. He thinks of the gaps in her calendar, the missing weekends, and a voice in the back of his head whispers: If she was capable of lying like that, what else was she capable of? It’s clear you di
dn’t know her as well as you thought you did.

  Sitting there in the kitchen, amid the overpowering smell of rotting bananas, he understands all of a sudden why he has been so resistant to Olive’s suggestion that Billie might be alive. Because if she’s not dead, then she’s also not the person he has written her to be: There’s no rational explanation for his wife being alive that doesn’t point to her being some kind of monster. And he’s not ready to change the point of view of his entire life story.

  He stares at the fruit bowl for a long time, noting the green fuzz that’s slowly enveloping a withered clementine, until he can’t take it anymore. He jumps up and marches the fruit to the overflowing garbage can, bags it up, and then grabs his car keys.

  I hope Billie is dead, he thinks as he drags the garbage out to the curb. Because I can’t begin to imagine what it will mean if she’s not.

  —

  As Jonathan walks back through the door of his house a few hours later, burdened down with grocery bags, he hears conversation and smells sautéed onions coming from the kitchen and recalls that Harmony was coming over to cook dinner. He stands in the doorway for a minute, gathering himself, trying to shed the black doubts of the afternoon.

  In the kitchen, he finds Harmony at the stove, fiddling with a pot of soup. She’s making conversation with Olive, who sits on the edge of a stool, one foot sliding tentatively toward the door.

  “Hey, Dad,” Olive says. “You didn’t tell me Harmony was coming over for dinner.” He registers a distinct note of complaint in her voice.

  He glances over at Harmony, whose face is pink and shiny from the heat of the stove, her body humming with activity. She’s wearing a low-cut top that reveals a faint sheen of sweat in the valley of her cleavage. He can’t help thinking that she looks vaguely postcoital. “Sorry, slipped my mind,” he says. He averts his eyes and begins unpacking groceries: cheese, almond butter, bananas, dish soap, the dried seaweed that Olive likes…and dammit, no toilet paper. How did he forget the toilet paper again?