Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Billie stared at him, her mouth slightly open. And then, unexpectedly, she began to laugh, a tight joyless laugh that cut out almost as soon as it began. She dropped her face into her hands. “Why are you telling me this?” she said, her voice muffled.

  “Because I couldn’t stand lying to you,” he said. “We don’t have that kind of marriage, and I don’t want to start. Dishonesty is what kills relationships.”

  Billie lifted her head out of her hands. Her eyes were bright and glittering. “We won’t talk about it again,” she said.

  He hesitated, unsure what this meant. “Maybe we should, though,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to talk about couples therapy. This thing, it didn’t come out of nowhere.”

  “Couples therapy? Seriously?” Billie stared at the wall across from the bed for a long time, thinking. Then she turned and offered him a curious conciliatory smile. “No. It’s already the past,” she said. “It happened and that’s that. Rehashing it with a stranger isn’t going to change anything. Let’s move on.” She reached across the bed and grabbed Jonathan’s hand and tugged it toward her mouth, bending to kiss it with dry lips. Then she lay back and opened her book again, paging through until she found the marked corner.

  He was rendered speechless, her lips still burning on his palm. Was it really going to be that easy? Wasn’t there something more that needed to be done or said? Yes, it was a minor transgression in the grand scheme of things, but wasn’t he supposed to suffer more?

  He waited for a delayed fallout. But things between them remained fine; they were maybe better than they’d been in years, as if the kiss had illuminated everything that truly mattered. He cut back his hours at work so he could spend some much needed time with his family: weekday dinners with Olive and Billie at their favorite restaurants, a family day trip to the butterfly beach, warm fall evenings sitting on the porch drinking wine and talking about Olive. He and Billie had a few bedroom sessions that left them drenched and gasping, like the old days. One Friday he even came home from work to discover Harmony and Billie sitting in the dining room, their faces flushed with wine and the scattered remains of a box of cookies on the table before them. “Oh, good, you’re home early,” Billie said mildly, and they went back to their conversation as if nothing at all had changed, even though Harmony couldn’t quite meet his eyes across the table.

  Whenever he tried to bring up the subject of the kiss—obeying some nagging sense that something between them remained unresolved—Billie would brush it aside. Things stayed that way until the very last day of her life, when she kissed him goodbye, picked up her backpack, and headed out for Desolation Wilderness alone.

  At the time, he’d felt enormously relieved by her reaction: It could have been so much uglier. Better his wife’s curious, cheerful forgiveness than a festering, palpable anger. But when he looks back from his current vantage point, Billie’s nonchalant attitude seems far more suspect. Especially knowing what he knows now: that on the night he kissed Harmony, the night when Billie was supposedly hiking Shasta with Rita, Billie wasn’t actually hiking Shasta with Rita at all.

  Maybe the reason Billie didn’t get upset about his transgression was because she knew her own was so much greater than his.

  He lifts his eyes now to meet Harmony’s. She’s staring at him with bright, measuring eyes, the wooden spoon dripping in her hand, as if trying to gauge his temperature now that she’s turned up the heat. The Thing That Neither of Them Has Wanted to Talk About. Harmony was the first person he called, panicked and frantic, that Sunday night last November when Billie failed to return home from her hike. Harmony showed up within minutes and hugged him wordlessly, as if she were still Billie’s best friend, and they’d proceeded that way ever since. The kiss was seemingly buried by the avalanche of grief, a hallucinatory mistake that neither of them wanted to exhume and examine.

  And yet. Here it is, somehow alive. Because he can see it now in Harmony’s earnest expression, the faint trembling of her lips: that she would, if given the chance, kiss him again.

  And judging by the rebellious stirring in his groin, he might just kiss her back.

  OLIVE IS ALONE at the top of a mountain, pine trees rustling around her, the sharp bite of snow in the air. She sits on a fallen log overlooking a valley, the setting sun in her face. At her feet sits a baby deer with its ears twitching in nervous anticipation. Someone is coming.

  “You have a choice to make.” She turns her head and sees her mother beside her on the log, legs stretched out before her, boot-clad feet crossed at the ankles. She’s got sunglasses on, zinc oxide on her nose, her face deeply tanned. “Do you like things the way they are? Because if you do, by all means, carry on. But if you don’t, nothing’s going to change until you decide to make it change.”

  “What are you talking about? Change what?” Olive says. She turns to get a better look at her mother but is blinded by the glare.

  Her mother turns her head toward the sun. “Sun feels nice,” she says, tearing open a granola bar. “It shines on us all, no matter where we are.”

  “And where are you? Are we in Desolation Wilderness now?”

  Her mom starts to laugh. And for a moment, it’s almost like old times, the two of them sharing a secret; and then the forest begins to fade away, and the mountain breeze deposits Olive gently back in the driver’s seat of the Subaru. Billie vanishes into Olive’s backpack, which is jammed with books on the passenger seat; the deer rearranges itself into a canvas grocery tote, long abandoned in the foot well. Olive looks up and tries to reorient herself: the gladiolus-lined driveway, the McMansion with its two-story entrance and windows etched with dancing grapes; the row of anorexic cypress trees tilting toward the ground. I am in front of Sharon Parkins’s house, she reminds herself.

  It’s her second vision that day alone. They are coming like that now: nothing at all for days and then clusters of them, each resolving briefly into sharp focus before fading into the background, like tuning past a radio station. There she’ll be, sitting in her physics classroom, and then abruptly, she’ll be somewhere else entirely, her mother beside her making enigmatic observations. Sometimes Olive will recognize where she’s landed (her mom’s favorite café; the top of Tilden Park), and other times the places are too vague to identify (a beach; an unrecognizable stand of pine trees). The visions are frustratingly cryptic and uncontrollable; they shimmer across her existence like layers of cellophane rather than offering any useful information. They feel like fragments of clues, signs pointing toward a bigger picture she can’t quite grasp. What does it all mean? She attempted mirror-gazing, following the instructions in Connections to the letter, but all she ended up with was sore eyes from staring into a mirror for three hours straight. She even located an old Ouija board in the attic and sat in the dark, begging the spirits for answers—Where’d you go, Mom?—but the planchette under her fingertips remained stubbornly rooted in place.

  Other than returning to Santa Cruz and parking herself at the base of the wooden stairway—for, what, weeks? in the hope that her mother will finally stumble past?—Olive has no idea what she should do next.

  This, she hopes, is where Sharon Parkins might help.

  Olive climbs out of the car and makes her way across the paving stones to the front door, where a small plaque, inscribed in calligraphy, hangs over the portico: No Solicitors, Please. She tentatively rings the doorbell, hearing it chime across some vast empty space behind the door.

  A tiny thirtysomething redhead in workout gear opens the door so fast that Olive has to jump backward. The woman looks at Olive, eyebrows furrowing. “Oh,” she says. She looks over Olive’s shoulder, confused. “I was expecting my trainer.”

  “Are you Sharon Parkins the psychic?” Olive asks, taking in the woman’s tennis bracelet and the enormous diamond hanging off her ring finger. She has the crème anglaise complexion of a woman of leisure, her hair pulled back into a shiny waterfall. She’s wearing an awful lot of makeup for a workout.


  The woman winces. “I’m not a tarot card reader, if that’s what you’re looking for.” Her hands are poised on the jamb of the door as if preparing to close it.

  “I’m not.” Olive wonders whether the surprise she feels is as obvious to Sharon Parkins as it is to her. She thought a psychic would be more…mentorly? Motherly? Spiritual, maybe. At one with the universe.

  Sharon certainly does not look like what Olive expected to find when she typed the phrase Bay Area Psychic into Google. (Then again, what did she expect? A head scarf, dangling gold Gypsy jewelry, a velvet-draped crystal ball nestled in her arms?) Olive’s initial Google search turned up 117 hits; she narrowed these down to 33 by modifying her search to Best Bay Area Psychic, turning up a psychic who specialized in finding lost cats and a guy named Dr. Wisdom who had a sideline in closet organization.

  Olive tried again: Legitimate Bay Area Psychic.

  Bingo. The top hit was a San Francisco Chronicle story: “Bay Area Psychic Leads Police to Body of 12-Year-Old Missing Boy.”

  Manuel Alvarez had been missing for eleven days when Sharon Parkins, a housewife in Palo Alto, began seeing his face. She had no idea who the boy was that she kept seeing in what she describes as “waking dreams,” but she knew he was important. So she called the local police station and asked to go through their missing persons files. It took less than ten minutes for her to identify Manuel as the boy she’d been seeing, and less than twenty-four hours for her to lead the police to the empty lot in San Bruno where Manuel’s body was lying under a pile of abandoned mattresses.

  “Sharon Parkins is totally legitimate,” says Detective Fred Politsky, who has consulted with Parkins on past missing persons cases. “I don’t know how she knows what she knows.”

  A psychic with a sideline in finding missing people: perfect. Olive typed Sharon Parkins Palo Alto into Google and retrieved an address, which led her here, to this faux-Mediterranean villa with a white Mercedes sedan parked in front.

  “My name’s Olive Flanagan,” Olive tries again. “I was hoping you could help me find my mom, who’s missing.” The muscles around Sharon’s jaw twitch and tighten, but Olive presses on: “But first I should tell you—I think I’ve been communicating with her telepathically.” Olive watches as Sharon Parkins raises one of her perfectly arched eyebrows in apparent surprise, although it’s hard to tell because of all the Botox.

  Sharon Parkins peers past Olive, noting the sturdy Subaru parked in the driveway, then looks her up and down, taking in the freshly laundered school uniform with the Claremont Girls College Prep logo emblazoned on the breast pocket. Finally, she sighs and glances at her watch. “Oh, honey. OK. I guess I’ve got a few minutes. Come on in.”

  She leads Olive down a terracotta hallway and into a living room with a hulking marble fireplace and a chandelier the size of a car. The couches are leather and dense with pillows. Every surface is cluttered with objets d’art—jade vases, porcelain statuary, bronze urns, framed oils—ranging from ancient to modern and East to West, as if the sheer abundance and variety are intended to offset any doubts about the collector’s taste. Olive looks down and realizes that she’s standing on a rug made out of a real bearskin, head and all, which makes her feel sick to her stomach. She chooses a seat on the couch where she won’t have to touch it.

  Sharon Parkins settles into an armchair across from her and leans forward, chin in hand. Her eyes scan across Olive’s face, flicking left to right, eye to eye, and Olive wonders if she’s trying to “read” her. Uncomfortable, Olive glances away, making eye contact with the milky pupils of an antique carousel horse, skewered by a brass pole, over by the fireplace.

  “Is—this—all from doing psychic work?” she asks, gesturing at the room.

  Sharon laughs. “I don’t do psychic work. Not that I get paid for. No—my husband’s in venture capital.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t advertise my abilities, let alone try to monetize them. Especially since I often can’t do anything to help. But people keep finding me and ringing my doorbell anyway. Although”—she glances at the backpack at Olive’s feet—“they’re not usually schoolgirls. Aren’t you supposed to be at school right now?”

  “Staff development day,” Olive lies. In fact, she skipped her afternoon classes in order to drive across the bay, and she has to be back by five P.M. in order to make it to her appointment with her new therapist. It’s the first time she’s ever cut class, which makes her skin crawl—surely she’s going to get in trouble?—but she reminds herself that this variety of insubordination is exactly the kind of behavior her mom would have encouraged. (Anyone can follow the rules. Find your own thing.)

  “So, should I start by telling you about my visions?” Olive asks.

  Sharon kicks her sneakers off and then crosses her legs, sitting back in her chair. “Start wherever you feel like starting.”

  “OK, well, it began about a little over a week ago,” Olive begins. She quickly tells Sharon about her mother’s disappearance and the first vision. About her mother’s name carved in the wooden rail at the beach. About the rest of the visions, increasing in frequency, right up to the mountaintop vision of a few minutes earlier.

  “So what does it all mean?” she finishes. “I’m not sure how it all adds up. Am I seeing the present or the future? How do I know if something I’ve seen is important or not? Is it all related?” Sharon nods, and Olive waits for her to speak before realizing that this is a nod of the Yes, go on variety and doesn’t signify any particular answer on Sharon’s part. Olive continues more pointedly: “I thought maybe you could tell me how to interpret everything. Since you’re the expert.”

  “I’m an expert?” Sharon laughs, exposing tiny teeth as even and white as party mints. “I can’t even interpret most of my own visions. There’s an awful lot of noise and not a lot of signal, if you know what I mean. So I’m not going to be able to help you interpret yours, sorry. Really, I wish I could help you. But if you’re looking for logic, you’re not going to find it within the unexplainable. Like I said, most people who come here leave unhappy.” She shifts forward as if the conversation is over. “Is that it?”

  Olive remains rooted in place. “But you find people, right? Missing people?”

  Sharon sits back again and looks down at her hands, pressing against the spandex of her workout pants. She wipes gently at the nap, smoothing it all into place. “I found Manuel Alvarez, if that’s what you mean.”

  “So how did you do that?”

  “It’s hard to describe. I woke up one day and just knew where to go; I had a strong mental image where we’d find him, and then…God.” Sharon presses her lips together. “It’s not a skill I can teach you, if that’s what you’re asking. And remember that I also see a lot of things that make no sense whatsoever, things that I never figure out. Like I said—noise.”

  Olive’s throat tightens. “OK. But even if you can’t teach me what to do, you still found Manuel Alvarez—right? So you could find my mom.” Sharon is shaking her head, looking very tired, but Olive presses on. “I thought maybe we could tap into her—what would you call it, energy?—if we worked together, with both of our…” She stumbles for the right word.

  Sharon’s lips twist back into a bemused smile. “Powers? Look. I’m not a superhero, honey. And besides, this isn’t exactly something you can do together. It’s not like ‘Wonder Twin powers, activate!’ ”

  Olive doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She looks down at her hands, clenched in her lap. “You don’t believe me about seeing my mother, do you?”

  Sharon reaches out to touch Olive’s knee. “That’s not what I meant. I’m getting definite energy off you. You’ve got something going on. And I would love to help you find your mom, I really would, if I could. But I can’t, not like that. In my experience, visions aren’t about communication; they’re a one-way street. Nor do I often get to choose what I see. It’s not like flipping to a TV channel to watch the eight o’clock movie.”


  “But you just said you find people.”

  “It’s more like they find me.”

  “So? You could at least try.” Olive realizes that she’s tearing up. “I don’t know who else to ask for help.”

  Sharon seems flustered by the sight of tears. “OK, OK. But no promises.” She sits there twisting the giant rock on her finger. “Do you have anything with you that used to belong to your mother?”

  Olive thinks about it for a minute. “I drive her old car.”

  Sharon puts her sneakers back on, and they walk out to the driveway. Sharon stands looking at the bottle-green Subaru with the dent in the driver’s door where Olive opened it into a pole last week, and three years’ worth of Earth Day stickers flaking off the rear bumper. The paint job is pebbled with rain-specked mud that is slowly eating away the finish because Olive thinks it’s wrong to wash your car during a drought, no matter how much her father has been nagging her about it. Sharon rubs her hands together and then places her fingertips lightly on the hood of the car. She stands there with her eyes closed, the sunlight playing on her skin. For a moment, looking at the glow of the woman’s face, Olive is hopeful; and then Sharon opens her eyes and shakes her head.

  “Sorry. All I’m getting is spark plugs and piston rings.”

  Olive persists. “It might be better if you got inside the car? Since she spent most of her time in the driver’s seat.”

  Sharon looks around as if waiting for someone to come to her rescue. “OK,” she says reluctantly. Olive opens the driver’s door for her, and the woman lowers herself into the seat, avoiding the corner where tufts of foam bloom from a fresh split in the leather. She places her manicured fingers at ten and two on the steering wheel, fingertips grazing the plastic. As Olive stands beside her, she peers straight ahead, out the windshield toward the Monterey Colonial across the street. She closes her eyes. The edges of her mouth twitch.